United3dArtists Archive

Hi, I collected all Tutorials, Manuals, Videos, Plugins, Models/Scenes and Releases from Truespace V1.0 on in the 90s up to now with full webpage mirrors of Truespace in english, german an japanese. Now I read it´s a problem with copyright to rerelease it again.
Otherwise a lot of people search for the content and still use Truespace.

So I can only use it on my own for nostalgic dives. What a pity...

Hi Crush, welcome Aboard,

Yes we know what you are feeling.. i have lot of plugins from the past.. some very good.. i remember Infinity2 hooo that's one of the best plugins ever made for truespace. 1 click 1 sky..

ParticleFX another great plugin.. i remember was my first plugin.. from Primitiveitch

Hi Crush! What took you so long to join?
You must be new to trueSpace since you only go back to V.1 how about Caligari V.1 for the Amiga?
Welcome to the group!

Sharing old content..... when the company no longer exists.... I'm not sure it's legally wrong to at least document (and maybe share links) archives in this case??

Maybe with a disclaimer "If you'd like it to be unavailable to the public, contact us and we will promptly remove it."

Or contacting the parties of the content, if possible, requesting the right to share it to the public? That too would also be nice. I'm sure there must be a good legal way to share archives.

Loss of programming and knowledge is terribly sad and shouldn't happen.

Welcome. Man you were busy, hope yoy can share some stuff one day

@steinie

Hi Crush! What took you so long to join?

I wasn´t able to register here. Some technical problems I think. Now it worked fine. I hoped that Truespace could revive in Microsoft hands, but it doesn´t happen and I´m very sure will never be again (the source has got too old to get it fast to an actual state).

Besides, I also had the first Caligari Amiga version (it should be hidden somewhere as adf) - the coders gave it to me at a cologne Amiga fair I´ve been in the past. I was writing some articles for a magazine I produced with a friend at this time as a hobby - this was my first touch with it.

During the last years I didn´t knew where my backups are hidden. The biggest part has been saved in small downloaded chunks on hundrets of CDs/DVDs.
My collection is very big and I started to archive the content to my disc-cataloger a few years ago. The most of it isn´t in there and there´s only the date written on the discs.
So I found only the last few of them and collected the Truespace things together. Without the complete contest videos and after removing (nearly all) double files. I now have ~15GB.
Adding the User-Videos and other missing content it could double if they appear in the future.

I must admit I´m not a hardcore Truespace User, but I was using it sometimes especially for coding reasons. I´m a hobby software developer since the appearance of the C64 and did some small 3D-Engines as a hobby on Amiga and PC. Truespace was a good tool to create some simple objects.

But I found raytracing, modeling & animation this year as a new hobby and so I remembered the Truespace dilemma again. That´s the reason I´m here now.

Cool Crush! Welcome to the forums!

I think, for the items that were free, they could be freely shared. The items that were available for purchase, probably could not be shared.

This is a shame, I would love to see this. Surely, there is a way to make it happen without upsetting people?

Today I added another ~1,5GB of missing plugins and a handful of User-Shorts after some hours checking discs of my archive yesterday. But there´s still much much more I´m sure. After looking at some of the vids I´m astonished what great short animations ideas the TS users developed. Some of them would really be worth to be redone in Full HD. Truespace is indeed more than only a beginner tool to jump into animation. I´ll try to look at them all and to make a collection of the best ones (in my opinion).
My biggest dream would be to also have some full project files added to the collection. A lot of people could learn from investigations.

Here is what I would suggest, why not hook up with Design Devil and see what he doesn't already have posted on his site.

http://www.designdevil.de/index.php?menu=plugins"

The problem I have is the lack of new users who will never have access to trueSpace with the Model side.
So Plugins posted with Design Devil will help the current users who might be interested (the old timers). I have tried some of the older plugins with 7.61B and the experience was like walking on eggs. Very unstable.

Any of the videos you might have could be posted on Youtube if you want. There are tons up there now. There are lots of users of trueSpace that don't know we exist. Posting on Youtube would help a larger audience.

You can post a link here if you want on anything you decide to do.

The plugins on DesignDevils Site are only a fracture of all that appeared during time. There are really a lot there, I see 129 on his site. That´s not very much to my actual FTP that has 7 times the amount and I´m sure there are even more hidden in my archive. Otherwise I should update the newest ones, so it should be even more, because the last complete plugin check was done a few years before Truespace was sold.

It´s also the question wether he wants to do the really big work running through all plugins, testing and hosting them? But If there´s a place I want to see them - it´s of course especially his site.

I didn´t tried the old plugins with the newest 7.6, but even if there are some problems I personally have nearly all other versions in my possesion if needed. The idea is interesting to check how many of the old plugins still work or not...

It would be a hell of a work to upload all videos to youtube - there are by far too much of them, especially if I find the uservideos in addition. But the videos are not all you can learn from - there are also a lot of tutorials, hints and courses saved from webpages as html, pdf or docs. Perhaps I try to upload some or at least the most important ones to youtube - I hope it works with the old codecs... As you perhaps know there also are some big problems that not all of the used codecs can be read by each program.

Well it is nice to own so many plugins but how many are still worth keeping? Plugins for tS 1.0, 2.0 or even 3.0 are hardly worth saving. A lot of the older plugins have been incorporated into newer updates of trueSpace. The question to ask isn't how many we need to save but which plugins are worth saving.

You might also take a closer look at the Wayback Machine. As I recall they have an "archive it" feature to add your site to their existing data base; it's quite huge and growing. Don't know how it works, but it may be a useful site to keep Caligari related resources alive as well as a potential source of old plugins tutorials etc.

Until now I thought the internet Archive would really archive all. That´s not true. Some Files are not crawled, not everything gets downloaded and archived and the baddest thing I saw a while ago checking old personal archives is - it forgets its archive after a while. Sites and archived content gets removed or lost during the time perhaps depending on the access for it and the time that has gone by. So the archive is only a help to look at sites that dissappeard a few years ago. A lot of things I have cannot be found anymore or never could, because the internet Archive started in 1996 and did not archive ALL from then on and the reason was that the internet had at this time not the speed to get all archived within a year. Even if a site has been archived the content is in most cases only randomly saved. A lot of pictures or files cannot be accessed anymore - I found a lot of sites like this.

The biggest collection worldwide of dead plugins. But to do what now ? I prefer to see the future.

Steinie wrote: The question to ask isn't how many we need to save but which plugins are worth saving.

Good question.

TrueSpace is still my secondary tool at work (just after Photoshop CS3) and almost 30 tsX are loaded and in use on a regular basis plus 20 other plugins I load/use on some special cases.
Note that almost all of these essential plugins are hosted on DD's site or my archive page or can be found on the web because the developper's site is still online.

Here is the current selection loaded in my "architecture design" layout configuration (I have different plugins loaded for different configurations stored in the Config Library, like animation or simulation layout) :

RSLayers
MagicBox
ZoomToFit
FindCamera
DDaxis
RotateLeft & RotateRight
BisectEdge
LUP
CopyPaste
SceneExplorer
OBJ Import/Export
SizeEx
CopyExPlus
SelectLoop
DivideLoop
GrowSelection
Knife
GiddySnap
Ertex
DistanceFromBenchmark
ConvertGluedToSingleMesh
LoadTextureMap
DrawFace
KillAni
ShowVertex
Magnet
ScaleAlongPoints/Normals
MeshSize2
DDPickThrough
Edge2Path
Infinity2
WeldFaces
u|v Toon shader
HexaPicker shader
SimpleGradient shader

Just like Crush, I have a ton of old tsX in my backup CDs but most of them are obsolete because their functionalities have been integrated into the new tS versions (who really miss tSXtender, hum ?), or because new plugins are doing the job in a more efficient way, or simply are not fully compatible with tS7.6.
To complete my collection, I wonder if someone here still has got one of these tools :

Choreographer
AnimDote
ArtDirector2
trueTexture

Of course some of the plugins are not possible to use anymore with the actual Truespace release or are integrated in internal functionality somehow. But I´m not so pro or have the time that I could check and say which I should delete or not. If you don´t need the plugins there´s much more content you can use, perhaps you could need something from the material & shader libaries or more important for man people hundrets of tutorials or historical lookup in the web mirror - not only the ones you saw at caligari. If you need to know something about developing to take a look at some plugin sourcecodes also could help you. The plugins are only a small fracture of the complete backup. It´s all there to get Truespace still alive a while. I don´t want anybody to force using things they don´t need - it´s the free decision to anybody.

It´s interesting, Choreographer and Animdote are in the collection up to 1.1 (is B3C newer or older?), but the other two did not appear until now but I´m sure I have them somewhere - I also have a patch for trueTexture and wouldn´t load it without the plugin. Perhaps I´ll find them in other backups. I don´t claim to have ALL plugins, but it would be nice to have them all in the future.