I think its awesome that many big communities have come together to bring their beloved game into the modern era of HD through retexturing. However, there are two big problems with the current way of finding and installing these resource packs.
Problems
1. Resource Pack Discovery
I dislike the current approach of having a thread with a pinned message that contains information and download links for the pack. I'm not saying this is a bad place for a pack developer to post their progress and any updates, but I think its possibly confusing and, dare I say, a little janky for the average person, not to mention the ensuing confusion after finding multiple threads about an HD texture pack for the same game.
2. Resource Pack Format
I like that there is now a more official way of managing resource packs through the Resource Pack Manager. However, I have a few comments surrounding this new tool. I like that the tool helps move all of that messy file management away from the end user, however not all packs, especially older ones, implement this new standard. This isn't the fault of the tool, but it does create some confusion in both identifying if its a texture or resource pack and in installing them correctly.
Solution
As the title suggests, I think a website that orders the resource packs by game and gives a fair bit of information about them solves this problem. To solve the second problem, I would like to repackage and reupload texture packs into resource packs. I am not entirely sure about the licensing and legality of this so I would appreciate some comments on how I should go about doing this.
Implementation
I'm going to create a repo on GitHub and host the website through GitHub Pages. For keeping these resource packs up-to-date, I want to encourage people to use the issue tracker and/or make a pull request, but I will still try my best to maintain them by monitoring the forums. To avoid malicious actors, I'm going to only allow myself or a trusted maintainer to repackage and reupload resource packs. As for the hosting of the repackaged resource packs, I'm stuck using something like Google Drive or Mega since GitHub Pages does not like it when people serve many multi-gigabyte files.
Closing Comments
The purpose of this post is to gather opinions, ideas, and suggestions surrounding this website. I want to make these awesome resource packs that so much effort has gone into easier to find and easier to install. So, please let me know what you all think. Constructive criticism is grealty appreciated.
Problems
1. Resource Pack Discovery
I dislike the current approach of having a thread with a pinned message that contains information and download links for the pack. I'm not saying this is a bad place for a pack developer to post their progress and any updates, but I think its possibly confusing and, dare I say, a little janky for the average person, not to mention the ensuing confusion after finding multiple threads about an HD texture pack for the same game.
2. Resource Pack Format
I like that there is now a more official way of managing resource packs through the Resource Pack Manager. However, I have a few comments surrounding this new tool. I like that the tool helps move all of that messy file management away from the end user, however not all packs, especially older ones, implement this new standard. This isn't the fault of the tool, but it does create some confusion in both identifying if its a texture or resource pack and in installing them correctly.
Solution
As the title suggests, I think a website that orders the resource packs by game and gives a fair bit of information about them solves this problem. To solve the second problem, I would like to repackage and reupload texture packs into resource packs. I am not entirely sure about the licensing and legality of this so I would appreciate some comments on how I should go about doing this.
Implementation
I'm going to create a repo on GitHub and host the website through GitHub Pages. For keeping these resource packs up-to-date, I want to encourage people to use the issue tracker and/or make a pull request, but I will still try my best to maintain them by monitoring the forums. To avoid malicious actors, I'm going to only allow myself or a trusted maintainer to repackage and reupload resource packs. As for the hosting of the repackaged resource packs, I'm stuck using something like Google Drive or Mega since GitHub Pages does not like it when people serve many multi-gigabyte files.
Closing Comments
The purpose of this post is to gather opinions, ideas, and suggestions surrounding this website. I want to make these awesome resource packs that so much effort has gone into easier to find and easier to install. So, please let me know what you all think. Constructive criticism is grealty appreciated.