Originally Posted by Nokia

It's not an if, it's a when.

Nearly all closed-source games had an end date due to the reliance on external servers. There's a reason Stop Killing Games and the initiative to preserve archives of games started picking up steam, all with companies shutting down games left and right to their liking once revenue is no longer flowing as expected. I doubt Toribash's community would be willing to go as far as The Crew's community where they went to make their own servers for the game, but I digress.

All of Toribash's interaction are through multiplayer lobbies, forums and Discord. Nobody has access to the source code, so the day the servers shut down alongside the forums is the day playing Toribash as we know it will die if nobody does anything.

However, as long as the official Toribash Discord server stays afloat and is maintained by volunteers, anyone can join and play this game anytime with the caveat of it being singleplayer only. We'll lose so much resources and history that made the game what it is today, but Toribash as a game will still be playable and experienced through Discord and community run efforts as long as the operating systems don't fully move on from X86 (judging by the ARM/RISC V race, it might within decades) marking the executable incompatible.

So instead of focusing on "omg Toribash will die soon", let's talk about what archival efforts might be necessary to keep Toribash, the game and its community, alive through Discord. You can keep reading if you felt like spending more time on this than doomscrolling on TikTok (I've seen the shit you were into on Wibbles.)

What if Toribash is removed from Steam?

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Every version from Toribash 3.8 onwards is downloadable through https://cache.toribash.com/Toribash-#.#-Setup.exe which anyone can download now and archive as they need to.

Wizard has made a list a while ago that's been updated with Toribash versions from 0.1 to 5.53. For versions later than that, do the same cache.toribash trick i.e https://cache.toribash.com/Toribash-5.76-Setup.exe. I'm not a Mac user, but seems like the same is true for https://cache.toribash.com/Toribash-#.#-Installer.dmg.

Anyone can download and reupload all Toribash installers to a cloud service for everyone to enjoy. But if the game stays up on Steam and is instead abandoned with its servers shut down, then there's no reason to do any of this as Steam will let you download the latest stable/beta branches.

What about the forums?

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Sadly, once the forums shuts down, there's no returning it. Unless you can somehow self host the forums by convincing Hampa to send you ALL of the files, which is ignoring all the hidden threads, staff-only stuff, permissions management, payment and addresses, IP and location information, I doubt the forums will ever return. Unless you have enough money to persuade him and physically purchasing his hardware.

Discord exists and has been the primary mode of connection for many since 2018, and it has the advantage of having a static invite link (https://discord.gg/toribash) that's been referred in the game as soon as you open it, so anyone that downloads and plays the game will find their way to the Discord server eventually. Unfortunately this means that in the case that Discord revamps its links or flat out disappears, Toribash will no longer have a direct link to its community, but owell Let's focus on archiving today instead of in 2036.

What about the attachments on the forums? Well... The link to attachments is https://forum.toribash.com/attachmen...attachmentid=# so if the goal went from "try to download EVERYTHING" to "download only attachments uploaded to threads" then it's doable with a script that downloads every attachment id by incrementing it up by 1. The question now becomes do you have enough storage to download all of that?

I've attached something to this post just to see how many IDs exists and will put it here.

Edit: As of writing this, the number of attachments on the forums is 633,670. Using forum.toribash.com/newattachment.php link, the biggest file size possible ranges from 9.8 KB for .inc file format and 10 MB for the .mdmp file format.

This means if EVERY file was a 1 byte file, it'd be 0.604 MB, and if they were 10 MB .mdmp files, the size explodes to 6.04 TB. Realistically, it's way lower than 6.04 TB, but WAY higher than a few GB's, so good luck downloading every attachment there ever was if you wanted to archive the forums' attachments. I'd not be surprised if attachments were more than a terabyte.

Of course, this goes without saying that EVERY attachment has to be sorted, from images to shader files, from replay files to lua scripts, and so on. Good luck.

What about textures?

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Anyone can modify any custom folder and share their sets through any storage hosting service. We used to have Hagan's toribashtextures but that apparently got nuked earlier this year, so all sets have to be screenshotted with their perspective download links if people plan to share them around, which can be achieved using Discord's threads feature i.e a #textures thread where anyone can post their own subthread for their set and its download link.

What about colors?

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The game already recognizes colors through their ID via item.dat. All that has to be done is preserving the color list IDs so people can use them to have their own colors, which can be done by ctrl+s'ing the page as html, or screenshotting it and sending it to the Discord. The list might not be updated with the more recent battlepass colors though.

Same is to be said with any "custom file editing" tutorial thread - heck, most tutorial threads must be archived for future use due to their usefulness.

What about 3D items?

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One can easily download every 3D model's .obj and .tga directly from the servers, like https://cache.toribash.com/objects/2105.obj and https://cache.toribash.com/objects/2105.tga for the "Deal with It" models, but we won't be able to do this if the server go down and the IDs don't tell you which bodypart and what setting the 3D item has. Therefore, someone has to make an archive of every 3D item with their bodypart and item.dat information for it to be loaded into the customs folder.

What about particles?

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I believe most flames in deactivated inventories will be nuked unfortunately as these are server side. However, any active flame is listed in item.dat through numbers that anyone can copy/paste. Again, just like with the textures, particles' flame.tga must be uploaded for others to have the same exact flames, so add a "Texture(s)" and "Particles" tags for people to differentiate between the threads.

What about replays?

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.rpl files are so small, one can keep thousands of replays without a problem. Case in point, my replays folder has hit 1.40GB with ~10k replay files since 2021. Replays on the forums however must be archived manually. Check the forums portion since I've outlined archiving every attachment there.

Anyone can send replay files through the Discord, but we'll lose the ones on the replays board. Archival is the only option here for the more important replays i.e world records and notable replays, and it'll be shared around through the Discord via #replays.

What about mods?

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Anyone can create and send .tbm files through Discord's #mods, but there's another problem. As of today, there exists 15,464 uploaded mods, and that's not accounting for singleplayer event mods and special mods.

Just like 3D items, mods are also kept in https://cache.toribash.com/cp/data/mod/modname.tbm so anyone can download the mods for now until the servers are shut down. Thankfully, not as absurd as the 633k attachment count, but it's still a sizeable number that'd take days to manually download if you don't want to risk accidentally DoSing the server.

What about scripts?

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Discord's #scripts channel exists, but archival efforts are, again, necessary as each attachment has a unique ID and cannot be easily downloaded like 3D models or mods.

Check the forums portion to see how many attachments there are to download.

What about multiplayer lobbies?

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Here's the hard part that MIGHT be doable if someone chimes in and informs me more about this.

Looking at the list of every server, ports are hosted from 20180 and go up (stay around 20###) and on the same IP (5.9.123.15, so it's theoretically easy for anyone to self-host servers if they understand port forwarding, and players would connect to it through /connect ip tcp if the multiplayer menu fails to function. For instance, /connect 5.9.123.158 20182 connects you to the lobby 5.9.123.158:20182, which is the "public9" server.

Two major issues; one, I have no clue if only forwarding to the same TCP/IP would make Toribash recognize it nor the mechanics for it to go "the IP 1.2.3.4:20182 is a valid Toribash server".

Two, and a bigger one, is instead of relying on Toribash's server, we now rely on the self-hosted server, so whoever hosts this has to commit to maintaining their PC to stay on OR uses virtual private server subscriptions to host lobbies, which can cost a few dollars per month if they lack the hardware to do this at home or cannot keep a PC on 24/7. It's not realistic to expect everyone to be able to port forward as many ISP routers don't allow such a feature.

With all of that said, I'll go through every 3D item to download it all for archival purposes later this week. Might do the same with mods and, maybe if I feel like saturating my backup server, some notable replays and attachments. Of course I'm not going to be instantly downloading everything, that would crash whatever toaster Toribash servers run on.