Media... New directions...

Hi all! To start off I'd like to say I'm really enthusiastic about our new media team after meeting them Sunday at the media gathering! We have some very talented artists who I just can't wait to see what they'll do when unleashed. I'd also like for all of us to take a step back and have a look at where we are as a team, where we've been (and some of the lessons learned) and the paths we might take to ensure our success. Keep in mind that while reading this email all of these points are just my opinions and they certainly are not the gospel truth! They are only the way that I see them and I hope that they will spark debate amongst ourselves so that we will have a clear vision of our history and the path that lies before for us... So here's the state of things as I see them...

• We have a pool of talented artists . I was very surprised, impressed and excited by the artwork everyone has shown me thus far. When I took the media coordinator position I thought we would have to develop most if not all of our talent over a long period of time to reach the level of production values that I wanted to see in WF games. On Sunday I found that this preconception is not true! We have some truly talented artists! I feel confident that we will be cranking out some high quality artwork in short order.

• We have a new beginning . As hard of a pill it was to swallow Uta withdrawing her art from WF it gives us an opportunity to make a fresh start and use the lessons learned in Acorn to standardize our artwork. This will means that new clients will have an easy time using our media. Also, our base of artwork will be consistent and easier to grasp by newbies. So there is a silver lining in the dark cloud that has hung over media as of late.

• We need a process to create professional quality media - In order for our project to succeed we need to have high artistic standards and consistent production values for each of our games. I see this as our biggest long range challenge. With such a diversity of backgrounds and training our artists need a coherent and consistent methodology for creating game media which is based on constructive peer review. MagnetHead and myself are currently working on just such a process and will hopefully be releasing our results for peer review in the near future. This process through peer review will (hopefully) help us grow as artists by exposing us to new techniques and styles which will lead to high quality media that WorldForge and other similar projects can use.

• Fact: Our Media Documentation Sucks - This is a priority area to be addressed! Media 2D does have some helpful docs but we need more... much more! Music is in dire need of care. Currently the only doc contained therein is DragonM's Audio Whitepaper. Also the 3D and SoundFX sections have no documentation. We need lots of help creating these docs. I'd be only to happy to hand out documentation assignments to anyone who is interested. We shall soon have a skeleton media site where we can place any docs you write so don't let that be an excuse. ;-) Writing these docs would most likely involve doing some amount of research on your own, contacting client developers (Dime and Uclient come to mind) and ask them questions about what assumptions they're having to make about the media their clients will be using. Also ascertaining what constraints if any should media adhere to so that clients can easily use the media we create is another area of interest.

• Lessons Learned From Acorn

  = Standardize Early - Acorn artwork was largely done by one person at least in part because there weren't any documented standards for new artists to follow. This made it very difficult for artists to begin contributing meaningfully to WF as the learning curve was quite high and fraught with peril. ;-) We need to make artists' job easy and clear by documenting standards that we all agree upon. Its hard enough creating artwork. Everyone needs to know what the rules are. :-)

  = Hand drawn sprites are too much work - We need to find a better way to suppliment if not replace the hand creation of tiles. Procedural texture generators such as Reptile 2, Texure Generator, sTile99, PSP, Photoshop and even the Gimp (in some cases) might be used here where only parameters need to be tweaked to come out with nice looking textures. If nothing else these tools could be used to create placeholder media.

• Media creation process must be open and transparent to new artists - That is to say the process of creating media must easily be grasped by newbies after reading the required documentation. We want to make it easy for new artists to contribute with as small of a learning curve as we can make for them. Code is easy to come by but art is not for OS projects. High quality artwork is the primary constraining factor to why a lot of open source gaming projects never really get a lot of widespread acclaim or momentum. Let's make media the easiest part of WF to join so that WF and other OS gaming projects have access to high quality artwork. As part of this transparency the media coordinator must be accessible to the artists to answer questions, peer review creations and help to develop consensus among the group. This is my commitement and responsibility to the media team members and indeed to the entire project.

• Media needs to be reuseable in as many clients as possible - Media should be created with care that it might be used in a 3d environment as well as 2d tiles. For instance... Instead of creating an plain isometric tile that's 72x36 (or whatever) it would be better to instead create a square tile 512x512 (a size that OpenGL likes), rotate it 45 degrees and squash it down to the required dimensions. The source tile could be used in 3d environments and the modified tile could be used in isometric clients. This same media could even be used in top down or perhaps even side scrolling clients. Let's create our artwork as efficiently as possible the first time so we don't have to replicate work.

• Everyone needs to be on the same page with respect to our license. In the past we have had a mish mash of licenses that people licensed their media under. This needs to stop if we're ever going to have a coherent media repository that WF along with other game projects can use w/o fear of licensing issues or conflicts. All art submitted to the new media repository will be licensed under the terms of the GPL (version 2 or later) and the GFDL (version 2 or later) unless special permisssion to use another license is granted by both myself and Bryce. Anyone submitting art needs to be made aware of this fact. If you don't understand what the GPL and GFDL say then I would strongly encourage everyone to read up on it at www.fsf.org regarding these licenses. If need warrants we can have a special licensing class or a meeting to discuss concerns. One possible scenario where a licensing exception might be made if someone wanted to release their material to the public domain instead of under the GPL/GFDL. :-) Licensing hasn't been a big problem so far only because most of our game art in the past was created by one artist. Our current CVS modules (media, media-2d, media-3d) are a real mess with respect to licensing. This will become a huge headache if we don't nip this in the bud... As one last note I'd like to say this about our recent licensing flap regarding artwork that was previously GPL/GFDLed and has been 'removed' from CVS. From this moment forward once you commit something under the GPL/GFDL you cannot remove your artwork from the project! Obviously, this doesn't apply if you're only doing maintenance, working on a better version to replace existing media, you're unhappy with how the piece turned out etc etc. I think everyone knows what I'm driving at here and can figure out what's acceptable and what isn't on their own. :-) If you attempt to remove your media collection or a large portion of it I will (speak with you first of course and then) most likely ask that your CVS write privileges be taken away and all the media which was removed will be restored back to the repository. I will be happy to speak with you further if you still don't agree but there is a 99.999% (never say never) that I won't remove the requested media from CVS. I know this sounds kind of harsh but it is very unfair for the project and all others who would use our media to be subject to the desires of any one person. It isn't fair to all the developers and artists who utilize and rely on someone's artwork for the rug to be pulled out from underneath them by an artist retracting their work. That said I sincerely hope that we'll be able to avoid all the ugliness that our project has seen in the recent past. If anyone (including outside the media team) is frustrated, agitated, angry or otherwise not having fun I am always open to discuss these issues to see why things aren't going well. This is our hobby after all and we should be having fun! :-)

• We must be patient for our media infrastructure and procedures to develop . This touches on a couple of points I want to address.

  = Its going to take some time to streamline the process of actually creating media that will work in our clients. This is going to be a lot of trial-and-error at first as this is undiscovered country and none of us has done it before. Some of the initial test media we create will have to be reworked or perhaps even totally redone until we get a good system and understand the constraints that client media should conform to.

  = Secondly, I know that there is a huge void sitting where Uta's art used to be and this hole needs to be filled quickly. I will endeavor to fill this hole with media wherever I can scavenge it. That said I ask that all the other developers to please be patient while we're getting reorganized. I am on to some good leads that will hopefully replace much of the media that Uta took with her. Please give us some time to get oriented so we can make a good start. Having to backtrack and redo art because we rushed to get media out the door will only further delay us!

Perhaps I have missed some obvious things but I think this is quite enough for us to chew on for now... I look forward to everyone's replies and comments! Don't forget to have fun!

Jason aka Pato

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