I'm more thinking like classifying the campaigns into groups like Pre Great War Era, Great War Era, Post Great War Era, FreeSpace 2 Era, Post FreeSpace 2 Era and then within its group using alphabetic ordering.
Exactly. IMHO this is the only way that makes sense, as nearly every user-made campaign is incompatible, story-wise, with nearly every other.
What usefulness does alphabetical order serve? If you're searching for a specific campaign, you can always do a text-search for all or part of the name (if you don't remember it all). It doesn't matter if they're incompatible; the time that campaigns happen is a fairly common thing to be specified (vaguely or specifically) in campaigns based in the freespace universe. It does have effects on the plot. Realistically, a campaign set immediately after the destruction of the Lucifer will be dealing with mop-ups or infighting etc, while a campaign set 30 years later will be dealing with the NTF. A campaign set immediately after Capella will also be dealing mop-ups and infighting, but 20-30 years later, dealing with the opening of the Knossos.
You can group them all into different groups, but we're very limited by what's in the Freespace universe. What would we call a campaign set 100 years after Capella? Post-post-post Second Great War?
Or we could just stick it at the bottom of the list and note the time period.
I don't like the new categories. Not only are they inaccurate (Transcend and Derelict did not occur during Freespace 2, STL is listed in the same section as the port although it occurs immediately afterwards), but they also require further explanation. Everybody is going to use Freespace 1 and Freespace 2 as reference points. We basically have 3 points of reference that everybody knows: Now, Freespace 1, and Freespace 2. Campaigns happen among one of these 3. They're canon and indisputable. We could add something like "Discovery of subspace", but then you'd have people going back to the techroom to figure out when that was. Plus, even total FS newbies will understand "Present Day".
Let the descriptions handle the timeframe IMHO. In the end, even though all FS campaigns establish a time in relation to FS or FS2, it doesn't necessarily matter to the plot.
So.. what descriptors (or qualities or values) ought to be considered important? And how should they be depicted (sp?)
Should there be something else?
Should one or more of those be removed?
Should the existing info be shown in some different manner (like instead of single letter abbreviations use something like seen in the sandbox example or something? Small identifying images like tags?
Comments?
My initial suggestion for the "V" and "M" letters was to have an icon for them, but nobody seemed willing or able to come up with a replacement. "Yes" and "No" would be more confusing once you scrolled past the captions at the top of the list, which will happen no matter how you break the campaigns up. I initially thought that the "Notification that the mod requires additional downloads" field was supposed to mean that the campaign provided additional mods, because required mods were already specified in the "Requirements" section.
For requirements I'd suggest drawing a line and categorising into three groups
- Works in retail
- Works in 3.6.9/3.6.10
- Unknown
That way we avoid the nonsense of having people download campaigns that don't work (like COW for instance) and it's more future proof. It also makes it easy for people to suggest what the restoration team should fix next. Once we have 3.6.11 and 3.7 releases we can add groups/icons for them.
There should really only be two categories, "SCP (current version)" and "Retail", since SCP is supposed to be backwards compatible. Frankly, the current version seems more idiot-proof than splitting them up into lists. Someone who sees them split up might think that you can only play retail on retail, and SCP on SCP. With the current list, if the requirement is simply retail, they see "Freespace 2". Well, of course they have that! Then they see "FS2_Open". Well, what's that? They click the link and find out. Or, they see "Inferno", and install FS2_Open. The only way for them to screw up is if they completely ignore the field (and, granted, every time you idiot-proof something, somebody builds a better idiot).
My CommentsFrankly I'm annoyed because it seems like everybody is putting less thought into this than I did when I uploaded the list. "Downloads" has been moved over to the left, when I had it on the far right so that it was easy to see and click. You read all the information from left to right and then you're ready to make your decision.
But I'm also annoyed because all of the suggestions that people are coming up with is to break the list up. A list that has a grand total of six campaigns.
At this stage, there is no reason to break the list up into anything, it's barely even a list. Splitting it up will only make it harder for people to add campaigns, and
that is what's hardest to get done around here. Everybody is willing to play critic and come up with their own way to tweak the campaign list into something that seems better, and we could do this forever, but nobody is willing to just get it done.
Also, I consider the campaign list on HLP to be absolutely unusable precisely because somebody attempted to split it up in a way that makes sense - to them. But it clearly doesn't work for finding a campaign that you know the name to, and it doesn't really work for browsing to find a campaign that you want to play, and in the end that's what matters (IMHO). Nobody who frequents the FREDding forum is going to care how this list looks. The people who see this list will be playing the game for the first time, they won't know what all the different eras are, they won't know what the different mods are, they'll just see a campaign that looks interesting and want to play it.
Having them ordered from past at the top to the present at the bottom is an order that makes sense to anybody who's seen a vertical timeline. It gives them a clear visual point of reference of whether a campaign is temporally close or temporally distant to Freespace 1 or 2. The release tells them whether they can play it. The requirements tell them how long it will take for them to get it. The number of missions tell them how big an investment it's going to be. The author lets them group quality campaigns from crap campaigns and pick an author whose FREDding and story style that they like. The notes let them see things that are useful to know but don't need to be explained further than "Yes" or "No". The description gives them an idea of what the campaign will be like (BoE conflicts, or guerilla fighting, or spec ops, etc). And the "Download" link lets them go directly to where they can get the campaign, rather than spending a half hour poking through a wiki that they're not familiar with or a forum that they're not familiar with to get the campaign.
So...that is my rationale for what was up there.
