hello. my advice as a consumer (i have not the skills to add assets) of this site.
First, some suggestions about content structure to ease (in my opinion) navigation in the site.
- add a notice (in asset presentation page) to explain how to get credit file (and so collection) & add button download credit for individual assets
- add a notice (in collection page) to explain what are collection for (assets that comes together ? video game project ?) // personally i always keep my assets library locally because i doubt between some assets until the end of the game dev.
- add a clear and concise paragraph/scheme at beginning of homepage to answer the five Ws (who, what, where, when, how, how many (optionnal), why / for what)
- many things are in FAQ.... FAQ is for motivated people : try to answer question before people have to go in FAQ
( - i would love to have an API to use OGA from my scripts )
Second, some thoughts about the main topic points 1) and 5):
1) About GIFs, this is effectively complex. And there is 2 points. A good example of the problem is : https://opengameart.org/content/cat-fighter-sprite-sheet where we see N times the same pictures and have to click to see the animation on a previewer over the page.
Below my opinion with reasonning.
a) When animate ? If we look in many search engines, GIF are animated on click.
When clicked, it open/unhide a preview block that play the animation. For exploring one by one the images, it is pretty enjoyable. This design is probably motivated by the fact that hover is not usable on smartphones/tablet pc.
So on user side, i think there's 2 good solutions: - the "click for animate" like used by popular search engine can work very well. In fact this similar to the current behavior on the differences that (on duckduckgo for example): - the preview window don't hide other contents - the size of the previewer is stable. - the "hover for animate", sadly not compatible with tablet/smartphone, but easier to implement that previous one.
Too, in order to easy identify a GIF from other images , the same kind of indicators that are on videos sharing site could be used , that is a rectangle with duration.Too it can be usefull to show number of frames.
b) About the choice of the preview; going back the the aim of the site : assets for video games.
For example, in point&click games, hover make only appear the name of the element, the animation is played on click (action). It is fun, i made a choice and accepted the action, and i don't want animation played while i was on simple observation.
This is the subject : observation phase (hover or focus) before action (click).
In observation, it could be usefull to have the key moments (start postion - illustration of move - end position ////// or just the illustration of move in cat fighter example) as a preview. I don't think these moments can be analysed by a simple algorithm. The contributor have to choose what is the key moment of the GIF (it could be done by a time cursor interface, but if someone can do an animated image of good quality, this person can easily take the key images from the source).
5) About adding a "left and right" preview button for if someone has more then one preview image. I like the idea, and more could it be combined with a timed preview sequence on hover .
hello. my advice as a consumer (i have not the skills to add assets) of this site.
First, some suggestions about content structure to ease (in my opinion) navigation in the site.
- add a notice (in asset presentation page) to explain how to get credit file (and so collection) & add button download credit for individual assets
- add a notice (in collection page) to explain what are collection for (assets that comes together ? video game project ?) // personally i always keep my assets library locally because i doubt between some assets until the end of the game dev.
- add a clear and concise paragraph/scheme at beginning of homepage to answer the five Ws (who, what, where, when, how, how many (optionnal), why / for what)
- many things are in FAQ.... FAQ is for motivated people : try to answer question before people have to go in FAQ
( - i would love to have an API to use OGA from my scripts )
Second, some thoughts about the main topic points 1) and 5):
1) About GIFs, this is effectively complex. And there is 2 points.
A good example of the problem is : https://opengameart.org/content/cat-fighter-sprite-sheet
where we see N times the same pictures and have to click to see the animation on a previewer over the page.
Below my opinion with reasonning.
a) When animate ?
If we look in many search engines, GIF are animated on click.
When clicked, it open/unhide a preview block that play the animation. For exploring one by one the images, it is pretty enjoyable.
This design is probably motivated by the fact that hover is not usable on smartphones/tablet pc.
So on user side, i think there's 2 good solutions:
- the "click for animate" like used by popular search engine can work very well.
In fact this similar to the current behavior on the differences that (on duckduckgo for example):
- the preview window don't hide other contents
- the size of the previewer is stable.
- the "hover for animate", sadly not compatible with tablet/smartphone, but easier to implement that previous one.
Too, in order to easy identify a GIF from other images , the same kind of indicators that are on videos sharing site could be used , that is a rectangle with duration.Too it can be usefull to show number of frames.
b) About the choice of the preview; going back the the aim of the site : assets for video games.
For example, in point&click games, hover make only appear the name of the element, the animation is played on click (action). It is fun, i made a choice and accepted the action, and i don't want animation played while i was on simple observation.
This is the subject : observation phase (hover or focus) before action (click).
In observation, it could be usefull to have the key moments (start postion - illustration of move - end position ////// or just the illustration of move in cat fighter example) as a preview.
I don't think these moments can be analysed by a simple algorithm.
The contributor have to choose what is the key moment of the GIF (it could be done by a time cursor interface, but if someone can do an animated image of good quality, this person can easily take the key images from the source).
5) About adding a "left and right" preview button for if someone has more then one preview image. I like the idea, and more could it be combined with a timed preview sequence on hover .