@genesis I can imagine the benefits to Steve’s wallet already.
I’m usually the type to research things and write my own private essay that I never share with anyone.
I don’t know if I’ll ever get to making a video myself, I’m kind of anti social media and prefer text.
What I certainly can do is start compiling some info about where I’m at. With big thanks to you I’m making a little headway into understanding the brains better, the old build has some really great log files and the brain section of the genome actually has lots of comments that Steve left behind to help himself debug it.
Anyone is welcome to make a video using my research for now and I would certainly collaborate on one, I just feel like I’m barely scratching the surface and still need to spend my time learning rather than teaching.
I’ve been going slower than I’d like but my kids are home for summer vacation so I don’t get much quiet time in the house for thinking on big ideas. In the next couple days I’ll start uploading my notes to a cloud storage and share the link with interested members.
@foggygoofball maybe make a new post with your research results. I should have collected at least one youtuber here. Maybe one of them will use it in a video? And reading your results here would be a nice first post for the 3 empty big categorys
Alright, that sounds like an excellent plan, friend. I’m not sure how long it will all take me as I’m still kind of absorbing information. I’d like to be certain about most of the info I post before I end up saying something foolish and wrong for the internet to latch onto.
Are there any juicy tidbits that have been shared over the years that I’m unlikely to know about? does anyone still have a copy of any old builds, or better yet an archive of the old forums that I can examine for myself?
I still have a copy of every Grandroids release there has been, about 16 of them.
About 7.5GB in total. But I’m not sharing them without Steve’s permission.
They are useful for understanding the basics of how the creatures’ brains work, I suppose, but apart from that they pretty much only have nostalgic value.
@nephilim thanks for reaching out!
I already got hold of the most recent previous build and it’s actually been incredibly useful. The genome in it is obviously a bit out of date, but it’s almost fully annotated, basically Steve left a whole bunch of notes to himself in there. It’s a lot of data, but it’s helping me to organize it in my brain.
@foggygoofball Yeah, I’ve spent many hours scouring the source code and the genomes and experimented with modifying the creatures’ brain maps. But that’s already years ago and I’m afraid that most of that work is irrelevant now.
I put a few videos on youtube back then: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usRUNwC3cc4
@nephilim Feel free to share your museum of old builds and other stuff! @foggygoofball can definitely be trusted 🙂
I’m busy catching up on unmoderated forum posts that I never asked to require moderation, and blog comments that I didn’t see, on top of emails that have marked themselves read before I even noticed them! I feel like I must have left the planet for a few days without realizing! Apologies for anything I’m late replying to! I guess I’ve had my head down too much, doing biochemistry…
Are there any juicy tidbits that have been shared over the years that I’m unlikely to know about? does anyone still have a copy of any old builds, or better yet an archive of the old forums that I can examine for myself?
I did save a copy of the old Grandroids page (forums and blog) before it went away. Happy to send you a copy – email me? mail@dmewes.com
(Unless Steve you’d prefer to not have copies of it lying around… Please let me know)
@danielmewes I sent an email your way a while ago, I’d be very interested in getting a copy of your archive. My address is unusual, so perhaps it went to spam. D*****r@who.net @steve has been really willing to share everything with me, he’s even sent me a recently updated copy of the genome from just last week.
@danielmewes I’m cool with that. I didn’t know you had copies. TBH, I’d be quite interested in them too. I have the original SQL database, of course, but CMSes just LOVE making their data unintelligible by spreading it over dozens of relational tables, so it’s not much use.
I exported the whole thing to Excel, but it’s all but meaningless. Apparently the user with ID XXXXX said something at time YYYYY. Look up time YYYYY and it tells me they said the thing whose primary key is ZZZZZ. But in which table? And who the heck is user XXXXX?…
Hey, yeah, I haven’t gotten a chance yet to figure out where to upload it to. I think it’s about 1 GB.
I also found out that it’s still trying to hit some actual grandroids.com URL for loading some kind of dependency that obviously no longer exists there. The pages still render though – I think it might be some additional script/image file/stylesheet that’s luckily not strictly needed. I’d ideally like to remove that before sharing the copy further, so it doesn’t keep generating 404s on Steve’s server…
Sorry it’s taking me a while, has been a busy week. Will try to get to it soon.
No worries! I’m a patient man and I know what it means to be busy for sure.
@steve As it happens, I also made a backup of the Grandroids website (excluding user profiles and user dashboard pages iirc) before it went down. I’ve been meaning to ask, but would it be okay if I uploaded it somewhere? Or maybe stick it on a subdomain of my own website, so people don’t have to download it to view it. I’d understand if you don’t want it publicly viewable, though.
