Yeah, I'm fully aware that the permissions thing is very important amongst this group. Plus a few people haven't been by these parts in years.
I still remember when Brezgonne pulled his Tholian models way back when. Don't remember exactly why, but it's just one example of honoring people's wishes. I certainly wouldn't want to host models without the author's permissions. However, for those that might want to contribute to a new repository, well I'd just like to see the new people interested in this game (admittedly, a small handful), say that discover SFC1 through GOG or Amazon or whatever, be able to track down new models a bit more easily than the current situation.
Another thought. For those that might want to maintain more direct control over those models, that may have some models stashed somewhere in their own web spaces, but that wouldn't mind sharing the links, we could start (re)accumulating those links as well. Some people update their models every so often, and they might be more comfortable just updating the model on their own web space, instead of working through a 'go between'.
There have been some awesome models bullt for SFC (and other games as well I'm sure via conversions and such) over the years, and it'd be nice to share those (from authors that still want to share their work) with our newer crowd.
A regularly maintained 'one stop shop' for the models that authors still want to share would be nice. Certainly this forum does this t a degree, but weeding through all of the various posts can be tedious, especially when you end up clicking on dead links trying to track down various models...
A number of people have moved on from this game, but I still like giving it a spin every once in a while. I wouldn't mind seeing someone take a renewed crack at it (Exeter is designing his own game, which isn't quite SFB->SFC, and CE is there of course, but trying to implement PA's, webs, etc. probably won't happen under the existing game), but in the meantime this is how I get my SFB fix. I haven't went back to the grease pencil and mylar sheets overlaying the SSD's since...