[Colonol Dekker]

Do you remember the pre millennial layout? With a well organised download section?  I kinda miss that.
I refer you to my social media comments regarding fan base attraction and maybe a pic of the day on instagram or twitter?

[Goober5000]

I posted this in the past:

Previous main pages:

HLP 1.0

HLP 2.0

HLP 3.0

The current main page is HLP 4.0.

Yeah, the HLP 1.0 site did have a pretty nice Downloads section.

[xenocartographer]

AFAIK the MediaVPs use remade interface art aside from the mainhalls. Medals, buttons, briefing icons, and logos are all custom. The HUD is stock but there are a few community-made HUDs out there, either as HD upgrades based on the retail HUD or new designs. Almost every big mod has its own mainhalls too so there's almost nothing retail about them. The few ships that haven't been upgraded yet like the Demon are retail assets but in all likelyhood nobody will notice.

As for the sounds.... yeah, they're completely retail. But really, this isn't about making standalone mods legal, whether they're legal or not is irrelevant since no mod teams can actually afford a lawyer. What's important is not getting sued and since free releases based on someone else's IP seem to be doing just fine on the "not getting sued" front I think free releases based on Freespace should be fine too.

And I think there are Freespace mods for other games like Homeworld that use those very same retail sounds and MediaVPs assets, and nobody's issuing C&Ds for those.[/quote]

Huh, alright.

I refer you to my social media comments regarding fan base attraction and maybe a pic of the day on instagram or twitter?

I'd like to throw Imgur onto that pile. It's certainly not as big as the two you mentioned, but it does have a front page that's seen by the vast majority of users, and it's relatively easy to get on (a well-curated album about an indie video game should have no problem).

[Colonol Dekker]

I think we need to pimp    big SCP projects not dependant on retail assets (wings of dawn, diaspora etc) blatantly at our target audience,  elite dangerous and star citizen players.  We need to find out where they congregate on social media and hammer that particular corner of the net.

[hack-wizard]

Section 2i: This, totally this.  I usually don't have to ask people where to find stuff after trying to use the search bar, unless it doesn't exist or exists on a totally different and unrelated site.

[karajorma]

I would say a Communications Director or brand person but I would first start with the HLP Facebook and Youtube and twitch page, find some people to admin them and start figuring out what kind of content to post. The rest is just linking it in places like reddit and on facebook and members here helping drive it.

Well I set up a Diaspora Twitter account and right now I've got no one following who isn't on the team. So how to change that? I'm going to see about getting twitter links on the website in a little bit. But apart from that, any ideas？

[Colonol Dekker]

Post at similar. Fire it at bsg boards, pages, feeds and groups. Here's a thought, is it able to be promoted on steam?

As before, ED and SC are the two big main players at the moment, jump on it and spread the love.   They'll eat all this delicious FREE content up, they just don't know it's there.

[Black Wolf]

I am absolutely in favour of consolidating the forums, to the point that I question the notion of giving the hosted mods their own subboards for public discussions. Why seperate all the activity and smear it out over dozens of boards? Have BP discussion threads sit alongside BTA discussion threads in the Freespace discussion forum, rather then giving them seperate fora that only have a few threads running active. Stuff like that makes this place look less active then it actually is, and it doesn't give new users the view of "What is hot these days?"

This is a pretty radical idea... and I can see a lot of positives to this. Although private dev and testing forums should remain for those mods regardless.

This biggest downside here is release posts... all the major campaigns have a stickied release post (perhaps that's something that would be solved in tandem with the other ideas posted about making releases more visible). The big release thread in Missions & Campaigns doesn't give much info in the way of release year, mod size, and overall reception and/or quality... I don't find it terribly useful because it's too big and unwieldy. I suspect new users aren't going to jump in here and be looking for mods made in 2004. So some differentiation between New Releases, Highly Reviewed, and Past Gems would be helpful. There's also the sticking point of various levels of continuity in mods. Some players often make posts about which mods to play in which order for continuity/story and we have a few threads they could follow.. which isn't always clear unless you stumble upon the right page on the Wiki.

I will say a major positive is that, as a dev, if public discussions of my mod were expected to be in the general FS forum, I would be way more active on those boards. It would pull me out of my own BtA bubble more easily. Dunno if other devs have this problem, though. I also know that the hosted general boards have, for some, become a point of pride.. so I imagine that would also be a sticking point.

I'm not saying this idea is perfect, but it does have merit worth thinking about. Do new players look at the board list to figure out what mods are available anyway?

I know I'm coming to this late, but this is the post I made on the GM's thread on this topic:

This isn’t all I want to talk about on this thread, it’s just a case of not really having the time to sit down and type out a proper reply to a thread like this, so while I do have more thoughts, I feel like this (the hosted project forums) is an area where we can make a real change. In fact, I think we need to change what we mean by “hosting” a project entirely.

In the past, hosting was de facto necessary for making a good campaign. You needed the exposure through avatars and a website to attract talented people to your campaign to help you. You needed a forum to post things where people could comment to keep that interest maintained, and keep your own motivation up. And you needed a private forum to actually coordinate making the mod. Those basic requirements haven’t changed, but how we get/deliver them really has.

Everyone knew about Betrayal’s “Mystery Project” long before Exile got hosted, and there are lots of unhosted projects I’m following that just have a thread or two in various places. The trend away from exclusive models has really cut away the one of the big reasons for public forums for uncompleted projects (I actually think that that trend has been a bit of a two edged sword – yes, public models have made some amazing things possible, but it’s also harder to generate interest in your mod if you’re just throwing together a bunch of public ships).

Axem is right that most of the public forums don’t see much activity. My proposal is pretty radical, but I think it might be a good one: get rid of them. Archive the current ones, create a new “Released Campaign Discussion” forum, move any legitimately active threads into that forum (with an appropriate name change so they’re tagged for the correct campaign). There’s an argument to be made for keeping things like Diaspora and FotG separate, but at least all the ones for projects that take place in the FS universe can probably exist together.

This does several things.

1. Replaces a tonne of dead boards with one active board. That makes the index easier to navigate, and keeps HLP looking more active.

2. Promotes “splashover” from really active mods (basically BP, but to a lesser extent things like Inferno) to others. Currently, people following one mod may well never check the forums for others. A lot of people simply won’t see mods, screenshots, patches, even releases in one mods public forum unless they actively check it. They might not play a potentially cool campaign because they’ve not noticed the kinds of discussion it’s generating. Yes, with one merged forum it’s possible that really active mods (again, mostly BP) to crowd out others, but right now the benefits will outweigh the costs (and the risk of getting crowded out might convince mod makers to be slightly more active ensuring they have enough to post to prevent that from happening).

3. Potentially helps coordination between mods. If I’m looking for Frontlines related activity and I see a screenshot from Inferno with a ship I really like, I can ask to use it, or trade for it or something.
If we do that, though, I think we also need to reconsider what we mean by hosting a mod, and who we offer it to.

The most important thing that HLP hosting offers in 2017 is a private forum. When I first got the FL forum, it was immensely useful for coordinating with beta testers and helpers. It made an enormous difference, and unquestionably meant that the mod came out faster. Yes, there are alternative ways of doing that, but none so neat as HLP – I’ve been asked to join a Discord chat for a project I’m doing a little work on, and that doesn't seem as efficient as a forum, for one because real time chat is a terrible way to coordinate people across multiple timezones, and for another because accessing it on my phone is much less practical than a simple forum.

I think we should open up “hosting” in the form of private forums to just about anyone who wants it. Once they release they can have a project badge that links to wherever they want – a campaign website, facebook group, wiki page, youtube page, imgur gallery, big release thread… anything they want. If a project fails, big whoop - there’s a private forum with a few dozen posts that nobody can access instead of a dead public forum and badge pointing to a website that hasn’t been updated in three years, serving as a constant public reminder of the failed project.

It’ll be a tough sell, especially since not every thread will be able to be moved to the new forum, and it’ll take a bit of active moderation to ensure we maintain that distinction between released and unreleased content. For the record, I’m imagining three forums:

Unreleased campaign discussion: Basically the current campaigns forum.

Campaign Releases: A highlight style board, each thread has a picture (possibly using that mod that was linked earlier to show that picture on the forum index) and a link to the main release/discussion thread. These would just list the campaigns (I’d also like the opportunity for a visible rating system or upvote system to ensure the highest quality campaigns were the easiest to find, but that discussion was had a while ago and my opinion was in the minority there), replies could even be disallowed and a cap placed on the number of characters to ensure people kept the discussions where they belong.

Released Campaign discussion: This would be where you post the campaign release threads, where you could discuss released campaigns etc. The result of merging all the hosted project forums.

Complexity and potential issues aside, I think there are lots of benefits, not the least being the end of any kind of two-tier system for hosted and unhosted projects – the only thing that will matter is released and unreleased, and the quality of what you produce.

[Black Wolf]

I think we need to pimp    big SCP projects not dependant on retail assets (wings of dawn, diaspora etc) blatantly at our target audience,  elite dangerous and star citizen players.  We need to find out where they congregate on social media and hammer that particular corner of the net.

I agree, to a point. ED and SC are a target audienbce, but I also think we need to consider everyone who might be a potential player. Places like these:

https://www.reddit.com/r/spacesimgames/
http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/
https://www.spacegamejunkie.com/forums/

Are all kind of like HLP in that they're active...ish. Probably less active, on average, than HLP, or roughly the same. But they do serve a slightly different, overlapping community. I think we should consider sites like this, not just for a quick "Hey, look at how cool FSO is!", topic. We should be posting campaign release topics at sites like this as well - a regular reminder that Freespace Open exists, there's a vast library of content, with more being created all the time, and it's probably one of the most actively modded space sim in the world right now.

Might not bring in a tonne of people, but I think it's a place to start.

[Blue Lion]

I would say a Communications Director or brand person but I would first start with the HLP Facebook and Youtube and twitch page, find some people to admin them and start figuring out what kind of content to post. The rest is just linking it in places like reddit and on facebook and members here helping drive it.

Well I set up a Diaspora Twitter account and right now I've got no one following who isn't on the team. So how to change that? I'm going to see about getting twitter links on the website in a little bit. But apart from that, any ideas？

Well you start using hastags that are vague in terms of gaming, space sims, mods and that stuff but also specific ones to your group (#freespace). Tweet your game or videos or whatever at people who do game reviews, lets plays whatever. The more people are talking to each other with and about the game, it increases the people who can see it.

[Colonol Dekker]

From little acorns do mighty oaks sprout.
The hard light Facebook page could use a bit of a pimp too...

[Blue Lion]

Well hell find however runs it and make me an editor and we can spruce it up a bit. I literally did not know we had one.

[Blue Lion]

Unrelated note, who runs the HLP twitter? It's active but isn't using hashtags

[Goober5000]

Well hell find however runs it and make me an editor and we can spruce it up a bit. I literally did not know we had one.

I've PMmed headdie.

Unrelated note, who runs the HLP twitter? It's active but isn't using hashtags

It's set up to automatically broadcast news and highlights.  I'll ask Sandwich; he might be the one that created it.  Looks like it was MjnMixael.

[Blue Lion]

I don't know how the twitter bot works but hopefully we can get some extra tweets in there to push our work because it's not going anywhere as is.

[Colonol Dekker]

The Facebook pagewas set up by me, Headdie (i think?) Does a sterling job of posting monthly newsletters and updates.It's got a fair few people on it, only no discussions.


Edit-

Well I've only gone and had my status revoked somehow



Double edit-
https://m.facebook.com/groups/8990888471?view=info


Here's the group, not the page which had more members and been going longer.

[DahBlount]

Anyone remember this?

'

The good:
Shows off lots of assets and features.

The bad:
Has several sound and visual issues that have been fixed in recent builds.
(not that big of an issue really)

The ugly:
It's a fustercluck which doesn't do anything to actually exemplify the action players would encounter under typical conditions.

An official trailer which gives viewers an actual idea of what they may typically encounter when playing FSO would be an excellent way to get the game out there. However, trying to create a trailer by committee or group opinion will end up going nowhere because people are going to argue about what should and shouldn't be in it.

It'd be a fairly sizable undertaking, but I think we could do it IF we could come to some sort of consensus on what we as a community want to portray ourselves and the game as in an orderly, meaningful manner.

[niffiwan]

Anyone remember this?

Yep; love it!

The ugly:
It's a fustercluck which doesn't do anything to actually exemplify the action players would encounter under typical conditions.

I think that's by design, it fills an need and fills it superbly. However, there is more than one need so....

An official trailer which gives viewers an actual idea of what they may typically encounter when playing FSO would be an excellent way to get the game out there. However, trying to create a trailer by committee or group opinion will end up going nowhere because people are going to argue about what should and shouldn't be in it.

It'd be a fairly sizable undertaking, but I think we could do it IF we could come to some sort of consensus on what we as a community want to portray ourselves and the game as in an orderly, meaningful manner.

Yep; I recall Droid (iirc) bringing this vid to my attention (the last time we were all discussing better marketing for HLP  )

And I think this is probably hits the 2nd need you're talking about square in the face, ~show the gameplay~. The downside is that the current trailer is a mission, just play & record it and it's up to date with the latest eye-candy. This sort of trailer requires a lot more work each time it's created to splice together video, sync it with a song, etc. Maybe this is a proposed-aide-team kinda project, a small team could agree on a set of visual settings to use; then all record clips of the main FS2 campaign, and then (probably one video editing lead) puts it all together. To make it simple you could try reusing the same music record similar clips, or you could try scripting a new set of clips. Maybe there's enough footage on youtube already from LPs, etc? Maybe add gameplay from different mods... although we also don't want arguments about which mods get included & which not.

My only another comment is that it's perhaps a little long for a gameplay trailer. But meh, even having the original updated with the latest eye-candy would be great.

edit:

Huh, well look at what the bots of Google found for me just after looking at both trailers again; a new gameplay trailer from 2016.  German language version, and a bit dark IMO, but still!

[mjn.mixael]

I am absolutely in favour of consolidating the forums, to the point that I question the notion of giving the hosted mods their own subboards for public discussions. Why seperate all the activity and smear it out over dozens of boards? Have BP discussion threads sit alongside BTA discussion threads in the Freespace discussion forum, rather then giving them seperate fora that only have a few threads running active. Stuff like that makes this place look less active then it actually is, and it doesn't give new users the view of "What is hot these days?"

This is a pretty radical idea... and I can see a lot of positives to this. Although private dev and testing forums should remain for those mods regardless.

This biggest downside here is release posts... all the major campaigns have a stickied release post (perhaps that's something that would be solved in tandem with the other ideas posted about making releases more visible). The big release thread in Missions & Campaigns doesn't give much info in the way of release year, mod size, and overall reception and/or quality... I don't find it terribly useful because it's too big and unwieldy. I suspect new users aren't going to jump in here and be looking for mods made in 2004. So some differentiation between New Releases, Highly Reviewed, and Past Gems would be helpful. There's also the sticking point of various levels of continuity in mods. Some players often make posts about which mods to play in which order for continuity/story and we have a few threads they could follow.. which isn't always clear unless you stumble upon the right page on the Wiki.

I will say a major positive is that, as a dev, if public discussions of my mod were expected to be in the general FS forum, I would be way more active on those boards. It would pull me out of my own BtA bubble more easily. Dunno if other devs have this problem, though. I also know that the hosted general boards have, for some, become a point of pride.. so I imagine that would also be a sticking point.

I'm not saying this idea is perfect, but it does have merit worth thinking about. Do new players look at the board list to figure out what mods are available anyway?

I know I'm coming to this late, but this is the post I made on the GM's thread on this topic:

This isn’t all I want to talk about on this thread, it’s just a case of not really having the time to sit down and type out a proper reply to a thread like this, so while I do have more thoughts, I feel like this (the hosted project forums) is an area where we can make a real change. In fact, I think we need to change what we mean by “hosting” a project entirely.

In the past, hosting was de facto necessary for making a good campaign. You needed the exposure through avatars and a website to attract talented people to your campaign to help you. You needed a forum to post things where people could comment to keep that interest maintained, and keep your own motivation up. And you needed a private forum to actually coordinate making the mod. Those basic requirements haven’t changed, but how we get/deliver them really has.

Everyone knew about Betrayal’s “Mystery Project” long before Exile got hosted, and there are lots of unhosted projects I’m following that just have a thread or two in various places. The trend away from exclusive models has really cut away the one of the big reasons for public forums for uncompleted projects (I actually think that that trend has been a bit of a two edged sword – yes, public models have made some amazing things possible, but it’s also harder to generate interest in your mod if you’re just throwing together a bunch of public ships).

Axem is right that most of the public forums don’t see much activity. My proposal is pretty radical, but I think it might be a good one: get rid of them. Archive the current ones, create a new “Released Campaign Discussion” forum, move any legitimately active threads into that forum (with an appropriate name change so they’re tagged for the correct campaign). There’s an argument to be made for keeping things like Diaspora and FotG separate, but at least all the ones for projects that take place in the FS universe can probably exist together.

This does several things.

1. Replaces a tonne of dead boards with one active board. That makes the index easier to navigate, and keeps HLP looking more active.

2. Promotes “splashover” from really active mods (basically BP, but to a lesser extent things like Inferno) to others. Currently, people following one mod may well never check the forums for others. A lot of people simply won’t see mods, screenshots, patches, even releases in one mods public forum unless they actively check it. They might not play a potentially cool campaign because they’ve not noticed the kinds of discussion it’s generating. Yes, with one merged forum it’s possible that really active mods (again, mostly BP) to crowd out others, but right now the benefits will outweigh the costs (and the risk of getting crowded out might convince mod makers to be slightly more active ensuring they have enough to post to prevent that from happening).

3. Potentially helps coordination between mods. If I’m looking for Frontlines related activity and I see a screenshot from Inferno with a ship I really like, I can ask to use it, or trade for it or something.
If we do that, though, I think we also need to reconsider what we mean by hosting a mod, and who we offer it to.

The most important thing that HLP hosting offers in 2017 is a private forum. When I first got the FL forum, it was immensely useful for coordinating with beta testers and helpers. It made an enormous difference, and unquestionably meant that the mod came out faster. Yes, there are alternative ways of doing that, but none so neat as HLP – I’ve been asked to join a Discord chat for a project I’m doing a little work on, and that doesn't seem as efficient as a forum, for one because real time chat is a terrible way to coordinate people across multiple timezones, and for another because accessing it on my phone is much less practical than a simple forum.

I think we should open up “hosting” in the form of private forums to just about anyone who wants it. Once they release they can have a project badge that links to wherever they want – a campaign website, facebook group, wiki page, youtube page, imgur gallery, big release thread… anything they want. If a project fails, big whoop - there’s a private forum with a few dozen posts that nobody can access instead of a dead public forum and badge pointing to a website that hasn’t been updated in three years, serving as a constant public reminder of the failed project.

It’ll be a tough sell, especially since not every thread will be able to be moved to the new forum, and it’ll take a bit of active moderation to ensure we maintain that distinction between released and unreleased content. For the record, I’m imagining three forums:

Unreleased campaign discussion: Basically the current campaigns forum.

Campaign Releases: A highlight style board, each thread has a picture (possibly using that mod that was linked earlier to show that picture on the forum index) and a link to the main release/discussion thread. These would just list the campaigns (I’d also like the opportunity for a visible rating system or upvote system to ensure the highest quality campaigns were the easiest to find, but that discussion was had a while ago and my opinion was in the minority there), replies could even be disallowed and a cap placed on the number of characters to ensure people kept the discussions where they belong.

Released Campaign discussion: This would be where you post the campaign release threads, where you could discuss released campaigns etc. The result of merging all the hosted project forums.

Complexity and potential issues aside, I think there are lots of benefits, not the least being the end of any kind of two-tier system for hosted and unhosted projects – the only thing that will matter is released and unreleased, and the quality of what you produce.

I somehow doubt this will actually go anywhere and I do not think it's THE solution. But I am so for this. There are so many benefits.. and if anything has helped SCP become sort of a "closed family" it's our adherence to internet forum traditions from the early 2000s.

[mjn.mixael]

Oh, and yes. I run the Twitter account. I'll see about posting more and/or giving Axem/the future social team access to post stuff.