I've played allmost all the games mentioned so far, I'd say Wesnoth can be loads of fun, however it can be rather counter intuitive at times, and modding it is a pita, after working on a new race for it I got totally turned off pixel art. I think it would work really well on a touchscreen though and I've been waiting for it to get ported to android, I know I would play it constantly if it ever makes it across. From a user perspective I'd say it needs more unit and environment animations, but having tried my hand at making some, I can definately see why its lacking in that area.
Glest has potential, but it feels quite ponderous and clunky, I suspect some of it is UI, but some of it seems to be design choices around build order, build times and responsiveness. Still, I hope to see more progress on it as time goes by.
Warsow/Nexuiz/Alien Arena/Tremulous/Saurbrauten all seem to be the same game to me, unreal tornament. Its like the FPS genre moved on to greater realism and intergration of rpg elements but all the FOSS shooters stuck with the old hyperfast twitchy-jumpy multicoloured fragfests. While the engines are an awesome achievement, it would take some serious changes to gameplay for me to be won over by any of these shooters. I like the look of CubeCreate, but having seen what that community did with Javascript, sadly I can't imagine the lua version will amount to much more than a series of casual minigames.
On the rpg front, there seem to be a billion and one 2D or isometric games, however, while I can sometimes get into a retro mood, for real immersion 2D just doesn't do it for me anymore and I can never manage more than an hour or two on any of these. I did my time on nethack clones, and I know it seems shallow to say this, but until one of them has a decent UI and some 3D graphics, I've had my fill of that genre too.
There are of course the mmorpgs, the likes of ryzhome and planeshift, however they all seem to be stuck in a timewarp, clinging to horrid gameplay mechanics and aging graphics like a badge of honour. Again I hate to be a graphics whore, but the textures need updating and the animations are jagged and weak, and in the case of Planeshift in particular the world seems abandoned, empty and lifeless. I wanted so much to like planeshift, heavily roleplay oriented and a unique world idea, but instead I found myself alone in a blocky world hunting rats with a blunt knife and no idea why. Any game that does that to me gets dumped.
I'm quite liking UFO:AI, which is why I've been doing some texture work for them, but it still needs a lot of work before I would seriously recomend it. I really hope to see a necromunda mod come out of it someday, however, once the storyline mode is complete and a few bugs get ironed out, I think it will be a really solid game, even if it does suck resources like nobodies business on Linux.
I am really looking forward to the Arx Fatalis port since it was open sourced, and freespace has made wonderful progress since being open sourced too, so has 0a.d but it is a bit sad that the best FOSS games around seem to be all ports of ex commercial games.
Personally I am still waiting for a FOSS version of something like morrowind or fallout 3, however It seems like I'll be waiting forever since no one seems to be working on anything like that.
Seems like a good idea, particularly the check boxes. I would suggest that being able to filter WIP results by the level of completeness during a search might also be handy.
To be honest the banner seems way too large, I'm a web developer by trade and we generally consider 120px to be the optimum height for a banner, with 200 px being the absolute maximum which is generally only used if the nav elements are within the banner. The reason for this is usability, a banner any larger than that takes up a huge amount of space, particularly on small screens, and forces users to scroll down to actually use the site in any meaningful way. If you really want a huge banner I would suggest a splash page or landing page which then leads to the main site which has a smaller banner. Have you ever heard of the term "above the fold"? it refers to all the content which is viewable without scrolling down, it is the section where you place your most important content, and in an ideal situation, all of your content, it is the area that will get the most impressions and the area which people will most commonly use to navigate your site.
The title banner is decoration, it is to accentuate the rest of teh page's content, rather than distract from it. Which is why you will notice most large sites have a fairly small banner and tend to stick to fairly neutral colours for the banner. I would suggest trying out one of the many colour palette generators online and sticking to 3 main colours for the sites layout.
I would suggest that both your current banner and the new banner both distract from the content of your site and decrease usability, discouraging repeat users and long stays. I do hope this feedback is not to critical, hopefully you can find some constructive points to help you with your design
I get the feeling hiponboy designed it with flare in mind, seeing as he posted in this thread saying he was working on a ui for you, and then posted that ui. I had actually been thinking of working on a new UI for you just from looking at the screenshots, until I found hiponboy's, which is superb.
Also, there is obviously a lot of interest in the linux version, have you thought of creating an easy linux installer, rather than making everyone compile from source?
If you used the soundcloud drupal module users could chose to upload songs to soundcloud through OGA, or publish their songs from soundcloud onto OGA. You could upload every track on OGA into an OGA user account on Soundcloud, and then pull back a list of the most recent tracks on OGA's account. This method is especially cool since it lets you shift a lot of the bandwidth off this site and onto soundcloud, and it may well let us tap into a huge well of soundcloud users.
Thanks Anon, although like I said, they are probably too poly heavy to be of much use in game without some tweaking, still they might be useful as is for prerendered scenes.
the jplayer link provided is a drupal wrapper for jplayer, if you go straight to the source jquery implementation it supports ogg, mp3 and degrades back to flash on older browsers. It might not be as plug and play as the drupal module, but there is certainly a way to get it working with a little bit of jquery coding. The easiest way would be using Jplayer playlists as demoed here: http://www.jplayer.org/latest/demo-02/
The playlists are stored as a variable in a piece of code like this:
So lets say I've just uploaded a new file, all you need to do is extract the filename, object name and an optional image filename, store them as temporary variables, and then inset those variables into current_playlist.html
That'll get you an embedded html5 playlist of the latest audio uploaded to the site.
Although if you wanted to get even trickier you could probably.. *goes off to look through the jplayer drupal module*
Actually, I don't see anything in the module which actually restricts the filetypes, it looks more like the old version of jplayer didn't support it. But since the module is just a wrapper that'll use the latest version which *does* support it, the drupal module probably supports it too.
I'd recomend grabbing the latest versions of the jplayer drupal module and the jplayer jquery code, chucking them up on a dev instance as seeing if it works with ogg, because it certainly looks like it should now, no matter what the drupal module says.
I've played allmost all the games mentioned so far, I'd say Wesnoth can be loads of fun, however it can be rather counter intuitive at times, and modding it is a pita, after working on a new race for it I got totally turned off pixel art. I think it would work really well on a touchscreen though and I've been waiting for it to get ported to android, I know I would play it constantly if it ever makes it across. From a user perspective I'd say it needs more unit and environment animations, but having tried my hand at making some, I can definately see why its lacking in that area.
Glest has potential, but it feels quite ponderous and clunky, I suspect some of it is UI, but some of it seems to be design choices around build order, build times and responsiveness. Still, I hope to see more progress on it as time goes by.
Warsow/Nexuiz/Alien Arena/Tremulous/Saurbrauten all seem to be the same game to me, unreal tornament. Its like the FPS genre moved on to greater realism and intergration of rpg elements but all the FOSS shooters stuck with the old hyperfast twitchy-jumpy multicoloured fragfests. While the engines are an awesome achievement, it would take some serious changes to gameplay for me to be won over by any of these shooters. I like the look of CubeCreate, but having seen what that community did with Javascript, sadly I can't imagine the lua version will amount to much more than a series of casual minigames.
On the rpg front, there seem to be a billion and one 2D or isometric games, however, while I can sometimes get into a retro mood, for real immersion 2D just doesn't do it for me anymore and I can never manage more than an hour or two on any of these. I did my time on nethack clones, and I know it seems shallow to say this, but until one of them has a decent UI and some 3D graphics, I've had my fill of that genre too.
There are of course the mmorpgs, the likes of ryzhome and planeshift, however they all seem to be stuck in a timewarp, clinging to horrid gameplay mechanics and aging graphics like a badge of honour. Again I hate to be a graphics whore, but the textures need updating and the animations are jagged and weak, and in the case of Planeshift in particular the world seems abandoned, empty and lifeless. I wanted so much to like planeshift, heavily roleplay oriented and a unique world idea, but instead I found myself alone in a blocky world hunting rats with a blunt knife and no idea why. Any game that does that to me gets dumped.
I'm quite liking UFO:AI, which is why I've been doing some texture work for them, but it still needs a lot of work before I would seriously recomend it. I really hope to see a necromunda mod come out of it someday, however, once the storyline mode is complete and a few bugs get ironed out, I think it will be a really solid game, even if it does suck resources like nobodies business on Linux.
I am really looking forward to the Arx Fatalis port since it was open sourced, and freespace has made wonderful progress since being open sourced too, so has 0a.d but it is a bit sad that the best FOSS games around seem to be all ports of ex commercial games.
Personally I am still waiting for a FOSS version of something like morrowind or fallout 3, however It seems like I'll be waiting forever since no one seems to be working on anything like that.
Seems like a good idea, particularly the check boxes. I would suggest that being able to filter WIP results by the level of completeness during a search might also be handy.
To be honest the banner seems way too large, I'm a web developer by trade and we generally consider 120px to be the optimum height for a banner, with 200 px being the absolute maximum which is generally only used if the nav elements are within the banner. The reason for this is usability, a banner any larger than that takes up a huge amount of space, particularly on small screens, and forces users to scroll down to actually use the site in any meaningful way. If you really want a huge banner I would suggest a splash page or landing page which then leads to the main site which has a smaller banner. Have you ever heard of the term "above the fold"? it refers to all the content which is viewable without scrolling down, it is the section where you place your most important content, and in an ideal situation, all of your content, it is the area that will get the most impressions and the area which people will most commonly use to navigate your site.
The title banner is decoration, it is to accentuate the rest of teh page's content, rather than distract from it. Which is why you will notice most large sites have a fairly small banner and tend to stick to fairly neutral colours for the banner. I would suggest trying out one of the many colour palette generators online and sticking to 3 main colours for the sites layout.
I would suggest that both your current banner and the new banner both distract from the content of your site and decrease usability, discouraging repeat users and long stays. I do hope this feedback is not to critical, hopefully you can find some constructive points to help you with your design
So cute! ^_^ I just had to make some more skins for it!
http://opengameart.org/content/additional-skins-for-the-cartoony-helicopter
No need to wait, kinect to blender mocap is a reality
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PtxfRpCBHE&feature=player_embedded#at=126
The program is "Brekel", its available here:
http://www.brekel.com/?page_id=155
may I ask where to get the existing ui files?
pfunked, have you thought about using this gui?
http://opengameart.org/content/moderna-graphical-interface
I get the feeling hiponboy designed it with flare in mind, seeing as he posted in this thread saying he was working on a ui for you, and then posted that ui. I had actually been thinking of working on a new UI for you just from looking at the screenshots, until I found hiponboy's, which is superb.
Also, there is obviously a lot of interest in the linux version, have you thought of creating an easy linux installer, rather than making everyone compile from source?
I might also suggest plugging into the soundcloud API, perhaps even using cloudplayer playlists.
http://soundcloud.com/developers/console
If you used the soundcloud drupal module users could chose to upload songs to soundcloud through OGA, or publish their songs from soundcloud onto OGA. You could upload every track on OGA into an OGA user account on Soundcloud, and then pull back a list of the most recent tracks on OGA's account. This method is especially cool since it lets you shift a lot of the bandwidth off this site and onto soundcloud, and it may well let us tap into a huge well of soundcloud users.
Thanks Anon, although like I said, they are probably too poly heavy to be of much use in game without some tweaking, still they might be useful as is for prerendered scenes.
the jplayer link provided is a drupal wrapper for jplayer, if you go straight to the source jquery implementation it supports ogg, mp3 and degrades back to flash on older browsers. It might not be as plug and play as the drupal module, but there is certainly a way to get it working with a little bit of jquery coding. The easiest way would be using Jplayer playlists as demoed here: http://www.jplayer.org/latest/demo-02/
The playlists are stored as a variable in a piece of code like this:
var mediaPlaylist = new Playlist("1", [{
name:"Big Buck Bunny Trailer",
m4v:"http://www.jplayer.org/video/m4v/Big_Buck_Bunny_Trailer_480x270_h264aac.m4v",
ogv:"http://www.jplayer.org/video/ogv/Big_Buck_Bunny_Trailer_480x270.ogv",
poster:"http://www.jplayer.org/video/poster/Big_Buck_Bunny_Trailer_480x270.png"
},
{
name:"Tempered Song",
mp3:"http://www.jplayer.org/audio/mp3/Miaow-01-Tempered-song.mp3",
oga:"http://www.jplayer.org/audio/ogg/Miaow-01-Tempered-song.ogg",
poster: "http://www.jplayer.org/audio/poster/Miaow_132x132.jpg"
},
{
name:"Finding Nemo Teaser",
m4v: "http://www.jplayer.org/video/m4v/Finding_Nemo_Teaser_640x352_h264aac.m4v",
ogv: "http://www.jplayer.org/video/ogv/Finding_Nemo_Teaser_640x352.ogv",
poster: "http://www.jplayer.org/video/poster/Finding_Nemo_Teaser_640x352.png"
},
{
name:"Hidden",
mp3:"http://www.jplayer.org/audio/mp3/Miaow-02-Hidden.mp3",
oga:"http://www.jplayer.org/audio/ogg/Miaow-02-Hidden.ogg",
poster: "http://www.jplayer.org/audio/poster/Miaow_132x132.jpg"
},
{
name:"Incredibles Teaser",
m4v: "http://www.jplayer.org/video/m4v/Incredibles_Teaser_640x272_h264aac.m4v",
ogv: "http://www.jplayer.org/video/ogv/Incredibles_Teaser_640x272.ogv",
poster: "http://www.jplayer.org/video/poster/Incredibles_Teaser_640x272.png"
},
{
name:"Lentement",
mp3:"http://www.jplayer.org/audio/mp3/Miaow-03-Lentement.mp3",
oga:"http://www.jplayer.org/audio/ogg/Miaow-03-Lentement.ogg",
poster: "http://www.jplayer.org/audio/poster/Miaow_132x132.jpg"
}
So lets say I've just uploaded a new file, all you need to do is extract the filename, object name and an optional image filename, store them as temporary variables, and then inset those variables into current_playlist.html
That'll get you an embedded html5 playlist of the latest audio uploaded to the site.
Although if you wanted to get even trickier you could probably.. *goes off to look through the jplayer drupal module*
Actually, I don't see anything in the module which actually restricts the filetypes, it looks more like the old version of jplayer didn't support it. But since the module is just a wrapper that'll use the latest version which *does* support it, the drupal module probably supports it too.
I'd recomend grabbing the latest versions of the jplayer drupal module and the jplayer jquery code, chucking them up on a dev instance as seeing if it works with ogg, because it certainly looks like it should now, no matter what the drupal module says.
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