Let's Play Official Archive: A Gamespite / Talking Time Joint

Also! I guess I should post a link to this here, huh? SO IT BEGINS.

Okay, so: Thanks to Parish's generous offer to host the archive on the wiki, I'm now ready to begin work on a permanent archive in earnest. Only thing is, compiling the images used for each and every finished LP is going to take a long, long time and I need the images ready before I can start posting stuff on the wiki. Doing it myself even at a pace of one per day would take me until around late-November or so to finish, and that's being generous with my spare time (especially considering that's about when work will start hitting me full-force).

That's where you guys come in! All I need is for any willing volunteers to go through any finished threads they can and compile all the images used, organized section-by-section for easy convenience. Once that's done, PM me to let me know that you're finished and send the zipped files over mine or Parish's way for him to upload. If you want to help out, please post in the claims thread or PM me to let me know which LPs you'd like to get to work on, so I can organize this without any overlap going on.

For those of you who want to go sort through your own LPs, just remember: only send the images you USED for your LP! That means no photobucket dumping for fun and profit - go through whatever you have and only send off the ones I'll need for archival. Odds are this won't happen, but I'd just like to make sure this is driven home early on.

-In progress-
Astyanax - ASandoval
Final Fantasy - Brickroad
Legacy of the Wizard - Netbrian
NetHack - Netbrian
Summon Night: Swordcraft Story - PapillonReel

-Ready to upload-
Arkham Horror - Dawnswalker
Bahamut Lagoon - PapillonReel
Clash at Demonhead - Nich
Dragon Warrior - TheSL
Final Fantasy (Ikaruga) - PapillonReel
Final Fantasy Mystic Quest - gudfooht
Fire Emblem - PapillonReel
The Fool's Errand - Nich
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past - PapillonReel
Link: Faces of Evil - Kyven
Maniac Mansion - Nich
Mario is Missing! - PapillonReel
Mega Man Battle Network 6: Cybeast Falzar
Microgames - Foxeris
Out of this World - Kyven
Persona 2: Innocent Sin / Eternal Punishment - Nich
Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom - PapillonReel
RHEM - Brickroad
Rockman & Forte - Nich
Shadowgate - gudfooht
SimLife - Kyven
Space Quest - Kyven
Suikoden - Brickroad
Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars - PapillonReel
Uninvited - gudfooht
Zombies Ate My Neighbors - PapillonReel

Closed? Ah... whoops. Clicked one button too many when making this thread, I guess. >_>

Separate folders is for the best - you'll have a lot of overlapping file names if you lump them all together, so keeping them separate will save a lot of time in the long run. Just zip 'em and send them over to me or Parish.

Not really, at least not yet. The PMWiki code is really easy to work with so I could probably do a lot of the legwork there on my own - it's getting the images ready that's the big hassle.

I've got most of my LPs saved as Word docs, but I usually had to edit them a bit after posting them.

Would that help any?

I don't know much about this process but would this thing help any with converting the code to html?

http://www.bbcode-to-html.com/

Is there a particular format you'd like the images to be in? In my DW one I had done a folder called "Screenshots", but that obviously wouldn't work if we've got a bunch of these thrown into the same folder. Or will each of these have their own separate folder under the LP's name?

Example:

• LPs
  • LP Name 1
    • .\Screenshots\
  • LP Name 2
    • .\Screenshots\
  • LP Name 3
    • .\Screenshots\

I'm just curious, are you going to but the microgame LPs in the archive as well?

(I must learn how to spell...)

Oh my god I do not even want to think about the nightmarish hellscape that is my LP image folder.

I'll see what I can do about Suikoden and RHEM.

Yep, that sounds about right. The way I see things turning out in the long run, each LP will have their own folders listed in order of update, eg. DragonWarriorPart1 -> DragonWarriorPart2, etc., just to keep everything neat and organized. Also so I won't have to hunt through hundreds of images to find the one I need in case I mess up an URL or something.

Sadly no; PM Wiki doesn't use html for its coding (it's the same as TV Tropes, I think). I'll try and cobble together a list of the tags for people to use though, it's actually simple enough that Notepad's / Textedit's "find -> replace all" tool can do all the work for you.

It might a little, but compiling the updates is probably the easiest part of the job since I can just edit my way in into posts and pull out what I need. My priority right now is mostly in getting all the images together, so getting that set up would be a huge help.

Yes!

@Brick: Someone's just PM'd me right now volunteering to compile RHEM. Do you want to do it yourself or are you okay with me giving them the go-ahead?

How's about this? http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/Bbcode

Just a little tool that might help. The "Save Images" add-on for FireFox (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3404/) lets you pull every image out of a page. Thrown in a filter for only images above 100x100 (so avatars don't download) and you can quickly pull out every image in an LP.

There would still be some rearranging afterwords, but it's a good first step.

Oh, and since I brought them up, I'll pull together all the images for the MicroGame LPs tonight.

I'm already doing it, like, right this very minute. And I'll do Suikoden next.

You can sic 'em on IKA/RUGA if you want, though. McD and I each only have half the images, and neither of us have all the great fanart/photoshoops saved.

Hmm... this could be really useful. The only catch is that Parish doesn't have it installed in the current wiki, so I'm not sure if it'll be viable yet or not. It's definitely worth a shot though.

This is good to know! Only problem is making sure you catch the right images, but it's much faster than my original plan.

Anyway, thanks for the suggestions so far guys! Keep 'em coming.

Well, I've already got the images of my LP sorted out.

So when I'm done I guess I can just send it in.

I knew writing up scripts for my LPs ahead of time would come in handy some day. I should be able to get together archive-worthy versions of all of my LPs fairly quickly as a result.

EDIT: Bit of an elephant in the room here: should we also include videos for mixed or all-video LPs? And if so, what quality (ie. original production copy or YouTube-downloaded version)?

What about the comments from the peanut gallery?

The index of an archived LP is usually the place to feature worthy contributions from others, such as fan art.

well one thing's for sure.

The Fire Emblem LPs wouldn't be complete without those TV show advertisements (ARE YOU AFRAID OF THE DART?), and the BM/WM LP isn't itself without all those arguments over alleged WM hate crimes.

Pfft. Alleged my ass.

How are the archives going to be structured? It occurs to me that most of Let's Play RHEM is nonsensical if you skip everyone's posts but mine, since my readers Mazian did most of the actual solving.

Wow, 138 megs of images. Crazytown.

The SA LP archives tend to include relevant or particularly interesting peanut gallery comments (which is part of why Boatmurdered is such a great read). It's true that including all of it would probably not work out so great, but including any reader comments that helped define or drive the LP (or that were particularly relevant) makes perfect sense to me.

You know, that's a good question. RHEM doesn't seem to be as much of an issue since, judging by a quick read of the thread, you tended to reference and integrate reader suggestions in the LP itself (or at least enough so that you can trace the train of thought they went through when figuring things out), but for some of the other interaction-heavy LPs I guess it could be a problem. Right now I'll just transcribe them straight and see how they stand up afterwords when separated from context.

For fanart, maybe I'll add a bonus section to each thread for extra fun times. I mean, outside of Octo's trademark humour, what would the Princess Tomato LP be without all the horrible glorious Percy shops?

I can do my Learning Magic: The Gathering pictures in a second. Should I also send videos? Because I'm don't have the Aero Flux videos back'd up, just on my youtube channel.

I'll use my "Ask a Silly Question For Free" card on my first post: Are you using the terms "sections", "parts", and "pages" interchangeably or am I just not getting it? I'm a little confused, so let's consider a concrete example.

I'm looking at the Dragon Warrior LP (http://www.gamespite.net/talkingtime...?t=4228&page=5) and the actual LP starts on page 5. If I were doing the image collecting for the Dragon Warrior LP, I'd be tempted to send you a folder structure like this:

Once I'm confident I have the proper concept rattling in my skull I'll sign up to help out with a few.

Cheers!

That's not quite it. Basically, just separate the images used in a thread by what update it's a part of (eg. in Zelda: ALttP, it'd go Part 1: Hyrule Castle, Part 2: Eastern Palace, Part 3: Desert Palace, and so on) and organize them in separate folders before sending the zip file over. That way I can upload the images separately so there isn't any overlap when sifting through them.

@Alpha: Foxeris actually got around to finishing the Microgames sometime last night, so Magic: The Gathering is all ready to be uploaded.

Cool. I think I get it, but let's check! I think the concept I might be missing is that not all LPs have parts (i.e. Shadowgate, Uninvited). For these, I would just do this:
Did I pass?

You almost have it, but think more in terms of updates. Even if some LPs aren't actually chaptered in name, they're still posted in separate chunks with a bunch of discussion in-between stopping points.

Ah, gotcha! Thanks for being patient with me.

But what about the videos? Do you want the youtube links or actual files? Because again, I don't have the originals (all this for Aero Flux).

this thread got me to reread the dragon warrior lp. so much fun.