Also Known As: banshee_revora (Steam) Joined: 15 Aug 2002 Location: Brazil
Posted: Sat Jan 01, 2022 5:28 am Post subject:
Happy 2022, from Project Perfect Mod Community!
Subject description: Time for big plans for PPM community!
Happy 2022, everyone! We hope all of you have a great year and that may your dreams come true, including your modding or game development dreams.
Until 2020, we had a tradtion of Happy New Year posts where we would summarize the releases of the year and post our plans for the future. I wanted to do that last year as well, however, real-life problems prevented me from doing it. It wasn't covid-19. In fact, 2021 was a tough year for me because of my Ph. D. I'm not done with it, my situation with it is not comfortable either, but at least right now I'm no longer a zombie, walking-dead creature after I've reached some important milestones on it. So, it is time to return to the Happy New Year tradition with some modifications to make this news post easier for me to write. I'll focus on the PPM community and software rather than summarize what our community has done during the year because that summary takes several hours to be written.
Until last October, PPM consisted of a a site, Forums, SVN and hosted sites (and Tiberium Web). Now, we introduced the subsites and Project Perfect Game (also called from now on as PPG). This is why I am referring to PPM Community rather than just Project Perfect Mod because PPG is part of the PPM Community. I am very surprised how our PPM Community has evolved so much during this year, despite all odds. Starting with the server move and all the effects that it had on this community, such as a much faster response time, however, some headaches due to bad configurations too. We have been mentioning Project Perfect Game in our Happy New Year plans since 2019 at least, although our plans to launch are probably over 5 years old. We simply did not have the prerequisites in our backend until then. This year we have launched it, although it is in its infant stages and we still have a lot of work to improve it.
For those wondering, our plan with PPG is to make it focus on making games out of community game engines and commercial game engines that can be used free of charge (if you plan to create non-commercial games with it), like Unreal Engine. So, we wanna focus on the usage of existing game engines rather than cover the creation of new ones. After all, it is part of PPM's spirit, although we would love to see the community creating new cool game engines like OpenRA. PPG should not be limited to real-time strategy games, although our public is mostly RTS fans at the moment.
Another breakthrough change that happened here this month and I did not officially announce it in the news is something that we have placed in every Happy New Year news post since... 2014. It is mentioned in " Improve news coverage from other games and communities". That is something that it has received a lot of work during the year. At the beginning of the year, we have finished our implementation of the ability to export news based on the use of keywords. So, we could have RSS feeds of news from #TiberianSun or from a group of keywords that could allow, for instance, news restricted to Command & Conquer mods (from different C&C games). In October, when we launched PPG and other subsites, one of the prerequisites that were implemented was the ability to transform news feeds into site news. It works fine, but we still have some matters to fix, such as how does it deal with quotes and codes. After doing all that we still had one big problem which was.... posting news demands a lot of effort and time. And it is a problem that is not restricted to me. We have a Submit News forum here where we rarely get news submissions because most people do not have the patience to write a wall of text or convert their images and links into a news post. It would be much easier if the efforts required to post news could be shortened to posting a link and letting people discuss it. So, we have extended our feed importing infrastructure recently and created a news creation tool. Let me get something straight here: I am not a bot. The tool helps me to post news much faster now, although I still have to revise and adapt the text. However, I'm taking 5 minutes to post something that I did in 2 hours. This is why you guys are seeing much more news posted recently and improved news coverage at the PPM community. However, this tool doesn't work for every single type of news post. I.e.: this specific news post is taking several hours to be written and the tool is being useless right now.
The PPM community relies on user-created content to keep fresh, alive and kicking. The massive creation of news allows me to contribute to it, but this is not enough. We need your posts, your created assets, your mods, feedback, doubts, etc. So, it is time to share our plans for the PPM Community for the next year and beyond, as we always do in our traditional Happy New Year posts:
-> Context-based post content: We plan to add, in a low term, a BB code to allow parts of a forum post to be visible only on forums or only on PPM, PPG, RA2 PPM, TS PPM, or C&C PPM.... or a mix of them. With the creation of the PPM subsites and PPG, we are in a dire need of this feature. I'm still trying to figure out the best way to do that without compromising our RSS feeds.
-> Create more content for Project Perfect Game: PPG needs to cover more game engines and to have more content about them. Right now, we only have a subset of the content of PPM on it, but the idea is that it will eventually grow to its own thing. We already have the infrastructure to do that. It also needs its own art, buttons, and a few things that will give its own identity.
-> Re-plan the use of the forum keywords by the users: Right now, when you create a post, you have the option to write some keywords for it. They will only show up if a moderator/admin approves it. But this is definitely a terrible way to use it because keywords will only be useful if they follow some standards. And this is a task for those who organize the forums. So, our idea is to have a fixed set of keywords in each forum that should be allowed to be used and it should affect its organization. I.e.: If you want to report a bug from a project, you could highlight the "#Bug" keyword in your topic. If a moderator of the forum eventually fix your reported bug, it could add a #Fixed to your topic or any other keyword that fits. Then, you could view all topics with #Bug in the forum if you hit the highlighted word at the top of the forum view. Things like that could also be helpful to reduce the number of forums here. Let's say you have a mod. Instead of having a forum for each faction, you could replace it with the use of keywords #GDI, #Nod, #Forgotten, etc. The possibilities are countless.
-> Modernize the forums user interface: We want to make it become more friendly to browse it with mobile devices. Also, we want to allow posting, editing, and other common tasks to be faster and as comfortable as a chat in discord. We also plan to bring friendly URLs, HTML5 support, and etc...
-> Add multiple participants for Private Messages, transform it into a conversation and a Report this Post to a Moderator: Right now, you can only PM a single person and this is quite unattractive when you have Discord, Whatsapp and so many other better messaging options. A Report this Post to a Moderator feature requires PMs to multiple participants, otherwise, the best thing we can do is a Report this Post to Banshee. We also need a better mechanism to warn when a PM receives a response.
-> Improve the internal news creation tool to quickly allow the creation of other types of news posts: It would be fun if we had a weekly resume of the attractive SHP, Voxel, 3D, maps, etc that were submitted in the forums. Or, if we had means to track the videos that were created by streamers who play the mods we develop here. And there is more room for different kinds of news that could still be interesting for mod/game development.
-> Modernize the sites and subsites: While most of our plans for site and subsites modernization has been implemented, there is one thing left: The ability to show news as we scroll and have each news with a friendly URL that can be crawled by the search engines.
-> Allow users to create communities in PPM forums that are detached from PPM's forum organization: We want to eventually allow any forum user to create forums without my interference. However, these forums would not show up at the ppmforums.com index, although they would still be publicly accessible if desired by the owner of the community. So, if you have a project, instead of requesting hosting here, you would simply create a forum for it. If it is good enough, we would promote it in our index. Otherwise, it would be ok. Of course that it is something that our current infrastructure is not ready to run and, when it becomes available, it would also require a lot of attention in terms of content, security issues, and bugs. This is a long-term plan.
-> Progress with my doctorate project to transform low poly pixel art into highly detailed images: The scope of my Ds.C. thesis is broader than that, but a super-sampling application of it would help us to convert our SHP files into something that could be used in other games and projects.
-> Progress with VXLSE III's 3D model export feature: This is important if we plan to become a community that modifies or develops 3D games. We have many voxel assets that would be very useful in newer games if we are able to convert them. Don't expect this to be finished at any time soon since I have a doctorate to finish first and my thesis will be used on this solution (being a small, but significant part of it). VXLSE III could also receive a different interface to allow the user to model voxel models in a similar fashion that it is done with CAD modelers.
And, that's all for now, gentlemen. I hope you have a great 2022.
That's a big to do list with a lot of interesting features, I wish you luck with its progress.
I'm going to try & be more active here a PPM during the coming year, I want to get back to making new shp & voxel content for public use again as its been awhile since I posted anything. _________________
Happy New Year guys! Banshee, some of these are great ideas. Modernizing forums and especially users creating their own communities. And private messages upgrade. I am looking for it. _________________ PPM Halloween Season 2021 QUICK_EDIT
You cannot post new topics in this forum You can reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum You cannot attach files in this forum You can download files in this forum
Happy 2022, from Project Perfect Mod Community!
