I tried to provide a pretty detailed answer to Ogrebane's question, but what I said there doesn't have to be everything. If you've got some ideas for OGA 2.0, we'd love to hear about them. :)
Dunno whether tiis was already mentioned, but a search function for the forums would be great.
search filter for 16x16, 4x4, 32x32, ... and 4 bit, 8 bit, 16 bit or 32 bit colors, and an alternate color palette upload option.
Not sure if it was already mentioned, but following quote
"Re: Nomads
I like how a random comment can bring back up forgotten content. Nice work elerya "
from Kurt took me to the idea, that an option like "show a list of random, unfavorited and unquoted items" could bring cellar children back to the light more systematically.
@CruzR: Agreed. I'll look into it. :)
@scrag_10:
Storing that metadata is simple, but collecting it is not. There's no way (from the uploaded image) to tell the intended size of the tiles, which means we're relying on users to enter that information. Unfortunately, if we overwhelm people with too many fields (the art submisison form is big as it is) we'll lose out on submissions because it'll be a pain.
I'm thinking of making the metadata for a submission an optional part of the form that people can fill out if they feel inclined. I may also set things up so certain users have access to add metadata to submissions from other people.
@riidom:
That's an interesting thought and it would be easy to implement, but I'm not sure where I'd put it. Space on the front page is already pretty limited.
Maybe if I allow people to customize their front pages, we could let them add that box themselves.
I think we need to go over the Submission form with a fine tooth comb as redesign the UI/UX. I doubt there is anyway to measure the submissions lost to the complexity of it, but we know it can cause losses.
Yes, absolutely.
I think we could at the very least collect the same data without being quite so intimidating.
I think an option like that dont need to be on the front page, maybe it could be placed in the browse-menu, and if that is getting full and cluttered too, into some "special searches"-submenu even.
Here's another great idea:
An "I am using this!" button. When you click it, a dialog will be opened where you could enter your project's name and the homepage's URI.
This way one can have a quick overview over the impact of somemone's piece of art.
> An "I am using this!" button. When you click it, a dialog will be opened where you could enter your project's name and the homepage's URI.
And it should probably be enabled for anonymous users, since not everyone who uses OGA to find art is a registered user.
Yes, an "I'm using this" button would be nice, as well as a more standardized way of defining attributions. Maybe something like...
People who use this work must:
[] Only provide credit
[X] Provide credit and link back to OGA
[] Provide credit and link to another site (fill in the blank ____)
I love the "I am using this" idea, it is great both for the artist (obvious) and the developer (gets exposure)
Just a heads up, the "I'm using this" button will be part of OGA2. Great idea! :)
I would like to see real support for the weekly (and other?) challenges. That is, I don't want to favorite in order to vote, because I only favorite things I intend to use in my game.
I have an idea about the data collection thingy. Some "automatic" tag suggestion. For example someone uploads "Monster Set #1" with "My first set of pixel monsters fitting to the 16x16 tilesets avaiable here on OpenGameArt.". Now a Javascript checks which words in the description are also known tags and adds them to the tags field. In this example it would be "pixel, monster, 16x16, tileset".
Another idea is to allows the users (not only the developers) to add, and maybe remove, too, tags. I've seen that on a few sites so far and seemed to work nicely.
Fulltext forum search!
Possibilty to use animated gifs for the previews.
I did not read through the whole history/thread/s hence this might already have been mentioned :-
It would be nice to see how many times a piece of art has been downloaded.
For e.g. even though I'm no programmer/artist whatever, I still liked the http://opengameart.org/content/tools-icons
It would have been interesting to see how many times the art piece was downloaded.
Less different sub forums... I am too lazy to click through all of them and I think this seperation is the main reason why the forums are so relatively dead.
Less is definitly better in that case.
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http://freegamedev.net
I disagree. The subforums make finding things easier.
hmm as a compromise... some forum software allow subforums, but if you click on the main forum title you get a view where only a list of the subforums is shown and the same time below all the active forum posts of all these subforums combined. Thus you would still have things neatly sorted, while not having to click through all the subforums to see what is going on there.
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http://freegamedev.net
While the new OGA 2.0 is pretty spiffy, I think it is starting to rip my eyeballs apart. I'm a very heavy right looker, so with the bar being on the left side I keep having these eye spasms where my eyes want to look right but are attracted to the large bar on the left. Could we please have an option for a right side bar?
If we don't get the right side bar, can I ask for content that is centered on the window? I keep my browser on a wide aspect ratio and having all content left justified makes it hard to switch between other centered websites and this one.
Hi! I'd like to have a RSS for new art.
Also, it'be nice to be able to retreive all messages of a user, including ourselve.
No offense to the current forum, but I think that the forums would be more active and useful if they were laid out more like the general standard. As it stands they're kind of hard to navigate and not very intuitive to your average forum-o-phile (like myself).
A few things that have probably been noted before, but for the sake of completion:
-The infobar on the righthand side is fine for the main page, but it takes up a *lot* of real estate when you're trying to browse the forums.
-Similarly (and this has probably also been brought up,) there is a big chunk of empty space on the right of my screen. That isn't a big problem for the main site, but it really crunches the forums together.
(illustration of what I mean in the above: http://i.imgur.com/GM59E.png
-They are not easy to navigate. If you click on a subforum, the only link back to the forum index is the standard one at the top of the page (as far as I can tell, anyway)
-The difference between the "contains new post" forum icon and the "no new posts" icon is unnoticble on the background color--The icon should probaly change colors as is standard to make it nocible.
-Things are too broken up. I know this has been brought up before, but it's important.
-The index page is really long, almost three screen-heights high on my laptop. This makes it very hard to take things in with a glance. The folder icons and text should probably be a bit smaller to make it all more compact and readable.
Sorry for the long post of criticisms; this is something I've been thinking over for a while. I don't mean to be negative; I just think forums are one of the most important ways to get people socializing, so making them easy is important. I know forum software can be a real pain, though, especially when you're doing it yourself. So... yeah.
Two more things which came to my mind :-
a. Being able to have things such as date for self. I like to use the dd/mm/yy connotation to see things and many people like perhaps the mm/dd/yy. It would be nice to have the ability to use either. I went to profile to see if such an option exists but its not there.
b. Having a link to games I play. There should be a page where people can add the games they loved, are loving, want to play more, games in development this would be good for the developer, the artists and the players as there is constant feedback to each as well.
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