Re: Pingus level comment tool

[Ingo Ruhnke]

David Philippi <address@hidden> writes:

> Am Son, 2003-08-31 um 19.17 schrieb Jarno Elonen:
>> Take a look and write a wishlist!

> 1. Like I wrote before, it would be nice to have the ability to
> propose background music for a level. A quick grep through /playable
> showed me that 7 files for which a music is defined and a couple
> with "none" specified. Not much for 121 levels. :-(

Assining music to a level file is trivial, I don't see any need to
discuss or suggest music in the comment tool, if somebody wants to
'fix' music he should just change it on a large group of levels and
send a patch. 

> 2. Level with have no description yet or "EditorDefaultValue..."
> could benefit from the possibility to contribute one. Maybe even add
> the option to translate descriptions on the webpage and a pulldown
> menu of translations that may be shown for that description. The
> easier it gets to contribute in some way, the more likely that
> someone does it. :-)

Contributions to the main game can't be done this way and won't have
success. If the game should progress one or two people have to sit
down and do the work on there own, having tweenty people throwing
suggestions and comments around doesn't really help anybody.

> Otherwise I'd suggest to put it on seul.org and add a comment in the
> news section of the Pingus homepage to get people to use it.

The real question is what should people do with the tool and how
should it help. For me there are basically two uses:

1. As a help for development, to get a better overview over the levels
   and to quickly find levels that fit a theme, for that having the
   thumbnails in the overview and a larger version of the level
   available on a single-click is very important, thus I would
   suguesst to make the full/half buttons either available in the
   overview or simply show a 50% or 33% image directly in the level
   page.

   Being able to seperate between wip/, playable/ and Co. is also very
   important here, after all I don't care much about the tutorial/
   levels when I am starting with the next world, so seperating each
   of the subdirectories into its own sub-page would be very welcome.
   This could also be used to lock-up specific sections, after all
   having people browse the levels for the next version is not really
   what desirable (nothing fancy required, just not providing a direct
   link is enough).

2. As a general database for users to exchange and submit levels,
   rating and commenting thus doesn't become much part of the
   development itself, but simply a way of users communicate with each
   other. Database would of course need to be structured a little bit
   different for that purpose, there would need to be an easy way to
   submit new levels (probally best build directly into the game
   itself) together with descriptions, etc. So in general the level
   overview wouldn't consist of the stuff that is in CVS, but would
   consist of the stuff that user submitted directly into the
   database. So in the end it would be kind of like a freshmeat or
   happypenguin.org, but just for Pingus levels. Of course with the
   current rate of one user contributed level per month it wouldn't
   really be worth to start that, but having a windows release and an
   updated level building tutorial could help here.

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