I know what issue is causing this loading lag, and it only affects administrators. It has to do with Drupal needlessly rendering a massive amount of information about template variables. I tried to remove it, but that ended up making a big mess, so I put it back. I'm sorry for the trouble. :(
If someone can figure out precisely what's causing the main content and the sidebar to be pushed to the bottom of the page when fonts are enlarged, I'll fix it in the stylesheet.
That being said, I will not be converting my absolute sizes to relative ones any time soon, becuase absolute sizes are easier to work with when combining things with images (which don't change along with the font size). I'll do what I can to make sure that the main content doesn't get pushed to the bottom, but I don't want to get into the business of guaranteeing that OGA will look perfect regardless of screen or font size. I don't have the resources to do that.
I wasn't quite sure whether I was going to reply to this, but I don't want to be seen as ignoring a legitimate issue, even if your way of expressing it was needlessly inflammatory.
I do realize that there aren't all that many complete art sets on OGA. As a game developer, this can be frustrating. On the other hand, I should point out that, a couple years ago, there were *no* complete art sets on OGA at all.
We are working on it. Complete sets take time and money to produce, often in the hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars. OGA operates on a shoestring budget -- as Redshrike said, there's not a whole lot that I can do as the administrator of this site to pull large amounts of art out of thin air.
At the moment, my main suggestion if you're looking for consistent sets of art is to check out the art collections on the left sidebar. Most of the consistent art sets have been added to collections. You should also be sure to sort your search results by the number of favorites rather than date, as the number of favorites tends to track fairly well with how useful an asset is. Finally, certain users submit lots of consistent art. If you want to see more art like a particular piece that you're looking at, click on the username of the submitter and take a look at their other submissions. Some artists are quite prolific.
Regarding what you said about submissions that aren't particularly complete, there's something I need to make absolutely clear about why we do things the way we do.
In the real world, art for any reasonably large game project is done by a group of people. In the case of a game like Skyrim with a large number of assets, some people are concept artists, some people are character modelers, some people model equipment, some people model terrain, some people do rigging, some people do animation, etc. The only way we're ever going be able to compete with high end commercial offerings is by doing what they do: working collaboratively. This means that not every piece of art is going to be an absolutely finished product. If we're going to be able to assemble large sets of consistent art, people need to be able to submit things that aren't entire sets, so that other people can add to them, etc. No one person working for free has the time to produce a large, complete set of game assets.
So, any artists reading this: Ganry's views on this are not the views of OpenGameArt.org. If you're working on content that you feel like someone else might be able to build upon, I encourage you to submit it, even if it's not a complete set of art in and of itself. OGA isn't just as archive for completed art projects, it's a site where people can build and develop new projects as well.
I occasionally see people who don't use Linux dismissing anything having to do with Linux ("I don't run Linux, so why should I care?"). My answer is this: even if you never intend to run Linux at all, the existence of an alternative operating system with features geared toward real users (as opposed to monetization) keeps Microsoft and Apple honest.
Let's say you've been an avid Internet Explorer user ever since it was released. IE, in its current incarnation, isn't a bad web browser, but that's really only due to the existence of Mozilla. Microsoft wanted to stop developing IE because they felt the web was "obsolete" (meaning it was too open for them to make money from). It wasn't until Firefox started siphoning off IE users in droves that Microsoft got serious about improving their browser.
Likewise, right now, gamers are being shafted by closed consoles and nasty DRM. Anything we can do to open up the gaming market further will make games nicer for everyone, and not just Linux users.
This isn't going to be easy to fix. It's probably a bug in the Drupal Views module, and their usual suggestions for removing duplicate entries aren't fixing the bug. I'm not even sure where to start with debugging it (Views is an incredibly complex module, and I'm not familiar with the code at all).
I'll see what I can do, but as this is comparatively rare compared to some other issues, it may have to be on the back burner.
While the cube trains ad fits in with the OGA theme, I don't think it really looks like it's "part of the site", per se. That is, it fits in with the site thematically, but stand out enough that it's obvious it's still an advertisement.
I can see that it's not an image host. However the watermark shows up on every download of that work as far as I see, either linked from this site or linked from another site.
That's because your web browser caches the image once it downloads it. You have to go to the OGA page and do a force reload, which on Firefox is ctrl-shift-R. If you're running IE, it may be ctrl-shift-F5 or something.
Also, what you're doing on that page isn't really what hotlinking is intended for. If you're using images for menu icons, you should just put them on the website that they're supposed to be on. :)
(Like I said, go to the OGA page and do a forced reload, and you should get the original, un-watermarked image.)
It's intentional, to bring traffic to OGA in case someone hotlinks. I recommend linking to the submission along with the image, and people can get the un-watermarked version there. They may need to clear their browser cache.
Can you link to the page where your images are showing up watermarked?
I know what issue is causing this loading lag, and it only affects administrators. It has to do with Drupal needlessly rendering a massive amount of information about template variables. I tried to remove it, but that ended up making a big mess, so I put it back. I'm sorry for the trouble. :(
If someone can figure out precisely what's causing the main content and the sidebar to be pushed to the bottom of the page when fonts are enlarged, I'll fix it in the stylesheet.
That being said, I will not be converting my absolute sizes to relative ones any time soon, becuase absolute sizes are easier to work with when combining things with images (which don't change along with the font size). I'll do what I can to make sure that the main content doesn't get pushed to the bottom, but I don't want to get into the business of guaranteeing that OGA will look perfect regardless of screen or font size. I don't have the resources to do that.
I wasn't quite sure whether I was going to reply to this, but I don't want to be seen as ignoring a legitimate issue, even if your way of expressing it was needlessly inflammatory.
I do realize that there aren't all that many complete art sets on OGA. As a game developer, this can be frustrating. On the other hand, I should point out that, a couple years ago, there were *no* complete art sets on OGA at all.
We are working on it. Complete sets take time and money to produce, often in the hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars. OGA operates on a shoestring budget -- as Redshrike said, there's not a whole lot that I can do as the administrator of this site to pull large amounts of art out of thin air.
At the moment, my main suggestion if you're looking for consistent sets of art is to check out the art collections on the left sidebar. Most of the consistent art sets have been added to collections. You should also be sure to sort your search results by the number of favorites rather than date, as the number of favorites tends to track fairly well with how useful an asset is. Finally, certain users submit lots of consistent art. If you want to see more art like a particular piece that you're looking at, click on the username of the submitter and take a look at their other submissions. Some artists are quite prolific.
Regarding what you said about submissions that aren't particularly complete, there's something I need to make absolutely clear about why we do things the way we do.
In the real world, art for any reasonably large game project is done by a group of people. In the case of a game like Skyrim with a large number of assets, some people are concept artists, some people are character modelers, some people model equipment, some people model terrain, some people do rigging, some people do animation, etc. The only way we're ever going be able to compete with high end commercial offerings is by doing what they do: working collaboratively. This means that not every piece of art is going to be an absolutely finished product. If we're going to be able to assemble large sets of consistent art, people need to be able to submit things that aren't entire sets, so that other people can add to them, etc. No one person working for free has the time to produce a large, complete set of game assets.
So, any artists reading this: Ganry's views on this are not the views of OpenGameArt.org. If you're working on content that you feel like someone else might be able to build upon, I encourage you to submit it, even if it's not a complete set of art in and of itself. OGA isn't just as archive for completed art projects, it's a site where people can build and develop new projects as well.
Bart
Also note: I blogged about this on the front page. At the moment I think it's the second blog entry. :)
Thanks, that was a wonderful write-up.
I occasionally see people who don't use Linux dismissing anything having to do with Linux ("I don't run Linux, so why should I care?"). My answer is this: even if you never intend to run Linux at all, the existence of an alternative operating system with features geared toward real users (as opposed to monetization) keeps Microsoft and Apple honest.
Let's say you've been an avid Internet Explorer user ever since it was released. IE, in its current incarnation, isn't a bad web browser, but that's really only due to the existence of Mozilla. Microsoft wanted to stop developing IE because they felt the web was "obsolete" (meaning it was too open for them to make money from). It wasn't until Firefox started siphoning off IE users in droves that Microsoft got serious about improving their browser.
Likewise, right now, gamers are being shafted by closed consoles and nasty DRM. Anything we can do to open up the gaming market further will make games nicer for everyone, and not just Linux users.
This isn't going to be easy to fix. It's probably a bug in the Drupal Views module, and their usual suggestions for removing duplicate entries aren't fixing the bug. I'm not even sure where to start with debugging it (Views is an incredibly complex module, and I'm not familiar with the code at all).
I'll see what I can do, but as this is comparatively rare compared to some other issues, it may have to be on the back burner.
While the cube trains ad fits in with the OGA theme, I don't think it really looks like it's "part of the site", per se. That is, it fits in with the site thematically, but stand out enough that it's obvious it's still an advertisement.
I can see that it's not an image host. However the watermark shows up on every download of that work as far as I see, either linked from this site or linked from another site.
That's because your web browser caches the image once it downloads it. You have to go to the OGA page and do a force reload, which on Firefox is ctrl-shift-R. If you're running IE, it may be ctrl-shift-F5 or something.
Also, what you're doing on that page isn't really what hotlinking is intended for. If you're using images for menu icons, you should just put them on the website that they're supposed to be on. :)
(Like I said, go to the OGA page and do a forced reload, and you should get the original, un-watermarked image.)
It's intentional, to bring traffic to OGA in case someone hotlinks. I recommend linking to the submission along with the image, and people can get the un-watermarked version there. They may need to clear their browser cache.
Can you link to the page where your images are showing up watermarked?
Delightfully creepy. :)
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