FreeOrion

Hello,

Firstly, thanks to everyone who has pointed me to various artists and locations to finding bits of the FreeOrion artwork.

I have however noticed that the graphics are scattered all over the place. For example,
- The artwork being used is found here, http://freeorion.sf.net/data.zip
- Some of the technology icons can be found here, http://www.freeorion.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1044
- I found some of the original sources for the category icons here, http://koti.mbnet.fi/~mystiqq/freeOrion ... llfive.zip
- There is a lot of good work which wasn't used is found here, http://www.freeorion.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1008

I think that a large amount of very good artwork is being lost. Comming from a project which lacks artists, I find this alarming.

Would it be possible to set up some type of media repository in which people could commit there works in progress, as well as final stuff. The idea would be that stuff would be commited to the repository and then discussed here in the forum as done previously.

If hardware, bandwidth or admin support is needed, I can provide them.

Hope this suggestion helps, any comments are welcome.

Tim Ansell

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http://www.thousandparsec.net/ - A journey of a thousand parsec starts with a single step

There aren't any people contributing at the moment, and I myself prefer to just upload my stuff to my server.

We did have a similar system as you've proposed in the past but personally I always found it somehow laborious. I'm not quite sure why we don't have it anymore.

In order to have any project art server space, we'd need to either have everyone who wants to upload something register first, which would likely be too complicated and would act as a barrier to entry, or make the server space publically usable and have someone constantly reviewing and filtering submitted content. In order for the latter to be usable, the filtering would have to be done after the art has been submitted and made pubically visible for some time, rather than before it can be accessed, so that there's not a long delay between submission and linkability. But this is problematic due to inevitable spam / vandalism...

So... it seems to me that, since you're so keen on archiving all the art that's submitted, you could just crawl the forums and compile any art you think it worth saving and host it yourself. Everything is supposedly CC licenced, so this shouldn't be a legal problem as long as you credit the creators.

Why not set up an repository with 2 directories...? Say a /pub and /approved kind of system... Make it FTP based where anyone can submit and then say the graphics leads and maybe some trusted users can tag submissions as 'keepers' and move them into the /approved dir? Just make the pub where people can only upload and not view the contents... pretty easy if someone has a *nix system around here...

But then again I don't have the server or the bandwidth or I'd do it...

Hehe... If you're really concerned here you could just burn them all to CD and let people know you have them.

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Computer programming is fun.

oh...

I'm not that concerned... just read over the post and figured that some system would be needed at some point... if there's going to be a large amount of race based artwork we'll definitely need something to manage all of the graphical assets... or not....

Just looking forward... and making drunken suggestions about possible solutions that I myself won't be the one providing said solutions...

LOL I sounded like Humphrey from 'Yes Minister' right there...

Anyways... nevermind me... I was just attempting to help

Why would registering be a barrier to entry?

Registering on the forums is required, why wouldn't it be the same for registering to submit for artwork? (Infact you could most probably authenticate against the forum database).



The problem is that if you, or your server disappears then the artwork could be easily lost. Specially if it's only a work in progress artwork or something which isn't yet been used.

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http://www.thousandparsec.net/ - A journey of a thousand parsec starts with a single step

An artwork repository would be a good idea, and definitely something we'll need. I haven't found a freely available webpackage that I like. Netcollab does the job, but I don't much like it.

Haha, I won't disappear.

Even though you're keen, there could be unexpected life events that prevent you from continued contribution and support. And there are other people whose art disappears... browsing through the forums does show a number of dead links... eg. anything on http://www.drektopia.com, and most short-term posters who link stuff but then disappear.

I'm not aware that we have lost any relevant artwork until now. It also doesn't make sense to me to keep every contribution and WIPs.

What is going to make it into the game goes to my HD.

This doesn't mean I'm against such a system, as long as it is easy to use.

Can't you use the same system (sourceforge) that is used to store each build of Fo, to the store graphics files.

I guess this would be possible, but I would prefer a system which provides a gallery.

I've set up a photobucket account:
http://s74.photobucket.com/albums/i251/freeorion/
username: *********
password: *******

Let's test this out. I invite everyone to upload some pictures, create some folders etc. Just play around with this. If everything works, I'll create a sticky thread.

Not ideal really, since anyone who's logged in could delete previously uploaded images...

Any suggestions? We could of course make the userdata available on request only, but this would mean additional work.

To prevent vandalism I could mirror everything regulary on my HD or server.