Hard Light Productions Forums
General FreeSpace => FreeSpace Discussion => Topic started by: an0n on April 02, 2008, 08:00:02 pm
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[size=9]MAKE.
PROPER.
MEDIA.[/size]
Don't expect everyone to download entire swathes of the internet to get to see the fruits of your tireless labouring.
Post pretty pictures. Make a video or two. Write a ****ing synopsis.
As things stand, the Freespace community is basically whoring it's wares to the Freespace community.
BAD IDEA!
Make proper releases. Regular updates. Run **** effectively, or the place is going to die an even slower death than it already is.
Goddamn non-market savvy, pansy ass....
/me grumbles
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Yeah, y'know, I agree with him. It's almost impossible to figure out FSOpen or the various releases without actually going through this forum. Inferno has serious problems with this.
BtRL is the best example of a project that's done it right.
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:wtf:
lol whut?
:wtf:
The SCP builds going around are betas (or at least, I hope they are)...not polished enough to be put together, but needing the testing...
Although, I have never figured out how to use the latest builds form myself.
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You guys obviously haven't seen ST:R's promotional plan.
But I agree. Used to be that HLP posted two or three news articles every day on the main page. Now we're lucky if something gets highlighted every month.
I hope that some of this will be alleviated with the new HLP main page, but we probably need a dedicated newsposter. Setekh and Windrunner are no longer around frequently enough.
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It's not even about news. It's about showing **** off.
They make a new ship and make a single thread about it in their project forum that rapidly becomes 3 pictures and 500 posts.
They need to release information and sparklies in a clear, concise and sexy manner.
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o rly?
[attachment deleted by ninja]
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While I do think you're taking this a bit far, I agree. Finding things such as old models is a real pain. Then you have the fact that the files that you need to run SCP in all its glory are spread all across this site.
I mean there should be a *Download 3.6.9* and relevant files or some such thread in a prominent location, but the fact is there isn't even a link to 3.6.9 anywhere on the forums (excepting Turey's Installer). When I first decided to install FS Open I went to the FS Open Support forum and found the installation instructions, which led to a thread with the VPs. Good right? Nope, the media VPs thread then linked to a thread that distributed a pre-3.6.9 build. This progression is still there now.
Sure it wasn't that difficult to find to find the correct build after that, but I have been a FreeSace fan for nearly ten years, so it was acceptable to me. If I had been merely curious about the game, I would have left immediately, everyone has better things to do.
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This is what I mean.
They're making the assumption that the people coming to check **** out will be HLPeople.
That they're gonna read through threads and downloading things piece-meal and config things manually.
When all anyone really wants is pretty pictures and sexy videos, and a frickin' EXE they can double-click to get everything to install itself.
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If I didn't love Freespace so much, I would have given up after the first few minutes trying to find how to play FS SCP. I think there needs to be a centralized location where files can be accessed and maybe even a .exe though Turey's Installer is good enough by my standards.
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Yes, it is a little difficult to coerce friends into playing FS2 SCP if they can't install it.
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First: http://www.freespacemods.net/
Second: I agree with an0n. Ironically I was just thinking about this tonight.
When I go to download a new program, or game, or anything, here's what I do -
I don't have time to read all of the latest changes in the changelog, 90% of which will most likely be for bugfixes. I don't really care about a massive list of features, and I don't care about a small list of features, because the former is boring and obscures the important things, and the latter leaves out the little things that could make all the difference.
So what I do is look at the screenshots and see what you can do and decide based on that. I get an idea of the features and how they're used. I get an idea of how easy they are to use. And more importantly, I learn whether the person designing the program knows what they're doing and cares about the person using the program, or if they're just packing a load of bull**** on their site and can't design/code for crap. Very often, the crappy programs have flimsy UI and it shows. Or, they have overly fancy UI that lags the whole thing down and causes crashes.
What pisses me off is when there are no screenshots. Then I usually google the thing to find out. But what no screenshots tells me is that the person who maintains the website or does the program doesn't care about how people perceive the program and they don't care about the time of the people who are about to use the program. And it's very easy to get caught up in this mentality, that I don't have to post pics, as a programmer, even if I do care about how much time people are going to spend to figure things out. But that's not what a lack of pictures conveys to an outside observer.
But most importantly, it's a lot easier to get passionate about a picture than it is to get passionate about a list of features. Especially for a game. And one of my major gripes about the SCP is that, even though the community *****es about Interplay not doing marketing, the community is pretty crap about it ourselves. BtRL gets a lot of mention because they hit the BSG fad and the 'official' game was crap. Also, they have very very pretty models. Also, they have somebody who goes out and contacts news sites and people involved with BSG and uses those contacts to publicize. The Freespace community as a whole does not have that person. Nor does it even have a decent website. (Whoever gets offended by that statement, tell me, that way I know who cares enough to direct my criticism at. Last time I made this complaint, I was told that HLP was working on something, and that was six months ago...)
I'm going to toss this idea out there of first-line and second-line development, where first-line is the people who make the stuff and second-line are the people who refine the stuff in order for general consumption by "everyone else". Freespace as a whole has a lot of first-line people. It does lack some kind of big, creative, project that isn't based on any other universe and does anything extremely different from what's been released so far (In other words, has its own identity), but that is still a possibility.
What the community really lacks are second-line people. PR people, people who make the website, people who write the documentation, people who write favorable reviews of the game, people who contact websites and magazines and celebrities and get the word out there about new stuff. HLP has no marketing, no PR department, but frequently there are promises made that are never lived up to. It takes maybe an hour to make a decent website from scratch, and there's nothing stopping you from adding on or improving to that website once it's up - unless you start investing in an ungainly content-management system that costs more time than it saves. There are also many, many different options...Googlepages is somewhat unprofessional, and the interface has a few quirks, but you can build webpages with it with all of the technical finesse required to write an essay with Microsoft Word.
Also somewhat missing are the more technical types, who test things out, package the stuff and get it ready to go, fix bugs, and so on. These are the grunt jobs that usually end up getting filled up by coders. Unfortunately, people with programming experience are the best people to fill those jobs, even though they also comprise first-line personnel along with modelers, interface artists, FREDders, sound artists, and so on.
Overall there are a lot of spots waiting to be filled, but someone has to really step in and take charge and organize things and get the ball rolling. But it's also true that there has to be some real fuel running to power that movement, and it can't all be used at once.
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Perhaps we should have a whole section of HLP (separate from the forums) that is dedicated to advertising (screenshots etc) and downloading FS2 Open. It would be a significant project, but if done right, would come out very well.
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Prehaps if the mainpage had some actual pictures.
Here's what other opensource projects do: Nexuiz (http://www.alientrap.org/nexuiz) Saerbraten (http://sauerbraten.org/) Warzone 2100 (http://www.wz2100.net)
Please note that Saerbraten and Warzone are butt ugly, but still has a better front page than HLP
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@wmcoolmon :
I agree on everything you said about pr and about that too :
It does lack some kind of big, creative, project that isn't based on any other universe and does anything extremely different from what's been released so far (In other words, has its own identity), but that is still a possibility.
I am working on a tc project for one year with a home made universe/ships/story line based on a cooperative gameplay for online game and a try to have a "sims" feeling (in fact a flightmodel with a lot of inertia and a 2 shot on target to destroy balance (not sure if i explain well with my poor English) . the difficult thing with that kind of project is that it is not easy to find people to work with (it seems easier to find people who wants to work on a popular universe than a totally unknown and i think it s understandable) and as long as we do not have enough things to show to be convincing we won't show up in a thread yet.
I personally feel that there are a lots of project in progress based on the scp engine (it s a very good thing ATM) but the active comunity seems busy with all of them already on progress, i think a good web page and a good pr would bring to scp community some fresh flesh as the community need player/Dev/modeler/
But i don't think it's just a website issue, there is some lack with the game it self, i mean before we had turey installer we had to download the game or install the game, download media vps, download the launcher and download the fs2openxxx.exe, that was not really big for fans but for a freespace profane it looks long and boring especially if that person wanted to play online (got to find on forums how to set up the game to play online with fs2net)
So now with turrey installer, almost everything get easier and user friendly, but i wonder if there is a way to have the fs2net part already setup when the game is installed and just need for the player to create his account...from the game ui itself.
The community made very good effort for the modders with the wiki (we do not need anymore to find links all across the web to find what we look for) but now community need to do efforts for the players too
C y a all in the vacuum of space :mad2:
(sorry for my poor English i hope i won t write correctly my meaning :D )
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I gotta be honest, I've been around here for a long time, and the other day I wanted to reinstall freespace. I couldn't find my CDs at the time, so I figured I'd look around to find the full download. Couldn't find it. So next I went searching, found my CDs, and for the life of me really couldn't figure out which build of the SCP to download, or which MediaVP packs were up to date, which were in beta, which were available, etc.
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o rly?
Best Preview Ever. Boy I can't wait for that feature :p
Seriously though, I'd release screenshots like that every week if I thought it would help.
Part of the problem is we've been perpetually on 'just over the horizon' mode... I think the whole situation will get better once we settle on a final 3.6.10 mediavp and build. To be fair, we've already come pretty far -- remember what it was like before Turey's installer and karajorma's FAQ?
But I do agree, we need PR help. We've lost a couple of the veterans who did this well (once upon a time HLP felt like it was devoted to renders). Someone who complains that they can't model or code but still wants to contribute could step up to fill this role.
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TBH, I was originally going to release a game play video of my fast mod to release with it, but my Ethernet card is still fried from when my old PSU kinda died, and it's a quite a pain ferrying fraps to my PC from a laptop, then the video back to the laptop. I still suppose I might make one, it'll just be a while before I'm bored enough to do it. :p
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I gotta be honest, I've been around here for a long time, and the other day I wanted to reinstall freespace. I couldn't find my CDs at the time, so I figured I'd look around to find the full download. Couldn't find it. So next I went searching, found my CDs, and for the life of me really couldn't figure out which build of the SCP to download, or which MediaVP packs were up to date, which were in beta, which were available, etc.
It does take quite a bit of searching to tell the difference between builds and what to expect, like the bump-mapping builds are not to be considered as stable as other builds (from what I recall, it's all still being tested, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong). It'd be nice to have a central SCP Download Page with all the various builds and VP's, rather than have to navigate the forum to find them.
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Agreed, honestly the only reason I'm on this forum is because of my love for freespace specifically. I'm sure there are plenty of other games I would come to love, except for the fact that when I try to download a mod or TC, I generally just turn away if the only web content they have is stored on a forum. I really don't want to search through forum posts to find a single download. If I can't get it off a web page, chances are I'm not going to download (as a subset of that, I don't usually download files off of web pages that are ugly or poorly put together.)
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Heh, after i looked, i got my mom to let me download that warzone 2100 thing. :p
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I have ot admit, it would be useful to have a list of "everything", neatly divided up into relevant sections and with descriptions. Would save an awful lot of time.
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Main Page
Download the SCP!
Full Installer (a la Turey's Installer)
Development Builds (i.e. Xt Builds, Scripting Builds, etc. any of the major build branches)
Released Mods (Would link to either main site or a download page, perhaps a direct link to the file)
Mods for Freespace
Total Conversions
If each download could have a little blurb about what it does, and in the case of the development builds, who should download it, I think it would simplify things a lot.
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I'm going to toss this idea out there of first-line and second-line development, where first-line is the people who make the stuff and second-line are the people who refine the stuff in order for general consumption by "everyone else". Freespace as a whole has a lot of first-line people.
What the community really lacks are second-line people. PR people, people who make the website, people who write the documentation, people who write favorable reviews of the game, people who contact websites and magazines and celebrities and get the word out there about new stuff. HLP has no marketing, no PR department, but frequently there are promises made that are never lived up to.
I've said something similar myself before. This is exactly the field that can be filled by the "I'd like to help but I have no skillz" brigade. It doesn't take any particular skill to enter stuff into the wiki. Certainly less than it takes to put some of the stuff I've seen people put into their sigs.
The first-line people can do that but why should we have to? If we do it then it hugely slows down development time. It doesn't take much skill to keep an eye on the SCP forum and add new features to the wiki. It doesn't take much skill to write up a Tech help FAQ by simply collating the answers the first-liners give. So why is no one doing this?
Sure anyone trying to do it who isn't as skilled will make mistakes but no one is going to crucify you for it. And it's a hell of a lot easier for someone who does have a full understanding of the technical problem or new feature to correct minor mistakes than it is for us to write the whole damn entry ourselves.
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Agreed. I may not be involved in deep stuff in the SCP, I'm only working on one mod, and even there I'm just modelling as well as doing a little bit of project management, but every minute I spend trying to write up a web page or wiki entry is a minute that I'm not working on modeling. Yet at the same time, as content moderator, I get a lot of people PMing me asking to work on the Star Wars Conversion project, who say the usual "I can't model, texture, program or FRED, but I could be an idea guy"
If you want to help, believe me, EVERY SINGLE mod is looking for good PR people, ones who can make a web page for us, or who can promote us, write up a good Wiki entry, or any of those other second line positions.
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Wank wank wank, we've already talked about all of this. This is deja-vu.
It's when it comes to doing something about it, the **** doesn't get done.
Posting "I agree" is redundant.
WE ALL AGREE.
Now find someone who can do it, and make them do it. THAT is the job for the "first line" people.
The text written here is pointless.