Re: Pingus level comment tool

[David Philippi]

Am Son, 2003-08-31 um 21.45 schrieb Ingo Ruhnke:
> 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. 

I don't think it matters wheter it's something important or hard to do.
In my opinion it's much more important to get people to the point where
they do a first contribution to the project. That way lies a possibility
to draw people deeper into the development of Pingus. I know that this
is true since I went that way. It took years from my first contribution
to Pingus until I decided to do a more substantial contribution, but it
was the fact that I had contributed to the game once that kept me
visiting the homepage once in a while.

> 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.

Why does throwing suggestions and comments help nobody? I for one
consider a pool of opinions a potential for usefull inspiration. May be
that there won't be much discussion of immediate use, then at least a
proove of interest from many people can be a source of motivation. 

> 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.

I agree, a larger image in the level page would be usefull.

>    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.

I'd add that this becomes even more usefull as the number of levels
grows. At some point it will get hard to get an overview with the
current design.

> 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.

I'd think it to consist of what's in CVS and stuff that's only in the
database. The part which is already in CVS should be marked thus and
everything else is a candidate to be pulled over into CVS if it fits
whatever requirements we impose. Maybe we'll even move stuff from CVS
out into the database. If such a project really succeeds, it would lead
to sets of user made worlds that can be played like modpacks for other
games. I don't know wheter Pingus will ever attract enough people to
make this happen but I think we should nurture the possibility instead
of smashing it as long as it doesn't impose more work then someone is
willing to spend.

Bye David