Ideas for features and changes to OGA?
Hey folks. :)
I imagine people have noticed some of the changes that have happened recently, the most publicized of which being the new texture archive format. A couple other things include a wide browsing mode (make your browser 1280+ pixels wide on the main page to see it) and the ability to hide certain blocks from view in your user profile.
This has inspired some discussion in the chat channel recently about other possibilities for changes and additions, and I wanted to ask people on the forum what people would like to see in the future as well, with a few caveats:
- I'm only one guy. There are things that may be great ideas that I just don't have time to implement as a single part time programmer.
- If I'm going to spend time on something, I need at least some level of consensus. If you like someone else's idea, please say so in this thread so I can get a gauge of how popular an idea is.
- Some things may be harder (or messier) to do than you think, so please be understanding of that. :)
- I have to prioritize changes. I tend to prioritize things that are very quick and highly beneficial first. I give a low priority to things that will take a long time to code.
- Assistance is welcome. We've got a test server set up now (as of a week or two ago), so if people are interested in helping, I can hook you up with an account.
- This is not a promise to do exactly what everyone wants. In fact, some needs conflict directly with one another (such as the need for easy art forms, and the need for more metadata to be included with art), and some things (such as our decision not to allow NC licenses) have already been discussed extensively and are non-negotiable. I'm also not going to do anything that would require dumping a large portion of OGA's existing codebase.
In general, I'm looking for big ideas for new features, such as the new texture archive, or quick ideas that are nice and don't take much time. I'll post a reply here with things that have already been brought up.
Here are some things that have been brought up already. If you'd like to discuss them in detail, please start another thread.
Hi,
maybe some table would be useful? Where admins can put up tasks that got suggested in this thread, with an estimation of efford, on a scale from 0-10 or similar. Then users can vote which items they would like to see integrated, and from the number of votes and the efford you can easier sort out the order of how to do things. If you want progess to be visible, add a progress bar to the table, so something with an efford of 3 can be in states from 0/3 to 3/3 for example, and if you notice that an estimation of efford was wrong, change it, and people can change their votes any time as well.
Since this is kind of a meta-feature with no direct use for OGA itself, I would vote for such a table only if it is easy to setup and maintain, but maybe ppl like it, and it keeps everything important at one place.
One suggestion I have, would be to add preview images to the RSS feed - the content is empty atm, and also it would be good to add "OGA - ..." to the beginning of headline, for identifying OGA posts easier.
Red warrior needs caffeine badly.
This would be nice.
@surt:
Done, to the extent that I can. I can't just put it on the user profile page, because some people want to be attributed differently depending on what works they submit. I was trying to come up with a way to allow for a default set of attribution instructions, but even then, if someone is submitting a work by someone else, some users will skip past already filled in fields and leave the default value there, which would mean that the art would come with erroneous instructions to attribute the submitter as opposed to the author. Anyway, the art submission page now contains an "attribution instructions" box, which users can fill in if they like.
Done.
I added what I could, but the most popular and most submissions boxes aren't views, they're custom code, which means I'd have to code up a whole other page to handle those. This isn't a huge deal, but it's harder than the other stuff, so it'll have to wait for a bit.
As I was looking at the front page, though, I noticed that some of the space there was poorly utilized. For instance, active topics and new topics seem to contain a lot of the same items, so I made the active topics box contain more items and removed the new topics box. I also filtered forum comments out of the Recent Comments box, since active topics are essentially exactly the same thing.
I have no idea how feasible any of these are, but I'll throw 'em out there just in case. :)
1) Filesizes next to download links on art pages. As someone with a limited bandwidth quota myself, it would be nice to know just how large a certain file/.zip archive/etc. is before I start to download it.
2) The ability to zoom in on image previews. Specifically for pixel art, it can sometimes be very hard to judge the quality of pixel art if it is displayed at native resolution. Right now when I come across a piece of pixel art on OGA I have to save the image to my hard drive and use an image viewer application to zoom in on the image. Unfortunately, I imagine this probably wouldn't be trivial to implement.
3) Let registered users "rate" art, i.e. assign a certain piece of art x stars out of y. This could allow content to be filtered by "highest rated" or something similar. Not really necessary by any means, but it could be a nice feature to have.
1) I like that idea, and it's probably easy to do. I'll look into it.
2) I like that idea, and it's probably hard to do. I'm guessing this will have to wait.
3) We have something in the works that's kind of like that, but not exactly. There are some details that still need to be worked out, though. On the whole, this one is non-trivial and it may be a while before it happens.
I've done a bunch of other stuff today:
I apologize if you ran into something today and it looked horrible. Some of these changes have a bigger impact than it would seem, so it's easy to miss them in testing. If you happen to see any obviously broken styling, please let me know here, as it's probably due to the changes I made this evening.
Personally, I'd still like to see a "used by' field on art pages, two-way attribution in a sense. Maybe the art can come with embeddable JS tags, almost like what CC offers, that calls back to OGA, provides a link to their project on the OGA listing, and a link to the specific art piece on their site or game.
@TheAncientGoat
That sounds good in theory, but in practice there are several things that would need to be addressed, the biggest one being the potential for abuse. Any time you give someone the ability to add a link back to their own site, spammers show up in droves. This would necessitate some sort of manual approval system for the project links people submit.
Let me propose a potential alternative that would be easier to implement. We can allow registered users to mark art with an "I'm using this!" flag. The art would then include a list of users who are using the art. If the user defined a project page in their profile, the list would include a link to that project page. The upshot here would be that we manually approve all user accounts anyway, so the project links will have already been verified by a human to be non-spam, and the entire process on the user side takes a single click.
Thoughts?
bart: Looks good. I'm quite happy with the section heading links as is, now when I click on the big "Latest Art" text it will take me somewhere! :)
It's still saying "Project" for the website link. And I was hoping for a suitable area to tell any self-entitled wannabe-game-dev kiddies that there is no point in nagging me to work on their amazing new MMORPG that is going to take the world by storm and such, rather than a description of the website.
Styling issue with the "Art by user" panel on the user page. Now barely too narrow to fit four thumbnails across.
EDIT:
Oh, and the link for "Recent Art Comments" leads to a page containing all recent comments, not just art comments.
Red warrior needs caffeine badly.
That would be a good compromize, but providing a "link to the artwork" type embeddable image would still be cool/usefull. Heck, one could tie it in with automatic accreditation generation, actually, make the artwork people use its own list, and then link to that list from the game's site.
Seeing as I'm in a dreamerly mood, one could even use that as a potential mirroring solution, if people don't have any other way to contribute to OGA, they could provide mirrors for the content they are using on their own domains, somehow linked to this system.
I dont think its really that hard to implement. Actually to scale it up you can just set the width or height to something bigger then the actual image is
Get the original dimensions and just double that. i.E. php -> getimagesize()
Example: (same image)
Problem for pixel art is that it may become blurry, (browser dependant)
@surt
But don't you know that Thier MMORPG Is Going To Be Awesome And They'll Totally Give You A Cut Of The Profits? :)
So, on the user profile page, you'd also like a box for a bio or something?
@TheAncientGoat
That's an interesting thought. The main problem is that the art pages already feel pretty complicated, and adding embed code to that would make it moreso, for something that I'm not certain would see a lot of use. If I were convinced that a lot of people would use it, I'd do it.
@Scrittl
Two things:
Any suggestions for dealing with the above issues?
Well, after 20th of May I might write a javascript based image preview that can do nearest-neighbor zooming.
But until then or if I still wont have time at that date and of course if you are willing; there is a simple method that you can do. When receiving a preview image, triple its size and save as zoomed. ImageMagick can easily do the task. A small test shows that 10.6kb png image tripled in size using NN interpolation becomes 14.4kb. Not a big difference. While showing in the preview, give an option to view in 3x size. Also separating pixel art from 2D art would keep duplication to minimum. And thinking about liberated pixel cup, it would be a good idea to have them separate.
Just an idea.
@cemkalyoncu
I'd be interested in your script if it would work as a drop-in replacement for the current lightbox and still work just as well in other ways (or if perhaps it took the current lightbox script and added a magnifying glass to it or something).
I know about imagemagick (and also gd, which is PHP's image manipulation library). Creating a zoomed image isn't the meat of the problem; it's creating an interface around it. Does the user doing the uploading specify which images should be zoomed? Or if it's the user viewing the images, how can I add that in without creating extra clutter on the art form that would be completely unnecessary in any case other than pixel art? I'm not saying it's not doable, it's just not something I could drop in as a quick-fix without making a mess or breaking other stuff. :)
Another idea for a feature: Private collections. Or at least semi-private so they wont be shown in the main page.
@cemkalyoncu
I'm leaning away from doing any sort of priavte stuff on OGA, although if a larget portion of the community wants it, I could probably be persuaded.
@bart: the idea of private collections is not restrict other users from seeing it, but to keep public collections clean and useful for everyone. Those private collections can be displayed in the user profile. May be the name is misleading, it can be called personal collection.
One more thing that bugs me: If I click on the thread links under "Active Forum Topics" I'm taken to the first page of the thread, rather than the most recent post.
Red warrior needs caffeine badly.
The RSS feed for forums sometimes has strange dates (so the threads appear somewhere at the buttom of the feed)
@surt
Yes, that bugs me too. I don't have a quick fix for it, but I'll try to code something when I get the chance.
I would like to see a search filter for pixel vs vector art :) Should be simple enough; An extra tag option when uploading and field in the DB.
I mention this because one of the first things I noticed when coming here for the first time and searching for media is that I was skipping pixel art immediatly, because it simply did not fit the style of game I was going for. I was looking for smooth gradiants, giving the 2D toon shading look, which was scattered over several pages of results.
Hi all,
I dunno if this is possible or not but as we are in the midst of the coding phase of the LPC it would be nice if there was a place (a sort of feed) which tracks commits of all the projects happening on LPC to the minute. This should motivate both devs. as well as potential testers and/or players to be updated to the latest code/commit. Just an idea. A better way would be a way for users to track projects (like github gives/provides but that's only for projects hosted on github)
@Bart btw I'm guessing you are going to work on your game Orange-Engine ONLY after the competition is over.
Look forward to feedback.