The trouble is with the perspective. If I use a perspective transformation to view the robot head-on, you can kind of see what I'm talking about. His right side (the side on the viewer's left) is larger than his left side in that perspective.
I used the warp tool to stretch his proportions so they were roughly symmetrical, and then transformed him back into perspective:
Obviously, after image manipulation, this is no longer pixel art, but it demonstrates what I think the issue is in terms of proprtions.
In general, it's pretty hard to do this by eye alone when drawing in perspective, but you don't have to. If you draw a rectangle in perspective, you can find the center by drawing an X from corner to corner. The center is where the lines cross. You can further subdivide that so you have a grid to work with that you can use as a guide.
Status update: All nodes are indexed, and I just succesfully searched for something submitted on December 30th. Looks like search is working, but let me know here if there are any other problems.
Update; We're down to about 36,000 more things to index, so maybe I've caught all of the edge cases. Hopefully new items will appear in the search when all is said and done.
@MedicineStorm: The latest node to cause a problem doesn't appear to actually exist. I don't recall the node ID number, but further node IDs will be added to the watchdog log so I can go back and figure out what's up with them. My first guess is that when nodes are deleted, some orphaned data is being left somewhere in tthe database. Thus far, it seems like one or two nodes here and there that appear to have been deleted, as opposed to, say, an ton of nodes that should still be indexed.
Just a quick update: We've got some data corruption on a few nodes, and that's causing the indexing process to fail. I'm trying to alter the behavior of the indexing process so that it logs the corrupt nodes and then skips over them, which seems to me like a more intelligent way to do it.
Out of the roughly 60,000 items we need to index, a couple thousand got done last night before it failed again. There are multple cases that might cause it to fail, so I'm working on finding all of them.
I may have figured out why indexing is failing. I'm running a test right now that might fix it, but I expect it to take all night, if not longer. I'll post a status update tomorrow.
If this doesn't work, we'll talk about getting people set up with developer access.
As it has been explained why mikeeusa's page is blocked and we seem to be rehashing the same stuff over and over again, this thread is now locked. Bringing up this topic again will result in a ban.
I feel like I should chime in here briefly to say that, yes, I still exist, and I'm doing fine. The lack of updates on my part is due to a lack of time and not a lack of inclination.
I'm trying to keep a better eye on things here, but I'm going to be intermittent at best for a while. If there are other people here who do have both the time and inclination to work on the site code, I'd be willing to talk about that.
@p0ss: I just wanted to say thanks a bunch for stepping up to the plate on the search and popular items. Is there anything I can set up for you that will make what you're doing easier? SSH access, etc?
This comes up once every couple of year, and I think it's best that we re-evaluate it from time to time to see if having the GPL available as an option still meets the needs of the community.
The reason the GPL is a license option at all is because there were several major projects that, at the time of OGA's creation, required their art to be licensed under the GPL (Wesnoth comes to mind, although I believe there were others), and because of the existence of legacy works from back when the GPL was the only game in town as far as licenses with a "share-alike" requirement.
The GPL isn't really a very good art license, because what constitutes the "source" for a particular piece of art is often ill-defined. The main example I can think of is a recording of improvised music. If you're improvising a musical work, there's no musical score to speak of, and the artist doesn't have a responsibility to generate one just because they happen to want to license their work under the GPL. In fact, generally, it applies poorly to any work of art that doesn't start out as a digital work. A scanned acrylic painting would be another example of this, since the "source" is the physical original (since no scanning process is ever going to reproduce the work with perfect fidelity).
Another rather fuzzy example is art generated in (for instance) Photoshop. Ideally, the source file would be the PSD, but Photoshop itself is proprietary (and expansive), and other programs that try to open Photoshop files (The GIMP, for instance) often don't quite get it right. If you have photoshop, the preferred form of the work for modification would be the PSD; otherwise, it would probably be a PNG file of each layer.
In conclusion, I don't think it's particularly clear-cut whether the source requirement can always apply to any form of media, not just music, and my preference is that we allow the artist to be responsible for making this determination.
So, let's talk about this. I'd like to get input from the community on what we should do with current GPLed art works, and whether or not we should continue allowing artists to select the GPL as a license for their work. Since these discussions can get sidetracked pretty easily, I'd like to ask in advance that people refrain from discussion two things in this thread:
Licenses other than the GPL
Opinions about how copyright law, licensing, and/or the GPL ought to work (as opposed to how it does work)
I'll open this thread up for comments and close it once we get to the point that no significant amount of new information is being posted (that is, either nothing is being posted at all, or we're stuck in a loop and rehashing the same arguments over and over). Please understand that not everyone is going to agree on the outcome, and that I'm going to have to reach some sort of decision about this, even if that decision is to leave things exactly as they are.
The trouble is with the perspective. If I use a perspective transformation to view the robot head-on, you can kind of see what I'm talking about. His right side (the side on the viewer's left) is larger than his left side in that perspective.
I used the warp tool to stretch his proportions so they were roughly symmetrical, and then transformed him back into perspective:
Obviously, after image manipulation, this is no longer pixel art, but it demonstrates what I think the issue is in terms of proprtions.
In general, it's pretty hard to do this by eye alone when drawing in perspective, but you don't have to. If you draw a rectangle in perspective, you can find the center by drawing an X from corner to corner. The center is where the lines cross. You can further subdivide that so you have a grid to work with that you can use as a guide.
Hope that makes sense. :)
Status update: All nodes are indexed, and I just succesfully searched for something submitted on December 30th. Looks like search is working, but let me know here if there are any other problems.
Update; We're down to about 36,000 more things to index, so maybe I've caught all of the edge cases. Hopefully new items will appear in the search when all is said and done.
@MedicineStorm: The latest node to cause a problem doesn't appear to actually exist. I don't recall the node ID number, but further node IDs will be added to the watchdog log so I can go back and figure out what's up with them. My first guess is that when nodes are deleted, some orphaned data is being left somewhere in tthe database. Thus far, it seems like one or two nodes here and there that appear to have been deleted, as opposed to, say, an ton of nodes that should still be indexed.
I've found and added another possible failure case. 55509 nodes to left to index, as of this post. Might take a couple of days.
Just a quick update: We've got some data corruption on a few nodes, and that's causing the indexing process to fail. I'm trying to alter the behavior of the indexing process so that it logs the corrupt nodes and then skips over them, which seems to me like a more intelligent way to do it.
Out of the roughly 60,000 items we need to index, a couple thousand got done last night before it failed again. There are multple cases that might cause it to fail, so I'm working on finding all of them.
Hi folks,
I may have figured out why indexing is failing. I'm running a test right now that might fix it, but I expect it to take all night, if not longer. I'll post a status update tomorrow.
If this doesn't work, we'll talk about getting people set up with developer access.
Bart
As it has been explained why mikeeusa's page is blocked and we seem to be rehashing the same stuff over and over again, this thread is now locked. Bringing up this topic again will result in a ban.
Hey folks,
I feel like I should chime in here briefly to say that, yes, I still exist, and I'm doing fine. The lack of updates on my part is due to a lack of time and not a lack of inclination.
I'm trying to keep a better eye on things here, but I'm going to be intermittent at best for a while. If there are other people here who do have both the time and inclination to work on the site code, I'd be willing to talk about that.
@p0ss: I just wanted to say thanks a bunch for stepping up to the plate on the search and popular items. Is there anything I can set up for you that will make what you're doing easier? SSH access, etc?
Bart
This comes up once every couple of year, and I think it's best that we re-evaluate it from time to time to see if having the GPL available as an option still meets the needs of the community.
The reason the GPL is a license option at all is because there were several major projects that, at the time of OGA's creation, required their art to be licensed under the GPL (Wesnoth comes to mind, although I believe there were others), and because of the existence of legacy works from back when the GPL was the only game in town as far as licenses with a "share-alike" requirement.
The GPL isn't really a very good art license, because what constitutes the "source" for a particular piece of art is often ill-defined. The main example I can think of is a recording of improvised music. If you're improvising a musical work, there's no musical score to speak of, and the artist doesn't have a responsibility to generate one just because they happen to want to license their work under the GPL. In fact, generally, it applies poorly to any work of art that doesn't start out as a digital work. A scanned acrylic painting would be another example of this, since the "source" is the physical original (since no scanning process is ever going to reproduce the work with perfect fidelity).
Another rather fuzzy example is art generated in (for instance) Photoshop. Ideally, the source file would be the PSD, but Photoshop itself is proprietary (and expansive), and other programs that try to open Photoshop files (The GIMP, for instance) often don't quite get it right. If you have photoshop, the preferred form of the work for modification would be the PSD; otherwise, it would probably be a PNG file of each layer.
In conclusion, I don't think it's particularly clear-cut whether the source requirement can always apply to any form of media, not just music, and my preference is that we allow the artist to be responsible for making this determination.
So, let's talk about this. I'd like to get input from the community on what we should do with current GPLed art works, and whether or not we should continue allowing artists to select the GPL as a license for their work. Since these discussions can get sidetracked pretty easily, I'd like to ask in advance that people refrain from discussion two things in this thread:
I'll open this thread up for comments and close it once we get to the point that no significant amount of new information is being posted (that is, either nothing is being posted at all, or we're stuck in a loop and rehashing the same arguments over and over). Please understand that not everyone is going to agree on the outcome, and that I'm going to have to reach some sort of decision about this, even if that decision is to leave things exactly as they are.
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