feedback Updating the Omnibus

[catty-cb 4,402]

Evening one and all

I have volunteered to take on the Omnibus as a project, in the next few weeks people will start to see the knowledge tree articles from these sites (all belong to Simtropolis) start to be added to the Omnibus

http://www.sc4ever.com

http://www.sc3000.com

http://www.sc3000.com/sc2000/info/

As anyone who has visited them will realize they are using very old site software and to be honest its amazing that they still work but they do crash quite frequently these days, the priority is to make sure the contents of these sites are also available here at Simtropolis should the worse happen.

I think we all realize just what a mess the Omnibus is in, and that finding the document you are looking for can be a bit of a miracle, unfortunately in the short term things aren't going to be getting any better as I will be adding quite a few more articles into it, but I would like everyone who reads this post or has ever used the Omnibus to please start thinking about what categories (and sub-categories) are needed, if its possible to change the layout of the Omnibus then what would you like to see, to give you an example the BlackLiquid (Banished Forums) website uses the same software as Simtropolis and its wiki looks like this.

http://blackliquidsoftware.com/index.php?/articles.html/

So please everyone give it some thought and all suggestions are welcome ... may not be doable but it still helps to get an idea of what people want to see in the future.

-catty

[Cyclone Boom 16,939]

This really is an admirable incentive, and thanks for making a start on it.

There's no certainty with the fragile nature of internet, and while both those legacy sites are still owned and hosted by Dirk, there's always the chance how something could go wrong. They are using an older web scripting framework, and still being connected to a database instead of functioning as static articles.

I've said this before, but the Omnibus is very much in need of an overhaul in terms of the design and categorization. To have an index list is one idea, and to alleviate the visually cluttersome and cumbersome navigation. That does need to be a prime focus on improving the accessibility. To echo what @catty-cb has said above, it would be great if anyone has input on what you'd like to see. Then myself and @CorinaMarie can look into seeing what's feasible within the constraints of technical limitations.

Something else is the name of the Omnibus. For me and I remember when I first joined ST and I was curious about what the word even meant! Now I suppose it's kind of become integrated in the culture of the community, but perhaps it'd be clearer if named to something else?

Such as: Tutorials, Articles, Guides, or Knowledgebase

We're open to suggestions. So if you've any ideas on categories or anything regarding the Omnibus, feel free to reply below...

And it can be as many times as you wish, double posting or whatever. We've no hard line rules on that front nowadays.

[Jasoncw 11,841]

The BAT tutorials are of varying quality, and while I haven't gone through every single one, the one about raytraced reflections in 3ds Max should definitely be removed. It's very out of date and no one should follow it.

 

[catty-cb 4,402]

11 hours ago, Jasoncw said:

The BAT tutorials are of varying quality, and while I haven't gone through every single one, the one about raytraced reflections in 3ds Max should definitely be removed. It's very out of date and no one should follow it.

Thanks for posting in the short-term we will add a comment to the top letting people know its obsolete, I am loath to permanently delete anything but we can move it and any other obsolete tutorials to a hidden area of the omnibus .... maybe have a public index page that records what's been hidden should anyone going looking for something they remember being in the omnibus and now can't find it .... a moderator could then move it back into public viewing if there was a good reason for doing so.

-catty

[CorinaMarie 29,621]

@catty-cb

I fully agree deleting is rather extreme. I'd favor an Obsolete Area which has full public access and then (as you said) the note atop each one to let peeps know its status.

[mattb325 28,880]

@ catty-cb, hats off to you for volunteering for such a huge undertaking!

I agree it's always best to not delete old articles, even in the case of Raytraced Reflections, which no-one would or should really follow now, you never know when it may come in handy for some users who might be on a very ancient 3dsMax version which doesn't support Bat4Max setup.

Also, if I can add a suggestion to the obsolete area: while >90% of the articles host the images directly, some of the articles - Ill Tonkso's is a great example - are missing almost every picture (thanks to imageshack and other disasters) which makes them unusable, even if the written content/premise is sound.

Perhaps those tutorials/guides that are missing heaps of images should also be in the obsolete section too, unless someone can find or recreate the images?

[catty-cb 4,402]

22 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

I'd favor an Obsolete Area which has full public access and then (as you said) the note atop each one to let peeps know its status.

I agree and as @mattb325  says its always possible there is someone out there still using the software

11 hours ago, mattb325 said:

@ catty-cb, hats off to you for volunteering for such a huge undertaking

I've been at a bit of a loose end since shutting down my website last year, don't regret it as I had to focus on real life and it was a relief not to have that daily commitment, but I'm one of those people who like to be busy doing something so sorting out the omnibus seems an ideal project ... it needs doing and its a task I can do at my own pace

Quote

Also, if I can add a suggestion to the obsolete area: while >90% of the articles host the images directly, some of the articles - Ill Tonkso's is a great example - are missing almost every picture (thanks to imageshack and other disasters) which makes them unusable, even if the written content/premise is sound.

Perhaps those tutorials/guides that are missing heaps of images should also be in the obsolete section too, unless someone can find or recreate the images?

 

It is possible to find some of the pictures in the Wayback Machine if you still have the picture link ... its not a guaranteed process, taking Ill Tonkso's as an example, its still possible to find the first missing picture

https://web.archive.org/web/20070101232327/https://img452.imageshack.us/img452/4564/tutor1ux0.jpg

But yes I agree with you if the pictures are missing from a tutorial then it should also be in the obsolete section, in the meantime I will add a note to the top of the tutorial and put back the first missing picture, hopefully someone may have the other pictures.

-catty

[Cyclone Boom 16,939]

Nice find there, and it can be quite rare for externally hosted images to be archived like that. So that's certainly worth checking to see if any might be on the Wayback just in case. It seems like the majority of people used to rely on ImageShack for uploading their SC4 pics. For the Omnibus and a lot were (and still are) locally stored here at ST which is one saving grace. If any external ones which are otherwise missing can be found, every little certainly helps with restoring the overall completeness of articles.

For obsolete articles, and I also support the idea to have those archived in a viewable but read only section. This way it would inform people how information is either incomplete or no longer applicable. But the info is still there to be read, while being aware it might not be relevant anymore (as per Jason's example).

[mattb325 28,880]

10 hours ago, catty-cb said:

But yes I agree with you if the pictures are missing from a tutorial then it should also be in the obsolete section, in the meantime I will add a note to the top of the tutorial and put back the first missing picture, hopefully someone may have the other pictures

Also, it may be possible to simply recreate the images afresh. This article...

....is archived without its images in the wayback machine, but, assuming simcoug no longer has the actual image files, then some, like this article are super easy to make a new version for the tutorial. If that's the case, let me know and I'm happy to give you a hand. Not all articles will be as obvious to recreate as this mind you, as the articles may cover areas that are not part of my skill set, but it saves putting perfectly good tutorials into an archive section

[catty-cb 4,402]

13 hours ago, mattb325 said:

 then some, like this article are super easy to make a new version for the tutorial. If that's the case, let me know and I'm happy to give you a hand. Not all articles will be as obvious to recreate as this mind you, as the articles may cover areas that are not part of my skill set, but it saves putting perfectly good tutorials into an archive section

Thank you for the offer and at some point I'm certainly going to want to do this and the same for any other tutorial that's salvageable, the priority at this stage has to be saving the tutorials from SC4EVER and SC3000 as unlike the tutorials already in the omnibus which are backed up there is a possibility having discussed this with @Cyclone Boom  that these sites may not have backups if anything were to go permanently wrong with them ... and while its possible that some of these documents could be retrieved from the wayback there would certainly be gaps, which does of course bring up the other issue with these sites and that's whether attempts should be made to save the files on these sites, in SC4EVER case there is only one file here

http://www.sc4ever.com/media/

the rest of the site consists of the forum (which I don't think can be saved) and the tutorials which I'll be copying over to the omnibus once I've finished on the SC3000 site, as for the SC3000 site its got a three download areas covering SC2000 cities, SC3000 cities and the SCURK section, how much of these files could be saved is a big question and hopefully somebody reading this post may be willing to take it on as a project.

-catty

[catty-cb 4,402]

Draft Categories for the Omnibus

Quote

General information

FAQ

Getting Started

User Interface

Help

Cheats and Easter Eggs

Command Line Arguments

Error and problem fixes and workarounds

Hotkeys

Index List

Custom Content

Exchanges

Formats

Games

Miscellaneous

Themes

Interviews

Maps

Mapping & Terraforming

Terrain Importation, Editing, & Generation

Terrain, Rock and Water Mods

Miscellaneous

Cities XL

Cities Skylines

SimCity 2

SimCity 3

SimCity 4

SimCity 2013

SimCity Societies

Obsolete

Other Games

Banished

Cities in Motion

Plugins

Colossus Addon Mod (CAM)

Network Addon Mod (NAM)

Reference

Building Architect Tool

Lot Editor

SimCity Urban Renewal Kit (SCURK)

Technical information

Theories

Tips, tricks, & strategy

Airports

Buildings

Bridges

Finance

Garbage

Highways

Miscellenous

Power

Public services

Rail

Roads

Seaports

Strategy

Subways

Transportation

Tunnels

Utilities

Water

Zoning and RCI

Tools

DAMN

Tutorials

BAT Tutorials

LOT Tutorials

Miscellenous

Modding Information

SC3 Tutorials

Changes and suggestions welcome

  Edited July 3, 2019 by catty-cb  
updated the categories

[catty-cb 4,402]

Back again .... ran out of time last night to add some comments to the draft categories for the omnibus post (see above) and am about to run out of evening again ....

 

But before I do .... when I started looking at categories for the omnibus I started off thinking it should be by game then sub-categories the problem with that was by the time I'd come up with a list of categories it was over two hundred lines long and if you added in the fact that some categories needed to be in more than one main-category it just wasn't practical and would have been information overload.

So I went for the draft category version in the above post .... tried to keep the main-categories to under fifteen (currently thirteen) and the sub-categories to something that an article could be added to regardless of the game, obviously there are a few sub-categories  that are game specific and under Miscellaneous and Other Games I've added a number of sub-categories for the various "city-type" games so anything that needs to be listed under a particular game can be, these can be added to if new games become popular and it doesn't need to be restricted to "city-type" but a lot would depend on whether someone had information that they wanted to add to the omnibus .... and yes I know SimCity Societies isn't going to win any popularity contents anytime soon but I've got all the discs for it and I'm sure there are other members of the site who still have it ... probably should go under Other Games 

I forgot to add an Obsolete category last night so am pretty certain I've probably missed something else along the way, any comments or suggestions are welcome

  Edited August 8, 2019 by catty-cb  
deleted smiley

[catty-cb 4,402]

A site map (or sitemap) is a list of pages on a website in this case the Omnibus as I felt it was something that would prove usefully while the Omnibus is being worked on ....

.... the aim is to have a complete list (and URLs) of not only what's already on the Omnibus but everything that's going to be added from the old SC3000 and SC3EVER sites, it will probably stay as a draft document until the omnibus categories are finalized ... if I move or rename anything then I will update the sitemap at the same time.

 

[catty-cb 4,402]

I have now updated the sitemap with all the articles in the omnibus (this also includes all the articles from the SC4EVER site) there are a number of duplicate articles for example in the SC4 Reference Category we have

and in the SC4 Tutorials Category we have

At this stage I plan to ignore the duplicate articles as my current priority is copying over the articles from the SC3000 website.

-catty

[catty-cb 4,402]

Am now on the home stretch re transferring copies of the articles from the old SC3000 and SC4EVER websites ... so am starting to look at the existing omnibus articles in particular the ones that have been damaged over time.

How many of the damaged or missing pictures (or both) articles its going to be possible to repair is still a unknown, but if you look at this article

which is very damaged and missing its pictures, then go and compare it to the copy that's held over in the Wayback Machine

https://web.archive.org/web/20120111143811/https://www.simtropolis.com/omnibus/_/SimCity-4/batlot-editor-tutorials/nightlighting-in-gmax-for-objects-and-windows-r202

it certainly looks like its going to be possible ... at this stage my priority continues to be the saving of the articles off the old websites, but if anyone has an omnibus article that they want or need repairing urgently then post here and I'll add it to the top of my-to-do-list.

-catty

PS: Still happy to take suggestions for Omnibus Categories