Site Administration
Hi,
I've been holding this post back for a while now because, well I love OGA, and I just don't want to be on here complaining about it, but I think we've reached a point where something needs to be said.
Still just to be clear, this is NOT a complaint, it's an expression of concern and an offer to help.
I think it should be pretty clear to all that OGA is no longer getting the administrative attention in needs.
Search is broken. It doesn't return results past January of this year. The issue was reported in February, it's now June. A year ago search broke in the same fashion. It took four months to get fixed, and then broke again just a few months later.
The main page hasn't had a 'news' post since the fix for a spam attack was announced last Novemember. That post itself is not peppered with obvious spam posts.
Furthermore, unless there's something going on that hasn't been announced publicly, I think it's pretty clear that development on the site has basically stopped.
I think the admins are doing an admirable job keeping up with montioring posts for legal issues, etc. and fortunately, artists and developers still seem to be finding and using the site. This is a real testament to the strength of the community and the technology already set up for the site.
However, it doesn't take a Nostadamus to see that over the long run, if the site doesn't get day to day administration or future development, it's going to die. It'll either slowly fizzle out as artists and developers turn away from it because they find it's not working, or one day it'll just crash or disappear and no one will know why or how to bring it back.
Again, this is not a complaint, it's an expression of concern.
I have nothing but love and respect for Bart and what he's created here with OGA. But it's clear whoever is currently handling the admin for this site simply doesn't have the time or inclination for it anymore. I am totally ok with that. For Bart personally, if he wants or needs time away from the site, by all means he should take it. He's certainly paid his debt and then some. If it were up to me, he'd be able to retire happily to the Bahamas anytime he wants. But there must be some process whereby adminstration and development responsibilities for the site can be passed on or even just shared or temporarily delegated to some person or persons who do have the time and interest to do it.
I am offering myself up as one such person, but even more importantly, I'd like to get the process and the conversation started. What can we do to ensure that OGA endures past the current difficulties and beyond?
Scott
Just to point out the - already pointed out - incoherence of having an OpenGameArt site without being fully Free/Libre Software. I known Bart released some of it as Drupal modules (and I glad that he did it, as I glad that he did this site possible, btw), and planned to release the remaining someday, what still not happened.
Independent of the - possible messy - state of the not-yet-released code, it should be released anyway (along with its database schema). If not for more potential people being able to try to fix - or improve - it, for a matter of coherence with Free/Libre culture that OGA (and we all here?) endoss.
@farrer: Even if the OGA software was fully open source, if OGA itself breaks down from neglect and stops working then it's all over for the community, most likely. Unless we all migrate somewhere else before that happens, and then it doesn't matter what software runs the new place. It's the people who make OGA, and the art they submit, not the code.
I hope it doesn't come to that quite so soon. Already many of us are on itch.io, sharing the same assets with the world, under the same licenses. But we don't keep in touch the same way over there. And I'm sure many people haven't made the jump yet, nor will they. Once OGA goes away (and sadly it's just a matter of time), things will never be the same again.
I think there are many of us that have offered help and are willing to take there own time to fix issues and make it the best it can, trouble is that no one really understands the Drupal code or how the site is even set up, which would need the time just to explain it, which Bart doesn't seem to have the time to do. So it really just gets left in limbo.
id be more than happy to work on OGA everyday, but I haven't got a Danny la rue how Drupal works, and would have to use something the I am familiar with.
it does sadden me that this could come to close soon, before everyone gets really fed up with the whole thing, or will create/move to another. maybe Bart is open to offers for the sale of the site? Then perhaps the site will get a more fulltime maintained team that it deserves and flourish for the future. And I don't mean that disrespectfully, what Bart has created here is brilliant, and his vision for this place to become what it has become over the years with his and others hardwork is fantastic, but there comes a time when you have to say "can I do this anymore?"
As capros says, it's been a year now from this forum post.
Chasersgaming | Support | Monstropolis |
@claudeb
I would not move over to itch.io, the site is not free software aware, has a paywall and forces you to register and all that nasty stuff.
Keeping up as a community should not be that hard if people really wanted, they could still meet in an IRC channel or so.
@chasersgaming
I know how it works and could handle it, the problem is just the legal side and the administration stuff. At least in my country you are responsible for stuff people do on your site, for example if they say illegal things, upload illegal content, copyright infringement, hate speech and all that stuff.
On the other hand you have a lot of stress being a sysadmin, you have to be available 24/7 in case there is emergencies, like security holes, hacker attacks or just spammers on the forum and then fix it all, while other people complain the site is down.
> Once OGA goes away (and sadly it's just a matter of time)
Ah!! Don't say that! There's got to be something we can do! There are plenty of community run projects that have been around for years. OGA seems to have plenty of willing and able volunteers. It seems like it's just a matter of coordination, getting the right community members in the right roles.
Personally, I don't know much about Drupal, but have definitely been around a web site and database or two, and am not at all afraid to learn. And while I don't have gobs of free time, at this point I am more than willing to contribute what time I do have to help fix the search issue and get OGA back on more sound footing.
@Duion: What are you talking about? itch.io has a license selector for all projects (even dual, distinct for code and art!) and displays those licenses prominently. Plenty of people take advantage of it, too. You also don't need an account even to buy, and a lot of stuff there costs nothing.
That said, good point about IRC. I know at least one online community that doesn't need much more than that. But weren't we also supposed to have one?
@Duion maybe you won't have to worry about administration side of things, as capros says, getting people in the right place, from what you say you could attempt to just fix the search problems or team up with others like you and work in random over a period of time, we could set up a timetable of round the clock shift patterns maybe, think we as a community can help this site,each other and Bart, if it's co-ordinated, if the code is an issue, those of you that have an understanding of Drupal put your names in the comments, then hopefully Bart can see it and assign accordingly, along with how many hours your happy to help, etc.
Chasersgaming | Support | Monstropolis |
You could just delete the search function and re install the default one, should work.
ok, sounds good, has it been tried? We will await a response on that one.
Chasersgaming | Support | Monstropolis |
Noooooooooo!!!!!!! I don't want OpenGameArt to die! I just posted my first art collection and if OGA dies, my art will die with it. I would never move over somewhere like itch.io. I like itch.io but the feel and the community there is just not the same. I really hope that OGA comes back to life so everybody can enjoy it. Think of it, if OGA dies, all the work put into it, both by the admins and the artists and everyone else, will all be for naught. :( :( :( :( :( :( :( :( :( :( :( :( :( :( :( :(
I think we have to make it clear that there are no signs that OGA will die anytime soon. It can continue on its own like this for a while. The signs of its death are exaggerated, and all that.
On the other hand, it is frustrating to say I'd even be willing to help out financially if someone would talk to me about it and then not hear one peep. It's hard to raise money when minimal effort is being done to make any. People can want to do things, but it has to be easy for people to do things on their own. That goes for the art contributed here and moderation and everything else too.
Someone mentioned someone else buying OGA... well, what exactly would they get? The reputation, existing links and the community, but none of that is ever guaranteed. By it's nature, what OGA does could be done by another site. All the art on it is freely usable, so there's nothing stopping someone loading it all up elsewhere and keeping the licenses intact. Heck, that's a problem with anybody trying to do this.
Look at the model of something like Wikipedia. Volunteers can do virtually anything: change a page, change the rules, change nearly everything. Then when Wikimedia asks people for money they have already built up a model. I personally dislike Wikipedia in that often what they call the "wisdom of masses" is just another way of saying mob rule. That's why you find strong leaders and don't make the easiness of the site end up making it harder for the leaders to do anything either.
In a sense I'm just going around in circles here. I might have even repeated what I said when I posted here last. Sorry if I did.
Bottom line is I want OGA to succeed. I'm willing to expand some effort and money to make that happen. I do think it has a bit of an existential crisis, though. Or maybe that's just me.
The author of this site receives by far the most financial support in the whole scene, why can't he just spend a few hours and fix some things? At the beginning it looked promising with new features and stuff, but it quickly got less and for over a year now there has been no activity at all as it seems.
It does not help, if there are like 20 unpaid volunteer admins, as long as the one who knows and has access to the code does not do anything, there will not anything be done.
I think Bart has already mentioned that it would take more than a few hours to fix the issues and bugs and could potentially mean taking the site down for a period of time for an overhaul, which I am not sure he wants to do, if he does that and doesn't fix the issues then we would have no OGA at all, also he can't afford to take time off work to work on the site as he would like to. The patreon funds cover what we see today with server costs and any other extensions that are provided to keep the site running as it is.
if we want to see the site in a fuller glory then we need to support Bart and help him hit his funding goal then he can take it on fulltime, and we can have all the bells and whistles, but this would appear to have a doubled edged sword scenario, as he seems more absent lately and there no real updates on patreon,Twitter or here from the man himself will question why give the support in the first place? , he receiving some funds and nothing's changed in a year,.
It may have some issues but this site still serves a very big purpose to a lot of us here that use it, not just the artists that submit artwork but also the developers that come here and we all have benefitted from it in some way, we don't have to worry about ad pop ups, and yet we can freely advertise ourselves to audiences that come here, via links etc, Bart could charge us for that, but doesn't, so some of us, not all, would have some financial benefit being here, so I think we should get behind the patreon campaign, there's more than 2000 people that are users here, so for $1 a month we should hit the target easy and have a fully manned opengameart and we will all benefit from the results I'm sure.
i think this will be the best way to get everything ressolved
Chasersgaming | Support | Monstropolis |
Hi everyone.
Sorry for not being around--I just graduated on Friday with my masters so things have been pretty hectic the past few months.
Sorry things haven't been kept up much. I have a lot of catching up to do on a lot of things, and unfortunately OGA isn't as high on the list as I'd like it to be but I will try to get back up to speed. I can't help with the site architecture much but I'll try to be around more for whatever that's worth.
Server costs are $100, he told me by himself, which is already pretty expensive, you could get away with half of that or even less. This makes still $400 profit, some people do a part time job for that income, but we don't get anything, not even a single post which would cost 5 minutes in time.
It is a bit bold against those people who receive a fraction of that support or nothing at all and often spend hours per day to produce content.
@all:
It's great to see this thread come alive again! It just shows that there's still plenty of passion and excitement for the OGA project out there! The site is still seeing a very healthy number of new submissions (easily 20-30 a week) with many of very high quality, so I think from it's core objective of being a place to distribute and find good high quality open licensed art assets, the site is still very much alive. That said, it's clear from the comments above, especially some of the most recent ones, that there's a growing level of frustration at the lack of basic updates and site maintenance. I think we're fast approaching the point where that frustration will become toxic and the site's death spiral will begin in earnest.
For those new to the thread, we've been over quite a bit of this ground before (including 'where does the paetron money go'). You're encouraged the read through the earlier posts to catch up, but here's the TL;DR version:
1) The patreon money covers basic server and administration costs but is not nearly enough to fund any professional development activity even on a part-time basis. More money for the patreon is not likely to happen, and wringing a better deal out the server costs is unlikley to save enough to fund any professional development.
2) There is already a decent sized web of volunteer admins and power users on the site, some of whom have the kind of direct, low level access required to make feature improvements, bug fixes, etc. But this group is entirely volunteer and their activities are constrained both by their other time commitments (families, jobs, lives, etc.) and an understandable reluctance to make major changes to a site that has rightly been called 'Bart's Baby'.
3) Bart still loves his baby, but he's become very busy with alot of other stuff in his life recently (family, job, etc).
Regrading search, we've also covered a good bit of ground on what might or might not be the problem. The general gist of the thing seems to be that it is broken and it would take many hours of investigation to find and fix the problem. None of the admins with access to do this work are particularly interested in putting in that time for the double reason that they haven't got it and Bart was about half way through setting up a new search engine anyway (the solr stuff).
Considering the 'title' search workaround works, may I suggest the following 'low cost' solution:
1) Switch the main page search bar to using 'title' search
2) Add a 'Description' field to the advanced search page. This would search for entries based on words in the full description.
3) Remove the 'Search' field from the advanced search page. (in it's place would be the fields for 'Title' and 'Description' search)
4) Put a post up on the main page announcing and explaining these changes.
This would effectively bury the broken part of search. It's admittidly not a great solution as it just hides the problem and it's technically a step down in functionality since 'Search' evidently searches some kind of mass index of keywords from title, description, comments, etc. But...
It would get us back to a search that returned results newer than Feb. 2016.
It would generally work as advertised/expected (unlike the current state, where searching by title, tags, submitter, etc. returns current results but general search does not, a confusing point for anyone not versed in this thread).
It would not require wasting the time and effort to sort out the problem with a search engine that is likely (hopefully!) going to be replaced at some point anyway.
It should not require a great deal of new work (assuming 'Description' search can be implemented as easily as 'Title' search was, and if it can't, well Step 2 is optional anyways.)
Moving forward with the site, I suggest we/someone contact Bart and ask that he designate 2-3 of the current admins (any volunteers among them?) as mini-Barts who are explicitly allowed to make large changes and/or fixes as needed/desired on their own. The goal would be to distribute ownership of the site across a pool folks, so that OGA isn't so entirely dependent on Bart for forward movement. Of course, that group would have to be very carefully selected, and I know it's entirely possible none of the current admins would have the time to help even if given the full clearance to do so. But all the same, I think this (or something like it) is the necessary next step to take OGA from being 'Bart's Baby' to be being a true community run project that can survive and endure long past any of our involvement with it.
@RedShrike: Congratulations on getting your masters! Now you can truly say: "Now I am the Master!" :)
Not sure who to ask but il put it here,
how are the documents uploaded saved to the server? Do they go in one directory folder type? Or are they separated and contented some other way? by tags, date or whatever else.
Chasersgaming | Support | Monstropolis |
All files go into one folder, there is no seperation, the separation is handled through the database, this site uses the default drupal template for that, it has not been changed.
Regarding the broken search, Bart probably started migrating to a new better search engine and did not finish it or ran into issues that are not easy to solve. Result is, it is unfinished, so either it has to be finished, or we have to accept it as it is or the cheap workaround would be to delete it and re install the default search engine which has worked.
And the money should be enough to do some professional development, even if you admit a ridiculously high salary, like 50-100 dollar per hour, that would still make a bunch of work hours each month that could be used to fix all those smaller issues.
@pOss you done a great job at adding the featured art section, and had a go at trying to fix the search, i guess you have some power here, is Duion suggestion possible? Can we not bypass the current search structure,(not delete it) and direct it to a default search instead for now?
Chasersgaming | Support | Monstropolis |
I'm willing to do much of this. I even have some authority to do it. I might even have the time to do it! :D
Unfortunately I lack the advanced access (or perhaps just the knowledge of how to access the advanced stuff) nor do I have the familiarity with drupal to execute some of these fixes. I tried reading up on some of the resources provided earlier, but they don't really cover the complex stuff like this. If there is some task that might help in the meantime (like refactoring the fuzzbolts inside the flux capacitor) that has to be done on a regular basis, I'm your person. I just need someone to show me how to do whatever mundane task that the other admins don't have time to do all the time.
p0ss? Master Redshrike? Any crash courses you can give me? I'll do the dirty work, just show me to the shovel.
--Medicine Storm
The website is worth quite a sum, at least the domain.
Duion wrote:
On patreon it states:
Actually i feel if he has 400$ extra each month he really should be around some time or alternatively pay someone to spend time here..
On the other hand if the 500$ barely cover the server costs - which is really quite high- i agree that he would no needto feel obliged to show up more than once or twice a year.
for 600$ you get that monster (for the double price you could buy it and let it work from home):
Intel®Xeon® E5-2650 V3
10 Cores (HT) x 2.3 GHz(2.6 GHz Turbo Boost)
128 GB DDR4 ECC
6,000 GB (8 x 1,000 GB SATA)
I know drupal a bit and i speak python and c fluent for gamedesign if the admins are overwhelmed i would look into giving a helping hand.
Thinbking about it i have trouble to believe that ads can raise 500$/month that easily.
On the other hand the first patreon goal is remove ads to pay the server maybe we should try to convince him to switch the goals, reintroduce the ads and grant he fourth goal instead which ist just 500$ more than the third...
$534 of $2,000
per month
If I reach this goal, I'll be able to continuously work on high-effort features and bugfixes that have been back-burnered (some for several years), such as a set of tools that make it easier for artists to collaborate and remix each others' work (like allowing people to draw, paint, and compose simple music in comments) while doing the legwork of keeping track of licensing and attribution information automatically. I'd also like to set up spaces where game developers can set up art archives specific to their game to make content creation easier.
>The website is worth quite a sum, at least the domain.
Sigh. As someone who bought and sold domains for a while, I can't let that one pass.
Maybe your right. All you need for a big sale are one person who thinks its worth handing money over and the owner wanting to sell. So in that sense, it only matters what two people think. so there are some unknowns.
Normally, though, someone who buys a domain looks at things like how to make money off of it. The common solution of looking at hit counts and then ad earnings per view and multiplying that out doesn't work here. There are no ads, and users aren't used to ads and in fact are strongly opposed to ads. Plan to milk it until you kill it and hope you get enough money to make it worthwhile by the standard model.
Uniqueness? Again, anybody can do the exact same thing at any time. Free and open art includes the idea that other people can do the same thing with even the same content.
Reputation, and the willingness to work with it for some benefit could come into play. Professional artists might fund such a thing, but then it'd be both supporting and undercutting their business model. Maybe something more educational oriented, like a coding cooperative. They exist.
Otherwise it's a donation model like a charity. That's reputation also, really. That could work. Lots of places do it.
I don't know what it takes, but even just being a charity recipient at Humble Bundle once would bring in more money than the site has ever seen, and it certainly fits a lot better theme-wise than some other charities there. "Support the site that makes many games possible."
So... anybody got Steam games featuring art from here who want to put something together? If we want it to be a long range goal it suggests getting a group together and making a game or ten and getting them on Steam solely to raise support for the site. Weird motivation for something super complicated, but I've seen stranger things. Kenney has his art pack on Steam, and I know of at least a few games there have some overlap here. Some others I'd probably recognize.
Brainstorming in public unfortunately undercuts any potential of me (or anyone else) buying the site to fit their own plans. Or maybe that's fortunately. Who knows anymore.
@Rainbow Design
He meant that the ads he runs currently barely cover the server costs, which sounds very plausible, not that the Ads do not cover $500 or the server costs $500.
The goals are all pretty high, probably because he is some IT guy in real life who makes $5000 per month or so, that may be why his highest goal is that high.
I know what servers cost and he even told me himself what his costs.
@dannorder
http://www.worthofweb.com/website-value/opengameart.org/
I know those estimates are over inflated, but it shows that there is significant traffic, if anyone wants that or has an idea to use that, then the site is worth something to him.
And regarding the art being used in real projects I think most people overestimate the weight of free art in the scene. Opengameart lives mostly of small 2D art stuff, since those games are easy to create, but serious 3D game developers that make use of free art are very rare, if they even exist at all.
I browsed through almost all free content available on the whole internet and regarding 3D art compatible content, there is almost nothing that fits gameready standarts. Not even on blendswap which has much more 3D models with higher quality in general, I could not find a single gameready model there that at least partly fits current standarts.
And helping to raise even more money will not help, since for over a year it is a blackhole project pretty much, he already receives far more than anyone else in the scene and nothing is happening.
https://www.patreon.com/Yughues for example just receives 50$ per month so roughly 10% of what opengameart gets and he works almost daily to create new content, so you actually get something for your money. For $500 some people already would work fulltime. He is already the highest earning 3D artist and even kenney is only at $134 https://www.patreon.com/kenney and he pumps out insanely many assets.
I don't think we need to worry about what money goes on whatever for whatever, it's what Bart is asking so he can man the site on a fulltime basis, for which he can continue to complete all the things he wanted to do from the beginning, and fix all the issues we have been experiencing.
i personally don't think $2000 is to much to ask for, here in the UK that works out about just under £1200 a month, on a 40 hour full time contract that's around £8.00 an hour. Once you paided your taxes and whatever it doesn't leave very much to live on, you might just scrape by, so for me the patreon targets are justified.
Bart has said on many occasions that he cannot afford to take time off his work to focus on OGA, which is understandable, but maybe with the goals reached he can then make OGA his priority and do other paid work at his own discretion.
That said, no one really hears much from Bart, or that he is very rarly on the site, for whatever reasons and maybe that is damaging towards him with regards for generating the support he needs, and maybe raises questions by some of us in the community whether he is actually committed still to OGA like he once was.
Chasersgaming | Support | Monstropolis |
To borrow from the good poet, I don't think it's a matter that Bart loves OGA less, but rather that he loves his children and family more.
I don't think there's much point to discussing where the patreon money goes or how much the OGA brand might be worth in a sale. If folks want to discuss those issues can they please start a new thread and talk about them there?
For this thread, I'd like us to stay focused on:
How to fix search?
How to organize the OGA community so the site is not so entirely reliant on single person for fixes and foreard development?
I have time, 15 hours a week, but don't know the code, so not really sure how I can't help other than to encourage everyone to the patreon drive. If there is something then let me know.
Chasersgaming | Support | Monstropolis |
Actually you called the thread site - administration.
For the search we can only hope that someone with admin rights says something to it.
@RainbowDesign: Sorry I didn't mean to imply that questions about the server arrangement or patreon money were inappropriate or somehow wrong for folks to raise here. You're right, given the subject of the thread, they're entirely reasonable discussion points to have brought up.
All the same, I'd still ask that discussion of the patreon money and server arrangement be moved to different thread. As you can imagine, they are huge topics for discussion in their own right, and as stated my main concern is how to get search fixed and how to transition the site away from it's heavy dependence on one person. I think it'll be all to easy to lose sight of these goals if we get caught up in a discussion of the patreon and server setups.
I gave it some thought. Patreon thing is relatively new
So I guess the balance is still negative
Not everything has to be continually developed. The site is feature complete. What more development does it need?
Well it's a place we can upload and make available our opensource projects without running our own server which would be hacked and geo-located by people who have personal issues with us. Why wouldn't we use it?
Not as long as I'm alive: I'll still be posting my models and music here.
Hopefully full backups of the site, files, HDD the site is on are made from time to time.
Takes dedication to find the gems in the site: perseverance, gumption. All good qualities. This is what, I guess, the site owners wish to support in the populance.
farrer: Perhaps clone dump tar.gz, sans passwords and private messages, should be made? That would be a monumental download tho. But like just a backup of the whole site you can DL: like wikipedia does. Offline library of openness. Maybe they could burn blu-rays of it and distribute those as an idea? Distribute the baskets etc?
I don't know, just a thought I had. I try to distribut backups of my projects just incase also.
I think people are fear mongering here. The owner needs to just clone everything everysooften (every day maybe?) and keep backups, then if some disaster occurs, just restore from last. Also maybe do some raid with 3 redundant discs or so?
@Duion
Chaos-Esque Anthology uses lots of OGA stuff and blendswap stuff. But it's not a "real" project. No OpenSource projects are "real": obviously opensource games are not going to be AAA as the focus is, in OSS projects, always on the programming, not as much obsessing over little details in assets and getting up in a huff.
AAA games have "great" assets because people are paid to do what they don't want to do: take orders and waste their lives serving a master that will give them essentially nothing in return. They lack gameplay though. They usually even lack interiors in their buildings, proper ballistics (because you can't compute it easily with no-volume meshes (unlike BSP which is all convex and volume is easy to compute), etc.
@MikeeUSA
Well Chaos-Esque might be a real project, but it just ignores performance questions such as polycount LOD levels etc and also ignores a consistend art style or if the assets work properly with animations etc. If you do that, then yes you can make a game with those assets.
I did not see a single free asset creator (besides myself) catching up to the latest standarts like creating performance conscious assets by keeping reasonable polycount, reasonable texture size, correct model and texture formats, correct material setup, creating LOD levels, creating collisionmeshes etc and all that. So why is that?
Looking at recent 2D games which need quite strong hardware to display simple 2D things i am afraid only free games seem to give something about performance....
But the discussion is not about if oga is unneedet i think you can look at the visitor statistics.
But that is all quite offtopic...
I think you know the admins better than i do maybe you just ask one of them directly when he finds the time to replace the search with the standart drupal search forms... Actually that might be a work of 1-2 hours.
@MikeeUSA Probably the dump isn't necessary (but maybe it is), as I believe that just the code and the database schema (from where we can heavily populate with some dummy random words for title comments tags and descriptions and whatever else is searchable) would be sufficient to try to set a 'debug mirror' to the search. Anyway, besides being myself a developer (C/C++), I have no experience on web development and less so on drupal, so I could be strongly wrong.
@capbros The workaround proposed to hidden the broken search and just set the 'search by title and search by description' is the best to do now. At the long sight, btw, I still believe that the release of the site's source code would be good (anyway, I do not known how hard would be to setup a debug mirror).
About the community (re)organization, that already began with more people with high permissions access and Bart's comment on the previous page saying that 'If there are other people here who do have both the time and inclination to work on the site code, I'd be willing to talk about that.'
@Duion Well Chaos-Esque might be a real project, but it just ignores performance questions such as polycount LOD levels etc
::
Chaos-Esque uses LOD extensivly (as does Xonotic).
Additionally Chaos-Esque has over 130 weapons. It has full sets of various styles with maps, vehicles, etc to go with them. One doesn't have to use one with the other if you don't wish. There are full sets of medeval things, futuristic things, and modern things. Life is not consistent in art style either, nor was Unreal Tournament 1999 or Quake: all had various sets of things (textures in those cases) so you could make the world you wanted. Chaos-Esque seeks to follow this tradition.
Yes, you may have LODs but the point was, that you cannot get the weapons made with LODs, you have to add them yourself.
Keep it on topic, guys.
--Medicine Storm
@Duion O, you're talking about what artist make.
Yes often we have to reduce polycount alot, and then make lots of LODs. Blendswap models are often way way way too heavy and a day or 2 is taken to get the model down to a game-usable size. And that's just for LOD0. OpenGameArt models are usually good tho.
Making the rest of the LODs is a fun puzzle. There are some that I can't get down any furthur :P
However recent blenders are so good a decimation, I can use that now almost in all cases... somewhat takes away the fun tho.
One thing we wish is that monsters would be animated that people upload, that would be cool. Just walk, attack, dead, standing, etc are fine for monsters. Also wish there were cute anime girls we could add to game... like the young wikipe-tan. That would make a great player model and is an opensource mascot.
Site seems fine, no need to worry I don't think: it does what it's supposed to do: hold and showcase opensource content.
"A day or two" well in that time you can make the model from scratch as well, but then what is the point in downloading them in the first place if they do not save you time?
Umm... Why would you derail this thread? You can open new threads if you don't want to use your announcement thread.
Off-topic comments after this point will be deleted.
--Medicine Storm
Just my two cents, but OGA design looks so bland and outdated by now and all the efforts made are just to keep it from sinking. Also, i can see a tendency of 3D artists migrating to sites like Unity-store or the likes.
I have been a collaborator and user of OGA for years so it pains me to see it getting stagnant, in the past small contests were hold, or commisions ordered using donations, ambitious games posted their developments... nowadays i can only see a notice months old and can barely distingish between "popular" and "lastest art" because of how everything is layered (cluttered is a better word), not to speak about the almost non existant forum community. Great models are buried somewhere where newcomers arent likely to ever find them, the searching function not helping much at that (lizardman, dwarf, barbarian and executor being the maximun exponent, which by the way were commissioned).
So i think that a starting page redesign should be max priority, highligthing the historical best in a big way (ramdonly or whatever) and making smaller and better ordered the popular, recent art... The focus is all wrong looking trought newcomers eyes, making everything hard to find by a dull looking and confusing GUI.
Next, tags should be rigid, and any new model author check the ones he thinks fits, (2d, 3d, characters, firniture...) have a look at blendswap for a good sample of this.
As far new development, I could see the case for putting a priority on re-tooling the main page.
But IMHO beyond a shadow of a doubt any and all work on the site right now should be focused on fixing, patching, adjusting, or otherwise kludging search so that it returns results newer than January 2016.
The is an absolutely core feature that needs to work properly and it is a serious disservice to everyone who has posted work in the last year, bordering on disgrace, that their work is ignored by searches.
Here is something you can try which seems to work ok,
on the advance search page, type in something as you would, like "character" or "rocket" in the Title space, then change the SORT BY category to "Post Date" then hit the search.
And hopefully you will get results from the latest posts.
ive tried it and works ok for me, if it works for you then that's great!,
maybe admins can make the 'post date' the default?
I have only tried one search word, not sure about multiple words.
:)
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