New models, art and such

[guciomir]

Once I read the newest topic with structures models (great job Colditz!) I encountered this:

You are right that we have done a really poor job of coordinating and integrating various past efforts. elio and Mysteryem have to some extent been doing some of this, but the rest of us have been quite busy with coding, and have been shy to make decisions on what to integrate. This indecision is worst when we see differences between the style of new changes and the old version, since we have no good way to achieve consensus about which direction the artwork in the game should develop. The other problem with style differences is that we are hesitant to change only some parts to a new style and leaving a clash of styles in the game, perhaps hoping that someone will provide a full replacement one day. So basically the 'safe' way of providing new artwork is to stay very close to the old style, and we really are in need of good advice on how to deal with anything else.

Per
Developer

I've seen tons of good models that just did not make it for whatever reason stated in quote.

Thus my suggestion:
1) find one guy who would become coordinator for textures/models
2) do not wait until ALL is done, but put textures and models piece by piece into the trunk and once everything is done backport to official release. When something worthy appears on forum and has a good license - put it into trunk! So many nice work got killed because noone cared to use it....
3) make sure every artist is working in trunk, not in official releases (for example Art Revolution by Olrox and Mangus was not compatible with trunk)

[Per]

I do not think you quite understand who trunk works. It is not a place to put unfinished works. It is the starting point of each official release series. It is also quite hard for mod makers and artists to work directly on trunk because it can at times change very quickly, can have lots of icky bugs, and building it is apparently not for the faint hearted on non-linux platforms. Working on a stable release (or reasonably stable beta...) is usually a better idea.

That said, our current "praise and forget" approach (never intended as such but Olrox described it quite well) is also not very constructive, so we need to find some way to manage such contributions as well.

[Berg]

Is it worthwhile to update, upgrade, fix errors in current structures or is there a plan to replace them with better models?

[Zarel]

I do not think you quite understand who trunk works. It is not a place to put unfinished works. It is the starting point of each official release series. It is also quite hard for mod makers and artists to work directly on trunk because it can at times change very quickly, can have lots of icky bugs, and building it is apparently not for the faint hearted on non-linux platforms. Working on a stable release (or reasonably stable beta...) is usually a better idea.

Actually, building it is not for the faint hearted on Windows. On OS X, it's literally three clicks (double-click the Xcode project, and click "Build").

That said, our current "praise and forget" approach (never intended as such but Olrox described it quite well) is also not very constructive, so we need to find some way to manage such contributions as well.

It is for this reason that my replies are usually not so much "that's awesome", but rather "that's awesome, and here are some things you should change before I think it will be accepted into trunk".

In a few cases (nearly all of Mysteryem's contributions, as well as a few others), they make the changes, and their changes are accepted into trunk, but in other cases, the artist seems fine with keeping their work as a mod, or simply not having it in the game at all, which is their own decision to make and I respect that.