Re: Is this list still alive?

[Gareth Noyce <gareth.noyce@ukonline.co.uk>]

Quoting Christian Reiniger <creinig@mayn.de>:

> On Friday 12 January 2001 14:48, The Corruptor 
wrote:
> 
> (I actually have to quote most of it)

Sorry! 
 
> Hmmm. Can you be a bit more specific? 
> You want that Advogato adds "artist" categories 
and/or that a similar 
> site (but focused on artists) comes up?

Ok, the original post was a little bit of a rant, 
and I picked specifically on two popular sites to 
highlight the increasing feeling I've had since 
joing the OS scene that it's very difficult for 
an Artist to get the same kind of notice for his 
work as a coder can. 

This is maybe a little of an exageration 
(admittedly), but the feeling is rammed home when 
you go to free sites (such as 
Sourceforge/Advogato) and see a complete bias for 
the programmer.  I was in the middle of producing 
an article for Advogato ranting about just this 
subject, but I won't now as I've already publicly 
vented my feelings.

As for functionality: I'd have to sit and think 
through it a little more -- It's only for Civil 
that I've been part of a group of artists (I'm 
used to working on my own afa games dev is 
concerned), and we're still getting things 
together as far as the 'groupware' side of things 
is concerned. I can however see a rising need to 
share actions/filters/script-fu snippets between 
myself and the team, not to mention all the 
guides that I've had to write to ensure 
consistency of style etc. (see the website for 
the lengths this has already gone to). This 
should really see it's way onto the SF group 
pages. It would also be nice if I didn't have to 
type it all!

I think my initial, ranting point was that it 
would feel pretty nice to actually register as an 
artist in places like SF/Advogato/etc, and not 
have to register my programming skills (picking 
on sourceforge here) in order to look like a 
competent OS developer.

> And you mentioned Sourceforge.
> How would a SF-for-artists have to look/be like?

It would probably have to look pretty 
pretentious! ;-)

Functionality wise I don't feel that artists have 
a particularly different requirement, just a need 
to get these things presented /for/ artists as 
well as coders.

We still require CVS, mailing lists, space for 
sharing files etc. Task lists are still useful, 
but should provide for the day-to-day things we 
do and not just concentrate on bugs and 
documentation.  It would be nice to have group 
wide repositories of scripts/actions/filters etc 
for project members. Past that I think we get 
into the 'project specific' requirements.

For 2d games similar problems always arise which 
could easily be translated into a little bit of 
web functionality to save the repetition of 
telling artists as they join a project:

* What colour is transparent?
* Where's the lighting from?
* What is the palette? 24bit? 256? If so can I 
have the palette...
* What size are sprite blocks?

The list goes on...

> Hmm, a thought that just came to my mind: What 
about some "game art of 
> the week" site reviewing levels, models, ... ?

I'd certainly compete for that... 

> Hmm, what's Blitz Basic? What are its strengths 
and why would you use it over, say, Python?

Well, it's not a 'real' programming language in 
the way python is. You could think of it as 
Python with SDL embedded. It provides nicely 
encapsulated calls for things like blitting, 
scrolling, displaying images, getting keyboard 
events etc. It's just a language built to provide 
an easy environment to write games in. It's 
pretty fast aswell... I'd provide a URL, but it 
escapes me ATM.

The thing about Blitz is, it encouraged a lot of 
people to tinker about with games developement 
and it has a nice environment to work in. The IDE 
is provided, there's no tracking down libraries 
etc. Essentially -- it's a good way to start 
out...

G



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