UnrealArchive.org

[Gustavo6046]

One really has to wonder where that's person's head was - in what world is 'that' an appropriate theme for a map? A close second to that map are the 9/11 'tribute' maps - seeking to commemorate the several thousand people who died by making a map for people to run around in killing each other!!! In poor taste is the least one can say about all that. End of rant.

I can't tell from the screenshot. I will trust in you that it somehow depicts a concentration camp, though. I wouldn't allow levels akin to that if I ran a server, as many people would be too averted to play.

I will definitely agree that those themes are poor taste. Many people died in the historical events depicted. And indeed, when I talk about history or politics, generally it's exclusively in a serious tone, as it is important to respect the course of History. However, I don't believe those levels glorify or condone the tragedies depicted in them. If they did, I would have no reservations with labeling them as inciting violence, or even hate speech. I agree that any content that constitutes hate speech should be removed from the Unreal Archive.

The description definitely has a suspicious air to it, though.

Now, if from playing the map it can be determined that it is such hate-speech content, I definitely agree that it should be removed entirely.

Edgy??!!

That's pretty much the most precise word to describe stuff said or made with the only intention of being, well, "cool" (but often in the sense of 'offensive'). Like many kida son the Internet like to do, you know. Usually the #1 strategy is to not feed the troll.

more cancel BS son the Internet like to do, you know. Usually the #1 strategy is to not feed the troll.

more cancel BS

It's actually a very legitimate discussion to be held. I agree that some places on the Internet have no right to arbitrate moral values, but at the same time I think they do have the right to decide not to host something if they disapprove of this something. If you're speaking at someone's house, respect their house rules.

Now, the thing here is that these levels in particular very much could constitute glorification. I don't think that is the case, though. It's still definitely a pretty indecent thing to host, and even if it turned out to be morally fine, it would still be in the weird/crappy side of Unreal Archive.

<tangent>
I still think it is stupid for today's American people to pour their brains everytime someone mentions the September 11th attacks, but I also think one of the worst parts is when they use their misinterpretation of the first amendment of the centuries-old American constitution to justify running around and shouting "cancel!!11!1" everytime someone decides they don't want to be hosting someone saying or doing dumb crap.

Where I live, people tend to be pretty stupid, but at least we are able to function as a proper, somewhat harmonious society. And we also do sometimes have pretty polarized politics to endanger that at times, but usually actual issues prevail. I really don't like how people have fallen into feuded animosity. But the average person here has enough brains to not scream childishly in the road.
</tangent>

[OjitroC]

i agree with what you say. I didn't respond further because of the danger of (a) derailing the thread and (b) venturing into the choppy and forbidden waters of a political discussion.

[EvilGrins]

more cancel BS

The so-called "cancel culture" gets a bad rip, when primarily the things that are getting cancelled fall primarily under the categories of racism and bigotry... which were already, and understandably, not viewed in a favorable way long before the term "cancel culture" existed.

I did a map edit a stretch back where the original map had the Traitor's Flag (flag of the Confederacy) on it. I simply removed it, it was a decent map other than having that travesty on it.

Being opposed to the so-called "cancel culture" is a little weird to me, as that which is cancelled primarily represents evil and oppression. I mean, seriously, who wants to defend stuff like that?

[Red_Fist]

I don't care, waste of brain waves, make any map you want. Editing out things is the offensive part.
Freedom, freewill and individualism is far more important.

[Gustavo6046]

Editing out things is the offensive part. Freedom, freewill and individualism is far more important.

Spoiler

No person's freedoms shall trample the freedoms of others in a free society that values the equality of its individuals. Those parameters you mentioned are all second to the maintenance - and enforcement - of a functioning society, with a collective where all peers can respect each other. Individual freedoms are granted by default, but this may and must be overridden when it infringes on the rights and duties of others. No law or code of conduct is asymmetrical, nor should it be. Even the principles of "free speech" do not defend the proliferation of statements and ideologies that may be harmful to the functioning of society and the collective, in particular the coexistence of all individuals' moral values and equal rights and duties in accordance with the codes set by society.

Note that "society" here also includes communities, like in this case UT99.org (or UnrealArchive.org), which in turn have themselves to obey to their respective local jurisdictions. Do you really think modern German jurisdiction would allow a German website hosting that map? I agree that German censorship in the context of video games is a bit of overreach sometimes, but in this case I don't quite think so.

I would like to continue and fully convince you, but this is not the right moment, nor the right place. Don't derail the thread with your delusive ramblings. I mean, if you insist, we can talk in PMs. (We probably should.) If not, let the Undertaker drag this discussion to hell, UT99.org is not a soapbox.

i agree with what you say. I didn't respond further because of the danger of (a) derailing the thread and (b) venturing into the choppy and forbidden waters of a political discussion.

Yeah, I hate it when that happens here. This is meant to be a place to appreciate UT and its history. And I assure you, Cliff Bleszinski himself would squirm and barf at the mere utterance of some of the political posts some certain persons have posted here in the website in the past. Like, that's so out of place!

[Red_Fist]

I will pm you. , I didn't start this, call me the, anti file-delete'r, defend the file.

[Shrimp]

I've added a new Authors page which lists all the authors of everything in their mangled messed up obscure glory

For example, here's the previously requested MrLoathsome page: https://unrealarchive.org/authors/mrloa ... index.html

Only authors with >= 2 items will be shown to avoid creating a completely unbrowsable mess, any more so than it already is.


As always, subject to future refinement, enhancement and improvement but it's "tier 0" of the feature at least.

[OjitroC]

That's a great new addition and potentially very useful.

Perhaps it needs an introduction - to make it clear that the author names are taken from the LevelInfo for maps, for example, and that this may not necessarily mean that the named person made the map? Also that this is an index of mapper names rather than a comprehensive index of works by an author (and there is a difference). An example - under Rob -=FraGnBraG=- Burns there are several maps with the [SP] prefix - true the base map was made by FNB but he didn't 'make' those particular [SP] maps as I'm pretty certain they were 'created' (that is edited) by RUSH.

The point of this is to forewarn people that they need to search under different author names if they want to find all of an author's work - example : FNB's maps appear under FNB and Rob -=FraGnBraG=- Burns.

Just a thought.

______________________________________________________ UPDATE ________________________________________________
A new and different point.

The Search Function

I've just come across something rather odd with the search function - search for 'Bull' (without the quotes) and I get 10 results - search for 'BullDozer' (without the quotes) and I get search results with Bull in them that didn't appear before, including several maps with Bull in the map title (example DM-BULL_BioFacility or DM-BULL_DreadnoughtSE). I thought it might be to do with the _ in the map title but DM-BULL_Ribiera comes up when searching for 'Bull' (no quotes). So, as I say, rather odd?

[Gustavo6046]

Mmm, full names.



I love this new feature! Little quirks like that are an easy fix. You could add an Alias system to narrow conflicting equivalent names like those down into a common alias, like in this case "Gustavo6046". But this certainly feels like it will be a very useful and neat thing

[Barbie]

I've added a new Authors page which lists all the authors

Nice, but what about multiple Authors like "Map made by Abel/Bebel/Cebel"?

Also I just noticed that authors within one character selection are not really sorted alphabetically (see https://unrealarchive.org/authors/M/4/index.html for example).

An example for a silly detected author name: "Made by: Firetiger5" - listed in category "M".

[OjitroC]

It works best for those authors who kept their 'name' consistent in all their works - for some authors it is less useful; for example, derdak2rot turns up in some unexpected places. In part that's why I suggested some kind of introductory guidance so that people know to go through all the pages of the starting letter of the author they are looking for.

The sorting does seem to lack some logic - looking on the second page of P one will find papercoffee and Pete 'Hook' Morgan who both appeared on the first page as well.

Of course, as Shrimp stated, the Page is subject to future refinement and improvement so perhaps something like that suggested by Gustavo may be implemented over time.

'reading the', 'remote administrators to' and 'other players' are some other examples of funny/silly author names (obviously taken from readmes).

[Feralidragon]

It's hard to keep consistency on a name over so many years.

I mean, I never really "changed" the name I use, nor do I really intend to, but:

• https://unrealarchive.org/authors/feral ... index.html (youngest version of me, when I was in a clan and was also known by the second name there);
• https://unrealarchive.org/authors/feral ... index.html (the name I stuck with ever since in all subsequent work)
• https://unrealarchive.org/authors/nogar ... index.html (my alter ego)

The first 2 could be merged, in the same fashion others are suggesting (automatically), but the last one not really, despite also being "me".
So it's tricky, and will never be completely right unless there's some manual intervention fixing things up.

Many years ago I planned to do something similar Shrimp is doing here, and one of my ideas was to also associate the work with their authors correctly, in a similar fashion as done here, but having been inconsistent myself I intended to do a first merge between authors, and then manually sort out some of the work to be associated at least with the actual recognized names by the community.

But I never really intended to have "all" the community-made stuff there in the platform I intended to build, since I would be far more selective on the content I would host (quality over quantity), at least for the most part (new work, even not that great, if done with passion and will to learn would also be welcome of course), so in my case that extra step would be doable, but in this case is far more complicated with so many different authors having been "detected" from the packages.

Which also introduces the following challenge: right now, browsing by author isn't really a great experience at all, and that's because if you're interesting in checking work by author, you can simply use the search to search for the author you want, and it works great, otherwise there isn't really a great point browsing authors...

That is, unless, there's at least some attempt at sorting these authors by some kind of metric, like by number of maps/mods, or by their latest activity by checking the latest created timestamp of the maps/mods (to check for active authors, although this could be equally applied to sorts of maps/mods).

Eventually they could be sorted by overall rating of their stuff or something similar (especially since there are plenty of map authors who did amazing maps but didn't really get their work properly appreciated and exposed), but the site is static for now, and 20 years later is hard to have any meaningful numbers to attest for the quality of the work done over the course of those 20 years, so a sort by activity would likely be the best way to browse by author, and could motivate people to do more content overall.

[Forum|User]

Unreal Playground's downloads are back!
https://alt-fire.com/playground/maps?ga ... perPage=10

Update needed, there is a lot "new" map.

[Barbie]

Hmm, I uploaded two files within the last two weeks and they don't show up in "Latest Content Additions". In my memory earlier updates created a bunch of additional lines in the upload window, but there were none at my recent two uploads.

[ividyon]

Here's a fun edge case:

One of Unreal 1's best known modders, .:..:, has a notoriously tech-unfriendly name. Cannot be googled. And now, it also defeats UnrealArchive.

You can find him listed here:

https://unrealarchive.org/authors/_/3/index.html

However, it will just redirect you to the author main page, because the mechanism that converts his name to a URL-friendly string just filters out his ENTIRE name. With that, his author page is currently unaccessible.