I lack the skill and tools needed to swap out the offending textures with FOSS ones, and no one has volunteered to help out with it. I think these are great assets that just need a tweak to be viable, but unless anyone is willing to give it a try, I'll have to remove this submission soon.
"popular this month" is not disabled by default. It displays on the sidebar even for visitors with no login. Each user has to explicitly disable it in their preferences for it to not show up.
I'm not sure adding one more time-based category would solve the problem. We already display "new", "favorite this week", "favorite this month" and "favorite all time". There is limited front page space, so swapping in a "favorite this year" every once in a while would allow that real estate to be shared.
Displaying a category showing the most favorited art of all time is important especially for new users who want to know the site's potential. I'm kind of tired of seeing the same spritesheet show up in Featured Art all the time, but honestly they really are great assets; even if it's old news to me, it's a pretty great find for the newbs visiting OGA for the first time.
I do often see more recent submissions in the Featured Art category, but they are rare since new submissions don't often get hundreds of favorites that fast. I am not clear on why this category is a problem, actually. It makes sense to me that the most popular are shown. The fact that many of them are older submissions is a side effect, not the reason they're displayed. There's a ton of old submissions that are honestly pretty terrible, but their age doesn't make them any more likely to be shown.
What is the problem we want to solve? Give more attention to the "middle-aged" artwork? (older than a month, younger than legendary-old-wizard) Maybe we should host a scavenger hunt: everyone looks for art they feel is under-favorited and buried, submits it as their 'diamond in the rough'. Everyone picks the one that really does deserve more love, and brings it the attention it was missing.
I agree not calling it "all time popular" is a bit of a misnomer for the category, though. I think the fact it is called "featured" instead of "popular of all time" is a hint at a possible solution; Perhaps the category should not be restricted by time, but also not be selected by number of favorties (which tend toward the stuff that's been around longer) but instead a manually curated list. A group volunteers of the most frequent users and submitters select the most useful, game-ready, and gorgeous art in all categories as they are submitted. The "featured" art is then randomly selected from that collection on each page load.
Problems with that, though:
This could become subjective. The art displayed is based on the preferences of the smaller group of volunteers instead of the larger community preferences as a whole.
If the collection is not regularly curated, it quickly becomes even more stagnant than "favorites of all time".
Great blog post, Thera! I'm finding all these animations very inspiring.
I know it seems unrealistic to have the water's surface area change (which implies a violation of conservation-of-mass) but I think I like the expand/contract animation more than the undulate animation. However, considering you mentioned ocean waves, a change in water volume makes sense for large (but shallow) waves like on a beach or lagoon, but perhaps not so much for a pond or stream, where volume (or flow) is constant.
I found myself most attracted to the subtler animations: not so much on the expand/contract, little of the undulation, not really on the the 1/4 wave either; they seem somewhat overactive unless it's a stormy day... But yes on the "inner waves" or brightness/darness-loop and flicker; seems like a liquid, but also calm.
I can definitely see using the smoothing flow animations, but not so much on the "around" flow animation. I guess with the "up" and "right" flow animations, I can have flow in all 4 cardinal directions as well as the "around" flow just by messing with frame order and selectively choosing the flow direction from tile to tile, so win-win! :)
Are these animations made of semi-transparent water layers added to an independent terrain tile? Or is the water & terrain a single animated tile? I can see the water borders are much more coherent when the texture of the terrain is animated into the shape of the water itself, but I would certainly use a separated-layers Build-It-Yourself Water Animation Kit™ :)
P.S. My art skills are atrocious, so feel free to disregard the opinion of my unrefined eye. :P
Also, how do you all feel about a "water" challenge next? Several people have mentioned animated water recently, but this would apply to ambient music and sound effects, too.
Is there any copy & paste action involved when you're on your ios tablet?
The site has a problem with certain control characters like the curved quote or EM dash. some text editors auto-convert reqular quotes or short dashes to the other style, which seems to cause the error you're experincing. We're trying to fix the issue, but it is a long process.
Spring is right, you may have to specify what you're looking for in more detail; overhead orthographic view? pixel art? photorealism? textures for 3D rendered water? 2D sidescroller waterfalls? Tidal beach animations? Splashes or particle effects?
Nope. :(
I lack the skill and tools needed to swap out the offending textures with FOSS ones, and no one has volunteered to help out with it. I think these are great assets that just need a tweak to be viable, but unless anyone is willing to give it a try, I'll have to remove this submission soon.
"popular this month" is not disabled by default. It displays on the sidebar even for visitors with no login. Each user has to explicitly disable it in their preferences for it to not show up.
I'm not sure adding one more time-based category would solve the problem. We already display "new", "favorite this week", "favorite this month" and "favorite all time". There is limited front page space, so swapping in a "favorite this year" every once in a while would allow that real estate to be shared.
Displaying a category showing the most favorited art of all time is important especially for new users who want to know the site's potential. I'm kind of tired of seeing the same spritesheet show up in Featured Art all the time, but honestly they really are great assets; even if it's old news to me, it's a pretty great find for the newbs visiting OGA for the first time.
I do often see more recent submissions in the Featured Art category, but they are rare since new submissions don't often get hundreds of favorites that fast. I am not clear on why this category is a problem, actually. It makes sense to me that the most popular are shown. The fact that many of them are older submissions is a side effect, not the reason they're displayed. There's a ton of old submissions that are honestly pretty terrible, but their age doesn't make them any more likely to be shown.
What is the problem we want to solve? Give more attention to the "middle-aged" artwork? (older than a month, younger than legendary-old-wizard) Maybe we should host a scavenger hunt: everyone looks for art they feel is under-favorited and buried, submits it as their 'diamond in the rough'. Everyone picks the one that really does deserve more love, and brings it the attention it was missing.
I agree not calling it "all time popular" is a bit of a misnomer for the category, though. I think the fact it is called "featured" instead of "popular of all time" is a hint at a possible solution; Perhaps the category should not be restricted by time, but also not be selected by number of favorties (which tend toward the stuff that's been around longer) but instead a manually curated list. A group volunteers of the most frequent users and submitters select the most useful, game-ready, and gorgeous art in all categories as they are submitted. The "featured" art is then randomly selected from that collection on each page load.
Problems with that, though:
What do you suggest?
Great blog post, Thera! I'm finding all these animations very inspiring.
I know it seems unrealistic to have the water's surface area change (which implies a violation of conservation-of-mass) but I think I like the expand/contract animation more than the undulate animation. However, considering you mentioned ocean waves, a change in water volume makes sense for large (but shallow) waves like on a beach or lagoon, but perhaps not so much for a pond or stream, where volume (or flow) is constant.
I found myself most attracted to the subtler animations: not so much on the expand/contract, little of the undulation, not really on the the 1/4 wave either; they seem somewhat overactive unless it's a stormy day... But yes on the "inner waves" or brightness/darness-loop and flicker; seems like a liquid, but also calm.
I can definitely see using the smoothing flow animations, but not so much on the "around" flow animation. I guess with the "up" and "right" flow animations, I can have flow in all 4 cardinal directions as well as the "around" flow just by messing with frame order and selectively choosing the flow direction from tile to tile, so win-win! :)
Are these animations made of semi-transparent water layers added to an independent terrain tile? Or is the water & terrain a single animated tile? I can see the water borders are much more coherent when the texture of the terrain is animated into the shape of the water itself, but I would certainly use a separated-layers Build-It-Yourself Water Animation Kit™ :)
P.S. My art skills are atrocious, so feel free to disregard the opinion of my unrefined eye. :P
You would just search for both the tag "challenge" AND "my summer time thing". This shows only the entries for this challenge.
Also, how do you all feel about a "water" challenge next? Several people have mentioned animated water recently, but this would apply to ambient music and sound effects, too.
@xom:
(thanks for reminder. Fixed)
Is there any copy & paste action involved when you're on your ios tablet?
The site has a problem with certain control characters like the curved quote or EM dash. some text editors auto-convert reqular quotes or short dashes to the other style, which seems to cause the error you're experincing. We're trying to fix the issue, but it is a long process.
Usually the term refers to the discrete block units within a 3D environment, but I think "Voxel" describes the style you're talking about.
These are great additions! I 100% agree there is a dearth of good animated water tiles. Zabin made some fairly good ones, though.
I've done some experimenting with some simple stand-alone animated water tiles, but I wasn't super happy with the results.
Spring is right, you may have to specify what you're looking for in more detail; overhead orthographic view? pixel art? photorealism? textures for 3D rendered water? 2D sidescroller waterfalls? Tidal beach animations? Splashes or particle effects?
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