Pruning image and sound assets distributed with the game engine
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@Hepps any thoughts on reorganizing categories? @Lafayette I believe would like one spot for devs to look at.
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@prastle categories I think is its own conversation. For me, the problem is not necessarily multiple places in forums to watch, it's that we have multiple websites to look at; then to make it worse forums is not bug tracking software and does not have those benefits. I think dev's posting in 'feature requests and ideas' makes some sense when it comes to pitching game changes.
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@LaFayette Yup I get ya I am just attempting to start the conversation with one of the mods that it will matter with. Please open our private chat as a new discussion for them all to look at. Hopefully a best of both worlds can be achieved. Less stress for devs and mods is the goal!
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@LaFayette Without even considering what sounds are going to be removed (rather, there are some missing that should better be added; for example technology sounds), I'm certainly against this, and I honestly cannot understand why anyone is favourable. The only substantial advantage I see is a few seconds less download time for TripleA, that cannot possibly be more valuable than a higher simple covering of sounds effects for the various eras, no matter how currently scarcely used, especially since sounds are a oft neglected item, thus many future mapmakers are unlikely to put much effort in it (it's already not so likely that they'll bother adding the required entries, when making maps set not in a late modern scenario).
Anyhow, I suppose you should link the GitHub stuff for this. Not everyone following the forum may see it, otherwise.
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@Cernel said in Pruning image and sound assets distributed with the game engine:
no matter how currently scarcely used,
This is where I respectfully disagree. If a single, rarely used map, uses sounds and adds 2% to the download size, that is 2% more that every player needs to pay in terms of download size and install speed. The installer speed is commensurate with install size. The "main" game assets is AFAIK really intended to be the common assets. Otherwise, why not include every asset in with the main game?
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@LaFayette On top of which having a full plethora of different sounds in the engine rather than individual maps does not in anyway improve the chances of a map maker including custom sounds. If someone wants custom sounds... they are likely to research it and figure it out. Few ever bother, those that do... figure it out and drop the sounds into their game folder.
My concern is really that all the custom sounds we have make it back into the right game folders.
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@Hepps said in Pruning image and sound assets distributed with the game engine:
@LaFayette Maybe also link those assets to the first post in the 'Map Maker Resources thread'.
As an idea, what do people think of us creating an "assets" repo in triplea-maps? We could put unused images and sounds there.
It would then be a place where sounds & images could be checked in and stored for general usage in other maps. Map makers could browse it and copy assets into their maps as they choose.
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@LaFayette By that you mean on GitLost I'm assuming?
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@Hepps Well, if we accumulate more images that are created and unused, it'll avoid creating more zip files. A forum post for "get your assets here" could be good, but I shudder to think about looking through dozens of zip files and the various variants. Nicer to have one place IMO.
Also I wonder if people would really want to post there if they have just one or two images.
For the record git deletes nothing, all items checked in are recorded in its history. Deleted files are marked as deleted but still always fully available in history.
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@Hepps it would make it very easy to browse all images. All repo's have a 'download as zip' link. From there most OS will show thumbnail previews. No need to hunt through pages of forum posts downloading zip file after zip file.
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@LaFayette All good. I am just not a techy... so I was really just asking if what you were talking about was GIT Hub.
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@Hepps In short yes. Git is a technology, like email. GitHub is a provider that hosts an implementation of Git, similar to how Gmail hosts email, or hotmail host email. There are other git providers, notably: bitbucket and gitlab. Github is very open source friendly.
Previously all TripleA assets, code and images and maps were on SVN hosted by SourceForge. That we went from one source control system (SVN) to another (git), really means that in some ways nothing changed over the lifetime of TripleA. I'm not sure if anyone here is really that big of a fan of SVN; but it was easy to confuse as sourceforge did happen to host a forums (and that is not SVN, that is just a simple forum). For completeness, what did change is that all map changes are no longer queued up for months at a time for one person, an admin, to do then a bunch of SVN work to register all the updates. With git that workload can be, for better or worse, distributed and is self service. You don't have to have (as in 100% required) a map admin anymore to push map updates for you.
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@LaFayette All good. I was just clarifying. I am behind the idea.
My suggestion to link it here was to ensure Neanderthals like myself know how to get to the "Pearly Gates".
"A joyous heart sours with the burden of expectation"
Hepster -
The pruning effort is essentially done, the files being removed can be seen here:
It was interesting to see confusion around images and duplication. For example, 'puppet-states' is in the main game engine, but all maps with that player already include those images.
For sounds, most are used, the sounds in the 'other' folder can be pruned (not very many). It's also interesting to see when assets were 'disabled' instead of just being removed, eg: "_old.png" images
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Should note, for sounds, the biggest surprise were the "turn_start" sounds, the game engine does not have configuration to play those sounds. Should be unused. FWIW: SoundPath.java has the list of folders that are looked at for playing sounds.
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@Hepps Sorry I'm still scarred from the experience of:
Me: "We're updating TripleA technologies! Existing is going to become new, better, easier, and free up time for us to make more TripleA improvements faster!" :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:
Audience: "What!! Change! TRIPLEA IS OVER! IT IS DEAD! MAY AS WELL SHUT IT DOWN! Why are you introducing new things?!"
Me: "Umm.. nothing is new, just updated, the things being updated were transparent and took a lot of time to manage" :crying_face:
Audience: "SHUT IT DOWN, SCREW YOU, YOU'RE KILLING TRIPLEA, WE WON'T USE THAT, WE LOVE SOURCEFORGE, WE'RE NOT MIGRATING!! WE'RE LEAVING!"
Me: :anguished_face:
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Commenting here about the proposal renamings at:
https://github.com/triplea-game/assets/pull/40/commits/79a8356d4d4e82bea77554391cc1fb2e17af53ceWithout considering the removed items (your call here) or the changes from plural to singular (not much an opinion here, tho in general I prefer having either all singular or all plural, for consistency (for example, are you sure you want to have forest singular and mountains plural?)), the other renamed things are worsening, in my opinion:
coastal->coast
In a grand strategic game, the actual coast can easily be but a very small portion of the whole territory touching the sea. For example, you can have Italy as a single territory. It would make sense to say that Italy is a coastal territory, but it would not make sense to say that Italy is a coast. Even if the game would be so detailed as having Normandy as a sigle territory, it would definitely sound better to me to define Normandy as a coastal territory, rather than say that Normandy is a coast. Coast would really fit better than coastal only for tactical games.
mires->marsh
Mire (as well as wetland) is a more generic term, encompassing both marshes and swamps, among other things. However, I would agree that marsh is at least better than swamp, if only one of the two would be available.
high_sea->sea
It doesn't make a lot of sense having a "sea" territory, as usually sea zones are all sea. This can apply to some uncommon cases, like maps having "sea zones" represeting rivers, and such, but a division between coastal and non coastal sea zones would be most likely more relevant for a grand strategic game. Even if a game would have a representation of internal waters, the sea is probably going to still be the common type of sea zones, so you would rather want to have a territory effect for the rivers and lakes, leaving the sea as the default (thus no territory effect for it or only for forbidding units altogether). So, in this case, we could rather add a territory effects for "internal" or "river" sea zones (better internal, as I guess such an effect would apply both to rivers and lakes). -
@LaFayette Removing sounds that are not generally used is fairly agreeable, albeit I'm warning you that any of those sounds could be specifically used (and in use), by specifying the path to them, in the sounds properties. If removing, I would rather suggest moving them into some assets, that are not downloaded with the program, but available for mapmakers to find and use.
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