Meh. I've tried to get in touch with people there as well. I believe even the forums associated with them cleared out at some point. I think they're still there, per se, but nobody uses them. It's really too bad, because while there are no areas in particular that I am after, I am certain there must be some real treasures floating around in the mix. It's a shame they aren't be shared with the community, not even in the restricted (but in a good way) manner the SAE originally intended.
Anyway, if anybody gets a hold of someone there or has access to some of the areas they once hosted, I'd be interested as well. Perhaps someone else in the community can take over the SAE and revitalize it?
New SAE will hopefully be up this weekend, including an archive of all Rolindar's areas I could dredge up, as well as a few others I managed to restore.
I *did* have a dump of the SAE archives, as well as a few others that were pretty exclusive, and well written to boot. Altogether, it totalled around 120 areas, I think, 30 or so of which were not part of the SAE.
Unfortunately, after going through a massive stack of backup cds, it appears that I managed to lose them somewhere.
I'm really QUITE unhappy about that.
Getting mud owners, especially owners of small muds, for some reason, to part with areas is like trying to pluck their pubic hair: They for some reason would apparently rather have you stab them in the heart.
I've got a couple people who may have a backup of it, am awaiting a response.
In related news, I'm most likely joining this to the free mud resource that Kavir, Anitra, Donathin, Nass, and I are discussing putting up. If this be the case, I'm thinking of generalizing the Smaug Area Exchange into a simple Mud Area Archives, and inviting players from various codebases to share their work.
Dace, I have Rolindar's Giants trilogy on my mud.. not sure if I still have the original files themselves anymore, though I might, if not, the copies I've got in my mud are already using the SmaugFUSS new resets but are available for a project like this. Yeah, just checked and it looks like I may even still have a copy that was backed up before I added Samson's reset snippet, though it's probably also not necesarily the original untouched area.. I'll check a little further to see if maybe I still have a copy that's in it's original state while I wait to find out where to send it.
If you are looking for the three giant areas I have original, unmodified copies on my backup drive. I also have a complete ( unless a new area was added to SAE in the past three years ) archive of the SAE areas, plus various others I've found on the 'net over the years.
If you are really serious about doing your area project I'll gladly send you a copy of them. I'm all for helping out the comunity in any way.
EDIT: Forgot to mention, all of these areas are in their original format, have not been updated with the new reset system, or any other changes, if some of them don't work right, blame the author :)
That sounds perfect.
The server that they were running on has been down for awhile, and is a seperate server from the rest of Shadow-lands, so I've actually been a little worried about whether or not their archives still exist.
Straiff, the owner of Shadow-lands, comes back from vacation today, so I'd like to get his official blessing first before I put them up.
However, if you could tar/zip them and e-mail them to me, I could start getting them set up :)
Wow, Zhamel, that does sound far better than I can pull off, I do happen to have a bunch of the areas that had been posted there, and most are still in original state (and despite being a "small mud", I don't mind sharing areas, especially ones that I downloaded from somewhere else myself), but I am sure that I don't have a untarnished copies of the whole archive. Way to go. :)
Like when Samson was working on getting together an archive of his AFKmud releases I sent him one even he didn't know about :P
Don't know why but I like to collect everything I can get my hands on. Guess it's 'cause you never know when something will end up being needed or come in handy.
Anyways, email sent and if you need anything else, just hollar.
Zhamel: That's awesome, at one point I was going to create my own little personal set of archives too, but my downloads haven't been regular enough it seems for me to keep up with each change to SmaugFUSS and my collection is very incomplete for the various other codebases and area sets and snippets that I've gathered to date.
Dace: Beautiful! And this will be an area collection, forums, & mud listing? No code repository, but everything else, eh? You said it'll be open publicly by this weekend, is that just the area/forum section? and at what address? (sorry for the barrage..)
I have a bunch of area'a i can contribute to this as well that have just been released with the ELdhaMUD codebase, as soon as i get time i will convert them back to stock and send them in.
Forum's up.
Am currently setting it up and uploading. Will post link in a day or two when it's all ready :)
Sorry, didn't see your questions until just now.
Forums on building, as well as the area collection, which will hopefully span more codebases than just Smaug.
I'm also going to add some nifty things to the forums like an RPG.
It'll be affiliated with the new mud listing site, but hosted on a seperate server :)
The Area Archives are now open to all, with a current count of 154 areas.
Feel free to register and start checking out what's posted, and hopefully post one or two of your own as well :)