United3dArtists Archive

Hi, perhaps this was covered elsewhere. if so, sorry.

I remember seeing Truespace many years ago and never tried it. I'm 41 and have been into computers since the early 80's but I never got around to learning 3d modeling. Now that TS is going away as we know it, I thought i'd try my hand because I want to learn to make games with Unity game creation system, and unity will work with Ts and TS is free. Im really turned off by blender. Anyway, I was reading the TS site and the president said grab everything you can, everything thats not nailed down cus this storm is gonna blow like an anrgy noreaster. ( o.k. i paraphrased a little)

I am in the process of trying to download all of the tutorials on the site. I read someplace there there were just 16 video lessons but i see they were mistaken. There are lessons for fundimentials, tutorials, master courses and older tutorials as well as everything in the guided tpuur section and all its reladed tabs and all the
Grafikdesign Marcel Barthel models and shaders... in other words.. with my light DSl connection downloading all this stuff and copies of all the webpages to use as referances and organizing everything into a nice package I can back up, is really a daunting task. Theres Tons of stuff on that site!

Has someone already done this? If so, will it be made available to the public along with the TS program after the site goes down? Should I keep downloading everything manualy?

Ya know.. i havent ever tried any of these all in one web site downloaders but perhaps someone could use one of those and have all the links work just like they do for real to preserve the structure of everything.. to make navigating all the videos easier...... just a thought.

One more thing.. will TS export to FBX?

TS doesn't export to FBX... yet

I downloaded almost everything lat year when it went free, and it fills a DVD with nearly 4 gigabytes of data (including ALL the tutorials).

Over this last weekend I downloaded the key installers, plus a reload of all my old tS 6.6 installers and tutorials as a backup - and that exceeded 1.6 gig.

So that's two DVDs.

I raised this issue in my last posting, about people loading it onto a peer-to-peer network for future tS enthusiasts to share/backup, but some wit came back saying the licence agreement forbids it, but if Microsoft are abandoning it, are they going to police the licence to that level of interest?

I think it might be worth developing a thread specific to who's holding and sharing what and where at a later date when the dust settles.

Thanks for the reply Worldmaker, After I posted thas message I decided to try my hand at downloading the website with a website downloader. It seemed to work for the most part. I have everything that has a Caligari.com and then some up to 4 levels of depth down. I have all the lessons, the entire forum, the archives, the proteam lessons, etc.. right at 5 gigabytes for me.. problem is a lot of the links don't open properly offline. I have contacted the maker of the program I am using to see what happened. It takes me about 4 hours to DL everything. I will have to try it again soon before they decide to pull the plug.

I have read that we Cannot redistribute the program files but would this apply to the lessons and pages from the website too? (needs answer)

Since we were told by the founder to grab everythimg.. would not he be in a position to make available to us a zip package with all the lessons and ofline browsing structure in tact? ( needs answer) Someone please ask him.

Microsoft would not be losing here if they let us redistribute these items, and since they are abandoning this project anyway, not to do so seems selfish and cruel. MS wants a loyal fan base in the face of their troubles, .. it would only be an an asset for them but instead its like they are shooting themselves in the foot. Perhaps Bill needs to step back into the acting CEO shoes. Bill if your out there, I urge you recapture the sprit of wonder and adventure in the peoples hearts. Your already an established giant. Do it for your grandkids, do it for the people like me who still love DOS 6.22, Do it for the Geeks. ( you remember what it like when you were a geek ) Time to change the MS paradigm to head into the real 21 st century. Be the peoples software company. This may be your companies only hope.

I assisted Microsoft prosecuting a vendor misrepresenting licenses of VB. They will prosecute anyone they find violating license agreements. They have every right to protect what they own.

Do not redistribute anything authored by Caligari, sold by Caligari as this is the property of MS.

The training videos Caligari advertised for sale are the property of MS. Training and tutorials found on the Caligari web site provided by Caligari employees are the property of MS.

Training and tutorials authored by community members found on the Caligari web site in the forums can be shared. The authors, having posted their content on the Caligari site as a public distribution point, have deemed them to be freely distributable.

John Phoenix wrote:Thanks for the reply Worldmaker, After I posted thas message I decided to try my hand at downloading the website with a website downloader. It seemed to work for the most part. I have everything that has a Caligari.com and then some up to 4 levels of depth down. I have all the lessons, the entire forum, the archives, the proteam lessons, etc.. right at 5 gigabytes for me.. problem is a lot of the links don't open properly offline.

I've found some of the links are tricky to handle, they are not embedded items, like images, in the pages, but linked across the web site to other areas. That's where I've had to manually download an image in a tutorial page or whatever.

I haven't gone into as great a depth as you, not touched the forum for example, but have the core data, which forms a reasonable archive.

v3rd3 wrote:They will prosecute anyone they find violating license agreements. They have every right to protect what they own.

It's only reasonable to defend their rights. I'd do the same myself.

I suspect Microsoft will turn a blind eye to private copying simply because it'd be difficult to enforce. It will be a different story if companies seek to profit from redistributing the product for a profit.

How about this idea?

( perhaps i should post this as a new topic so more folks will see it)

Take all of the lessons video, html all the proteam lessons.. all the lessons everything.. from the website and a team from this community would reproduce each one and then package that for free download? This would solve the MS problem and you know someone is going to wind up putting truespace on rapidsahre or some such site. Thats a given.. almost every app winds up there. And then since people will have truespace and they have this forum and the lessons well, that will help the longevity of the project and keep the die hard fan base alive.

I know that would be a very huge task but without it, I fear after the website is gone people will lose interest in truespace and this forum will dry up. Thus for someone like me starting off with truespace now, in a year or so I won't have anywhere to go for support, and will have to move on to another app also.

Just something to think about.

John Phoenix wrote:How about this idea?

( perhaps i should post this as a new topic so more folks will see it)

Take all of the lessons video, html all the proteam lessons.. all the lessons everything.. from the website and a team from this community would reproduce each one and then package that for free download? ....

Just something to think about.

I think that enough people will be making contributions on here to maintain the community for a while, and some of that will incorporate lessons and suchlike material.

And as all the lessons are available for free download I'm still sure they can be freely, privately, circulated without Microsoft protesting. As I mentioned above, it's only when you try to make a commercial circulation that they are likely to intervene to protect their commercial rights.

If you guys think the Microsoft/Caligari tutorials will be posted after the Caligari Site goes
down, you'll be mistaken. Caligari has stated various times that it is not allowed. My suggestion is
get them now so you have them later.

They are already showing up on Youtube...good luck getting the toothpaste back into the tube.

Steinie wrote:If you guys think the Microsoft/Caligari tutorials will be posted after the Caligari Site goes
down, you'll be mistaken. Caligari has stated various times that it is not allowed. My suggestion is
get them now so you have them later.

To the best of my understanding there should be no restraint on anyone writing and circulating their own tutorial, which is the point being made here.

And before you suggest that using image captures would be a breech of publication of Microsoft, blah, blah, there should be no limitation on using words, these are commonly found in dictionaries, not to the best of my knowledge currently owned by Microsoft, although it's rumored they are trying to patent them, one at a time.

Don't forget that the last announcements give the website a lifespan of 5 months. That's quite a while to get the content from there, be it tS, courses, etc, so there is less of a rush than might be expected.

Redoing tutorials would be good, many use tS6.6 or even tS5, and there's a lot of tS7 that just was never covered in those courses. So certainly room for making new ones, and perhaps even more useful than saving the old ones. Sometimes looking forward is more productive than just looking back

Depending on how my job and contract hunting goes, I might have time to make a few more bitesize, and I might even think about releasing something more substantial but with a price tag, though it would be low cost of course. Not ruled anything out yet, but haven't had time to dive into exploring those options quite yet.

HTH!
Tom

I'm the owner of versions 5 and 6.6, and holder (does it count as owning?) of 7.6 so keeping all the past records, tutorials, manuals (mmmm, manuals the weight of paper, the solid.... sorry getting carried away) makes good sense to me.

Tom, those Bitesize videos really come in handy. Would be cool if you were able to produce a few more in the future.

There is Jack's organics course, the main course in my opinion for learning modeling, however, please correct me if I'm wrong, but there does seem to be a need for video courses or tutorials for 7.6 & obviously 7.61. From what I've seen on the tutorial webpage, there are some good courses on Texturing and Animation, (which are large topics to cover) but only for the much older versions of TS...5 & 6, and many don't apply to workspace side, only model side, which (if not for forum/user created tuts), leaves a bit of a hole in the TS7.x learning experience.

Many of the 'how to" questions that I see repeated by new users coming on board (myself included) relate to those two broad topics, Texturing and Animation. Don't misunderstand, there is much to learn from each other here, and we do, no complaints at all as this is a very generous community. I'm simply referring to video tutorials for 7.x on those two topics only, would be nice to see in the future. Some of Tom's existing Bitesize videos uncover some of the mysteries of texturing and animation, two thumbs up Tom, thanks for those! Thanks Jack for covering the modeling so well in one course, I sweated through it but learned alot! Thanks to all the other senior members here for their time spent creating tutorials for others to learn from, and for patiently doing a great job in filling in the learning gaps that come up on a daily basis here.

Sheesh...my tutorial roundup page is going to need a major revamp...
what are the technicalities of me hosting/ reposting, say, the 'Tips and Tricks' tutorials from the monthly newsletters?
Legal? Sketchy?
I'm planning on saving a local copy of the user-submitted tuts from the forum that I'm already linked to. A little link-massage and they should continue to work once the site goes dark.

Steinie, your Baker's Dozen(s) are going to need the same treatment...I noted that a lot of the links point to the caliSite/forum and if that's going away... you'll be a few doughnuts short of a dozen.

I agree, there are plenty of older tuts and new, 7-specific ones are needed.
I'm still interested in saving as much of the accumulated knowledge of the hive-mind as possible... while the tools may look different the techniques and concepts are still valid.

SpacekDet, my Baker's Dozen has been redone and reposted at this tSCommunity
Forum under "Tips and Hints"
I think all the links work now and I removed any pointing to the Caligari Forum.

As discussed elswhere the legal issue to overcome is the owner of the copyright for the training materials. MS own anything produced by Caligari. MS own anything published by Caligari/MS employees. For example, TomG's mini tuts were items he produced and published while an MS employee hence you need MS permission to use them and you need MS permission as to how you use them.

You can safely download MS materials from the Caligari site for your personal consumption. You can archive a copy for backup purposes (based on fair use).

You may not redistribute these materials to anyone without the express written consent of a director or officer of MS.

At this time MS authored/published material is only available from the Caligari web site.

Any video tuts written or produced by community members and posted to the Caligari site are the property of the authors. Caligari acted as a distributor only. Many of these were links to youtube channels anyway.

HTH

What a pain in the dic...tionary needed to describe what a pain it's all turned out to be.

The Passion of the tS is turning into a case of "Why Bother"

DICK
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

CADE
Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable
thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should
be made parchment? that parchment, being scribbled
o'er, should undo a man?

-William Shakespeare - King Henry VI

spacekdet wrote:What a pain in the dic...tionary needed to describe what a pain it's all turned out to be.

The Passion of the tS is turning into a case of "Why Bother"

Yes. There is such a huge amount of pessimism about the whole subject of keeping tS alive in the community, of finding ways around the possible, maybe, suspected, feared MS opposition, that I'm already becoming disheartened with the whole subject.

Should I bother, is everyone here too obsessed with M$oft or are there a few little sneaky M$oft employees here, making sure the community dies a safe and quiet death?

If you look at what is going on seriously there is a lot more optimism than pessimism.

I don't know what you are griping about regards finding workarounds for perceived problems. There are limits for everyone to understand. Those limits do not stop anyone who is interested in getting the current software, tutorials and the benefits of the material available in the forums.

The community members who have held leadership roles (i.e. the developers and other senior members) in the Caligari forums continue to provide tools, guidance and encouragement to the community. They have signed up here and are participating.

Educating the community on the issues regarding MS ip rights is simply what it appears to be.... education.

If you don't like the realities presented the fact remains it is your choice as to whether you bother to pursue TS or not. You can also ignore the education should you wish to but you do so at your own risk.

...so sit in that foxhole soldier and be a yellow belly for tomorrow you
will face the firing squad! (quote from Shakespeare IF he was writing a war movie)
Are you all Mice or Men?
If a woman please call my number at....

I've been 'pursuing' tS since 1995 and maybe I'm just too damn stubborn to give up now.
I've written tutorials, hosted and linked to other's tS tutorials and materials on my site and did it not for money but because I like this software, sometimes in spite of itself.
Maybe I'm just a fool, but I enjoy teaching and helping others learn about trueSpace.
I certainly don't know everything, but maybe I can point them in the right direction to the answer.
The problem is, all those answers are going to just disappear into the ether at some point.
It's hard to know where to begin and what to save. I'm still a little overwhelmed about the whole situation.

My goal was to provide helpful information for the seemingly abandoned users ("x million new downloads!") who may be coming along looking for help after the caliForum goes dark.
It's hard to continue that enthusiasm however, considering the uncertain future.

It seems an incredible waste of time and talent to let all the accumulated knowledge gathered in the two forums to simply disappear. That would seem to be some sort of limit, eh, the day when typing in http://www.caligari.com" gets you a 404?

Yes, fine, I've had the tutorial videos downloaded and archived for my own use since I joined proTeam, and I 'completed my collection' by getting the ones that were released since proTeam died.
I wasn't planning on redistributing them for fun nor profit. I understand your point about their being MS property now. If they want to squash them after 5 months that's their prerogative.

I'm just disheartened by the amount of (re)work I'm facing trying to salvage as much of the hard-earned knowledge of the users as I can before the plug gets pulled.

Please excuse the squeaking of the mice as the town undergoes 'urban renewal'.

So why not ask MS for permission to publish the copyright protected tutorials and such?

Finis wrote:So why not ask MS for permission to publish the copyright protected tutorials and such?

Yeah! ... I "second" what Finis said!!!

Start by posting an open request to Roman on the Caligari forum in similar fashion as the open request for the 7.61 beta release. Ask Roman who to contact at Microsoft. I think it would be best if one of the Pro Team members (especially an "author") with a long history with Caligari initiates the request and post.

Best regards, First Light

I'd suggest trying to contact someone in the MS legal department. Ask for permission to publish in a specific place like your website or this forum. Don't ask for blanket permission to publish anywhere or for everyone to be able to redistribute the material since that's unlikely to be granted.

Maybe a place to start: http://www.microsoft.com/iplicensing/"

Prepare by discovering who has the means to publish the material, who of them is willing to, then pick one to do it. Then contact MS with a specific proposal.

Steinie wrote:...so sit in that foxhole soldier and be a yellow belly for tomorrow you
will face the firing squad! (quote from Shakespeare IF he was writing a war movie)
Are you all Mice or Men?
If a woman please call my number at....

Can you form a cognitive argument?

Here's a question maybe you could help answer.

Why would MS want to negotiate any kind of arrangement with anyone here regarding the ip rights to the forum content or redistributing the TS executables, or to open sourcing the product, when dribbling idiots are already declaring they will do so without any regard to MS participation or consent?

Do you honestly think that public discussion of defying MS helps Roman build business arguments attempting to extend the future?

Obviously the point is lost on some that what we need to interest MS in extending their generosity beyond what we have is a sound rational argument that accommodates their needs and respects their rights as much as solidifies some gains for the members of this community.

The time to be prepared to act reasonably and with conviction is around September, the time limit set for the termination of the forums and the Caligari site. September marks the fiscal year end and anything that MS decides will no longer be funded in the next fiscal year will get shut down at that time.

Those who are interested in organizing a group to represent the TS community's interest should start thinking about doing so now and letting the members of this forum understand what they are proposing and the support they are looking for from this community.

I realize that everyone is looking for a silver bullet that eases the frustration and takes the work out of the situation we find ourselves in but this is where we are right now. A lot of the posts here and on the Califorum are venting this frustration and we all need some form of release. We also need to realize that right now we need to get our oars in the water and pulling in one direction. The devs are organizing themselves and pushing out scripts like there is no tomorrow because they believe there is no tomorrow and without their contribution TS is lost. It would be a great tragedy to see their efforts diminished by ill conceived statements ignoring real consequences.

First Light wrote:

Finis wrote:So why not ask MS for permission to publish the copyright protected tutorials and such?

Yeah! ... I "second" what Finis said!!!

Start by posting an open request to Roman on the Caligari forum in similar fashion as the open request for the 7.61 beta release. Ask Roman who to contact at Microsoft. I think it would be best if one of the Pro Team members (especially an "author") with a long history with Caligari initiates the request and post.

Best regards, First Light

FYI, there were at least 2 posts that I saw prior to TomG's departure posing this question and they were politely ignored.

I think our best bet will be one of the beta testers contacting Roman directly. Outside of accounting functions I do not see any signs of senior MS involvement in Caligari or TS outside of the acquisition since the acquisition. Roman is now VP of VE and I do not see the hand of MS legal in the license agreements.

Roman therefore is the only point of contact at MS worth approaching as those he reports to will only want a TS update in September. Roman is busy and has no staff.

The only way I see we can help Roman is to somehow assemble a business case that he can present that makes sense to the decision makers involved. Given we have no knowledge of the future plans within MS for Rosetta, TS or its successor or Roman, this will be a really tall order.

Sorry I've been away for a month.

I was intending to talk with Microsoft but I'd better catch up here first in case anyone got there first.

Meanwhile I just checked the Caligari site and noticed that trueServe 7.61 has now been added to the free download list.

I hadn't noticed it before so assume it is a new addition for everyone to take while there is time.

Back to work......