Unreal Archive
Java
A persistent archive of user-created Unreal and Unreal Tournament content.
unrealarchive.org
github.com
Unreal Archive is an initiative to gather up, index, and catalogue as much Unreal, UT99 and UT2004 (and hopefully soon Unreal Torunament 3) content as possible. So far, we have maps, map packs, voices, skins, mutators, player models, as well as support for things such as patches, updates and drivers as well as a (currently very empty) section for written documents with the intent of providing guides, tutorials, manuals, and other related documented knowledge which also seems to get lost and forgotten.
The tech stack and some of the decisions involved may seem odd, but in keeping with the theme of longevity, preservation, and the general ease of losing things on the internet, these are some of my motivations:
- statically generated content - the website is generated as a collection of
plain HTML pages. This ensures no dependence on having to host a website
with any dependency on any sort of back-end service beyond the simplest of
HTTP servers. specific pains have been taken to ensure it works well with
file://local resources as well, so it doesn’t even need to be hosted! - written in Java - largely because I know it well enough to do this, but also because it’s not going anywhere soon, so the indexing and site generation capabilities will remain in action for a long time.
- data stored as YAML files - a fairly simple format that’s also easily human- readable. in 30 years when all the YAML parsers have died, if someone looks at these files, they’ll be easy to write new parsers for, if that’s ever needed.
- the “database” is Git - easy to distribute amongst many people, and since this is primarily an archive, the data does not change rapidly enough to require anything more real-time.
- built-ino mirroring functionality to either download the entire file base, or to transfer it to any compatible S3 bucket store, and contribute mirror links back to the main Archive.
- the entire project is “licensed” under UNLICENSE, with the intent of it being as absolutely open as possible, for as long as possible.