Happy 2023, from Project Perfect Mod Community!

Banshee

Hello everyone! At Project Perfect Mod, we wish a happy 2023 for everyone! The year when your dreams come true, and you get a lot of interesting content, games, and mods to play.

And now, it is the time for our traditional Happy New Year posts, where we will keep the same structure as the last one: first, we talk about 2022 for the PPM community websites and forums and then, the future plans.

2022 for the PPM Community:

The year 2022 was important for the Project Perfect Mod Community to confirm its news activity at a level that we definitely were not used to. For those who visited PPM before 2022, we had months where we had 1, 2, or even didn't have any news posts at all. Now, we have two to three news per day, sometimes more than that. And if we don't have news here, you might have a hard time finding related news elsewhere. If you visit Project Perfect Game or any of the other subsites (Command & Conquer, Tiberian Sun, Red Alert 2, and the recently released Generals one), you won't find news posted in November in any frontpage. We have also fixed several bugs in the subsites, and their news posts are longer different from the look of the original Project Perfect Mod. We still have to fix the content in Project Perfect Game and also fix the community news trackers in this place.

The news activity has also increased because we have been covering more content. We have added to our coverage different game engines, such as Spring, Open TTD, Open RCT2, and FreeCiv. We have also brought closer to our lens image creation tools such as Blender, GIMP, PaintNET, Krita, among others, including add-ons for these tools. We have also covered some popular programming IDEs such as Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, and NotePad++.

Besides that, the changes are not visible. Bug fixes and even an incomplete work on the forum engine to make our forums more... alive, like something that could eventually become some sort of chat tool. There were a lot of efforts in the back scenes to improve the news posting detection and creation tool to achieve this kind of activity with the news posting mentioned earlier.

Future Plans for PPM Community:

The PPM community relies on user-created content to keep it 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 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 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's content needs to cover the game engines that its news posts are covering. 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, which 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 fixes 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 in reducing 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, etc...

-> Add multiple participants for Private Messages, transform it into a conversation and 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 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 the 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 have 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 on 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 will 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 is done with CAD modelers.

And that's all for now. I hope you have a great 2023.

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