That sounds good! There's also this post on user-tagging: http://opengameart.org/forumtopic/user-tagging . I don't know if allowing user tags would make the problem of miscategorsation worse (because of more people doing it inconsistently) or better (since we already have the problem of poor choice of tags, which other people can't fix) though :)
One of the issues I've found is due to the scoring/ordering of search results being poor. Completely irrelevant results can be shown before ones that might be more relevant. In some cases, something is included in the results because someone happens to say the word in the comments - e.g., see how the top result for sword is http://opengameart.org/content/flare-portrait-pack-female-edition because someone says it in the comments. Okay, there is a sword in the picture, but this probably shouldn't be anywhere near the top result if someone is searching for sword :)
The problem with it being hard to find the LPC base assets is that it doesn't get the top hit (or anywhere near it). Extra categorisation wouldn't help here. (Compare say with Google, which has no trouble finding the LPC assets on that search term - Google also does better with the sword example I think.)
If Solr's sorting is better, then I think that would be a big improvement in itself (though the proposals for better categorisation do sound good, and would be very useful in their own right.)
"Making a mobile version of anything that uses Flash requires embedding a runtime environment and adds about 10MB to the overall download size regardless of what you make (not too keen on this)."
Although bear in mind that Haxe (or anything else) may do the same - the libraries still have to be bundled - so it's worth checking that out before making a choice. (Particularly for C++ on Android, where I believe there's less availability of built-in libraries, most of them are only available via Java.)
Although it's fair game to release work under a modified licence with additional restrictions, I believe this would mean that it can't be hosted on Open Game Art (since it's not one of the available licences allowed; more generally, this licence wouldn't be considered Free/Open Source due to those restrictions, so would not be usable for Free/Open Source games).
Can I clarify - are the additional restrictions something you've added since the original version on this page was, or was the original always wrong? (You say "new" licence, but then, I see if I download the archive here, it does have the additional restrictions in the text file.)
As an aside, I see that this page also lists LGPL 2.1 and LGPL 3.0, I don't know if that's incorrect too...
ryan.dansie: "Artwork submitters on the site may also benefit from a license which allows all of the freedoms of CC BY 3.0 for non commercial games but if used in a commercial game, the artwork would automatically revert to a commercial license as specified by the copyright holder."
As you note, BY-NC will do this. However, any licence considered "Free" or "Open" by the FSF and OSI respectively must allow commercial redistribution. My understanding is that Open Game Art is for licences considered "open" by these definitions, to support the creation of complete Open Source games. I think this is a good thing - one of the great things about OGA is that every art is guaranteed to be Open, which includes commercial reuse.
Also note that even for freeware authors, non-commercial restrictions become a pain. What if I want to distribute on a website that has ads? What if my game could be included on a commercial magazine Cover CD?
I agree it is a problem that it's unclear if CC BY-SA art can be used in a game, without putting the whole game under CC BY-SA too. This vagueness is even a pain for Open Source - if I use CC BY-SA art, but the game code/binary is only licenced as GPL, is that a violation because CC BY-SA says derivatives must be released under the same licence? Indeed I think this vagueness is one of the reason why GPL isn't a preferred licence for art.
I don't know if a game would be considered a derivative work, rather than a collection, but the problem is that this uncertainty exists. It's a shame that AFAICT they haven't cleared this up with version 4.
I think the biggest problem is new art being pushed out from the front page, if someone submits several items in a short time. Ideally this could be improved, independent of how art is actually categorised. So I would add my agreement to the comments about expanding the amount of latest art shown on the front page. I've always thought it odd that, for a site dedicated to art, the front page gives only a tiny amount of space to the Latest Art - only the latest 4 contributions are shown, which seems ridiculously small! Meanwhile, more space and more entries are shown for things like forum topics, comments, and art collections (don't get me wrong, those things are useful, but they are surely less important than the art itself).
So as as cemkalyoncu, Sharm, Danimal say, it seems it should be easy to add an extra row. But why stop there - Consider for example https://freecode.com/ - the front page gives prominent attention to the 25 most recent projects. The side-bar then gives the ones before that in text links for the last several days, in all, about 100 projects are shown. Despite being a busy site, the worry of apps getting pushed out by multiple submissions doesn't arise.
3 rows would give 12 or the most recent entries, and yet more older entries could be listed as text links only down the side, similar to the recent comments. I also note that a large amount of space is given to the blog. I realise the admins would want to give prominence to the blog :) But at the same time, this is only occasionally updated, with an entry from May still showing on the front page. Blog entries from May, but only 4 of the most recent art uploads - that balance just seems wrong to me. Perhaps limit to the last couple of blog entries, and give a lot more space for latest art? Whilst redesigning a front page may not be straightforward, it is surely easier than more complex feature requests being considered?
The idea to only show one submission from an artist on the front page if they submit several seems reasonable too, though I agree with cemkalyoncu and para about possible confusion - I might think that only 1 new item has been uploaded since last time I looked, but not realise there's another hidden entry, so ideally this should be optional. (And certainly for the separate page http://opengameart.org/latest it should be off, or optional, as users looking there surely want to see it all, not just one per author.)
For the debate about grouping multiple entries, I feel this should be done where there is a commonality in the art, not simply that it's by the same author. Otherwise it makes searching harder - if I'm searching for "goblin", I don't mind if 100 goblins appear (that's what I'm searching for), but it is harder if I get an entry of 100 unrelated icons, and then have to search through that to see what the "goblin" is in that entry. On that note, perhaps one feature that might be useful is more specific tagging - e.g., per file rather than per entry? I don't know how feasible that is though.
A thought experiment: one person uploads 5 separate items at once, whilst another person does it over a long time. There must be plenty of artists here who have loads of different art entries, including those that may be related. Are the latter a problem too, or is it only a problem due to the "Latest Art" issue? If they aren't a problem, then it seems odd to say that one group should be collected together, and the other group shouldn't, for all time - surely a better solution is to resolve the Latest Art issue.
As noted, it's an animated image, so it's not something you could make trivially in 5 seconds (at least I couldn't). It lacks polish, but that's true of an awful lot of the art on this site, and there are quite a lot of free games that have a similar cartoonish style of graphics.
I'd also argue that some of the better looking artwork isn't necessarily better for games - this example may be simple, but it's an animated icon that's game ready. But on the other hand, there are plenty examples of images or 3D meshes that might be much more polished, but aren't useful for most games due to not having an animation.
What do we mean by "space wasting"? I presume there isn't a shortage of server space for 1.1KB images :) Is it making a problem for searching? Can we do something to improve the search?
I'm also not sure that combining images into one submission is better. When I search for, e.g., coin, it's much easier if I can see that single image. I find it harder when what shows up in the result is a collection of a large number of icons, and I have to look hard to find out what the relevant image is. Now I'm not saying that everything should always be separate images - obviously there has to be a balance, and if someone uploads an icon pack of 100 images, it'd be silly to break that up into 100 separate uploads. I'd say a criterion should be whether the images are naturally related into a group, e.g., "RPG icons". Some of mrmadbr's look related, but not all of them - I don't think images should be bundled together for the sake of it.
Redshrike said on the coin page: "Having each one as an individual submission makes it harder to navigate the site and harder for devs to find all of your work." - surely the latter is done just by clicking on the author link, which shows all the author's work? In what way is it harder to navigate - do you mean too many results in search?
On the issue of the front page, I feel that all uploads should appear on a "latest art" on the front page, as currently happens - otherwise there's the problem that even when new good art is uploaded, people may not find or notice it.
If the problem is that the quality to new users looks too poor, then I think the answer is to do more to showcase the better (and game-ready) art. There's already the "Popular this week" which does this in an automated fashion. Maybe there could also be some process where people decide on the best art on this site, and then a random selection of that gets shown to people on the front page?
I would be against any sort of quality restriction to be on the site - or rather, because people have very different views on what's ready or useful for a game, I don't think it would be workable. We already have the Favourites system which is a way of rating art, which can be used when searching. Are there other things we could do?
Actually that first part isn't clear. Cc by sa does not require you to release game code - it says nothing about code in the licence.
The question as to whether you'd have to release the whole game as cc by sa is one of the debated aspects that no one really knows, and is a problem with it imo (as cc by sa isn't rally suitable for software).
OTOH, the second part is clear, any use of the work means you have to abide by the licence. It doesn't matter if you modify it or not.
I don't think we can complain about the name, when it's being used in the generic sense to refer to open game art. I mean, it might be one thing if they'd called their site "OpenGameArt" (though even then, it would probably be coincidence due to the genericness of the term, rather than intentional), but this is just used to describe an open game art bundle - what else do they call it? Can no one else really use the words "open game art"?
"I hope people understand that OpenGameArt.org isn't directly involved. (Also, if I ever want to host a bundle campaign here, what do I call it?)"
I don't think that's a problem - I don't think people are going to assume they must be done by the same people. But this does demonstrate the problem - if they shouldn't be using the term "open game art", should OGA not ever be able to use the word "bundle", because they used it?
If one wants names to be unique, I think that requires starting with less generic terms. The reason the names are the same is because they're describing the same thing - it's like saying that two different fruit and vegetable stores are both fruit and vegetable stores.
I think OpenGameArt.org Bundle would be fine, as that clearly refers to the website.
That sounds good! There's also this post on user-tagging: http://opengameart.org/forumtopic/user-tagging . I don't know if allowing user tags would make the problem of miscategorsation worse (because of more people doing it inconsistently) or better (since we already have the problem of poor choice of tags, which other people can't fix) though :)
One of the issues I've found is due to the scoring/ordering of search results being poor. Completely irrelevant results can be shown before ones that might be more relevant. In some cases, something is included in the results because someone happens to say the word in the comments - e.g., see how the top result for sword is http://opengameart.org/content/flare-portrait-pack-female-edition because someone says it in the comments. Okay, there is a sword in the picture, but this probably shouldn't be anywhere near the top result if someone is searching for sword :)
The problem with it being hard to find the LPC base assets is that it doesn't get the top hit (or anywhere near it). Extra categorisation wouldn't help here. (Compare say with Google, which has no trouble finding the LPC assets on that search term - Google also does better with the sword example I think.)
If Solr's sorting is better, then I think that would be a big improvement in itself (though the proposals for better categorisation do sound good, and would be very useful in their own right.)
"Making a mobile version of anything that uses Flash requires embedding a runtime environment and adds about 10MB to the overall download size regardless of what you make (not too keen on this)."
Although bear in mind that Haxe (or anything else) may do the same - the libraries still have to be bundled - so it's worth checking that out before making a choice. (Particularly for C++ on Android, where I believe there's less availability of built-in libraries, most of them are only available via Java.)
Although it's fair game to release work under a modified licence with additional restrictions, I believe this would mean that it can't be hosted on Open Game Art (since it's not one of the available licences allowed; more generally, this licence wouldn't be considered Free/Open Source due to those restrictions, so would not be usable for Free/Open Source games).
This would also affect http://opengameart.org/content/wandering-vendor-npc .
Can I clarify - are the additional restrictions something you've added since the original version on this page was, or was the original always wrong? (You say "new" licence, but then, I see if I download the archive here, it does have the additional restrictions in the text file.)
As an aside, I see that this page also lists LGPL 2.1 and LGPL 3.0, I don't know if that's incorrect too...
ryan.dansie: "Artwork submitters on the site may also benefit from a license which allows all of the freedoms of CC BY 3.0 for non commercial games but if used in a commercial game, the artwork would automatically revert to a commercial license as specified by the copyright holder."
As you note, BY-NC will do this. However, any licence considered "Free" or "Open" by the FSF and OSI respectively must allow commercial redistribution. My understanding is that Open Game Art is for licences considered "open" by these definitions, to support the creation of complete Open Source games. I think this is a good thing - one of the great things about OGA is that every art is guaranteed to be Open, which includes commercial reuse.
Also note that even for freeware authors, non-commercial restrictions become a pain. What if I want to distribute on a website that has ads? What if my game could be included on a commercial magazine Cover CD?
I agree it is a problem that it's unclear if CC BY-SA art can be used in a game, without putting the whole game under CC BY-SA too. This vagueness is even a pain for Open Source - if I use CC BY-SA art, but the game code/binary is only licenced as GPL, is that a violation because CC BY-SA says derivatives must be released under the same licence? Indeed I think this vagueness is one of the reason why GPL isn't a preferred licence for art.
I don't know if a game would be considered a derivative work, rather than a collection, but the problem is that this uncertainty exists. It's a shame that AFAICT they haven't cleared this up with version 4.
I think the biggest problem is new art being pushed out from the front page, if someone submits several items in a short time. Ideally this could be improved, independent of how art is actually categorised. So I would add my agreement to the comments about expanding the amount of latest art shown on the front page. I've always thought it odd that, for a site dedicated to art, the front page gives only a tiny amount of space to the Latest Art - only the latest 4 contributions are shown, which seems ridiculously small! Meanwhile, more space and more entries are shown for things like forum topics, comments, and art collections (don't get me wrong, those things are useful, but they are surely less important than the art itself).
So as as cemkalyoncu, Sharm, Danimal say, it seems it should be easy to add an extra row. But why stop there - Consider for example https://freecode.com/ - the front page gives prominent attention to the 25 most recent projects. The side-bar then gives the ones before that in text links for the last several days, in all, about 100 projects are shown. Despite being a busy site, the worry of apps getting pushed out by multiple submissions doesn't arise.
3 rows would give 12 or the most recent entries, and yet more older entries could be listed as text links only down the side, similar to the recent comments. I also note that a large amount of space is given to the blog. I realise the admins would want to give prominence to the blog :) But at the same time, this is only occasionally updated, with an entry from May still showing on the front page. Blog entries from May, but only 4 of the most recent art uploads - that balance just seems wrong to me. Perhaps limit to the last couple of blog entries, and give a lot more space for latest art? Whilst redesigning a front page may not be straightforward, it is surely easier than more complex feature requests being considered?
The idea to only show one submission from an artist on the front page if they submit several seems reasonable too, though I agree with cemkalyoncu and para about possible confusion - I might think that only 1 new item has been uploaded since last time I looked, but not realise there's another hidden entry, so ideally this should be optional. (And certainly for the separate page http://opengameart.org/latest it should be off, or optional, as users looking there surely want to see it all, not just one per author.)
For the debate about grouping multiple entries, I feel this should be done where there is a commonality in the art, not simply that it's by the same author. Otherwise it makes searching harder - if I'm searching for "goblin", I don't mind if 100 goblins appear (that's what I'm searching for), but it is harder if I get an entry of 100 unrelated icons, and then have to search through that to see what the "goblin" is in that entry. On that note, perhaps one feature that might be useful is more specific tagging - e.g., per file rather than per entry? I don't know how feasible that is though.
A thought experiment: one person uploads 5 separate items at once, whilst another person does it over a long time. There must be plenty of artists here who have loads of different art entries, including those that may be related. Are the latter a problem too, or is it only a problem due to the "Latest Art" issue? If they aren't a problem, then it seems odd to say that one group should be collected together, and the other group shouldn't, for all time - surely a better solution is to resolve the Latest Art issue.
As noted, it's an animated image, so it's not something you could make trivially in 5 seconds (at least I couldn't). It lacks polish, but that's true of an awful lot of the art on this site, and there are quite a lot of free games that have a similar cartoonish style of graphics.
I'd also argue that some of the better looking artwork isn't necessarily better for games - this example may be simple, but it's an animated icon that's game ready. But on the other hand, there are plenty examples of images or 3D meshes that might be much more polished, but aren't useful for most games due to not having an animation.
What do we mean by "space wasting"? I presume there isn't a shortage of server space for 1.1KB images :) Is it making a problem for searching? Can we do something to improve the search?
I'm also not sure that combining images into one submission is better. When I search for, e.g., coin, it's much easier if I can see that single image. I find it harder when what shows up in the result is a collection of a large number of icons, and I have to look hard to find out what the relevant image is. Now I'm not saying that everything should always be separate images - obviously there has to be a balance, and if someone uploads an icon pack of 100 images, it'd be silly to break that up into 100 separate uploads. I'd say a criterion should be whether the images are naturally related into a group, e.g., "RPG icons". Some of mrmadbr's look related, but not all of them - I don't think images should be bundled together for the sake of it.
Redshrike said on the coin page: "Having each one as an individual submission makes it harder to navigate the site and harder for devs to find all of your work." - surely the latter is done just by clicking on the author link, which shows all the author's work? In what way is it harder to navigate - do you mean too many results in search?
On the issue of the front page, I feel that all uploads should appear on a "latest art" on the front page, as currently happens - otherwise there's the problem that even when new good art is uploaded, people may not find or notice it.
If the problem is that the quality to new users looks too poor, then I think the answer is to do more to showcase the better (and game-ready) art. There's already the "Popular this week" which does this in an automated fashion. Maybe there could also be some process where people decide on the best art on this site, and then a random selection of that gets shown to people on the front page?
I would be against any sort of quality restriction to be on the site - or rather, because people have very different views on what's ready or useful for a game, I don't think it would be workable. We already have the Favourites system which is a way of rating art, which can be used when searching. Are there other things we could do?
Actually that first part isn't clear. Cc by sa does not require you to release game code - it says nothing about code in the licence.
The question as to whether you'd have to release the whole game as cc by sa is one of the debated aspects that no one really knows, and is a problem with it imo (as cc by sa isn't rally suitable for software).
OTOH, the second part is clear, any use of the work means you have to abide by the licence. It doesn't matter if you modify it or not.
I don't think we can complain about the name, when it's being used in the generic sense to refer to open game art. I mean, it might be one thing if they'd called their site "OpenGameArt" (though even then, it would probably be coincidence due to the genericness of the term, rather than intentional), but this is just used to describe an open game art bundle - what else do they call it? Can no one else really use the words "open game art"?
"I hope people understand that OpenGameArt.org isn't directly involved. (Also, if I ever want to host a bundle campaign here, what do I call it?)"
I don't think that's a problem - I don't think people are going to assume they must be done by the same people. But this does demonstrate the problem - if they shouldn't be using the term "open game art", should OGA not ever be able to use the word "bundle", because they used it?
If one wants names to be unique, I think that requires starting with less generic terms. The reason the names are the same is because they're describing the same thing - it's like saying that two different fruit and vegetable stores are both fruit and vegetable stores.
I think OpenGameArt.org Bundle would be fine, as that clearly refers to the website.
What's the problem with it? Even if it's too high polygon, renders can still be made for 2D images.
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