So, I am taking the existing MLP submission pack pinned at the top and extending the submissions until xxxxx.

EDIT 12/12/2015: EXTENDING TO FEBRUARY 1ST, 2016. This will be the last extension!

However, more importantly:

This will be the final submission for Massassi. All submissions sent to Massassi during this time will be added to the MLP. Once December 15th comes and the pack is compiled, Massassi will no longer accept any new submissions. The website will change into a slightly updated, static archive. The forums will stick around as long as is sensible, but I predict we won't have a reason to keep those around for long either.

I will make a thread near the end of the submission to discuss the final future of Massassi in general. But go ahead and start thinking about what you'd like to see a "dead" Massassi continue on as. Just a static archive, nothing more? Do you really want to keep the community part going at all, do you see value in it? Etc. I'm not making any announcements on that, but I would like input.

'ssassi is dead, long live 'ssassi.

but if massassi is archived, how will FGR submit TODOA 2:Electric Boogaloo?

More importantly, if Massassi is archived, how will I submit Hysteria when it's complete sometime in the year 3941?

9 baud modem.

Yes, you heard me.

Nine. BAUD.

Dang, I gotta make sure NeSquared gets wrapped up before then and find the next thread a new home.

How old is this site now anyway, officially? I've lost track. I use to post on the front page Massassi's birthday when it came around.

I kinda miss doing the SOTD too

You should check out my level for this pack. As you'll notice, its name is Take-Off: Destruction of Alderaan.

That's right.

It's TODOA too.



So the answer to your question is: via Dropbox in December 2014.

This thread does not deliver.

If the following is a reliable source, it's almost 17 years old come March 27th (putting it's birth in 1998, which sounds right from what I recall).
http://forums.massassi.net/vb3/showthread.php?2338-Happy-birthday-Massassi!

I'd guess it's 1998 since my classic division of Massassians used to be 1998-2000 (Old School), 2001-2003 (Middle School), 2004-2006 New School, 2007-> ("What The Hell's Wrong With You"-School).

(Of course, it's been such a long time since that FGRism that the 2007-2009, 2010-2012 and 2013-2015 generations would probably need a new name. Or should be divided like 2007-2009, 2010-> I dunno)

(MOOBEKI IS AT IT AGAIN)

(TIME WELL SPENT)

(MOOOOG)

Since you asked for feedback, my personal stake in Massassi had been to stay until the NeSquared (and NeShattered) thread was wrapped up, which at its current pace is likely to be within the next year or so, though it could be longer if the past few months are an indication. Obviously, that'll change if the forums were to shut down before that. I'd imagine it'd be nice if Massassi at least stayed as a static archive, and beyond that, I have no strong feelings what the future of Massassi holds.

There's a part of me that will be bummed that, in all my time here, I never did make a JK level. The reason I signed up on Massassi in the first place had been some delusion that I'd be motivated into making a level. I suppose there's still the year to make good on that, though I'm fairly sure I won't; I have NeS and ISB-related stuff to take care of still.

Honestly Gebohq, if you want, I can just hand the forum over to you and you can host it yourself once I take most of Massassi down. You can then turn it into a NeS-only forum, delete all the other forum sections and just keep the ISB.

It's up to you, but I can't think of any better use for the forum software after this. The license is still good and all, so yeah.

Certainly food for thought. I'll keep it in mind, if and when that bridge comes for the crossing.

It's finally happening, eh? I need a new English-language forum to frequent...

Who would have thought, all those years ago, that this site was going to be around for so long? It's certainly been a good run.

I hereby claim the right to post the very last forum post ever posted on Massassi.

if massassi must die we must plan and properly execute a massassi bbq

I'll certainly miss this site if it goes down. I would hope that we could continue to keep an archive of all the old levels that were submitted, but I'll understand if they need to be taken down simply for server cost reasons. This site has been around for over half of my life, and although I rarely post much anymore, I still check the site at least once or twice a week to see what's going on (which admittedly is more of a compulsive habit).

Open a r/massassi subreddit and keep the party going. You might get plenty of old members to subscribe. Also, archive the tutorials. They are a unique source of knowledge that would be lost without Massassi.

What would this mean for the jkhub?

Nothing. JKHub is Giraffe's baby, and I just host it. He's free to continue to do so.

BTW, nothing is final, guys. If you guys want to set up something or change it up, I'm open to ideas. I just don't have the time to do anything myself, so the best I can really offer is to put Massassi in a state where it can remain relatively maintenance free. I'll offer a full download package of the site then as well.

So far I haven't seen any real complaints from you all about the possibility though, so I guess it's the right time. We got a number of months yet before this matters anyway.

So you're telling me massassi is currently in a state where it's not maintenance free? I'd be curious to see what is on that list of things to maintain. Surely it's administrative stuff, and more on manning the forums than actually doing things on the server. Anyway, as I know my way around the web and I have hosting space, I would gladly offer any help I could to keep things alive. Massassi has been here for more than half my life (as I'm sure it has for you as well) and I'm not ready to see it sunset yet.

I like to believe I owe everything up to this point in my life to massassi. As I was always a gamer, modding games took it too that next step, eventually I found my way into web dev after Blujay banned me and I thought to myself "I can make a better masassi". I built my first geocities site, 8t88utilities. 15 or so years latter I have many years of web development experience and moved onto iOS mobile development. I have a good job because of that, met a great girl, 2 kids with 1 on the way. It's all thanks to massassi. I mean that. Seriously. Even today I'm still reminded of it, as I work on a 3d platformer in the unreal engine. If I would've never spent all those years learning 3d modeling, texturing, programming, I would never be able to do any of this.

I definitely intend to release my Downtown city map with this pack, and I also intend to help keep massassi alive. This doesn't have to be the last map pack.

zanardi: as it stands right now, no, it's not maintenance free. The main site code is literally ancient (PHP3) with so many security hazards that it's not even worth looking at. It needs to be rewritten entirely. I have all the dangerous scripts marked with no permission right now. These are things that really should be fixed but requires a lot more time than I really have to spend on it. I've asked for others to step forward in the past on this stuff but no one did :/

Also, of course, the forums require maintenance and updates. Eventually the forums won't be supported anymore and that's going to be yet another huge pain in the ass, since there's absolutely no reason to pay for a new license for this garbage software. Spam filtering is also needed for registrations and that is nearly unsolvable for VB because of how awful it is.

Hosting isn't too much of an issue, the whole thing just needs a redo. Bad. And of course, it's questionable whether it's worth it, considering the number of visitors to the site.

Anyway, we can talk about this in the coming months, zanardi. If you want to update the site or whatever I will gladly give you the opportunity, but just keep in mind that it's probably not worth redoing all the submission systems when no one is really submitting anything. Even a call for a level pack resulted in a whopping 2 submissions.

I was typing out a huge effortpost but I realized that it's not worth my time.

There are long-standing structural defects in the JK community that preclude keeping things alive and healthy. The short version is that Massassi is and always has been a repository for levels and mods that literally nobody ever played, and this might have worked out ok up until we started hitting our 30s and had careers and kids. I don't want to discourage you from volunteering your time, but life's short and I'd hate to see you waste a lot of yours on what amounts to a dusty upload form.

I'd be willing to work on updating the site, or participate in some way. I know I don't really participate in the community much, since I have a lurker mentality, but it would be sad to see Massassi disappear. Work would need to be done to not only update the main site, but the community and content as well. Wouldn't make sense to update a site for a dwindling community, after all. Changes would have to be made in order to make it survive, and experimentation would have to be done to see what works. An archive would be nice, just to preserve everything.

I'm not sure what exactly can be done to revitalize the community considering who the most active people are.

The most positive reception to my JK-related work has come from people who played the game back in 1997 and put it away. By comparison, active JK players have tended toward what I'd call destructive antipathy toward anything not created by one of their most prominent members. I'd love to get more of the normal, well-balanced people involved, but frankly even if they were looking for a community they wouldn't stick around one like this.

There already is a JK editing community that has no signs of going away any time soon, and that's JKHub. Massassi hasn't had anything to do with JK editing revitalization for years. I think it's pointless at this point to go "hey, I know how we can all get back to editing JK, and it's going to involve blackjack and hookers- actually forget about the JK editing".

Sorry.

Honestly, I think that Gebohq and the ISB crowd should be given the time they need to finish their projects and after that CoolMatty can really do whatever he wants. Of course, he can already do that at any point in time but still.

As the creator of the globally* most popular post-Drazen JK level (whopping 12 reviews against 3.5k downloads!), the only occasions when increased download activity or interest pops up for JK is when someone actually popular goes ahead and features the game or when there's a game re-release (and the last one before that one was in 2009).
* = As in, outside the usual JK communities

And as you can see from the GOG comments, most of them are on the lines of "hey I remember this game from when I was a kid, nice to revisit this one again, shame about not actually being modern-system compatible". No comments (yet) like "hey, I remember being an insufferable c*** at Microsoft Zone in the late 1990s and I AM CURRENTLY REMEMBERING being an insufferable c*** right now!", by the way.

But then there's this oddity (which I guess proves my earlier point wrong): standalone release of DBZ:TDIR. Over 8k downloads.

Is it popular because JK MP is so great or that the game is just a masterpiece of eternal proportions? Or is it because DBZ is f***ing popular and the DBZ fans who have downloaded TDIR don't give a flying toss about the game itself?*
* = Or is it because Earth's Defense Force for Half-Life is eternally under development?

(By the way, standalone releases like that are specifically prohibited by the JK EULA but guess how much LEC/Disney cares. In fact, that release was deleted from ModDB once but it didn't take too long for it to be reuploaded and it's been there ever since.)

In other words, keeping Massassi alive has and hasn't had anything to do with JK editing in years, it certainly won't be a part of it now, so if someone really wants to take up the effort to keep the forums alive (or even update the software), well, that'd be nice. But may be unlikely.

Yet like zanardi (an actually talented JK editor who has moved on to actual 3D editing software and has an actual life! I love you, man), this site has affected- no, effected me way too much for over half of my life. Which is why I think that I should be allowed to make the last forum post (that and it'd be absolutely fitting considering all of those threads on which I posted last and they were never posted in again). Unless Brian wants to do it. That damn kayaker!

Exactly my point. If Massassi tried to stay a JK editing site, it's dead. If any effort was made to keep Massassi around, or try to revive it, it would have to be in some form other than JK editing. The game is in too much of a limbo, I suppose it would be called, to gain a revitalized following. That, and we have the JKHub. It would also have to be something other than a dime-a-dozen gaming website, in order to get and keep users. It would have to be some pretty drastic changes, if it's decided to be attempted. Massassi's grown old and is way past its time, in its current form.

I always viewed Massassi as this refrigerator slowly stocked with food and condiments that, over time, people stopped visiting. And the community was a mold ecosystem in the back that was sucking up moisture and starch in a dark corner. Once thriving, over the years, molds like this completely die (VB forum failure) or suffocate themselves out (petty admin abuses), but what I strangely liked about this specimen was that it was slightly more sentient and more tenacious than the rest. This green mold growth refused to stop throbbing, and the gas expulsions were uniquely poisonous.

That's the best I can say about the Massassian forums. From a JO/JA editor who came in 2003 and the defacto modator of That Board Modding Under That One, modding is dead in general. I've seen great mappers from the height of JO/JA get thrown under the bus in this game industry. In today's AAA games, is there even good level design anymore? Visualizing things in 3D probably helped me to some extent in Civil Engineering (a lot of people are spatially blind in this industry), so I guess that's that.

Thanks CM for standing by for Massassi for so long. (not sarcasm btw)

> we can talk about this in the coming months, zanardi

That sounds good Matty, I'll send you my contact info.

I hear what all you guys are saying, but for me personally I don't care whether the community survives, or if people view massassi as a modding site or if nobody even visits it anymore. My vision for the future of massassi is this: I don't want to revamp or rewrite a bunch of things to try to revive massassi or make it something it isn't. I'm definitely willing to fix and remove old broken stuff or in regards to security issues. In a nutshell I just want to keep massassi in it's current state indefinitely, a sort of working time capsule.. Mainly because that's really all the time I would be able to realistically invest into a project like this. Ideally the forums are still operational, the files are all still hosted, everything except for new submissions (And to be quiet honest, I may want to accept new submissions if someone is actually still producing content). I'm not wanting to do this for anyone or anything other than myself. I like the idea behind it.

That sounds like it will work out since your motivation and vision is to simply keep the current site running no matter the community's level of activity. I do find the idea of Massassi continuing to exist even if it should have died long ago an entertaining one.

well fuk

AAA games are **** for modding because they're all produced by greedy *******s who infect their products with mod-inhibiting DRM and attitudes. Skyrim is really the only exception I can think of. But there are plenty of games out there that have more vibrant modding communities than JK ever had. Minecraft and Kerbal Space Program come to mind.

As for level design, it seems like it's not even a consideration in a majority of games anymore due to the design of them. Most of them are no longer broken up into discrete 'levels,' with open-world reigning supreme. Of course, with open world, there is less consideration taken toward the amount of fun the player has in any particular area..

The last AAA-ish game I played that had good 'level design' was Dark Souls. Before that, I couldn't really say. UK2004, maybe? Then again, I avoid AAA games for the most part, so maybe I'm not the best judge.

Such as Wolfenstein 3D.

To be fair, I remember back years ago during Massassi's few episodes of identity crisis that I suggested maybe the site should focus on the idea of level design, like the discussion of it or something of that sort. Looking back and now, that idea would be misguided and somewhat hypocritical since the question of "what is good level design" is something beyond me or most on the site could reliably answer, mostly due to lack of experience and pure bias. I remember Massassi Reviews and similar sites (map-review.net, bless that long-gone place) that tried bluntly, but really, what is good level design? Who knows. There's has to be at least a "minimum of good," right?

I don't play games much anymore, but the problem with that open world design imo is that it usually involves open places with a bunch of dude enemies standing around in the middle. I've heard developer promises of how this gives freedom to plan attacks, allows assessment and creativity, multidirectional gameplay, yadada, but I've found that the same solution works for every case in that scenario. Pretty much every time. With enough glitter and small rewards of achievement, I guess you could trick the player into thinking that it's not the game's fault for not designing unique challenges but that the player, doing the Same Thing for Every Case way, is getting better at the game and at the end of the Same Thing for Every Case career, he is an expert. That's has to be a term for that. Enough rambling for me.



I liked in the newer Batman games when you are presented with a room full of guards, obstacles and intertwining paths, a set of tools, element of dangers and movement options. Like a tight operation. Stuff like that. The open-city gameplay tended to be weaker because you attacked pockets of resistance standing around.

The sad thing is, I have a number of half-finished JK/MotS multiplayer levels that IMHO are actually pretty cool. Some gameplay stuff in there that other people haven't done. Every once in a while I revisit them, but I can't make any real progress as my time is limited and JK editing is really time consuming. It's always in the back of my mind to one day finish them and release them. It'd be a shame if that never happened. I can see the problem though. It would be great if we could keep the hosted content though. I just know that at some point I'll have another JK revival and download some of my old favourites and some I never even tried.

Don't care much for the site. Long live the forums though. If only to keep tabs on all you nerds. JK love you guys.

Or more realistically, Doom (And Heretic, HeXen, and Strife). Of course, that (those) game(s) is(are) much easier to modify than JK ever was. Plus, throw on a legacy of fan made ports to keep the game up to date on current systems (Most likely due to iD and Raven software releasing the various source codes for the games (Strife never had its code publicly released, but it was since exhumed and used for the version of Strife that is now on Steam, which has also reinvigorated the modding community, I believe. Granted, the modding community for Strife is basically the same thing as Doom's community because it runs off the same engine and the same mod tools can be used for it). JK, as far as I know, never had some kind of fan port for it, probably because of the lack of a code to work with, or no one wanting to reverse engineer the files (What happened to Strife and the (G)ZDoom port(s)). Of course Dark Forces, the big-sexy-daddy of JK, has some simpler, Doom like tools, and while it's a slow progress, DarkXL is still in production (With plans for Outlaws and the Build Engine game Blood). That would certainly benefit df-21.net, anyways. Of course, with all of these projects done or underway, well, yah it's probably too late for JK, especially if the re-releases still lack support for more modern computers. So some better get crackin' on a JK port for modern systems and new mod tools if ya' care, mkay?

I'm still working on Gorc but about as quickly as Lucius is working on DarkXL.

Thing is, like I said, even if it's finished it won't be enough to revitalize the community because most of the community doesn't care. I still remember the hate I got when I said I wouldn't reimplement the same cog checksum so they could keep cheating the same way. <--- this is what the real jk community thinks is most important

OTOH people from outside the community who played JK as kids loooooove the project but aren't invested enough to contribute.