You have to make that image, and derivatives of that image, available for anyone you give a copy of your software to. They're allowed to redistribute those under the terms of the GPL.
The GPL does not say that you have to give stuff away for free. It just says that you cannot place restrictions on what the person you sell it to is allowed to do with it (the GPL says what they can and cannot do with it; they're allowed to resell or give away for free what they paid you for).
What constitutes a "derivative work" of an art asset in the context of the GPL is not so obvious (the GPL was not designed for art, it was designed for software source code). A direct edit of the image qualifies, screensshots probably do too. A program that loads and processes the image does not (the image is just "data" to the program, the program is not derived from the image). A bundle that includes the images also probably does not (there's some information on bundled stuff in the GPL text, as I recall).
All that said, I'm not a lawyer. Take legal advice on-line with a healthy pinch of salt.
Your project sounds interesting (something a bit like the Trek game I always wanted to play but never could), but at least for the purpose of this site linking it so directly and explicitly to Star Trek is going to be problematic due to copyright reasons...
I'm not so sure that reducing the padding is a good idea. Obviously you can fit more content on, but I think it will also make the page look too crowded.
Just my thoughts. What do you think about this idea? Do you agree?
I understand the problem, I disagree with the proposed solution because whether you show 8, 12 or however many items, it's not scalable. The effect you describe can still happen.
A better solution, I think, would be to limit the amount of art that is shown by any one artist. Say someone submits 10 pieces of art. The 3 (say) most recent show up, along with a link "more recent art by this author..." that shows all of them. A refinement would be that if art is in different categories, you try to show range by giving preference to art from different categories over just 3 art entries in the same category. That's harder to do automatically though (maybe if you base it on tags). Both the amount of entries to show and the time when you no longer list things as "more recent art by this author..." would probably need to be tuned.
The old "experimental/alpha" solr search worked well for me, but the legacy search and what is in place now really don't... just now I tried looking for "item power up" and ended up getting multiple pages of duplicate results (about 5 or 6 different entries), some of which weren't actually relevant...
Just to keep things complicated: I personally loath having to download a zip file. Sometimes I want to have a quick look at some assets and if I can click an image link, I can view the image in-line. The zip file needs to be downloaded and navigated, and if I decide that I don't want it afterall I need to delete it manually. In short, I need to do more work. If I'm browsing stuff on my tablet it's even worse.
Of course it could be argued that this is what the preview is supposed to be for, but sometimes these don't show all the assets very clearly.
All of that beeing said: the ability to download an image with associated meta-data would be useful. I usually place these (along with a link to oga) in a separate text file of the same name.
At the end of the day there is no way to please everyone, so do whatever makes the most sense.
Look out for case sensitive differences: I think "LPC" and "lpc" are separate tags at the moment.
Personally I don't think the tag system is very useful and I could live without it; I find it far more useful if the search picks up keywords from the descriptive text. The reason I find it less than useful is that it is entirely dependent on what the author thinks to put in there, so searching for "32x32" may or may not be useful. The ability for other users to suggest or add tags to a submission might be able to fix that, but it's extra optional work, so it may not get done (and you still need to find the art before you can think to add a tag to it); it also needs to be moderated.
I think it's a good idea to rethink what the tags are for. Why have them in the first place? I think there are two distinct use-cases: to categorise art ("2D", "3D", "tileset", "sprite", "animated", "isometric", "32x32", etc.) and to add key-words that don't necessarily show up in the descriptive text ("house", "futuristic", "fantasy", "LPC-style", etc).
The first feature is partly served already by the check-boxes, and I would suggest merging it with that/expanding that one so you can add more fine-grained categories. If you allow users to specify their own categories you eventually get the same problem you have now (too many/random categories to be useful) but you know someone will have a legitimate use for something that's not in there, so the extra information needs to be both generic and useful. I think that's doable, but not easy. For thinks like tilesets and pixel-art characters it would be good to have the base size ("32x32", "16x16") as a standard input box so it is easy to unify across entries. Perhaps have things like poly-counts for 3D models so it's easy to search for models up to a particular count (I don't know if this is too useful though).
The second idea, I think, is basically how tags work now. It's probably best to keep that as-is and simply accept that the usefulness might be limited, although if these are simply extra terms that the search looks for (as opposed to something that you can filter on) it's probably ok.
Personally I find the tags sortof useless, since their usefulness is entirely limited to what the author thought to put in there. Looking for words in the title/description is more useful, I find. Sadly the old search is rather stupid in this regard... the solr search should fix this when it's back up.
You have to make that image, and derivatives of that image, available for anyone you give a copy of your software to. They're allowed to redistribute those under the terms of the GPL.
The GPL does not say that you have to give stuff away for free. It just says that you cannot place restrictions on what the person you sell it to is allowed to do with it (the GPL says what they can and cannot do with it; they're allowed to resell or give away for free what they paid you for).
What constitutes a "derivative work" of an art asset in the context of the GPL is not so obvious (the GPL was not designed for art, it was designed for software source code). A direct edit of the image qualifies, screensshots probably do too. A program that loads and processes the image does not (the image is just "data" to the program, the program is not derived from the image). A bundle that includes the images also probably does not (there's some information on bundled stuff in the GPL text, as I recall).
All that said, I'm not a lawyer. Take legal advice on-line with a healthy pinch of salt.
It's a small internet!
Your project sounds interesting (something a bit like the Trek game I always wanted to play but never could), but at least for the purpose of this site linking it so directly and explicitly to Star Trek is going to be problematic due to copyright reasons...
I'm not so sure that reducing the padding is a good idea. Obviously you can fit more content on, but I think it will also make the page look too crowded.
I understand the problem, I disagree with the proposed solution because whether you show 8, 12 or however many items, it's not scalable. The effect you describe can still happen.
A better solution, I think, would be to limit the amount of art that is shown by any one artist. Say someone submits 10 pieces of art. The 3 (say) most recent show up, along with a link "more recent art by this author..." that shows all of them. A refinement would be that if art is in different categories, you try to show range by giving preference to art from different categories over just 3 art entries in the same category. That's harder to do automatically though (maybe if you base it on tags). Both the amount of entries to show and the time when you no longer list things as "more recent art by this author..." would probably need to be tuned.
Any updates on the search?
The old "experimental/alpha" solr search worked well for me, but the legacy search and what is in place now really don't... just now I tried looking for "item power up" and ended up getting multiple pages of duplicate results (about 5 or 6 different entries), some of which weren't actually relevant...
Personally, I consider the search broken and the site barely usable until the solr search is back up...
Just to keep things complicated: I personally loath having to download a zip file. Sometimes I want to have a quick look at some assets and if I can click an image link, I can view the image in-line. The zip file needs to be downloaded and navigated, and if I decide that I don't want it afterall I need to delete it manually. In short, I need to do more work. If I'm browsing stuff on my tablet it's even worse.
Of course it could be argued that this is what the preview is supposed to be for, but sometimes these don't show all the assets very clearly.
All of that beeing said: the ability to download an image with associated meta-data would be useful. I usually place these (along with a link to oga) in a separate text file of the same name.
At the end of the day there is no way to please everyone, so do whatever makes the most sense.
Look out for case sensitive differences: I think "LPC" and "lpc" are separate tags at the moment.
Personally I don't think the tag system is very useful and I could live without it; I find it far more useful if the search picks up keywords from the descriptive text. The reason I find it less than useful is that it is entirely dependent on what the author thinks to put in there, so searching for "32x32" may or may not be useful. The ability for other users to suggest or add tags to a submission might be able to fix that, but it's extra optional work, so it may not get done (and you still need to find the art before you can think to add a tag to it); it also needs to be moderated.
I think it's a good idea to rethink what the tags are for. Why have them in the first place? I think there are two distinct use-cases: to categorise art ("2D", "3D", "tileset", "sprite", "animated", "isometric", "32x32", etc.) and to add key-words that don't necessarily show up in the descriptive text ("house", "futuristic", "fantasy", "LPC-style", etc).
The first feature is partly served already by the check-boxes, and I would suggest merging it with that/expanding that one so you can add more fine-grained categories. If you allow users to specify their own categories you eventually get the same problem you have now (too many/random categories to be useful) but you know someone will have a legitimate use for something that's not in there, so the extra information needs to be both generic and useful. I think that's doable, but not easy. For thinks like tilesets and pixel-art characters it would be good to have the base size ("32x32", "16x16") as a standard input box so it is easy to unify across entries. Perhaps have things like poly-counts for 3D models so it's easy to search for models up to a particular count (I don't know if this is too useful though).
The second idea, I think, is basically how tags work now. It's probably best to keep that as-is and simply accept that the usefulness might be limited, although if these are simply extra terms that the search looks for (as opposed to something that you can filter on) it's probably ok.
Odd. It should collect them there (it does for me).
I use it as a quick bookmark for stuff I find generally useful and want to be able to find again quickly later.
Probably just leave a comment (or send a PM).
Personally I find the tags sortof useless, since their usefulness is entirely limited to what the author thought to put in there. Looking for words in the title/description is more useful, I find. Sadly the old search is rather stupid in this regard... the solr search should fix this when it's back up.
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