What I'd love to see is some kind of board of reviewers/group within each art category/style (i.e. 3d, pixelart) that would build consistency relations between different artp ieces.

As it is now art looks very different as it comes from different projects and artists even if it shares category. Why not try to make it so that if I view an artwork (a1) and like the style, I could push a button and then every other art work that is considered to be enough unified/consistent with that artworks style would show up (a78, a129 etc).

To build these kind of relations one would either need a serious crew that is appointed and represents the site/community, or, you could try to use the community to do the consistensy-linking itself between different pieces. Both solutions have their pros and cons.

Once the consistency relations are in place it would be nice if the site autogenerated cónsistency packages. So, if I see artwork 56, I can also see that there are x other works that are consistent with that style and would usually work very well together. Imagine there is a button - I press it, and I start downloading a tar-file with all those artworks in it (given of course, all those works have  oner or more common license(s))

I know there could be discussions about what is "enough" consistent and that different games have different understandings of it, but to be honest I don't think it's such a huge topic: Most players / artists can easily spot what is a stylistical breakge/problem. Whatever that is, it should not have a consistencey link to the rest of the art in a game. Also, however this is executed, it would still be of great use, and maybe even encourage people to try to create more consistent stuff.

I.e. imagine contests or bounties for adding 50 new items (and a list of them?) to a certain consistency package.

Just my 2 cents.

Tagging can be used to match up similar art styles.  For example, I could go back and tag all the art for my game.  http://opengameart.org/category/art-tags/osare (I just added the tag to that one).  If this sounds like a good idea I'll go back and tag all my game art.

bart: The creation of "collections" that could be used to group works of same/compatible/consistent style sounds like a solution. :)

I would however suggest that it's somehow designed to insure that art usually is placed in a group. If that should be done by appointing editor(s) to each group or if every user should be empowered to add/remove content from each group (or better yet: Nominate works for inclusion in a group - then editors could simply apply / deny the work into the group. If a work has been denied once into a group then it can't be nominated for it again, in order to insure that editors don't do same work over and over again etc.) There are many ways to solve all this, but using the collections concept seems right on.

pfunked: I guess tagging art that way would be a pretty decent solution until a better one, ie. the above, has been implemented. Especially as art within one and the same project usually has some consistency style wise.

The only drawbacks I see with the tagging usage as a permanent solution is:

1. If I tag all art from project x with "project x" as tag, then people who submit art that is consistent with project x's style will, in some cases, feel sidelined/that it's wrong to name a style of art after whatever project that was first to use it as a tag. While I understand what you're getting at and agree it's a good temp solution, I imagine what I originally suggested to work in a way that was more about styles and less about individual projects. I.e. instead of calling a group "Diablo 2" we would call it "Realistic Isometric Fantasy Setting" (just an example in lack of better names here).
2. Working around styles doesn't make it into a prestige thingie. I can imagine there are a lot of people that would actually never tag something as x if x wasn't their own projects name, and maybe rightfully so to a certain degree: After all, what they just tagged was never a part or created by/for x in the first place.

All in all, I think we're on the same page here...

I always figured collections as the central "interface metaphor" of OGA2. The rest is gravy ;).

PLEASE make use of HTML5 instead of Flash in OGA 2.0 for the audio previews. ;)

oooh!  

don't forget my suggestion to add a link to user profiles that links to their list of contributions.

for me thats the main thing missing from oga; it would also help address what WTactics suggested:

"What I'd love to see is some kind of board of reviewers/group within each art category/style (i.e. 3d, pixelart) that would build consistency relations between different art pieces."

being able to easily view (ie not have to choose from a submenu and then a list) a particular users contributions will automatically help view a consistent set of work.

Not sure whether this was mentioned already, but it would be useful to have a major visual clue if you are not logged in. This to prevent half of the actions of anonymous, followed by a “sorry, that was me there, I didn't see I was logged out.”

DeviantArt allows browsing both by Popularity and by Newest.  I think Popularity is the default, giving the impression that there is mostly high quality work on DeviantArt.  Of course, the vast amounts of mediocre art can be seen when browsing by Newest.

OGA, like DeviantArt and every other place with user-submitted content, follows the rule that 90% of everything is crap.  I wonder if people get the impression that OpenGameArt has poor quality art because by default we show everything submitted.

Our "Featured" section kinda works to display very popular items, but maybe we can automate that section e.g. items with a certain number of Favorites automatically get added.  Then we can consider moving the Featured section higher on the page.

I'm not saying I don't want poor quality art on OpenGameArt.  In fact, what's poor quality to one person can be inspirational and perfect to another.  I think we should just display our best stuff more prominently.

Hi all,

 I wish pfunked had linked the Featued link. I also wish that the featured link make it somewhat easier to understand why a particular peice of art was featured and why another one is not featured. Some idea both for users and developers. An e.g. of a random featured art http://opengameart.org/content/whispers-of-avalon-grassland-tileset Now as a user I just don't have any idea why it was featured. It would be good if this could made a bit more transparent (or atleast the ratings and  possibly other points and objectives which go on into making stuff Featured.) 

Anyways, I had chatted with Bart, pfunked and others day before yesterday. I sincerly believe Bart should have a timeline by which suggestions are accepted or not (maybe a month) or something, whatever he feels good about. Bart should make a page/node where everything on OGA that he is going to do or wants to do for OGA 2.0 is spelled out. Things he is going to work on right now, things he would do later, things which are miscellenous (good to do but only if somebody else either funds or does the coding for it.) This he should do as early as possible as its always a good idea to write down things. As Said before there is no good way of searching the forum, so there is a high possibility that some good suggestions may get bypassed if one thinks of doing it later.

I also posted couple of blog posts in this week, the last one which got published yesterday http://wp.me/pfuZu-fM . I'm going to steal an idea which I posted there as well.

1. "One of the other off-shoots of ideas I see is a tool which can be used either from GNU/Linux, Mac or MS Windows where I, a user can filter stuff (images,sounds etc.) depending on my need and the software would go to the site and take stuff from there. I have seen something similar for wallpapers in Ubuntu a few versions back. Of course the developer (bart in this case) would have to make his database,labels with some standard and give some technical documentation perhaps but this could be done. Also there could be some sort of an uploader which would upload art from a user’s desktop to the site as well. A unified program which does both would be perfect. Of course would post the same in the forum as well for bart to think about." -shirish

2. Also the idea of having a resource where people can upload large files with revisions and all is good. I don't know or have any idea if OGA 1.0 provides for this or not.

Also the FAQ itself shouldn't it be in different nodes, the FAQ should be one document where the questions are shown and the answers are hidden (but are there on the page/node) . This way a user can see the relevant answers he wants to view. The FAQ itself is far from complete as it doesn't tell if there are limits to how much a user can upload and how long his art would be on the site. I'm sure there are many more questions which are not covered in the FAQ. Also there are no policies listed anywhere. Would x-rated content (read adult art) be allowed on the site or not. If yes,then there needs to be some sort of age verification process. I know it might be a bit outlandish notion but one never knows.

3. I have subscribed to couple of forum threads. All of them just show the first line or couple of lines of the post, it would be good perhaps to read the whole post from e-mail itself. There should also be a possibility to post to the thread from e-mail itself. This can be good only when the previous suggestion/feature is implemented.

I may be missing out on couple of more points which I might have though but there's the gist of it. Just my 2 paise.  

A Flagship Project: a game that is an official OGA project.  Either create something new or just co-opt something (e.g., OSARE) and designate it as OGA's flagship project.

I'm the newest member, perhaps the least that can't talk, but I've been surfing OGA for quite some time as anonymous. 

What I would love to see in OGA is:

- Not really important, but Markdown filter :) 

- Encouragement of "the why's should you post your fiction in OGA": The writer's forum is practically empty, maybe because they just see the front page, or they are just developers like me that want to grab and go (not anymore :) ). OGA should really encourage people that are interested in games for them to create concepts and write fiction. Why? Because eventually, the writer or the game designer (and GAME DESIGNER DOES NOT EQUAL GAME DEVELOPER that should be noted)  will see their skills grow. Now, the Open Source world--many see them as just "leechers", but in truth and all honesty, the OSS world shapes us to become good at what we do. 

Heck, I wanted to become a writer, my main language is Spanish. I love books and all and some of the books I read inspired me to try. Sadly, I stopped since I had no mentor to guide me. This is the problem with OSS, no project started has mentors, and if a project had mentors to guide new rising stars then that would mean the project could be successful. 

Now, writers (who focus on game storylines, characters, plots, etc) should be made aware of licenses. The OSS community desperately need writers, I saw games mostly made from programmers, do note that while programmers work hard most of them are not fit to be writers, designers or create a vast fantasy world (this take months!). Of course, sometimes there are exceptions :). OGA SHOULD encourage groups to create projects. 

- Groups - As I mentioned above OGA SHOULD encourage its users to form groups (and apply a code of conduct, some users can be quite immature). Groups are the answer to a game project, not many people can create a game from scratch. A game development group forum is needed, but that means OGA might need to add more forums for programming languages, OpenGL, AI questions, etc so the community can support itself through the members.

Alright, back again to the writer and design subject, there could be perhaps hundreds of reasons of why not to release your under a OS License. It worries me that, and I should mention that open source does not mean we should all release games to linux only (although that would help a lot to promote linux, thanks god I'm operative system-agnostic), if no community take action to encourage writers and game designers to come out and share their work with the world, the games in the open source community will remain as it is, a frustration. Selecting an open source license does not mean there shouldn't be a business model, let's say OSARE is finished and pfunked starts a premium private server for OSARE players to join in and kill some badass bosses, do quests, etc. He/she could charge anything since a service if being provided. Or even pay an small fee for updates (this could cause users to leave, lol)

And the "sad but true" fact is that it is time consuming, it's a thought that I've had in my head for some time, it halts the growth of our work in progress. To put it bluntly I don't want to see more users that want to be game developers programming alone, there could be potential in some of them but if they don't join groups to keep it fun and not all business, they'll lose interest and drop their work, the same goes to writers. Another thing to point out is that, the game business is quite closed, if you notice, all game development books on important subjects such as AI, etc are not free, and quite expensive, most frameworks just give you some tutorials, but not enough to grasp the concepts.

phew, I had this for some time lol :) sorry if there are any grammar mistake :B, too bad I'm not in IRC (my stupid ISP seems to be blocking the port, gotta find another)

I completely agree to ThePrinny on encouraging people of diverse backgrounds to participate. In my experience, this really helps if you want to “grow” games that are more than one-man projects.

For example LÖVE: a game engine/framework with a shallow learning curve, which allows for quick prototyping, is easy to use for people with little or no programming experience. Thus the official forums are filled to the brim with artists, writers, programmers, designers, etc. It has proved a fertile place for new projects using LÖVE, because whatever skill is needed, there is always someone around who has that skill.

Of course, the website's name is OpenGameArt, but there is nothing wrong with giving non-artists a place to keep them in the loop. Closer cooperation with other sites with different focuses could also help. (Is there something like an OpenGameWriting site around, that anyone knows of?)

@Robin: DeviantArt is a place to share artwork mostly, but I've seen user share their poems and literary work. What I mean is that well, OGA can remain OGA as long as all the subject discussed is related to games. Opening more branches of OGA will just become a pain to maintain for the admin sadly :( 

Cheers!

it would be nice if we could sort the users by the first letter of their usename on the website, like, have a list of the letters, and you can click on one, and it shows just the usernames that start with that letter. Also, not sure if it has been mentioned before, but when I go to a userpage, I would like to see a list of their submissions on that page, or at least a link to a page that lists their submissions. There is the track button, but I think there should be a dedicated "Submissions" button.

Well, there is my $0.02.

I agree with above poster, but instead of the clickable letters I suggest a simple search box that's ajaxified: Writing two-three letters would instantly display all usernames that began with them. It's easy to implement, works like a charm and is more intuitive than the paper-version approach that clicking letteres come from :P

Oops.  That wasn't anonymous.  That was me :)

This "Collection" idea sounds great. Seeing all the models i submit are all based inthe same project it would be nice to package all of them and make it say "WeaponGuy's Medieval Model Set" or something like that and just have the whole lot of them in a downloadable package.

I know it has been stated before, but before doing ANYTHING else, IMHO, the art browsing needs to get a lot better - as it is, it sucks for exploring content. :P

Other than breaking down the art into more specific categories, I dont know how much more simple browsing the art can be lol

The only issue I see now is the perspective groups when browsing 2D art. The current categories are context based (sprite work, map tilesets, icons and textures) but there are two perspective based categories - isometric and top down. While isometric is a category that is used properly - the majority of the art inside is indeed isometric - the top down category is slightly misused. It's turned into an isometric and misc perspective category. Do you agree that both isometric and top down be removed from the browse list and turned into filter options? This could lend a hand to those less known perspectives like the ones used by ultima style games.

Also, can we have something tell us who uploaded a certain piece of art in the chance they upload someone else's art and only provide an author name and no contact info. We could find out who uploaded it and ask them. That is, if I'm not being blind and that already exists. If that's the case disregard this entire last paragraph ;)

@Person Not sure if non-admins can see it, but I have, in tiny text, "submitted by <user>" at the top of each piece. As for improvements to browsing, that's one of the major motivations behind collections :).

*facedesk* I knew I was being blind! And those collection ideas sound grand, very cool.

(first post in this thread)

I want to have a grid of new items that is not divided into sections, but only shows the latest submissions and has the category in a small link below it. Like http://www.deviantart.com/

It will be easier to add more art this way and there is no "2D art is most important" stigma through positioning.

I agree with the people who mentionned an extra space in the profiles, just for the contributed artworks the member did to OGA. something like "OGA portfolio"

Also, it would be nice to have a box on the frontpage for the "latest comments". Right now, unless i'm missing something, comments made by people on the artwork pages are just flying by and going unoticed. For exemple: http://opengameart.org/content/oga-medals#comment-1843

Appart from that everything is good and mockup for 2.0 looks good :)

not sure if this wasn't told before, but I d like to see audio entries in the "Featured Art" section as well (if you will keep that section though)

For audio I have really seen a dearth in musical styles. I actually posted a blog post about it sometime back. What I would like to see is not just more music but also more musical styles. There could/should be also possibility of having individual instrument sounds and the ability to mix them (although long term) That would be real musical repository then.

Well, if I could, I would make reggae-inspired dubtronica, but as it is, I find it hard to make all the syncopation needed in order to make it cool enough. Too bad. :(

I hope you do make a splash when D7 comes out. From the calculations it seems D7 should be out somewhere around September 19th .

You should also check out Drupal Commons if that might be something that could meet your needs.

Just my 2 paise.

I want to upload a whole collection of mine but I do not want to spend a week uploading each piece individually. On the other hand I also don't want to bundle it all together so no one will ever see the contents and making it so the never get used.

Solution - Collection uploading.

When creating a new entry I select a "I'm Uploading a collection"

Collection Name ________

Normal License Options

[x] Use Sub-folders names as additional tags for items in that folder

Archive to upload (zip, tar.gz, etc) ________...

So what happens is the server receives the archive, decompresses it, and creates individual entries for each file in the archive, naming them according to the filename, adding them to the collection, and tagging them as need.

The date has shifted now to October 6th as  the linear date from the Drupal released date website. There is also November 7th given as logarithim date. It should be another 3 weeks before a stable build gets released or something and then bart would have to look for the views module which should take some more time. It would be nice if bart atleast tells us how D7 looks, feels when its released. A sorta review of the new version.  That would also make for compelling content especially those guys who might want to use Drupal for forums and stuff. 

Dunno if that came up before but I want the art pages to be handled like forums, so we can see updated posts, number of replies, search through in forum view etc.

atm there are some good discussions from time to time on those pages, but hard to find for people who didn't subscribe to it. Also it makes OGA look more vivid and encourages community participation because of that IMO

Avatars =)

Something worth looking at, methinks: http://openattribute.com/

Maybe a "Tools" section for things like the blender unified rig, base meshs, tutorials ?

I look at this from a lot of different angles, by trade I'm a web dev/ui dev, specialising in Drupal and Android. By night I'm a coder/musician/writer/2d/3d artist. So I guess there are the key perspectives I see OGA from

Artist: 

Currently the submissions section is clunky, I know you are working on this as a priority and I don't know what you've done already but here is what I'd like to see:

   Draft status, I want to be able to save everything I've put in without sending it live, often my uploads take a long time, I want to know that even if the main upload fails or the browser crashes I wont have to fill in all the details and upload all the previews all over again.

 More/better tagging system.  I really don't get the current system, the freeform tags make sense, but the checkboxes are all over the place. They really need to be cleaned up and reorganised. A good breakdown for 2D might be something like:

Type:

Texture, Skin, Icon, Portrait, Background, Concept Art,

But the next section should be determined by what you selected above, so for concept art you might get asked for:

Setting:

Historical, Fantasy, Modern, Sci-fi

And then for something like:

Style: 

Realistic, Cartoon, Stylised, Dark, Anime, Pixel

But for Textures those things don't really make sense, so you would instead get asked for

Material:

Natural, Man Made, Abstract

And then a subsection, so if you chose natural you'd then chose from:

Grass, Dirt, Wood, Stone, Plant

 In this way artworks get tagged in a way that makes sense for each pice of art, rather than trying to shoehorn all art into a common set of categories.  yes, there may end up being a lot of options, but if each individual piece need only ever see a handful of them, then it wont overwhelm the artist while still providing the kind of granular browsing options users are after.

Coder:

 The way I see it I would either come here looking for a project to work on or I would come looking for help on/art for my projects.

In essence this is a job search network where no-one gets paid, but the general process of putting up jobs and looking for work still applies.

 Looking for projects:

Firstly, projects need to be browsed the same way you might browse through games on steam. Pick a genre and pick a style, and once I'm looking at an individual project I want to know what stage each project is at, what skills they have already and what skills they are after, I want a screenshots of their current build, a link to try out the current build, a link to their forum and a link to their sourceforge, most of all I want to know how active they are. If there was some way of measuring the activity of their site's forums (like counting the number of new entries in an rss feed of their forum), that would be really helpful. If I could enter in detals of the kind of project I'm idealy looking for on my profile page, that would be awesome too.

 Looking for help:

 Firstly I want most of the work to done automatically, I'm new, I don't know the ettiquete, I just want a button that says  "ask for help" or "start your project". At which point I'm asked for all the information above, the genre, the style, the skills I already have on staff and the skills I am looking for, then I enter in links for my site, my forum, my sourceforge and images and videos.  Again these pages should have the ability to save a draft at any time before publishing it. When I hit publish I should be given links to an automatically generated forum and the final project page, which has an edit button incase I messed something up.  Once I've done that, I want to be able to browse through people's profiles according to their skills and what kinds of projects they are working on and would like to work on.

User:

 Finally, as someone who just hangs out here, I want to be able to vote on things, reddit style, nested comments, upvotes AND downvotes in additions to favorites. I don't want to clog up the list of things im following  by favouriting everyhting I like, but I still want to be able to indicate what I like or dislike, and I like and dislike a LOT of things.  I know you probably don't want to discourage artists by having their work downvoted, so just don't show votes below 0. Really, it will probably motivate them to make better or more appropriate work anyway. If you could add a simple drop down list of  reasons for the downvote/upvote, that'd be cool to. So I could say "Poor Quality" or "Not Useful",  and conversely be able to rate things as "Good Quality", "Useful" those tags could then be plugged into the views module and spat out as "most useful art" and "best quality art".

 Profile:  This should be my home page, with as many options as you can reasonably throw at it, I'm talking profile pictures, galleries, projects I'm working on, groups i'm a part of,  messaging to other users and anything else you can think of. I want to be checking my OGA account every day, I want to be updating it and customising it, making it mine. That'll make me attached to the site and the community.

Grouping/packing art would be nice, because it's not only important to have nice art, but also to have a collection of models in one style/era. With grouping/packing I mean that artists get the option to group the art in the ui, and (if not too hard to code) zip them together when downloading. Example:

We have three pieces of art in the same style. In the current system it is not easy to find out about them all. What I suggest is that you can search for groups of art, for example: medieval weaponry. Art packs Can just be a number of links below another.

What could also be nice is to auto-exclude any license the art doesn't have in common (for groups), so if one has cc-BY and cc-by-sa, but the other only has cc-by-sa, the group will have cc-by-sa.

A resorce request page with the art there looking for categorized by projects

A "commission this artist" link which developers can use to request commissions from specific artists whose style they like that also allows artists to name their price.

An "implement this piece for my project" feature that requests an artist to prepare the model to a specific project's specifications, also possibly with a price attached. 

There are a couple of nice tutorials made by OGA users, some of them out in the www, some even here in the forums. But sadly, the "Articles & Tutorials" menu entry covers only two articles/tutorials. I think it would be a great idea to bundle all those tutorials (or, at least, links to all those tutorials) on a single page. This would help newbies (such as myself) to get to know some basic workflows / skills more easily.

I have 2 suggetions.

1. I often foind it difficult to see (in a moment notice) if I am logged in or not. We could solve that by having two styles. One for when you're logged in and one for when you're not logged in. Recolours are good enough to show the difference. (e.g. Green = logged in, blue = not logged in)
2. As a developer I have no place to write what my skills are. (Something like the artistic talents field). Please add this. (I am sure this is easy.)