On the idea of aggregating content/automatic galleries/showcasing, etc. We met with Valve last week to talk about accessing this very information, direct from the Workshop. They wrote us an API just for this very thing, which we will be taking full advantage of on the new website. With this API, we'll be able to:
Single sign-on with your Steam account to polycount (meaning: Log in to Polycount with your Steam account, or link the two together).
Pull information from the workshop that is relevant to this community. E.g. "Show me all content that has marked Polycount as a third-party contributor" or "Show me content from Workshop pages of users with linked Polycount accounts."
From there we can use this data to easily populate aggregated pages, to easily show 'top content' by the Polycount community as voted on by the Workshop community.
The new site is a couple of months away, so these specific features won't make it to the website until then.
@adam
How about for TF2/CS:GO community can get fair treatment like dota 2 community for upcoming new features for this website?
Absolutely! Looking at the numbers, the Dota 2 community is the largest so we wanted to hit this first. We'll be looking at TF2 and CS: GO and asking the same questions soon. Promise!
On the idea of aggregating content/automatic galleries/showcasing, etc. We met with Valve last week to talk about accessing this very information, direct from the Workshop. They wrote us an API just for this very thing, which we will be taking full advantage of on the new website. With this API, we'll be able to:
Single sign-on with your Steam account to polycount (meaning: Log in to Polycount with your Steam account, or link the two together).
Pull information from the workshop that is relevant to this community. E.g. "Show me all content that has marked Polycount as a third-party contributor" or "Show me content from Workshop pages of users with linked Polycount accounts."
From there we can use this data to easily populate aggregated pages, to easily show 'top content' by the Polycount community as voted on by the Workshop community.
The new site is a couple of months away, so these specific features won't make it to the website until then.
Great, and pls add a button like "send friend request on steam".
I wouldn't mind seeing a tad more love for TF2 either. Sure it's getting older and a lot of people are losing interest (I am jumping over to dota to try to improve my skills and start to sculpt) but once it got moved into the sub-forum it's crickets over there.
Don't forget, we have a contribute tag for TF2 workshop as well (all my items are tagged for at least polycount and xnorm and one has been accepted so far).
An occasional banner would be cool.
As far as Dota, it all sounds good, workshops, tuts, challenges, etc..
First of all I would like to thank everyone who make this community run.
My suggestion:
I think It would be amazing if you could get the steam judging board (:D) for the monthly contests or somehow give assurance to the winners that your items will be in game. This will be the best prize for the winners (much better than a software license IMHO)
It will also be very good for those who don't have much of marketing power to make their items get seen and voted in the workshop.
I don't know if someone has already mentioned this or not (sorry tl;dr).
On the idea of aggregating content/automatic galleries/showcasing, etc. We met with Valve last week to talk about accessing this very information, direct from the Workshop. They wrote us an API just for this very thing, which we will be taking full advantage of on the new website. With this API, we'll be able to:
Single sign-on with your Steam account to polycount (meaning: Log in to Polycount with your Steam account, or link the two together).
Pull information from the workshop that is relevant to this community. E.g. "Show me all content that has marked Polycount as a third-party contributor" or "Show me content from Workshop pages of users with linked Polycount accounts."
From there we can use this data to easily populate aggregated pages, to easily show 'top content' by the Polycount community as voted on by the Workshop community.
The new site is a couple of months away, so these specific features won't make it to the website until then.
First of all I would like to thank everyone who make this community run.
My suggestion:
I think It would be amazing if you could get the steam judging board (:D) for the monthly contests or somehow give assurance to the winners that your items will be in game. This will be the best prize for the winners (much better than a software license IMHO)
It will also be very good for those who don't have much of marketing power to make their items get seen and voted in the workshop.
I don't know if someone has already mentioned this or not (sorry tl;dr).
Wouldn't that mean Valve would be doing the competition rather than Polycount?
- AMA with a Valve artist/dev, we could either gather questions to ask or if they are open to the idea perhaps twitch stream a Q&A that people could watch live and ask things in real time.
I imagine if this happened a lot of people would be interested, so we could have the session recorded and have prepared questions from those that know they won't be able to participate due to their time-zone (we're an international bunch! ). Just a thought! No promises.
A thousand times this.
I would be ecstatic to talk to someone at Valve about when support for custom VFX is coming. My hope is to get on the ground floor for that, and I would imagine others in the polycount VFX community are thinking the same thing.
Which brings me to my suggestion:
Active engagement between the polycount community and valve to test unimplemented content-creation practices
We could be the perfect guinea pigs for whatever their VFX process is going to be.
Active engagement between the polycount community and valve to test unimplemented content-creation practices
We could be the perfect guinea pigs for whatever their VFX process is going to be.
A million times this.
Polycount already pushes the limits of what dota can do/handle, why not allow us to be the variables in their mad experiments. Or better yet, learn from what has been done here, take that pipeline and optimize it to make everyone happy.
Wouldn't that mean Valve would be doing the competition rather than Polycount?
NO maybe I didn't explain well enough.
I don't mean that valve should judge, I mean they could have a representative in the committee that judges the items to make sure that the winner item(s) gets in the game.
officially linking my steam and polycount profiles would be AWESOME - the wealth of functionality that could deliver is fantastic.
I'd also love (along with everybody else) for polycount to help all of our submissions gain visibility (both in the workshop and in the larger polycount community).
and exploit Polycount's position to clear up a lot of the questions surrounding how exactly submissions are weighed in the workshop (views/votes/etc.)
Maybe I will ask too much but if you can agree with steam and let the polycount members (who doesnt have steam account) vote our items wth polcount account. And advertise our work in other polycount threads so we can spread the word!
With regards to the hangouts, if there isn't a good way to get an expanded hangout, perhaps we could look at developing a web app so people can easily see our polycount hangouts and jump between them?
I think the easiest way for us to bridge those hangouts at the moment would be to list all running polycount dota 2 hangouts (and participants), and have an irc webchat running on the same window.
Nannou posted something like that from zbrushhangouts.com - would polycount be willing to develop something similar, or host something similar if one of us developed it?
With regards to the hangouts, if there isn't a good way to get an expanded hangout, perhaps we could look at developing a web app so people can easily see our polycount hangouts and jump between them?
I think the easiest way for us to bridge those hangouts at the moment would be to list all running polycount dota 2 hangouts (and participants), and have an irc webchat running on the same window.
Nannou posted something like that from zbrushhangouts.com - would polycount be willing to develop something similar, or host something similar if one of us developed it?
There are a few ways to do this - one is we setup a polycount account in Google Apps that lets us have a page including all our hangouts and arbitrary content similar to how our Facebook portal works. The other is doing just what zbrushhangout does - it's a simple web page with some api calls to Google Hangout. Hosting wouldn't be a real issue either way. We're working on getting a google apps account so we may start there but if someone else wants to build something in the meantime we (I) can get it hosted fairly easily.
Maybe I will ask too much but if you can agree with steam and let the polycount members (who doesnt have steam account) vote our items wth polcount account. And advertise our work in other polycount threads so we can spread the word!
This just depends what API calls they make available. Authenticating and linking with Steam is already doable on our roadmap. Just need some more technical work that is already in progress to get finished before we can start on something like that.
officially linking my steam and polycount profiles would be AWESOME - the wealth of functionality that could deliver is fantastic.
I'd also love (along with everybody else) for polycount to help all of our submissions gain visibility (both in the workshop and in the larger polycount community).
and exploit Polycount's position to clear up a lot of the questions surrounding how exactly submissions are weighed in the workshop (views/votes/etc.)
Hey Pior you can actually do this though would require a "bot" to crawl through the pages and get the images etc. I had a basic prototype running on my Dropbox when I think it was Ace-Angel who asked if he could just get a picture only waywo page.
Tricky part would be to restrict it to the Dota 2 workshop doesnt classify it as a seprate group so would have to crawl all pages till whatever was last cached. Not tricky just slow but I did a test of a 100 pages and was about 2-3 mins for waywo
Something like this is coming in a forum upgrade. Bots are fine for now but there way more efficient ways of doing this than just page scraping.
First of all I would like to thank everyone who make this community run.
My suggestion:
I think It would be amazing if you could get the steam judging board (:D) for the monthly contests or somehow give assurance to the winners that your items will be in game. This will be the best prize for the winners (much better than a software license IMHO)
It will also be very good for those who don't have much of marketing power to make their items get seen and voted in the workshop.
I don't know if someone has already mentioned this or not (sorry tl;dr).
We nor Valve can give assurance to winners that items make it into game.s Valve is very keen to let market forces dictate this - the idea being if a community makes great content, then it will make it in through sheer popularity. The TF2 Electric Boogaloo is the guiding example here.
I wouldn't mind seeing a tad more love for TF2 either. Sure it's getting older and a lot of people are losing interest (I am jumping over to dota to try to improve my skills and start to sculpt) but once it got moved into the sub-forum it's crickets over there.
Don't forget, we have a contribute tag for TF2 workshop as well (all my items are tagged for at least polycount and xnorm and one has been accepted so far).
An occasional banner would be cool.
As far as Dota, it all sounds good, workshops, tuts, challenges, etc..
Totally noted on the TF2 love. Rogue and I play way more TF2 so we have a vested interest in getting more focus there. What is this dota game everyone is talking about? ;P
I don't want this to come across the wrong way, but if the resources on item creation are not enough, then you should focus on your fundamentals. The only thing special about dota is its style, and its shader. There are several good steam guides, written by polycounters, on the subject. If anything just compile the existing resources in a Dota specific section on the wiki http://wiki.polycount.com/
@adam
How about for TF2/CS:GO community can get fair treatment like dota 2 community for upcoming new features for this website?
Don't worry they will. After all we started with TF2 - see Polycount Pack. As for CS:GO it's just skins right now so not much for our community to do there. We are kind of going where the communities and artists are wanting to go so start an initiative yourself, gain support from other polycounters, and this becomes an obvious direction.
From there we can use this data to easily populate aggregated pages, to easily show 'top content' by the Polycount community as voted on by the Workshop community.
Sounds cool but hopefully it embraces the entire community more than just 'top content' as voted on by the workshop community.
We already have that and it's called seeing the same 3 items on the front of Steam for 4 months. That's the MAIN problem with the Steam Workshop as it is right now. Continuing that trend on another website only compounds the problem in my opinion.
Hopefully 'all content' by polycounters can be showcased more so ALL members of this community can get better votes, exposure, chance at in game content.
I understand that pimping the best stuff looks best for Polycount as a showcase for a few artists, but that kind of looses focus on this being more of a supportive community, Something Polycount is known for, but Steam is not.
I also think TF2 will now need a 'polycount tag', maybe you guys can ask Valve to do so.
Maybe those tags could also be tied to the contibutors list.
Instead of me having to retag 25 items the api could just tag it polycount and xnormal as all those items are checked for profit share anyway. (they could do the same with Blender and whatnot)
There are a few ways to do this - one is we setup a polycount account in Google Apps that lets us have a page including all our hangouts and arbitrary content similar to how our Facebook portal works. The other is doing just what zbrushhangout does - it's a simple web page with some api calls to Google Hangout. Hosting wouldn't be a real issue either way. We're working on getting a google apps account so we may start there but if someone else wants to build something in the meantime we (I) can get it hosted fairly easily.
Cool! I'll take a look into building a test webpage and find out how far the Google APIs go. I've not seen zbrushhangout with any people actually in it, so it just seems to launch links to a new hangout, or the last created hangout. Maybe there is an indirect way of retrieving participant information via a Hangout app.
I brought up the topic of having noob challenges on showcase separately on the noob challenge idea thread. So the winner(s) of the contest get showcased in a Noob Hall of Fame or something like that. What do you guys think?
I dont think that is really neasecary, because of the items/concepts that the challenge are based off might be in the store, so its redundant, but it would be rad if we could get a news post when it starts up announcing that there is a noob challenge starting up, and if anyone ever wanted their first step into dota ugc , this would be a yood starting point
Sounds cool but hopefully it embraces the entire community more than just 'top content' as voted on by the workshop community.
We already have that and it's called seeing the same 3 items on the front of Steam for 4 months. That's the MAIN problem with the Steam Workshop as it is right now. Continuing that trend on another website only compounds the problem in my opinion.
Hopefully 'all content' by polycounters can be showcased more so ALL members of this community can get better votes, exposure, chance at in game content.
I understand that pimping the best stuff looks best for Polycount as a showcase for a few artists, but that kind of looses focus on this being more of a supportive community, Something Polycount is known for, but Steam is not.
I also think TF2 will now need a 'polycount tag', maybe you guys can ask Valve to do so.
Maybe those tags could also be tied to the contibutors list.
Instead of me having to retag 25 items the api could just tag it polycount and xnormal as all those items are checked for profit share anyway. (they could do the same with Blender and whatnot)
Dont worry, we can figure out how and what type of content to showcase once the feature is up and running :thumbup:
Replies
From there we can use this data to easily populate aggregated pages, to easily show 'top content' by the Polycount community as voted on by the Workshop community.
The new site is a couple of months away, so these specific features won't make it to the website until then.
Absolutely! Looking at the numbers, the Dota 2 community is the largest so we wanted to hit this first. We'll be looking at TF2 and CS: GO and asking the same questions soon. Promise!
Great, and pls add a button like "send friend request on steam".
Don't forget, we have a contribute tag for TF2 workshop as well (all my items are tagged for at least polycount and xnorm and one has been accepted so far).
An occasional banner would be cool.
As far as Dota, it all sounds good, workshops, tuts, challenges, etc..
My suggestion:
I think It would be amazing if you could get the steam judging board (:D) for the monthly contests or somehow give assurance to the winners that your items will be in game. This will be the best prize for the winners (much better than a software license IMHO)
It will also be very good for those who don't have much of marketing power to make their items get seen and voted in the workshop.
I don't know if someone has already mentioned this or not (sorry tl;dr).
This sounds awesome!
Wouldn't that mean Valve would be doing the competition rather than Polycount?
A thousand times this.
I would be ecstatic to talk to someone at Valve about when support for custom VFX is coming. My hope is to get on the ground floor for that, and I would imagine others in the polycount VFX community are thinking the same thing.
Which brings me to my suggestion:
Active engagement between the polycount community and valve to test unimplemented content-creation practices
We could be the perfect guinea pigs for whatever their VFX process is going to be.
A million times this.
Polycount already pushes the limits of what dota can do/handle, why not allow us to be the variables in their mad experiments. Or better yet, learn from what has been done here, take that pipeline and optimize it to make everyone happy.
NO
I don't mean that valve should judge, I mean they could have a representative in the committee that judges the items to make sure that the winner item(s) gets in the game.
I'd also love (along with everybody else) for polycount to help all of our submissions gain visibility (both in the workshop and in the larger polycount community).
and exploit Polycount's position to clear up a lot of the questions surrounding how exactly submissions are weighed in the workshop (views/votes/etc.)
I think the easiest way for us to bridge those hangouts at the moment would be to list all running polycount dota 2 hangouts (and participants), and have an irc webchat running on the same window.
Nannou posted something like that from zbrushhangouts.com - would polycount be willing to develop something similar, or host something similar if one of us developed it?
There are a few ways to do this - one is we setup a polycount account in Google Apps that lets us have a page including all our hangouts and arbitrary content similar to how our Facebook portal works. The other is doing just what zbrushhangout does - it's a simple web page with some api calls to Google Hangout. Hosting wouldn't be a real issue either way. We're working on getting a google apps account so we may start there but if someone else wants to build something in the meantime we (I) can get it hosted fairly easily.
This just depends what API calls they make available. Authenticating and linking with Steam is already doable on our roadmap. Just need some more technical work that is already in progress to get finished before we can start on something like that.
Already planned on roadmap.
Something like this is coming in a forum upgrade. Bots are fine for now but there way more efficient ways of doing this than just page scraping.
We nor Valve can give assurance to winners that items make it into game.s Valve is very keen to let market forces dictate this - the idea being if a community makes great content, then it will make it in through sheer popularity. The TF2 Electric Boogaloo is the guiding example here.
Totally noted on the TF2 love. Rogue and I play way more TF2 so we have a vested interest in getting more focus there. What is this dota game everyone is talking about? ;P
Please use the wiki but I also know that it can be slow and janky. Something better is coming but right now it's the best we have.
Don't worry they will. After all we started with TF2 - see Polycount Pack. As for CS:GO it's just skins right now so not much for our community to do there. We are kind of going where the communities and artists are wanting to go so start an initiative yourself, gain support from other polycounters, and this becomes an obvious direction.
Sounds cool but hopefully it embraces the entire community more than just 'top content' as voted on by the workshop community.
We already have that and it's called seeing the same 3 items on the front of Steam for 4 months. That's the MAIN problem with the Steam Workshop as it is right now. Continuing that trend on another website only compounds the problem in my opinion.
Hopefully 'all content' by polycounters can be showcased more so ALL members of this community can get better votes, exposure, chance at in game content.
I understand that pimping the best stuff looks best for Polycount as a showcase for a few artists, but that kind of looses focus on this being more of a supportive community, Something Polycount is known for, but Steam is not.
I also think TF2 will now need a 'polycount tag', maybe you guys can ask Valve to do so.
Maybe those tags could also be tied to the contibutors list.
Instead of me having to retag 25 items the api could just tag it polycount and xnormal as all those items are checked for profit share anyway. (they could do the same with Blender and whatnot)
Cool! I'll take a look into building a test webpage and find out how far the Google APIs go. I've not seen zbrushhangout with any people actually in it, so it just seems to launch links to a new hangout, or the last created hangout. Maybe there is an indirect way of retrieving participant information via a Hangout app.
I'll see what I can cook up.
Dont worry, we can figure out how and what type of content to showcase once the feature is up and running :thumbup: