Masterwork Tools
patreon
Poll: SD Cards of the OpenForge collection
🕑 Added 2022-10-02 23:45:48 +0000 UTCSo lots of people find downloading all of Openforge to be a bit of a task, and it's not surprising. It's over 100 gigs and spread in multiple places (though it is all in Dropbox). One of our patrons suggested a yearly SD card could be mailed out with everything. At present, OpenForge is ~114 gigs, so we would need a 128 gig sd card, which after shipping would cost about $20 per card (and obviously this price goes up and down, with a long term trend towards down). If we offer this service, we want to get an idea of how many people are interested and how much people are willing to pay.
We could also offer OpenForgeDeprecated and OpenForgeDevelopment, but those are even bigger, requiring a 512 gig card. If we offer this, whatever price we pick, we would likely make the price the same, but adjusted only for the difference in card cost.
I would expect we would update the cards once per year, and release them in January with all models through the end of the prior year.
I don't know that we could offer this at the lowest prices on this list, because it's a fair amount of work to get this going. Check all appropriate boxes, and I'll close this out next Sunday.
Comments
Fred1
I'm not experienced with this but there might be a solution using git LFS and git partial clones or some similar management. https://git-scm.com/docs/partial-clone
Joe Guetler
Have you taken a look at Git LFS? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLR1RNqJ1Mw https://git-lfs.github.com/?utm_source=github_site&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=gitlfs
Michael Wellman
Something you could do is Liscense some people to create and update these SD cards. Personally I have the hard drive space and spare time to curate the collection and keep it updated regularly. If given permission it would be a small thing to sell Liscensed copies, for the cost of the SD cards and the overhead to ship them, better yet, it would be possible to have an agreement to receive cards via us postal service that include self addressed envelopes and run of copies of what is requested and send them back. The issue here is that you would need to vet a few authorized people to do something like this but if they all agree to do it in the way you prescribe, you could run spot checks on this. I personally just joined up with you on patreon, and plan on dumping the whole collection to my local drives anyways so to put it all onto SD cards or thumb drives is no big issue. I have been looking at the zip links and will be building a directory tree for myself to organize them after download, I am sure you have your own, but this was all so I could maintain and print a vast collection of parts. However, it occurs to me that if your going to offer something like this you will likely have to sink a lot of time and effort into setting up a way to do this, then do it and your talking about doing it for very little. Honestly I would rather ask that time be spent in creating, so assisting you in that by setting my vast computational resources to creating thumbdrives full of terrain goodness to send out to folks to help out is no big deal. Four or five computers transferring from hdd to thumb drive over USB 3 would take a few hours per controller so I could easily make 15 to 30 a day without taxing myself from scratch. I would need to see exactly how much time each computer took but yeah. This would also solve your upload limits on the servers your using. Anyway, this is getting long and there would be a lot to figure out, license fees, so you still make profit, what drives to use if they are being sold, etc etc etc. I just thought I would post the thought because it occurred to me that just trying to host 150gb of stl files this popular would be daunting for a few reasons, and I am suprised you don't spam into bandwidth problems everytime someone like me pulls the entire collection. But, yeah, there are a great number of options to deal with some of these things, and perhaps a few volunteers with more time and computers then they reasonably need could help with such a project, getting up your time in the process.... Just a thought, though unsolicited do I do apologize for the long post
Masterwork Tools
A suggestion I got in the discord is to publish something that has all files in the repo with ordered by their change timestamp so that people can then just go download the repo in increments. One other issue for some people is that at 114 gigs, they don't want to download it at all. For some people, the SD card is a way to avoid saturating their network connection for weeks.
Masterwork Tools
I actually tried that with github, but there are tons of limits and problems with it. Upshot is that big files, and some of the stuff in openforge can get pretty big are blocked. But what's worse is that it more or less doubles the size of the repo or more because all of the changes (including the delta to create the file) are stored in the git index, so it becomes really slow and really big right away.
Patrick Hofmann
That would be really great
Rene van den Broek
I'd rather see a github type solution for patreons, where you can simply pull and merge once a month to keep te local set updated in the tree/folder structure you intended
