I also want to nip any concerns in the butt right now that a massive redesign would potentially ruin the atmosphere or feeling of Polycount: That is concern #1 for Drew (r13) and I. Especially Drew, thats his job: To make sure Polycount remains Polycount.
All forums would remain the same, we simply want to streamline how you get that content on the site and how you view or review it on your end. We're growing and we need things to get a little faster around here so thats where our focus is.
Since we never want to take your guys' money (seriously, don't ask how to donate or anything, we don't want it) we're workign out ways of getting what we need to get the site done.
I know you've said stuff like this for a while, and I think it's absolutely awesome that you want to continue doing things this way. That said, though, I'd sign up for "Polycount Premium" if it meant you guys could afford to get the right people to throw together features when you need them.
I don't know exactly what sort of premium service Polycount could host that isn't done on other websites. If you were looking for something to entice people, maybe having it unlock features like (small, and in extremely limited number) images in signatures, small gallery pages, and a teensy bit of text under your avatar that has some sort of custom tagline limited to a certain number of characters would be features that some members would like.
Thanks for responding, Adam. I think what you mentioned will really be a huge improvement and help to showcase all the amazing art produced by this community.
I think this is an interesting topic, so here's some questions to ask yourself as the site grows. Maybe turn some of the "it would be cool if" into "we need these changes because...".
How do you decide which to look at?
How many threads do you typically look at per session?
How long spent on each?
Do you comment often enough for your tastes? -- Do you get enough comments?
Do you start browsing P&P with the intent of looking at sweet art, or giving critiques on not-as-sweet art?
^ Did you expect to find something sweet when you clicked the thread?
When you see something that desperately needs critique, how often do you do so?
Do you reciprocate critiques comments or advice? (doesn't need to be immediate)
Can you remember who has given/taken from solid advice to/from you over the past year?
How would changes to the site impact the way you browse, comment and receive feedback change your answers?
Personally I'm interested in environment art and tend to gloss over characters, they can be awesome, but I have little to add to the conversation whenever I look at them.
I wouldn't mind Pimping being split up by Character/Environment/Props, but then it is a slippery slope when things start splitting up too much and you lose the feel of P&P altogether.
Like other people have said, a possible solution might be some sort of tagging system, or simply a thread title naming convention that could separate the types of threads instead of putting them in different sections.
Thread tags would be awesome to have for certain art types. Character, Environment, Weapon, Vehicle, etc. It would make searching for something way easier
A sub forum for character art would be a good idea imo. I'm not a character artist and i have nothing against charaters but there is so much of it that it sometimes makes it hard for me to check out the stuff that is more relevant to my own work.
Don't think there should be any more categories tho because then the forum gets too cluttered.
One idea we're certainly going to be noting is the idea of thread tagging that isn't obnoxious.
-Tags don't appear by default.
-Tags are added to a thread by the users, but chosen from a pre-defined list of tags. (Avoiding 'BOOBIES' tags, for instance).
-Tags are easily added to the system if so requested from the community (E.g. TF2 is popular and people want a TF2 tag. We'd add that to the list to choose from.)
This all feeds in to a higher level idea of a feature I have that I hope to talk about one day
I like everything the way it is now, if I were to have to pick on something I'd agree on the thumbs up/like button or thumbnails. Not sure how thumbnails would work on early stages. though.
If it was me, I would merge all the P&P forum into one or two big "What are you working on" threads. It is BY FAR the thread I'm browsing the most. It is just incredible to discover new artists and awesome art in so many different forms without any effort. It feels like the CGHub front page but in a more vertical layout.
It's probably a matter of taste but the less click the better. At least for me.
personally i think it's fine as is, but the section could really use a "like" button for posts so we can eliminate most of the annoying blind praise posts that clutter up threads. i think it would encourage critiquing good assets too, rather than just bad ones as it is now.
Hey there Adam - I agree with most of your plans and ideas but one also has to remember that a full, complex and pricey revamp (pricey in terms of time as much as in terms of money) is not necessarily sure to succeed.
That's why the thread thumbnail idea is interesting. It sure would require a lot of work to inject it in the current site with all the potential DB problems it would cause ; but, we could also take the problem hands on and try it out on a temporary polycount.com/tempthumbnailtest.htm test forum (using any forum engine supporting thread thumbs) to see if it works in the first place!
Another hack worth trying : what about running some kind of script on the DB that would extract all the image URLs posted in PnP threads in the last 30 days and display all these images in one big page, not unlike Pinterest, Visualize and Tumblr - and each image would link to the proper thread it belongs to. It would not be a final, uber-redesign solution but it would at least have the benefit of trying out the idea, and give us a taste of what PC could *actually* become.
Also - I am myself quite a fan of the weekly recaps but I sometimes would love to see something even more exhaustive - that is to say, an automatic aggregation including very WIP images as well as beginners work. Because the problem of the recap page is that it is trying to be "the sexy polycount showing only sexy stuff" (an approved, semi-disguised star rating system really), and while it sure has value for headhunters and people in need of some kind of artgasm, I think that we, a community as whole, are mature enough to accept polished pro work being displayed next to noobish wips. ZbrushCentral and CGhub might want to "impress with sexiness" but when you really think about it, this is not really the PC spirit.
In short : If the thing about PC is that we are truly all about direct constructive criticism with no useless patting on the back and sugar coating, then the layout has to reflect that too. Since high caliber and amateurish works are both worthy of constructive criticism, why not accept that as a natural aspect of an art community and state it loud and clear ?
Your last paragraph is the backbone of what we're trying to accomplish with our plans. I hate being vague but trust that you and I are on the same page.
As for the other suggests, we have a development environment to try new things out. As I stated before hand, though I'd prefer to not toss a band-aid solution at the site where there's larger underlying issues we need to sort out. Once I'm done with what I need to do for those plans, I can toy around with quick solutions.
Pior that's a great idea. Displaying beginners work along with the pro's work I think would be more inviting and really show that polycount is home to beginners and pro's alike.
I would be all for separating character art and environment/ prop art. Keep What are you working on mixed but having sub-forums would make it easier for people who prefer one over the other to find more art they are interested in.
I love GameArtisans badge feature where users get little awards they can show off for things theyve done. It adds gamification to the forums and makes people more enticed to be involved. There could be badges for people who frequently give good critiques and specific ones for environment artists or character artists. Or maybe ones where users can recognize certain users for being experts at certain engines and they can have a badge for it. This would allow people to take special confidence in what that person has said if they say something about someone's Cryengine 3 environment and are considered a Cryengine 3 expert. This would allow people to show off who they are instantly to anyone looking at their post and people can understand where that person is coming from.
Adam: Thanks alot for the reply,im happy to hear that the layout of the forum will be looked at in the near future. Some of the immediate ideas that could be implemented could be a sticky to encourage posters to make good titles on their posts. That wouldnt break the forum and i think it would help posters get more feedback on their work.
One thing i would like to sincerely like to discourage is any sort of badges,awards or any sort ego stroking devices. The reason for this is that i always saw polycount as a place that the newest artist all the way to the most seasoned expert can go,post and get honost and constructive feedback. I would hate to see anything implemented that could potentially discourage new artists from joining and contributing.
The reason i made this thread is because i want Polycount to remain an open community where any and all artists will feel welcome to join and be a part of, not a place where good artists get attention and new artists are ignored.
However one thing i could see as useful is a system to add "likes" to a post to reduces the amounts of needless pat on the back replies.
I would love the options of tags at the beginning of thread titles. It's always so vague sometimes what is a character art thread and what is a enviro thread. Sometimes I only want to look at enviros.
Putting an [Character : 3D] or [Enviro : 2D] would make this much easier.
I honestly don't think you guys even need to go that far, just a system of tags that will allow said tags to take prefix and suffix areas in your thread title is good enough for me.
Currently, I'm using Google and it's Site search function on PC to browse through P&P.
Also, about the image idea, you think that's a good idea? Images would need to be a min of 80x80 px size to make even worthwhile, and there is a good chance you need to allow thread modifications for the images later on.
Also, a tag maybe that shows if something gets 'finished' or 'incomplete'? I would like to see unfinished work get it's own tag too vs. finished work.
NOOO dont touch it! I love how its like a meat grinder in there. Its like a constant feed of the industries quality bar, people can post lame stuff, but if its lame, well, - then that's that. If its super awesome it gets quoted and rides a few pages. I think there is something tranquil about how fast it moves too. Its like a constant reminder to keep making stuff. I think if it was broken into several category's the pacing would be too slow and un-inspiring.
I love the idea of a filterable tags system. The major thing annoying me in P&P right now is the barrage of threads about art tests and external competitions. Tags solves that pretty well.
Another thing that bothers me is threads full of pointless praise posts. I don't think a straight-up "like" system is the solution, however, recently I've been browsing the Facepunch dota and TF2 threads and noticed they have a cool system of post awards. Beneath each post you can assign a variety of awards like "informative", " artistic", "winner", "agree". I think a system like that could reduce the number of fluff posts and help people give input in a simpler fashion. People could simply leave awards instead of making short posts. There's a little button to push that shows a breakdown of all the users which have assigned which badges, so people still get recognition for their input rather than an impersonal "like".
I like the idea of keeping it very PC like, but am against too many posting rules and you sould critique this way or that and earn special brownie points whatever.
I like to offer praise if its s a nice piece of work, id it was just a 'like' button then it's too impersonal.
Another thing with P&p is that is not always been made clear whether its a critique forum, just a place to show your latest stuff. Quite often if you post a little crit people just tend to ignore that and take praise from artists of a similar standard on their own thread.
I virtually never look at the dedicated threads, just skim through P&P most of the time.
I would hate to see more and more sub forums, other forums do this and the chances of anyone looking at your work become negligible.
with P&P it's more democratic in that you have to look at everything, unless you eyes have special in built crap avoidance filters:)
I personally enjoy ike looking at beginners work as much as experienced artists, but its not always easy to explain the subtleties of what they are doing wrong, but it's fair to say if it's not very good you won't get many comments.
P&P is enormously fast paced now, but I quite like that and often skim back up to 10 pages in case I miss anything.The general standard on Polycount has never been higher IMHO
love the news digest also, more of that sort of thing and special features, interviews etc
i think the best way would be to make a survey, that each active member was to take. asking ten, or twenty, simple questions (multiple answers) regarding a restructuring of pnp. thus we would know what people want the most.
Once the tagging (Horah my idea was already in the works) and thumb-nailing system are in place, I'm pretty sure PC will be attracting a much larger crowd.
Just ease of access alone will populate threads more!
I don't want premium accounts, or employee of the month thingies, but I do believe in philanthropy.
Even though PC shouldn't rely on it, I'm pretty sure some people would be ok to give a bit of money every months, like renting a game server or w/e, in a complete anonymous and disinterested way.
Just sayin.
Thanks for the update, Adam. It sounds like there are a lot of great things in the works.
I understand that you don't want to take money from any of us to help with it all, but you said it yourself. You want Polycount to be our home for game art. But here's the thing. Polycount already IS home for a lot of us. Many of us would love to help pitch it, and give back to the community in ways other than just adding art and comments. Let us contribute. I don't know if you guys have a seperate bank account for polycount or anything, but I think it would be a great idea to have one, and then any donated money goes to it to help pay for bandwidth and website upgrades. If you are looking at hiring an agency to do this update for you, Why not have a donate button with a set goal, being the cost, or even half the cost of what the agency would charge. That way, the community, those who call this place their home, can help renovate their home. I think a donate button with a set goal will prevent people from thinking you guys are taking all the donations and running off to buy the next bottle for your whiskey club, and will prevent taking huge amounts of money from the community, as I'm sure that is probably part of your concern. Hell, even if you have a donation button that accepts a maximum of like $100 a month, with a maximum of $2 donations per account, just to help pay for bandwidth and what not.
That being said, I get that you don't want to accept money from us. But, maybe... just maybe... leave your pride out of this and let us contribute!
If you stick with your gut and don't let us, then all I can say is thank you for being such a great mod (you too, r13!). I don't think this gets said enough. You guys are doing a fantastic job with this site, and I, for one, really appreciate everything that you're doing.
Thanks for Polycount! followed @slipsius lead a bit. But an idea which is kinda like Polyconuts collaboration project (don't know how that is going). Would be to make what we do, games or in this case a game (small game) and sell it. I understand that it would not be easy but maybe we can discuss about it and see where it leads?
Replies
All forums would remain the same, we simply want to streamline how you get that content on the site and how you view or review it on your end. We're growing and we need things to get a little faster around here so thats where our focus is.
I know you've said stuff like this for a while, and I think it's absolutely awesome that you want to continue doing things this way. That said, though, I'd sign up for "Polycount Premium" if it meant you guys could afford to get the right people to throw together features when you need them.
I don't know exactly what sort of premium service Polycount could host that isn't done on other websites. If you were looking for something to entice people, maybe having it unlock features like (small, and in extremely limited number) images in signatures, small gallery pages, and a teensy bit of text under your avatar that has some sort of custom tagline limited to a certain number of characters would be features that some members would like.
How do you decide which to look at?
How many threads do you typically look at per session?
How long spent on each?
Do you comment often enough for your tastes? -- Do you get enough comments?
Do you start browsing P&P with the intent of looking at sweet art, or giving critiques on not-as-sweet art?
^ Did you expect to find something sweet when you clicked the thread?
When you see something that desperately needs critique, how often do you do so?
Do you reciprocate critiques comments or advice? (doesn't need to be immediate)
Can you remember who has given/taken from solid advice to/from you over the past year?
How would changes to the site impact the way you browse, comment and receive feedback change your answers?
I wouldn't mind Pimping being split up by Character/Environment/Props, but then it is a slippery slope when things start splitting up too much and you lose the feel of P&P altogether.
Like other people have said, a possible solution might be some sort of tagging system, or simply a thread title naming convention that could separate the types of threads instead of putting them in different sections.
Don't think there should be any more categories tho because then the forum gets too cluttered.
-Tags don't appear by default.
-Tags are added to a thread by the users, but chosen from a pre-defined list of tags. (Avoiding 'BOOBIES' tags, for instance).
-Tags are easily added to the system if so requested from the community (E.g. TF2 is popular and people want a TF2 tag. We'd add that to the list to choose from.)
This all feeds in to a higher level idea of a feature I have that I hope to talk about one day
It's probably a matter of taste but the less click the better. At least for me.
That's why the thread thumbnail idea is interesting. It sure would require a lot of work to inject it in the current site with all the potential DB problems it would cause ; but, we could also take the problem hands on and try it out on a temporary polycount.com/tempthumbnailtest.htm test forum (using any forum engine supporting thread thumbs) to see if it works in the first place!
Another hack worth trying : what about running some kind of script on the DB that would extract all the image URLs posted in PnP threads in the last 30 days and display all these images in one big page, not unlike Pinterest, Visualize and Tumblr - and each image would link to the proper thread it belongs to. It would not be a final, uber-redesign solution but it would at least have the benefit of trying out the idea, and give us a taste of what PC could *actually* become.
Also - I am myself quite a fan of the weekly recaps but I sometimes would love to see something even more exhaustive - that is to say, an automatic aggregation including very WIP images as well as beginners work. Because the problem of the recap page is that it is trying to be "the sexy polycount showing only sexy stuff" (an approved, semi-disguised star rating system really), and while it sure has value for headhunters and people in need of some kind of artgasm, I think that we, a community as whole, are mature enough to accept polished pro work being displayed next to noobish wips. ZbrushCentral and CGhub might want to "impress with sexiness" but when you really think about it, this is not really the PC spirit.
In short : If the thing about PC is that we are truly all about direct constructive criticism with no useless patting on the back and sugar coating, then the layout has to reflect that too. Since high caliber and amateurish works are both worthy of constructive criticism, why not accept that as a natural aspect of an art community and state it loud and clear ?
As for the other suggests, we have a development environment to try new things out. As I stated before hand, though I'd prefer to not toss a band-aid solution at the site where there's larger underlying issues we need to sort out. Once I'm done with what I need to do for those plans, I can toy around with quick solutions.
I would be all for separating character art and environment/ prop art. Keep What are you working on mixed but having sub-forums would make it easier for people who prefer one over the other to find more art they are interested in.
Useless Viewer: Gotten 50 comments saying only "cool!"
Next Achivement!
Get it up!: Post a rigged model of a dick
One thing i would like to sincerely like to discourage is any sort of badges,awards or any sort ego stroking devices. The reason for this is that i always saw polycount as a place that the newest artist all the way to the most seasoned expert can go,post and get honost and constructive feedback. I would hate to see anything implemented that could potentially discourage new artists from joining and contributing.
The reason i made this thread is because i want Polycount to remain an open community where any and all artists will feel welcome to join and be a part of, not a place where good artists get attention and new artists are ignored.
However one thing i could see as useful is a system to add "likes" to a post to reduces the amounts of needless pat on the back replies.
Putting an [Character : 3D] or [Enviro : 2D] would make this much easier.
Currently, I'm using Google and it's Site search function on PC to browse through P&P.
Also, about the image idea, you think that's a good idea? Images would need to be a min of 80x80 px size to make even worthwhile, and there is a good chance you need to allow thread modifications for the images later on.
Also, a tag maybe that shows if something gets 'finished' or 'incomplete'? I would like to see unfinished work get it's own tag too vs. finished work.
Another thing that bothers me is threads full of pointless praise posts. I don't think a straight-up "like" system is the solution, however, recently I've been browsing the Facepunch dota and TF2 threads and noticed they have a cool system of post awards. Beneath each post you can assign a variety of awards like "informative", " artistic", "winner", "agree". I think a system like that could reduce the number of fluff posts and help people give input in a simpler fashion. People could simply leave awards instead of making short posts. There's a little button to push that shows a breakdown of all the users which have assigned which badges, so people still get recognition for their input rather than an impersonal "like".
Example:
I like to offer praise if its s a nice piece of work, id it was just a 'like' button then it's too impersonal.
Another thing with P&p is that is not always been made clear whether its a critique forum, just a place to show your latest stuff. Quite often if you post a little crit people just tend to ignore that and take praise from artists of a similar standard on their own thread.
I virtually never look at the dedicated threads, just skim through P&P most of the time.
I would hate to see more and more sub forums, other forums do this and the chances of anyone looking at your work become negligible.
with P&P it's more democratic in that you have to look at everything, unless you eyes have special in built crap avoidance filters:)
I personally enjoy ike looking at beginners work as much as experienced artists, but its not always easy to explain the subtleties of what they are doing wrong, but it's fair to say if it's not very good you won't get many comments.
P&P is enormously fast paced now, but I quite like that and often skim back up to 10 pages in case I miss anything.The general standard on Polycount has never been higher IMHO
love the news digest also, more of that sort of thing and special features, interviews etc
point taken
Just ease of access alone will populate threads more!
Even though PC shouldn't rely on it, I'm pretty sure some people would be ok to give a bit of money every months, like renting a game server or w/e, in a complete anonymous and disinterested way.
Just sayin.
I understand that you don't want to take money from any of us to help with it all, but you said it yourself. You want Polycount to be our home for game art. But here's the thing. Polycount already IS home for a lot of us. Many of us would love to help pitch it, and give back to the community in ways other than just adding art and comments. Let us contribute. I don't know if you guys have a seperate bank account for polycount or anything, but I think it would be a great idea to have one, and then any donated money goes to it to help pay for bandwidth and website upgrades. If you are looking at hiring an agency to do this update for you, Why not have a donate button with a set goal, being the cost, or even half the cost of what the agency would charge. That way, the community, those who call this place their home, can help renovate their home. I think a donate button with a set goal will prevent people from thinking you guys are taking all the donations and running off to buy the next bottle for your whiskey club, and will prevent taking huge amounts of money from the community, as I'm sure that is probably part of your concern. Hell, even if you have a donation button that accepts a maximum of like $100 a month, with a maximum of $2 donations per account, just to help pay for bandwidth and what not.
That being said, I get that you don't want to accept money from us. But, maybe... just maybe... leave your pride out of this and let us contribute!
If you stick with your gut and don't let us, then all I can say is thank you for being such a great mod (you too, r13!). I don't think this gets said enough. You guys are doing a fantastic job with this site, and I, for one, really appreciate everything that you're doing.
Stefan - Right on, thanks. Moderating isn't done so much by me specifically as it is by the mod team so lets hope they see this.
J/K, wouldn't want achivements at all, its has become a bad influence on games already.