Civ4 Col: Broken download database links, please help to re-upload

I forgot :blush:.

Passed on your thanks and he kindly offered to send other Civ4Col mods too if we need them so I asked him for a list. They're not in the missing list so maybe these are already on CFC and still working fine?
  • Slavery Market
  • Triangle Trade
  • jTradeRoutes
  • Origins
  • Return Home
  • Trail 1.2
  • Livestock Breeding
  • civ4col_unit_new_orders_mod_v0_1_for_patch_1_01f

If you could please ask for the 2, I'd be grateful :hatsoff:.
 
Hi mate, looks like the same forum upgrade broken tables & links issue has messed up your original top post here too.

Oh and for anyone passing by wanting to help I should post a copy below of the Atomic Gamer backup mod rescue trick I've posted over in the Civ4 and Civ3 restoration threads. I'll have a go at it myself and rescue as many Civ4Col mods as I can probably early next year as I really want to finish up releasing my Civ2 mods before getting back into more preservation work.



Thanks to help from Stromling over on the Civ4 forums where The_J is also pushing some great preservation work I have finally figured out the system used by the old Atomic Gamer file hosts used by many Civ3 modders and figured I'd post a copy of it here for the Civ3 community too!

I've got a bunch of lost Civ 3 and 4 scenarios that were not part of the Atomic Gamer CFC backup due to being personal uploads on their site instead.. I and others have been trying to figure out how to search for download codes in the MASSIVE backup collection for years and hadn't had any luck!
https://archive.org/details/atomicgamer

The codes in the archive names and the download codes were 2 different things and I couldn't work out a connection as I had not realised that the searchable codes on the archives were actually shortened reversed dates!

Stromling already explained this to me over PM but I'll stick these step by step examples here for others so we can spread the word and solve a lot of problems across this site (mostly in the civ3 & 4 forums). Basically if we put any broken atomic gamer download into web archive we can hopefully see the extra info we need..

Example 1 - the missing Civ4 Age of Discovery Mod (no not Dale's, this is another one) I was trying to find yesterday:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/age-of-discovery.415830/
I put it's dead download into webarchive and find this backup:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130531074316/http://www.atomicgamer.com/files/90780/age-of-discovery
From this link I can see the download code of 90780 and the page tells me the file name, it's size, and the date it was uploaded to Atomic gamer:
AgeOfDiscovery.7z - 32.7 MB - 03/19/2011 (19/03/2011 outside of America)
That date means it should be in the 110319 archive or archive days close to that. So I search for that number in the collection and up it comes:
https://archive.org/details/AtomicGamer_110319
I click show all files:
https://archive.org/download/AtomicGamer_110319
I click view contents on the main tar file:
https://ia801306.us.archive.org/vie...ems/AtomicGamer_110319/AtomicGamer_110319.tar
And bingo.. there's a archive with the download code 90780 and it's a similar size! :) Filename is not there sadly so ya gotta download, check if its the right file and then rename to it's old name.

Example 2 - the missing Civ 3 Star Trek mod bonus music files I've been trying to find for 2 friggin years (link briefly mentioned in the description text)
https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/star-trek-mod-v-0-9-0-beta-7z.16249/
I put it's dead download link into webarchive and it FAILED:
https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.atomicgamer.com/file.php?id=86966
However I can see the failed link is in an old format (file php id) compared to the discovery one above (files/xxxxx/) which had the download code in some slashes, so I try the 86966 code in that format with a * on the end which will show all pages listed under that download code that were hopefully backed up.
https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.atomicgamer.com/files/86966/*
Bingo!
https://web.archive.org/web/20120617234339/http://www.atomicgamer.com:80/files/86966/mussfx_civ3stm
From this link I can see the download code of 86966 and the page tells me the file name, it's size, and the date it was uploaded to Atomic gamer:
Sounds.zip - 724.3 MB - 07/03/2010 (03/07/2010 outside of America)
That date means it should be in the 100703 archive or archive days close to that. So I search for that number in the collection and up it comes:
https://archive.org/details/AtomicGamer_100703
I click show all files:
https://archive.org/download/AtomicGamer_100703
I click view contents on the main tar file:
https://ia801300.us.archive.org/vie...ems/AtomicGamer_100703/AtomicGamer_100703.tar
And bingo.. there's a archive with the download code 86966 and it's a similar size! :) Filename is not there sadly so ya gotta download, check if its the right file and then rename to it's old name.

Sometimes there won't be a web archive backup of the old atomic gamer download page but as you can see above it could just be a matter of the old format atomic download link needing to be adjusted to their final one, and if all that fails then Stromling points out that you can usually work out the date of upload by the day it was posted on the CFC forums, sometimes file names and sizes are mentioned in the posts too.

. . .
 
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Great work @Blake00 .

How is that, can you open a tar file on a windows PC?
Asking because I'd directly like to replace the link, but maybe it's necessary to re-pack and re-upload.

7zip opens tar files I think, however that's not quite what I was doing above as those tar links aren't downloads and are actually links to a built-in tar file viewer on archive org. You don't want to download the entire tar file as its full of other people's stuff and can be gigs in size (depending on how busy that day was on Atmoic). By using the archive org tar file viewer you can see the individual files inside, find the download code your looking for and just download that file from inside the tar without ever having to get the whole tar file thankfully.

However yes the download you want still has weird name (eg userUploaded.86966) and thats exactly how it looks when it's downloaded to your pc meaning it needs to be renamed to it's original file name (eg AgeOfDiscovery.7z) to be opened. Which means it's not the best option for replacing links with (unless instructions are put on the download page telling people they need to rename the file to open). So yes re-packing and re-uploading is probably going to be required for anything found in the backups.
 
Age of Further Discovery ModMod for AoDII v1.12| https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/age-of-further-discovery-modmod-for-aodii-v1-12.12729|@Aymerick|2016-10-05|civ-iv-colonization-downloads.110[/URL]
Good news mate.. was able to locate both Age of Further Discovery and the original Age of Discovery 2 mod (not in your list but very very missing too!) in this thread here:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/age-of-discovery-2-and-ageoffurtherdiscovery.655886/

Have taken copies and uploaded them to CivFanatics here:
https://www.civfanatics.com/users/downloads/civ4col/AgeOfDiscovery2_v1.12.7z
https://www.civfanatics.com/users/downloads/civ4col/AgeOfFurtherDiscovery_v0.03.7z

I can see this copy of Dale's Age of Discovery 2 is the lost final 1.12 version which is great, however I can't workout what version the Age of Further Discovery is.. Aymerick did a bunch of releases with his final full one being v0.03 however he also had a test thread for v0.04 too. I wonder if this is one of these or an earlier release...
 
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Thanks @Blake00
The link for Age of Further Discovery I have replaced.

Regarding Age Of Discovery 2, @Dale please let us know if you are okay with this upload, if you want us to remove it, or if you prefer to re-upload it yourself again.
 
Thanks @Blake00
The link for Age of Further Discovery I have replaced.

Regarding Age Of Discovery 2, @Dale please let us know if you are okay with this upload, if you want us to remove it, or if you prefer to re-upload it yourself again.
All good I made sure I spoke to Dale on the WPC discord first and have been keeping him up to date so he's cool with me resurrecting his stuff and fixing the dead links (he also helped me do it for his AoD1 mod for regular Civ4 a while back too). Although we are indeed wondering if his own copy is better due to being untampered with, so I may end up replacing the download with his copy. Shall see what he says. EDIT: Nope turns out, his copy is lost sadly.

Also I found some Age of Further Discovery readme's in my copy of Dale's mod so I need to pluck them out of there and put them in the Age of Further Discovery download. Roamty's files are a bit of a mess really!
EDIT: Done! Have moved the AoFD readme's out of Dale's AoD2 download and put them into the AoFD download where they belong. Have also confirmed the copy I have of AoFD v0.03 and not the v0.04 alpha so the later is still missing.

EDIT: Have also managed to find all 20 missing screenshots on Webarchive and have restored them to CFC. :)
 
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Good news! @Dale asked @Solver to check his WPC backups and he was able to find Dale's original AoD2 pure upload. It's around 30MBs smaller and has several thousand less files in it than Roamty's copy so it looks like the AoFD addon was indeed installed along with some others mods making it rather tampered with! So I've now replaced it with Dale's original clean copy on the CFC file server and we're all good now! :)

Also I'm thinking let's take this opportunity to correct another issue I've noticed relating to these mods as well. In his efforts to help Roamty created a page in the download section called "Here are old copies of Age of Discovery 2 And AgeOfFurtherDiscovery" which is a bit of mouthful lol. It had links to his mediafire copies, so I originally removed them and redirected the download to my post in his thread with the CFC hosted links however I'm now thinking I should do a full reallocation. Age of Further Discovery already has it's own download page (which you've already fixed the download link for @The_J ) so that means Roamty's one is partly a duplicate, plus the reason Dale's Age of Discovery 2 dead download was missed in this audit was because it has no download page! So I'm thinking why don't I fix both problems and take ownership of Roamty's download page (I'm sure he won't mind as he was just trying help and they're not his mods, plus he's not around anymore anyway), reallocating it to just Age of Discovery 2 and cleaning it up (I'll slap in some of Dale's pictures), setting the download link to go to Dale's thread instead of Roamty's, and lastly giving ownership to Dale (or if he doesn't want it we can leave it with me).


1695015242878.png
 
@Blake00 I am more than happy for you to continue being the Official CFC Mod Archivist (@The_J that should be his bloody user title!) of any of my old content. It's probably best that that sort of archive material is in the hands of someone on staff, as there's no guarantee I'll still be around in the future. I did disappear form Civ communities for about 10 years, so it's not unheard of for me. :)
 
All done!

Have converted Roamty's AoD2 and AoFD joint download page into a pure AoD2 download page and used info & pictures from Dale's threads. The download link goes to Dale's thread and I also chucked in a small plug for Old World. ;)

Have changed the ModDB page to use similar text from the thread, uploaded all screenshots from CFC, quickly whipped up a banner & icon, and uploaded the final 1.12 version which will hopefully stop people using the old version 1.01 there (Oh and I've also answered those comments from people complaining about bugs on the old one telling them to try the newer final release).
 
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