The Moving Caravan is back! New Owner/Admin, and the Cactus Ports Collection

fearedbliss

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Hello everyone,

It's been a few months since I shut down The Moving Caravan. There has been a lot of activity behind the scenes which I would like to take a moment to brief everyone on. First and foremost, The Moving Caravan is officially back online! We will get back to that in a second.

Some time after the forum shutdown, I started working on single handly porting as many mods as possible to the Cactus platform. This meant that I was looking around the internet for all types of mods that were created for Diablo II (Original) since the year 2000. I was able to port around 80 mods at Platinum and Gold quality, and each of these mods had documentation on what I did to port them, their authors, information about what year it was released, screenshots, and anything else I thought was important. This is my personal, curated collection of mods that I'm sharing with the community, the same as what I already do with Cactus, Singling, and Succulent. It is not a collection that is open for public development. After all the mods were ported, I re-scanned all of the ported mods, and dropped any mods I thought weren't truly contributing to the collection, or the mods weren't unique enough from each other for me to keep. After that process was done, I dropped 34 mods from my collection, and there are now (as of the time of this writing) 51 mods available in my collection (44 platinum, 7 gold). All of these mods are perfectly safe (as best as I could get them to be - or else I wouldn't have ported them in the first place) to be used, and are easy to install. You just need to download the port you want, drop it into your Platforms directory, add it to Cactus, and click Launch. I highly recommend using Cactus' backup feature to backup your Platform/Saves/Etc before launching any mod. All of these mods have been personally tested to be compatible with Cactus, cnc-ddraw, DSOAL w/ Open AL, and are fully protected with Cactus. Meaning that Platform/Saves are fully protected by Cactus as well. I hope everyone has a lot of fun with these mods. Visit the Cactus Ports Collection to start taking a look and downloading the mods!

Going back to The Moving Caravan, as you can see I was busy lol. While that was happening, @Manny was actually hard at work recreating another forum in the spirit of The Moving Caravan. Seeing him hard at work on this over the past few months got me thinking.. given his hard work, and dedication to the forum, and original Diablo II, and given that Manny was one of the earliest members of TMC, and the second highest poster after me (which is an achievement lol), Manny would be the perfect person to take over and continue the legacy of TMC, and take it to the next level. After some conversations with @Manny, this is now a reality. I would like to formally announce that I've transfered The Moving Caravan's official database, and have re-routed "themovingcaravan.com" to Manny's infrastructure. He will now be the primary owner and admin of The Moving Caravan. I'm confident he will be able to continue the spirit of the forum, and take it to the next level. With any ownership transfer, comes some differences. I'll let Manny speak on anything he wants to talk about regarding that, but as you can see, we are now using XenForo rather than phpBB. I'm still a huge fan of phpBB and would use it again, and there are other technical stack differences (Database platform, OS, etc). These are all just differences in preferences, but they are all rock solid solutions nonetheless. The Moving Caravan's new theme and style look amazing, has a sense of minimalism, and improved readability. Since there were a few migrations that occurred (and also because I only backed up the database and nothing else), all previously uploaded screenshots are gone. This is ok, we are all still playing the game and will generate new screenshots. There may also be some old bbcode style tags in comments as well. Those may or may not be cleaned up over time depending on the importance of the post.

If you are new to the forum, I would recommend still reading The Moving Caravan's Opening Post which laid out the original vision of the forum, which is still the current vision at a high level.

Overall, I'm very excited about the future of The Moving Caravan. I'll still be lurking around, and posting occasionally.

- fearedbliss
 
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Epic post, @fearedbliss!

I'm so glad we could work together to bring back The Moving Caravan, and I'm stoked to read about your new Cactus Ports Collection!

Video games come and go, modern ARPG ladder seasons come and go, but classic games like Diablo II, and Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, which were beautifully and passionately developed, are certainly a dying breed. I believe these games deserve to be celebrated and preserved. While this is undoubtedly a niche community, it is no less an important one!

I'm currently getting ready to enjoy a much-needed spring break in the Florida Keys with some friends and family, so I won't be around as much over the next few days, but I'm here for the long-haul, and will soon follow up with a post about the future of TMC. ^^

-Manny
 
Exciting to see the forums back! It may not seem like it, but it fills the void for those who are in the niche of wanting an open and relaxed place they can just shoot the shit and play D2. It was also nice seeing your dedication to making those mods run in Cactus, as many of them require difficult setups with specific patches needed, and some of them enforce their own DRM (back before blizzard removed the CD requirement) so they don't work at all in Windows 10+.

My last D2 session was in 1.06 a few months ago, but I'll likely come back to it again over the summer and look forward to shared adventures ;)
 
Cool to see the forums return, not that I've posted in a long time but I still popped my head in here every few months just to see what was shaking. :p
 
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