I have also said that a few times before, but you know, most people here are just learning their art and upload some useless or bad art, the silence treatement is their reward, because everyone knows noone starts knowing everything and they just politely let it go instead of saying "U suck faggot!!" and then bashing them in the head.

If the artist is polite and sincerely wants to learn, then he will even recieve advice, and wont get any comment that will discourage him for life (i think im in this category), so silence is better than a bashing, bad art will just sink into oblivion. If you want good art you should go the collections, the best stuff is there to prevent you from wasting your time going trougth every single art piece, number of favourites and downloads is also a good indicator of quality.

Good artists do it for money, thats the reason you will only find masterpieces here and there on the site, because the proffesionals were kind enought to contribute some of their awesome and expensive work for free to the community. Kudos to them, hire them if you want great art.

@Ganry,

1) OGA is a resource for freely licensed graphics/sounds, but it also aims to be a community hub for the graphics/sounds aspect of open-source games; many of the features of OGA that interfere with it working as a good resource, are intended to build the community hub aspect of it

2) As Danimal said, in the long run ratings & collections should make the more useful parts of OGA relatively more accessible

@Ganry: I'm not sure what you want.  OGA only funds a small subset of the graphics on the site (and generally hasn't done as much recently, presumably because of the huge amount of money, time and effort that went into the Liberated Pixel Cup).  Everything else is user-provided.  There isn't some magic wand that Bart can wave to make assets appear out of nowhere.  Some of us have worked to organize sets of consistent assets, but to some extent that's limited to what interests us at the time or what's easy to do.

I also think that posting a thread like this is also a very poor way of getting people to help you.  Just saying that artists are only giving things they think are useless or worthless is kind of an implicit insult to everyone who has contributed to the site.  If there's something specifically you need, you should just ask for it.  If people don't jump to help, you may need to pay someone.

Now, are there some assets on OGA that aren't very useful?  Obviously.  But as Blarumyrran said, there is a community aspect to the site as well.  Some pieces represent incomplete art which could be polished up or expanded into game-useful assets.  Others represent the development of artists who might not be up to making game-ready assets 100% of the time, but are enthusiastic about FOSS art and want to contribute and learn. Let's take the piece of art you linked.  It's no secret that IsometricRobot is somewhat new to the site (4~ months?) and is also still building up his pixel art skills.  Not all of his work is game-ready yet, but he's shown some great promise and done some good work in the process (see this thread for example: http://opengameart.org/forumtopic/pixelate-a-sketch).  I think that you have misread his motives, and singling him out like this isn't going to help him improve either.

We could run the site in two ways: as a curated collection of only the highest quality art, or as a community where anyone can submit just about anything. We chose the latter. I think it's more in the spirit of the free/libre community -- create something and release it, you never know who might find it useful or build upon it.

The other option is to pick a quality line and only accept submissions above that quality. Like any other user-driven community, only the best 10% is widely useful (aka "90% of everything is crap"). And choosing that line is hard -- what's useless to one person might be perfect for another.

Personally some of my earliest works I now consider useless -- but if it weren't for this community giving me critiques and letting me grow I would have never created my more recent useful works. Several other artists have grown significantly through the community. I think this is a good thing that wouldn't be possible in a more exclusive club.

We already run it as a combination of the two. Collections are user currated content, and from time to time submissions are rejected (usually because of licencing issues or if the submission contains no actual content). Its actually really hard to make something with *no* value, even sketches can be remixed and reused in new ways for other art works. 

I think the Sara art challenge is a great example of works being remixed over and over until they become game quality art, maybe none of the submissions are fully ready for any given game or engine, but they are incrementally getting there, and giving the artists experience and feedback in the process.

I'd agree with clint; every game has different needs, both in terms of art style and technical requirements, even if we set a minimum bar, it'd still be a lot lower than many devs would like, simply because we will let through content which isn't right *for them*. 

If we were solely focused on getting open art to developers, then this site wouild be just reposts of content from existing open source games. However this site isn't primarily about specific game devs or existing work, its about finding new game art, new game artists and growing the general open gaming community. 

If you want loads of off the shelf art, just remix it from an existing FOSS game, if you want to foster and encourage new game artists, then we need OGA to stay how it is.

Finally, I do not want it to seem that we are all dismissing your feedback, you do raise a valid concern, and we have been working to try and address it. Collections is a relatively new feature, and there are more such features in the pipeline, but the site is mainly developed by one guy, who happens to be incredibly busy.

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

You should know as well, that, if you ask politely on the forums and give information about your project you can make someone help you developing what you need.

I think there are two ways of looking at the alleged problem:

1. There is too much "useless" material, that makes it harder to find the good stuff.

2. There isn't enough good stuff.

It's unclear to me which the OP was getting at more. Quality control would help with (1), but I agree with others that this would be a bad idea (too much a matter of opinion what's useful or not, and better to solve the issue with better search, and we already have Collections). It wouldn't solve (2) anyway.

I would disagree that there's hardly any good stuff - I've found plenty of useful images for things like textures and 2D static images. One thing I have trouble finding is animations - a lot of the time I see images intended to be a character in a game, but it's only a static image, and therefore useless for most genres of games. But ultimately I suspect the problem is that creating such game art is hard, and there aren't enough people willing to do it for free.

"If I make a bad game, no one cares if it's for free. Even free mobile games are criticised by their users no matter they are for free or not."

Though this isn't an end user site, it's a developer site. Not to say there shouldn't be criticism, but hopefully of a more constructive kind. On the one hand, yes, if I have some barely started scrap of a game, I wouldn't dream of releasing it, even as Free and Open Source. But on the other hand, I think the analogy would be someone uploading some code of a demo to somewhere like Sourceforge - not as a game for end users, but as code for someone to potentially make use of.