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Blog
What you are looking at right now is OpenGameArt.org version 1.5 (or most of it, anyway -- there are a couple things I'll be adding over the weekend). The site should (hopefully) be relatively usable and intuitive at this point, and you should be able to do everything you could do back in version 1.0. If you run into any problems with anything (posting on the forums, commenting, submitting art, etc), leave a comment here, or drop in on our IRC channel:
#opengameart on irc.freenode.net (or chat with us from your browser)
- bart's blog
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The last 30 days have been a whirlwind of development as Flare officially moved to GitHub. Finally we have a new release to share!
This release is all about wrapping the core gameplay in main menus, pushing Flare closer to feature-completeness. Now players have four game slots to experiment with different builds. Also, choose your gender and a portrait for your hero or heroine!
View the Official Release Notes
Special thanks to the crew who contributed directly to v0.14: Brandon Morris, Justin Nichol, kitano, Thane "pennomi" Brimhall, wokste, Alexander Olkhovskiy, Artur "zear" Rotek, Bonbadil, and Paul-Wortmann. And thanks to everyone here at OpenGameArt for the endless stream of feedback and testing!
- Clint Bellanger's blog
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MrBeast just finished the first part of the next 16x16 tileset commission, here:
http://www.opengameart.org/content/sewer-tileset
Still to come is a cave interior tileset and a set of objects for use with either set.
- bart's blog
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Valve has just announced that they're going to release the Source engine SDK for free. Is this cool news? Sure, I'll probably check it out myself. But, the big downside here is that as high quality, closed-source engines are made free as in beer, the FOSS community loses out because we don't have anything that can compete with Unity3D and Source in terms of both features and ease of use (one or the other, perhaps, but not both).
We're losing mindshare here, folks. If you're one of those people (you know who you are) who thinks it's okay to force everyone to constantly switch applications and muck around in text editors in order to do anything useful with a game engine, then how do you explain the popularity of engines that are easier to use?
It's one thing if programming time is an issue -- we all have limited time. On the other hand, it's just plain lazy to justify a lack of features and ease of use by claiming that these sorts of things are completely unnecessary.
If your software is unintuitive and hard to use, and requires people to read forums and poke around through (often incomplete) documentation, it's not finished yet. Time to get to work, folks. :)
Peace out,
Bart
- bart's blog
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So, those of you who follow the forums are no doubt already aware that I'm in the process of putting together OGA 2.0. It's going to have some major new features, which I'm not going to discuss at length here -- you can read about them in the OGA 2.0 forum. :)
What I would like to discuss is a point release before OGA 2.0 that will (hopefully) make the site a little more pleasant to use, and make development a lot quicker and easier for me.
Here's the deal:
The current version of OGA has a lot of legacy junk left over from when I didn't really understand Drupal very well. I made some architectural mistakes, and because of that, a simple Drupal version upgrade (the current site runs Drupal 6, whereas 2.0 will run on Drupal 7) is impractical. Instead, I've written a 1000+ line data migration module that copies all the content over, reorganizes it a bit, and sets up the new site. Unfortuantely, every time I make a change to OGA2, I have to add that change into the migration script and re-run it to make sure everything migrates propertly. I'm not going to mince words here: This is a time consuming pain in the ass.
So, what I'd like to do is get the Drupal 7 site to a point where we have feature parity with the current version, then move the site over to that. Afterwards, I can develop the beta version of the site without having to maintain a bunch of ugly data migration code, which will make my life vastly easier. Plus, most people agree that the new site is a lot nicer than the old one. :)
As I see it, here's what still needs to be done (I'll cross these off as I do them):
- Searching needs to work. (It's broken now -- no idea why) (apparently I need to run the search index command manually when nodes are first imported)
- Art browsing needs to work. (Turns out if I just create a menu link to an advanced search, it should work fine)
- As much as possible, old links to art need to point to the right place.
- Medals need to be moved over. The actual module works, but the content isn't there yet.
- Stats blocks need to be moved as well (top submitters, etc)
- Links and articles need to be moved.
- The blog needs to work again. (ugly but working)
- User permissions need to map correctly (right now, everyone is just a regular user on the new site)
- The FAQ needs to be moved. (gonna just do this manually after the site is live)
- Our RSS feeds. (should be easy)
- Audio previews. (This is mostly working, but needs some additional help)
- Friends and favorites. (currently in progress)
- Theme tweaks.
None of the above tasks is *particuarly* major, although given the slow development process, they may take a little while yet. I honestly don't know for sure how long it will be.
There are a couple things that we might have to temporarily give up, due to the fact that the necessary drupal modules haven't been updated for Drupal 7 yet:
- Twitter announcements of new art
- Polls
In addition to making development easier, this will also allow me to introduce new site features as they're added, as opposed to making everyone wait for all of them to be done at once.
I'll keep everyone posted as I make progress. For now, you can check out the beta site here:
Please withhold comments on the big, empty left side bar until I've had a chance to actually put content in it. The beta site isn't done yet. However, at this point, you shouldn't be running into errors or theming bugs. If you see any such issues, please let me know so I can get them fixed before we go live. Oh, and feel free to submit whatever you want to the beta site for testing purposes, but understand that I will wipe the data frequently. Any new submissions to the beta site will be lost permanently. I'm not kidding.
Peace out,
Bart K.
P.S. Just to be clear, the beta site IS NOT OGA 2.0. There are a lot of features yet to implement for OGA2, and this point release doesn't mean that I'm not going to address those features; in fact, as I said, it should make development a lot faster.
- bart's blog
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I'm looking to get some more 16x16 tilesets made, this time for a cave and a dungeon/sewer environment. Details about the project are here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/PixelArt/comments/ic8nt/hello_rpixelart_opengame...
If you're interested, please reply here or contact me with a link to a sample of your work and an estimate. If you have any questions, feel free to ask! :)
Bart
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Just wanted to let everyone know that we'll be doing another expansion of the wildly popular spell icon sets. This time OGA is teaming up with the Weaver Project for the commission, with another 10 spell "families" including sizes and color variations on each. Note that we already have the funding to pay for this set, so it won't be in the commission box. We're still looking for a commission goal. :)
Here are some teasers from the set:
- bart's blog
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This has taken me far too long, but TheCubber's Dwarf commission has been posted. You can find it at this link:
http://opengameart.org/content/rigged-textured-dwarf-model
I'll be putting a new commission goal up as soon as I'm able to arrange one.
Also, the site is growing to the point where it's getting difficult for me to realistically handle everything, particularly since I'm working on developing OGA2. I'm looking for someone who would be willing to handle the day to day tracking of donations and commissions, so things like this don't fall by the wayside. Since this will involve dealing with people's donations, I need any volunteers to be at least 18 years of age, and be a trusted member of the FOSS or creative commons community (or related group). If you're interested in helping with this, please either reply here, send me a message through the contact form, or catch me on IRC (BartK on irc.freenode.net -- if I don't answer, it's because I'm AFK, not because I'm ignoring you).
Thanks!
Bart
- bart's blog
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During my tenure thus far as the head of OpenGameArt.org, I've run into a lot of different requests for art by various projects. I'd like to start out by saying this: Please, if you need art for your FOSS project, don't hesitate to come ask us! That's why we're here. :)
That being said, there are ways to ask for art, and ways not to. Unlike some places, we'll never yell at you for not asking correctly, but there are still some things you can do (and avoid doing) to make your request more likely to be filled. I'd like to go over these today.
(Continued on my FreeGamer blog post...)
Unrelated note: I might be the last person to know this, but it's apparently possible now to subscribe to flattring something, which will automatically flattr a link every month for a year. If you're like me and forget to use flattr, this is handy. :)
- bart's blog
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We're still configuring things, so please excuse any issues you might run into. Feel free to report them here or bring them up in the IRC channel. :)
I'm going to bed. I'll post more in the morning.
Peace!
Bart
- bart's blog
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