ColumbusOHGamer

Let me give you some better numbers... http://www.cmmods.com/web/cmlog.nsf/489a06c8d54df42c85256c75007e92f2 You can see that I'm averaging about ~80GB per month until May 2008. (OK, so my original math was a little off) Those numbers are just the d/l bytes. Total website usage is about 1GB per day more. Something happens in June and the amount of data climbs. Probably some good mods came out or maybe a file leech found the site. The highest single day byte count since Jan 2007 was 19GB. Obviously the average is much lower, but you need to account for spikes. Also, some of my high volume days came from people using auto download tools that would create dozens of sessions, d/l'ing the same file over and over. I had no good way of controlling that, but if you can limit the sessions to something like 3, you'll eliminate that issue and significantly reduce your bandwidth. I really think that if you simply limit the number of concurrent connections and/or set a bandwidth limit per user, you'll easily be able to host a mod website on one server. Of course, I would suggest a redundant box for safety, but that's a business decision. CMMods has been running on one server (1.8GHz, 2GB Ram, slow 250GB HD) for 6 years. No one really complains about speed or downtime, but really, how can they complain about a free service?

CORRECTED.

OUTSTANDING!!!! I can tell you that most people will not care about slower d/l speed, as long as we're not talking about 2k/sec. They'll just click the link and walk away/go to bed/watch TV. They'll b!tch from time to time, but if it's free, they'll take it. But if you were to charge them even $5 PER YEAR, your usage will drop by 80%. I surveyed this idea a long time ago. 80% said they would NEVER pay to d/l mods. Martin/Steve/Matt/Charles/Etc., I think that once bf.c looks at the total monthly maintenance cost, you'll hopefully see that it won't be as bad as first anticipated. I can not speak for your financial situation with this effort, but c'mon guys, would it really cost that much? Think of the ROI you'll get with your happy customers coming back to your website religiously! RedWolf, It *IS* possible to build a "one-time" setup website and have it be successfull. Once the initial development is complete, it really only needs updated if a new game is released. As I said above it's been a LONG time since I did any programming on my site, and its going fine.

Wow! I don't know where to start..., so many topics, so little time. Let's start with some facts... 1. I currently pay about $80/mo for a 1.5M/756k, unlimited byte count, commercial class connection with Time Warner Cable. This is a second, dedicated line. My other line is used for my in-home business and personal use, not cmmods.com. 2. I just purchased my 3rd server upgrade for cmmods and will install it within the next couple weeks. Running the site ain't cheap, but it's not going to crush me either. 3. I used to see a fairly regular stream of donations in the beginning. There was a handful of VERY generous people that pretty much paid for the first year or so of operation. But now it's pretty rare to get even a couple $5 donations per month. The last 3 years have been pretty much out of my pocket, including the hardware upgrades. I'm not complaining though! I very much appreciate ANYONE who takes the time to send me a couple dollars. Every little bit helps!!! 4. I tried the banner ads for a short time. They sucked. I ended up making $0.50 per week in ads. Not worth putting the users through the hassle. I also thought about charging some sort of fee, but just couldn't bring myself to do it. I wanted a *FREE* place where modders and mod sluts could meet and share their warez. I HATE THE IDEA OF RESTRICTING CREATIVITY OR MAKING OTHERS PAY FOR IT! I'll get back to this later. 5. I am averaging about 2GB/day in downloaded bytes. 6. I currently have about 20,000 registered users, although I'm sure MANY are inactive (one-time use) or duplicates. So let's say 40% are active, about 8000. 7. The earliest mod on my site is from November 2003, authored by the great pakfan. And that was after the great crash of 2003. The site was originally started October 2002. So CMMods has been operating for about 6 years. 8. I'm hosting about 17GB of downloadable mods and scenarios total. This amount grows regularly. 9. The mod/scenario creators have NEVER been paid for their work They do it because they love it! It's such a great thing to see so many modders contributing to the CM community by providing all of us with their wonderful artwork. They really do enhance the experience when playing. 10a. I'm getting tired. I love the CM family of games, but I have so little time that I haven't played one in over a year. I have a 8-5 day job, an in-home business (another 30 hours/week), my family and I'm trying to build a cheap race car (http://www.donateliferacing.com) in my "spare" time. The CMMods website is getting less and less attention every month. If you have emailed me in the past 3 years, you probably have not gotten a reply. I don't open that mailbox but once a month now. For that I am sorry, but I hope you understand. 10b. I haven't made an update to CMMods in... well, I don't remember the last programing change I made. Which means I'm not keeping up on the latest productions from bf.c and consequently, the databases are not as full featured as they should be. 11. I talked with Matt/Steve (they are interchangeable aren't they? ;-) ) in the past about some sort of "agreement" between cmmods and bf.c, but they wanted to have control if it was going to be an "official" bf.c website affiliate. I totally and completely agree with that decision. As someone who owns their own business, I understand the value of having control over ALL it's aspects. I hope the information above will help everyone understand what's at stake. Let me try to sum things up. I like the guys at bf.c and have no bad feelings for them. In fact, I was kind of glad to hear they wanted to open their own mod hosting website. The thought of letting someone else have the burden of expense and time for mod hosting sounds pretty good in my busy life. However, I will say that I was very disappointed to hear that some sort of fee or usage limitation would be implemented. I always envisioned all the modding websites, not just cmmods, as a FREE place for the modders to host their artwork and the mod sluts to grab them all. So now I'm in a dilema. I'd love to turn off the website and let someone else deal with all the issues. But I just can't stand the thought of telling my 8000-20000 users "Hey, you have to go pay for the mods now". It just doesn't sit well with me. So, for now, I'm going to keep it up and running. Not as a "competitor" to bf.c, just another resource the community can use.

I would SOOOO hit that!

Space Odessy=============== Dave: "What's going to happen?" Old Dave: "Something wonderful!" A Fish Called Wanda========= Archie: "Wanda!... Wan, Wan, I wonder if you could tell me..."

If you want a place to upload or download your scenarios (and soon mods), you can do it for free at CMMods.com! Enjoy!

Ditto for me. I can play, but I have dial down the graphics (no AA, Compatible Textures, etc.). That part is very disappointing. As someone who didn't play it before 1.03, I can repeat the enjoyment of the detailed graphics. Watching the 40mm rock with the recoil from each shot is impressive. I only played 2 scenarios. I still saw issues like an Abrams "floating" above the terrain and the M1126 taking FOREVER to use it's 40mm. But overall, I like the game and I'm glad I bought it.

/rickrolled you suck.

He's not. He's SUPER-human!!!

Well, that didn't take long at all. CM:SF Scenarios/Maps are now ready for uploading and downloading at CMMods.com. As soon as I can make some master unit lists, the mods database will be open for business too. ENJOY!!!

Look for it soon!

I have gone ahead and updated the ToW menu to now have direct links to the entrys that contain the tool, filelist and FAQ. Oudy, if you decide to change them in the future, please only UPDATE the current entries... do not add new ones as the links will still point to the old ones. Thanks for loading them for everyone!

So after installing, I noticed there are no more .BMP files like the other CM games. How can a user mod the graphics in ToW? Thanks for any info.