Automatic credits file generation!
We now have an easy way of generating credits files for your game project.
If you're using a piece of art in your project, create a collection (Collect -> New Collection on the main menu) and when you download a piece of art to use in your project, be sure to add it to that collection that you just created (you can do that from the left sidebar of any art page).
At the bottom of every collection there is a "Download Credits File" link, which you can click on to download a text file with the credit information for all of the art files in the collection.
Please note that these credits files are automatically generated, and we can't guarantee 100% accuracy. That is, ultimately it's your responsibility to make sure you credit art authors correctly; we'll do our best to make that as easy as possible, but we can't be held liable if the credits are wrong in some way.
Important note to Artists
We are deprecating the "Attribution Instructions" field (which was somewhat ambiguous) in favor of a "Copyright/Attribution Notice" field, the difference being that the new field is intended to contain a verbatim copyright notice that people using your art should copy and paste into their credits (which, in retrospect, is how we should have done it in the first place). If you feel like it, you can convert the old attribution instructions in your art submissions to attribution notices. (Note that you're free not to fill in the attribution notice field at all, and the person using the art must still credit you by name if the license requires it.)
Comments and suggestions are welcome, as always.
Bart
Comments
this is a great feature, I just spent quite a bit of time assembling credits for the game I am working on, will definitely try this feature for the next one as it could save a lot of searching.
Both of these sound like great updates, sweet! Right now my collections are just for storing things I want to use, so I'll have to reorganize it later for things I am using once I get that far. I like the Copyright/Attribution Notice update, as well.
I just noticed that the parser for attribution instructions bails out on the letter "<".
This was when checking my collection http://opengameart.org/content/cuyo-levels. We have a lot of "Copyright <=2001", for example in http://opengameart.org/content/cuyo-level-maze.
Ah, I think that's because it's trying to strip HTML tags out of a field that's actually plain text. Hopefully there's an easy way to fix that.
Yup, there was. Your credits display correctly now. :)
This might sound like extra stuff to include but it could make the difference between a useless or extremely useful credit file. Depending on how the art is uploaded the one uploading might have set themselves as the artist and put other artists as collaborators so multiple people could edit the thing. An asset might have been a joint effort between multiple people, not just one artist. It may be helpful to include the collaborators field in the credits since more than one person may have contributed to it and want credit directly rather than relying on someone visiting the link to the resource in question.
I've seen several community projects by surt or Sharm in recent times. I can't begin to guess at how many have been produced by multiple artists that all deserve credit for their work throughout the history of OGA. It would really help if the collaborators were included in the credits (if any are present).
Actually, that was kind of a silly oversight in my part. Also very easy to fix. It's in there now. :)