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.
"but I assume it means that any derivatives I make from the art there has to be released under that license and must credit the original author, right? I'm perfectly fine with that."
This is correct.
"But what about making a game that uses such an asset? Does that mean that the source code has to be released under that license, too?"
Certainly not, because even if you had to release the game as CC BY-SA, that licence doesn't say anything about source code.
What is unclear though is whether CC BY-SA does apply to the entire game - if it did, then it would mean people would be free to distribute your game under that licence.
Is this a commercial project, or just for free/fun? If the former, these are questions to ask a lawyer. If the latter, why not release the source anyway?
Or if you mean you're happy to release the source, but are asking whether it has to be released under CC BY-SA. In practice, plenty of people release source under licences like GPL or BSD, even if they use CC BY-SA art. It is an unfortunate problem with CC BY-SA that if it really applied to the entire game, it would mean the source would have to be CC BY-SA too.
If you're going to be drawing on top of it, it's still going to be a derivative work, so not okay.
At first I thought they were actually using the LPC sprites ( http://lpc.opengameart.org/static/lpc-style-guide/assets.html ), though it does seem slightly different (e.g., different height proportions). But then having said that, if you just want a base template, how about using the LPC ones instead?
Recent versions have added a 3rd quest, and a new gameplay mode with a random dungeon, among various other improvements.
I've tested it on my Samsung Galaxy Nexus and the Android emulator, so please let me know if anyone experiences problems. It requires Android 2.3.3 or better, and a resolution of 800x480 or higher. This also requires installing the app Ministro, which you should be prompted to do when you first run Erebus (if it's not already installed). Ministro manages the required Qt libraries on Android. The libraries can take up to around 25MB, so it may be best to download over a Wifi connection.
I'd say that the problem of "Light objects neutrally" is why providing "different rotations of the same image" is a useful thing - because once you have lighting/shadows, creating the different orientations isn't as simple as just doing a rotation. (This doesn't apply to the spaceship example, which does seem to be a simple rotation, but I think it's a point worth mentioning in general.)
It's true that one can simplify things if objects are lit from above, but I think isometric games do look better with a shadow cast to the side.
If I was writing an Asteroids game, I would rotate at run-time as "orient in any direction" is a key part of a game - but for cases where the directions are more limited (e.g., 4 or 8), providing multiple images can give better quality.
On APIs, in an ideal world APIs like SDL would all be GPU optimised, but they're not, and rightly or wrongly, there are people with games and engines built on SDL (perhaps because it's the APIs they know and it works, or there's a big codebase that would need porting).
Plus I don't see why this is a problem for you anyway - if you only need one image because you can rotate at runtime, then simply take one image. At worst, the artist wasted his time, I don't see how it slows you down :)
I prefer to use an alpha channel rather than colour keys these days, and it's easier to work with (e.g., one can scale the image with anti-aliasing - if you do that to an image with a colour key, you'll get a "fringe" effect where the colour key is blended with adjacent pixels, and is no longer invisible as it's a slightly different colour). But again, I don't see it as a problem, it's easy enough to convert (e.g., the Grim Color Reaper plugin for Paint.NET). If you think it's easy to switch to a new API, then it should be easy for you to convert the image.
If we want to consider modern techniques, why bother with 2D images at all? Just render the 3D object directly, then you can decide on things like the lighting yourself. What are the advantages of using the 2D images?
In paper RPGs, races like goblins/orcs have often been inherently evil - and in that sense, killing them is no more unethical than killing demons.
Another way of looking at it I think is that the races are essentially at war - or alternatively, it is a matter of survival.
I thought it interesting how in Morrowind (and presumably the other Elder Scrolls games), creatures like Orcs were friendly, and the enemies you encountered were either other humans or undead/demonic/magical. Though I don't think it avoids the issue of killing (indeed, in that game, you are killing other humans), just the races behave differently.
In theory, I like the idea of an RPG that has a focus on things other than killing, and isn't simply about killing room after room full of monsters. However I think writing such a thing is far from easy - you need a far larger amount of ideas, just for a small amount of gametime. Plus it doesn't change that killing enemies is still a core part of most RPGs - it's like saying it should be possible to complete a shoot 'em up without killing things :)
One advantage of having XP awarded on smaller things like killing creatures, and having them respawn, is it makes it easier to balance the gameplay - if it's too hard for a player, they can always get stronger by killing a few more creatures.
With paper RPGs where you have a human GM, it's easier to deal out the XP at the end of a quest (or major part), because a human can better use their judgement to decide how much a person deserves or needs to balance the game.
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.
"but I assume it means that any derivatives I make from the art there has to be released under that license and must credit the original author, right? I'm perfectly fine with that."
This is correct.
"But what about making a game that uses such an asset? Does that mean that the source code has to be released under that license, too?"
Certainly not, because even if you had to release the game as CC BY-SA, that licence doesn't say anything about source code.
What is unclear though is whether CC BY-SA does apply to the entire game - if it did, then it would mean people would be free to distribute your game under that licence.
Is this a commercial project, or just for free/fun? If the former, these are questions to ask a lawyer. If the latter, why not release the source anyway?
Or if you mean you're happy to release the source, but are asking whether it has to be released under CC BY-SA. In practice, plenty of people release source under licences like GPL or BSD, even if they use CC BY-SA art. It is an unfortunate problem with CC BY-SA that if it really applied to the entire game, it would mean the source would have to be CC BY-SA too.
If you're going to be drawing on top of it, it's still going to be a derivative work, so not okay.
At first I thought they were actually using the LPC sprites ( http://lpc.opengameart.org/static/lpc-style-guide/assets.html ), though it does seem slightly different (e.g., different height proportions). But then having said that, if you just want a base template, how about using the LPC ones instead?
Erebus is now available for Android phones/tablets on Google Play! https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.sourceforge.erebusrpg
Recent versions have added a 3rd quest, and a new gameplay mode with a random dungeon, among various other improvements.
I've tested it on my Samsung Galaxy Nexus and the Android emulator, so please let me know if anyone experiences problems. It requires Android 2.3.3 or better, and a resolution of 800x480 or higher. This also requires installing the app Ministro, which you should be prompted to do when you first run Erebus (if it's not already installed). Ministro manages the required Qt libraries on Android. The libraries can take up to around 25MB, so it may be best to download over a Wifi connection.
I'd say that the problem of "Light objects neutrally" is why providing "different rotations of the same image" is a useful thing - because once you have lighting/shadows, creating the different orientations isn't as simple as just doing a rotation. (This doesn't apply to the spaceship example, which does seem to be a simple rotation, but I think it's a point worth mentioning in general.)
It's true that one can simplify things if objects are lit from above, but I think isometric games do look better with a shadow cast to the side.
If I was writing an Asteroids game, I would rotate at run-time as "orient in any direction" is a key part of a game - but for cases where the directions are more limited (e.g., 4 or 8), providing multiple images can give better quality.
On APIs, in an ideal world APIs like SDL would all be GPU optimised, but they're not, and rightly or wrongly, there are people with games and engines built on SDL (perhaps because it's the APIs they know and it works, or there's a big codebase that would need porting).
Plus I don't see why this is a problem for you anyway - if you only need one image because you can rotate at runtime, then simply take one image. At worst, the artist wasted his time, I don't see how it slows you down :)
I prefer to use an alpha channel rather than colour keys these days, and it's easier to work with (e.g., one can scale the image with anti-aliasing - if you do that to an image with a colour key, you'll get a "fringe" effect where the colour key is blended with adjacent pixels, and is no longer invisible as it's a slightly different colour). But again, I don't see it as a problem, it's easy enough to convert (e.g., the Grim Color Reaper plugin for Paint.NET). If you think it's easy to switch to a new API, then it should be easy for you to convert the image.
If we want to consider modern techniques, why bother with 2D images at all? Just render the 3D object directly, then you can decide on things like the lighting yourself. What are the advantages of using the 2D images?
In paper RPGs, races like goblins/orcs have often been inherently evil - and in that sense, killing them is no more unethical than killing demons.
Another way of looking at it I think is that the races are essentially at war - or alternatively, it is a matter of survival.
I thought it interesting how in Morrowind (and presumably the other Elder Scrolls games), creatures like Orcs were friendly, and the enemies you encountered were either other humans or undead/demonic/magical. Though I don't think it avoids the issue of killing (indeed, in that game, you are killing other humans), just the races behave differently.
In theory, I like the idea of an RPG that has a focus on things other than killing, and isn't simply about killing room after room full of monsters. However I think writing such a thing is far from easy - you need a far larger amount of ideas, just for a small amount of gametime. Plus it doesn't change that killing enemies is still a core part of most RPGs - it's like saying it should be possible to complete a shoot 'em up without killing things :)
One advantage of having XP awarded on smaller things like killing creatures, and having them respawn, is it makes it easier to balance the gameplay - if it's too hard for a player, they can always get stronger by killing a few more creatures.
With paper RPGs where you have a human GM, it's easier to deal out the XP at the end of a quest (or major part), because a human can better use their judgement to decide how much a person deserves or needs to balance the game.
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