I vote on stuff I like, now with cue i probably down vote more. But that's because I am having to look at things that aren't up to par. Before i would just not click on that item.
======editted//because I do love polycount but...
I do think there is some animosity around here. I'm not sure where it stems from though. Greed? It's a tough market and everyone would like to make money on it.
Personal feelings? Maybe people don't like others work/style/or that person for some reason?
Some people get tons of feedback on every little thing, some get none at all...
Back in the TF2 days there was a time when there was an update that was made by the community for the game. How fucking awesome would it be to have Polycount work with organizations like Dota Cinema and BTS or whoever else, and Valve and put together a community made Dota update.
Agree with everything kite mentioned. I prefer how the TF2 community presents the Electric Boogaloo update for one factor: Fan artists. Hats aside, they contributed an entertaining mini comic and a gallery of amazing fan works! Not only Youtube personalities are promoting the update, you can see fan artists on Tumblr promoting Electric Boogaloo along with their featured works too! How awesome is that?
I hosted #Dota2Collab on twitter searching for more Dota 2 fan artists. Note that this is a free collaboration project, and to my amazement I received a lot of gorgeous submissions of any artistic skill level. They possess such great passion and they're willing to make time for a free project, it's a shame they're overshadowed in comparison to other community circles.
Yes, I'm hoping to see a Dota 2 community update featuring hero lore comics, a short film, an art gallery and a thematic Polycount community chest! If Valve allows this, I'm definitely certain a lot of us would be excited to hop in a community update, be it Workshop artists, fan artists, Youtube content creators and more!
I've been noticing since the workshop queue update that most items that feature in the 3 icons on the library/play window gain an extra 30-120k views then anything else on the front page. Does anyone have any idea what are the requirements of popularity are to make it on the library window?
Personally I feel it kinda makes the queue redundant if just being on this page gives you 100x the views the queue does. Surely it's not helping valve judge popularity of a set, only informing really them that most people don't bother going to the workshop page and will click on any item icon that happens to be in front of them as they go to play the game.
Yeah, Valve should do away with the 2-3 'most popular' items on the front page. It's always the same items for long spans of time. And that's probably partly because they are great, but also because that is what is most recent/seen.
Once they get that window they are there for good.
They can't post everyone's stuff, and we all know not everything should get that attention. Some stuff just isn't that great. But maybe they could rotate those slots a few times a day between stuff that is highly rated.
say 85% good votes gets you in that rotation?
That way 2-3 items don't get all attention, but to get attention items have to be pretty good.
I still dream of a day when the workshop page looks pretty much like my netflix queue. Just rows, most popular, day, week, all time, friends favorites, etc etc, that would be a page of of several scrolling queues all on one page, where you could vote for the item without leaving this queue.... one can dream....
Kite, I'd say don't hesitate to make a mockup of that dream ! Anything that can be done to help Valve can help - especially considering that they have been implementing many of the suggestions made here in the past (one-click collection items thumbs up, artists 'follow' button, binging up old items back into the spotlight, and so on.)
Kite, I'd say don't hesitate to make a mockup of that dream ! Anything that can be done to help Valve can help - especially considering that they have been implementing many of the suggestions made here in the past (one-click collection items thumbs up, artists 'follow' button, binging up old items back into the spotlight, and so on.)
You made valid points, so here is a rough mock up of the vision. Idea is you mouse over the arrows to scroll the individual queues, while being able to vote from this page, and this page it self would be scroll-able, so it would be like 12 queues of almost infinite scrolling mini queues, it would be so fucking cool, you could vote 100's of items from one page! Hope you guys like! Happy Hatting!
If Valve doesn't respond, I'm more than willing to eventually incorporate some of these ideas into the Hattery's Workshop page (instead of just showing the latest 10 as it is now). Hopefully we'll get to the point where just about all the artists are uploading to the Hattery so that we're not missing anyone
If Valve doesn't respond, I'm more than willing to eventually incorporate some of these ideas into the Hattery's Workshop page (instead of just showing the latest 10 as it is now). Hopefully we'll get to the point where just about all the hatters are uploading to the Hattery so that we're not missing anyone
That's awesome to hear! I really hope Valve does some feature stealing from netflix, something like this could streamline workshop and voting and it could be really amazing!
@Kite, i really don't like that idea mianly becuase then people will vote based on icon rather than based on actual ingame item. Just take out the vote on the page and I'd be fine with the new layout. I think if collections took only one spot, it could easily push items to the front.
IMO, it's bad idea. You can't see all screens and model here. So if you will see something good here, it's not mean you will see same quality in the game. Thumbnail != Ingame Shots. So you can't vote correctly
I get where you guys are coming from, and the voting on this page is not even necessary, I mainly think browsing the workshop should have a more streamlined format like this. My idea behind adding voting on this page was just trying to think of another way to entice more users to vote on more items because of the accessibility of voting from here, but again my main focus is on the browsing format, and these voting buttons were just a tack on feature that we could easily live without
My attempt to a streamlined and accessible voting layout. Ditch the middle-man (the "Browse the Workshop" page. (Not entirely...)) and include it directly into the client.
Possible pro's we see with this layout:
* Players can vote on sets without having to browse the workshop page.
* Workshop artists don't have to spend time on making extra promotional material.
* Items displayed are showed real time.
* No-more misleading promotion art.
* Players could try the items in bot/real matches (certain timelimit on equiped items)
* ???
* (Discuss.)
Possible cons we see with this layout:
* Technical flaws of this preview could exist that can mislead voters and produce downvotes. (Rigging issues, etc.)
* Slower computers can't view items in their glorious high definition deliciousness. (Resulting in false ratings.)
* By conventional downloading methods for items, slow internet speed users and capped internet users won't be able to vote. (if these items can be streamed somehow...)
* ???
* (Discuss.)
My attempt to a streamlined and accessible voting layout. Ditch the middle-man (the "Browse the Workshop" page. (Not entirely...)) and include it directly into the client.
Possible pro's I see with this layout:
* Players can vote on sets without having to browse the workshop page.
* Workshop artists don't have to spend time on making extra promotional material.
* Items displayed are showed real time.
* No-more misleading promotion art.
* Players could try the items in bot/real matches.
* ???
* (Discuss.)
Possible cons I see with this layout:
* Technical flaws of this preview could exist that can mislead voters and produce downvotes. (Rigging issues, etc.)
* ???
* (Discuss.)
Awesome mock up, and I would LOVE to see some sort of real time preview like this in the client for workshop, but the big issue I would see is the technical limitations behind it. Currently there needs to be some files that are loaded in locally from the machine for the client to display the preview, like sets in the store/ loadout. If they were to add a real time preview for all submissions the idea of having a client download each set to preview it would be crazy. Even if it just temporally cached the files it could still add to lots of bandwidth and lots of reads and writes to the disc. If they could off load that to a server side for this aspect it could be more doable, but then that would be a whole new bag of cats for Valve to deal with
What could be cooler than actually see the items on a hero as they will be seen in game?
Nothing!
True, there are veiwer bugs and most likely they'd make it into the workshop view. Some items show specular WAYYYY off from in game, etc... particles, blah blah.
I can still see use for in game shots and promos, but this would be very very cool.
Awesome idea vertical! That way I could play with my unaccepted items. :-)
It would be really cool if they would support it that somehow workshop artists can play with their unaccepted stuff - as for me I would love to play with my Witch Doctor set for example.
Vertical, don't really think that a limit time would cut it though. Maybe after the player dies once it resets. Or even a limited number of games you can play to "test" it out.
* Players could try the items in bot/real matches (certain timelimit on equiped items)
I really don't think this would be in Valve's best interest to do something like this if they went with a real time workshop format. They don't let you test sets in the store, so why introduce a way to test unreleased items in the game. The feature should really be nothing more than the preview in the menu. If Valve kept it to a more simple preview like you presented this would be easier for them to host on the server side, so users would not need to download anything to preview sets in real time.
Not quite. TF2 DOES have a try out feature, however it is not cosmetics, just weapons.
Dota doesn't have gameplay changing weapons.
Also, it is only old weapons, none of the new release weapons can be tried out because that would discourage sales.
But, TF2 DOES let you see the item on characters and even try paints on them in a preview window.
I honestly see no reason why using them in a regular game would matter. It's only for looks and it doesn't take gameplay to see the item.
As far as user resolution, it would be the same across all items on a per user basis. People with high res would see all items high res, people with low would see items all low res.
But, TF2 DOES let you see the item on characters and even try paints on them in a preview window.
I honestly see no reason why using them in a regular game would matter. It's only for looks and it doesn't take gameplay to see the item.
As far as user resolution, it would be the same across all items on a per user basis. People with high res would see all items high res, people with low would see items all low res.
It's like that for dota now.... they have a preview of existing items with a link to the community market/store. The thing that vertical presented was an ability to load items from the workshop.
Resolution does actually matter, some items might look fine with 50% resolution while others might just look like pixels. Being able to see the item at 100% means that you can see the item at its best.
It's like that for dota now.... they have a preview of existing items with a link to the community market/store. The thing that vertical presented was an ability to load items from the workshop.
I really love the idea of having in-game preview of workshop items, but I think it may be asking too much from Valve. The Models sent do not require that much space, let's say around 2mb per item (10-20mb per set). That being said, with several thousands of players constantly spamming next/prev buttons the traffic usage would be really quite gigantic.
But then again Valve is not a small company and I may be overestimating the traffic. Looking at workshop right now, the images/gifs are quite heavy themselves :P
And hey, throwing ideas at Valve is never a bad thing
I really love the idea of having in-game preview of workshop items, but I think it may be asking too much from Valve. The Models sent do not require that much space, let's say around 2mb per item (10-20mb per set). That being said, with several thousands of players constantly spamming next/prev buttons the traffic usage would be really quite gigantic.
But then again Valve is not a small company and I may be overestimating the traffic. Looking at workshop right now, the images/gifs are quite heavy themselves :P
And hey, throwing ideas at Valve is never a bad thing
If Valve is looking to improve the workshop in any way, it can only get better.
I think with the live preview, you don't need any marketing material to hog the server space with submissions. However, you will still have a dedicated page for your items anyway.
In other words, the server is going to be busy but the server space will be balanced out with the marketing material that's not needed anymore.
I really think it's possible for a live client, I mean, look at our import tools since 2 years ago... We've come a long way since then. Valve can just reuse existing code and modify it. (Copy the Loadout page and add a few extra features that's also used for the import tools (eg. Camera perspective buttons, etc.))
Also, a separate server to retrieve stored workshop files to not influence the Dota 2 network.
TL~DR - Balanced out server bandwidth with obsolete marketing material, totally do-able by Valve.
One very straightforward way to make the Workshop better would be to make Steam faster overall ! I am not sure if that's the case for everybody, but on my end browsing pages (like the current Workshop and Store) through Steam is extremely slow compared to doing the same in Chrome.
It's especially obvious compared to Hulu for instance. That site is lightning fast !
Regarding an in-client live preview : I think this could indeed be great, but my only concern about it is that it might not always show items in their best light ... After all, a carefully framed screenshot used as thumbnail can say a lot about an item, and we all know that taking the perfect screenshot takes time ! But of course the problem is that it is always possible to twist things a bit by using tessellation and highres textures ... But that's not always necessary a bad thing, especially compared to the awful automated screenshots on grey background taken by Valve.
Maybe a sweet spot would be to have a real time preview laid out in such a way that the thumbnails and all the carefully created promotion material are all visible too ? After all, one of the great things about the current workshop system is that if forces everyone to learn and get better at a lot of useful things (presentation, video editing, illustration). It certainly takes a lot of effort but I think that everybody grows from it !
Promotional material is also good because it not only sells the item, but it also sells the idea behind it - the same way that kids cartoons "sell" the idea of toys representing badass characters. Valve knows that very well, as shown by the care they put into their hero reveals. Remember the 3 Spirits update ? And the Oracle reveal too. These cool images (sometimes animated !) build hype !
In short : a rotating turntable doesn't always make items look as nice as they actually are, especially when the stock animations of a given hero are not too great But if it is presented as a sleek page with a nice layout and all the relevant gallery images on display, it could certainly be a nice thing to have.
One very important thing to keep in maind is that such a system would have to be *very* responsive. Even if a realtime preview looks really fancy, it is irrelevant if it ends up loading slower than, say, an average Facebook or Gmail page. Maybe the turntable could be generated from image captures, like this ?
On a side note : I totally agree with Vertical on the fact that the Artist(s) names should probably be displayed. It would also require precise credits tho, as an item can have a lot of "authors" which are actually just third parties.
Replies
======editted//because I do love polycount but...
I do think there is some animosity around here. I'm not sure where it stems from though. Greed? It's a tough market and everyone would like to make money on it.
Personal feelings? Maybe people don't like others work/style/or that person for some reason?
Some people get tons of feedback on every little thing, some get none at all...
Agree with everything kite mentioned. I prefer how the TF2 community presents the Electric Boogaloo update for one factor: Fan artists. Hats aside, they contributed an entertaining mini comic and a gallery of amazing fan works! Not only Youtube personalities are promoting the update, you can see fan artists on Tumblr promoting Electric Boogaloo along with their featured works too! How awesome is that?
I hosted #Dota2Collab on twitter searching for more Dota 2 fan artists. Note that this is a free collaboration project, and to my amazement I received a lot of gorgeous submissions of any artistic skill level. They possess such great passion and they're willing to make time for a free project, it's a shame they're overshadowed in comparison to other community circles.
Yes, I'm hoping to see a Dota 2 community update featuring hero lore comics, a short film, an art gallery and a thematic Polycount community chest! If Valve allows this, I'm definitely certain a lot of us would be excited to hop in a community update, be it Workshop artists, fan artists, Youtube content creators and more!
Personally I feel it kinda makes the queue redundant if just being on this page gives you 100x the views the queue does. Surely it's not helping valve judge popularity of a set, only informing really them that most people don't bother going to the workshop page and will click on any item icon that happens to be in front of them as they go to play the game.
-Toasty
Once they get that window they are there for good.
They can't post everyone's stuff, and we all know not everything should get that attention. Some stuff just isn't that great. But maybe they could rotate those slots a few times a day between stuff that is highly rated.
say 85% good votes gets you in that rotation?
That way 2-3 items don't get all attention, but to get attention items have to be pretty good.
You made valid points, so here is a rough mock up of the vision. Idea is you mouse over the arrows to scroll the individual queues, while being able to vote from this page, and this page it self would be scroll-able, so it would be like 12 queues of almost infinite scrolling mini queues, it would be so fucking cool, you could vote 100's of items from one page! Hope you guys like! Happy Hatting!
That's awesome to hear! I really hope Valve does some feature stealing from netflix, something like this could streamline workshop and voting and it could be really amazing!
Possible pro's we see with this layout:
* Players can vote on sets without having to browse the workshop page.
* Workshop artists don't have to spend time on making extra promotional material.
* Items displayed are showed real time.
* No-more misleading promotion art.
* Players could try the items in bot/real matches (certain timelimit on equiped items)
* ???
* (Discuss.)
Possible cons we see with this layout:
* Technical flaws of this preview could exist that can mislead voters and produce downvotes. (Rigging issues, etc.)
* Slower computers can't view items in their glorious high definition deliciousness. (Resulting in false ratings.)
* By conventional downloading methods for items, slow internet speed users and capped internet users won't be able to vote. (if these items can be streamed somehow...)
* ???
* (Discuss.)
Bright Green = updated.
Awesome mock up, and I would LOVE to see some sort of real time preview like this in the client for workshop, but the big issue I would see is the technical limitations behind it. Currently there needs to be some files that are loaded in locally from the machine for the client to display the preview, like sets in the store/ loadout. If they were to add a real time preview for all submissions the idea of having a client download each set to preview it would be crazy. Even if it just temporally cached the files it could still add to lots of bandwidth and lots of reads and writes to the disc. If they could off load that to a server side for this aspect it could be more doable, but then that would be a whole new bag of cats for Valve to deal with
Nothing!
True, there are veiwer bugs and most likely they'd make it into the workshop view. Some items show specular WAYYYY off from in game, etc... particles, blah blah.
I can still see use for in game shots and promos, but this would be very very cool.
Due to techincal limitations many computers, some people probably can't view items at the best resolution.
I also agree on what kite said about the downloading too
Most detail is on the diffuse/colour texture itself, no? Anyway, the slower computers would pose an issue on the client viewer.
I agree with downloading can be an issue for slower internet users and capped users.
Updated the initial post. http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=2216867&postcount=214
It would be really cool if they would support it that somehow workshop artists can play with their unaccepted stuff - as for me I would love to play with my Witch Doctor set for example.
Vertical, don't really think that a limit time would cut it though. Maybe after the player dies once it resets. Or even a limited number of games you can play to "test" it out.
I really don't think this would be in Valve's best interest to do something like this if they went with a real time workshop format. They don't let you test sets in the store, so why introduce a way to test unreleased items in the game. The feature should really be nothing more than the preview in the menu. If Valve kept it to a more simple preview like you presented this would be easier for them to host on the server side, so users would not need to download anything to preview sets in real time.
Not quite. TF2 DOES have a try out feature, however it is not cosmetics, just weapons.
Dota doesn't have gameplay changing weapons.
Also, it is only old weapons, none of the new release weapons can be tried out because that would discourage sales.
But, TF2 DOES let you see the item on characters and even try paints on them in a preview window.
I honestly see no reason why using them in a regular game would matter. It's only for looks and it doesn't take gameplay to see the item.
As far as user resolution, it would be the same across all items on a per user basis. People with high res would see all items high res, people with low would see items all low res.
It's like that for dota now.... they have a preview of existing items with a link to the community market/store. The thing that vertical presented was an ability to load items from the workshop.
Resolution does actually matter, some items might look fine with 50% resolution while others might just look like pixels. Being able to see the item at 100% means that you can see the item at its best.
Yeah I understand that.
But then again Valve is not a small company and I may be overestimating the traffic. Looking at workshop right now, the images/gifs are quite heavy themselves :P
And hey, throwing ideas at Valve is never a bad thing
If Valve is looking to improve the workshop in any way, it can only get better.
I think with the live preview, you don't need any marketing material to hog the server space with submissions. However, you will still have a dedicated page for your items anyway.
In other words, the server is going to be busy but the server space will be balanced out with the marketing material that's not needed anymore.
I really think it's possible for a live client, I mean, look at our import tools since 2 years ago... We've come a long way since then. Valve can just reuse existing code and modify it. (Copy the Loadout page and add a few extra features that's also used for the import tools (eg. Camera perspective buttons, etc.))
Also, a separate server to retrieve stored workshop files to not influence the Dota 2 network.
TL~DR - Balanced out server bandwidth with obsolete marketing material, totally do-able by Valve.
It's especially obvious compared to Hulu for instance. That site is lightning fast !
http://www.hulu.com/tv/popular/shows
Regarding an in-client live preview : I think this could indeed be great, but my only concern about it is that it might not always show items in their best light ... After all, a carefully framed screenshot used as thumbnail can say a lot about an item, and we all know that taking the perfect screenshot takes time ! But of course the problem is that it is always possible to twist things a bit by using tessellation and highres textures ... But that's not always necessary a bad thing, especially compared to the awful automated screenshots on grey background taken by Valve.
Maybe a sweet spot would be to have a real time preview laid out in such a way that the thumbnails and all the carefully created promotion material are all visible too ? After all, one of the great things about the current workshop system is that if forces everyone to learn and get better at a lot of useful things (presentation, video editing, illustration). It certainly takes a lot of effort but I think that everybody grows from it !
Promotional material is also good because it not only sells the item, but it also sells the idea behind it - the same way that kids cartoons "sell" the idea of toys representing badass characters. Valve knows that very well, as shown by the care they put into their hero reveals. Remember the 3 Spirits update ? And the Oracle reveal too. These cool images (sometimes animated !) build hype !
In short : a rotating turntable doesn't always make items look as nice as they actually are, especially when the stock animations of a given hero are not too great
One very important thing to keep in maind is that such a system would have to be *very* responsive. Even if a realtime preview looks really fancy, it is irrelevant if it ends up loading slower than, say, an average Facebook or Gmail page. Maybe the turntable could be generated from image captures, like this ?
http://www.snap36.com/360-industrial-photography.php
Cool stuff to think about !
On a side note : I totally agree with Vertical on the fact that the Artist(s) names should probably be displayed. It would also require precise credits tho, as an item can have a lot of "authors" which are actually just third parties.