Paint Organisation?

[daye]

hello

i'm remeber at first time any of you make a automatic update paints.

Why not speak to Piboso and use for update automatic paints, tracks, and bikes.

With tha's all people have the same game and same options (and good update for all)

[Ian]

I like the idea with a bit of tweaking here and there when your up and running should be good.
I would love to see a full set of Motogp/WSB skins and bikes, this may be a good way to get the mod community heading in one direction instead of trying to make every type of bike.

[Hawk]

I was thinking about doing the paint system in a different way. I want to include them into the bike mod. Eventually everyone will want to have that bike mod, and they are already complete folders. I can just gather all the paints, rename them and put them in the correct bike folder. This way there never is any confusion about which paint belongs to which bike and everything is already organized into categories. Of course i will provide a seperate paint folders with all the paints organized, but i think this could be one way of keeping everything centralized and organized. What are your thought about this?

Hi JamoZ.

A good idea in theory, but do you intend to supply all the current and future default bikes paints too? After all, the main point of providing a paints database is so that riders have access to all the currently available rider paint schemes, wether they are personal paints or paints of MotoGP/GP500 stars past and present, so that anyone who is online can see other riders paint schemes.
Being able to download any or all paints from one place will encourage riders to install all paints from the database to help achieve this goal of being able to see any other riders paint scheme they decide to use while riding online.

Seems to me that whatever you decide to do, you will still have to create a database structure for all paints catergorised into their class folders for the default bikes(ie, 1000cc/500cc, etc. etc), and then a folder for MOD Bikes Paints, but this time with sub folders for each individual MOD bike created.

But I believe your hardest task will be to get authors to not only inform you about a new paint, but to save the paint file in a named-format that allows you to easily place that file into it's correct category. This is the problem I had, and I had to continually ask people which class their file belonged to. I also asked the community to let me know if any paints were in incorrect folders so I could correct the placement error; no one ever did let me know of one paint placement error. In fact only one person posted to let me know of a newer version of a couple of MOD Bikes that were in the Mod Bike database, and that was "_oDi_".
So I think however you do this new paint database, your going to have to except that your going to have to do quite a lot of administration to keep things bang up to date, as it needs to always be if your going to get the communities trust in knowing that this paint database is the one to use if they want a paint for their bike.

Just some food for thought, as they say

[Warlock]

I think every user should care about his own paints (personal ones), if the paint is not well named or has not info about the bike it belongs, just reject it.
We can have a sticky post of howto name them (when we decide the best way), if the paint is rejected , redirect them to the howto post.

Maybe a .rar file with the paint and a .txt file with the info, should be submitted to the organization responsible person.

[JamoZ]

I was thinking about having one single thread were everyone just posts his paint in a pre made template. That way we won`t get 200 threads for a single paint, and if done properly everything is alot easier to go trough and to keep it up to date.

I was thinking about something like this (other idea`s are welcome) :

Bike   : Yamaha R6
Class : Supersport
Paint : RTH R6 - JamoZ #14 (also up for discussion)
Link   : downloadlink

And then a small screenshot showing the paint.

Paint names would have to at least include the model (M1/RSV4/CBR etc), the rider (Valentino Rossi or Warlock) and possibly the number (like #46 or #13) or year the paint is made of (Ex : M1 - Valentino Rossi 2009)

People who post paints that are not setup properly using the template & name are asked to change it so the thread keeps organized. Also i would like to see that a thread like this is being kept comment free like "good job!" or "great work" or any other kind of discussion regarding the posted paints. For this we could setup a painting thread where everyone can discuss paints, techniques, requests or show off work in progress paints. Right now the painting thread is becoming just as messy as on the old forum. 

A thread like this would mean that it`s alot easier for me to pickup all the newly posted paints and put them in all the pre made bike folder. This way i don`t have to organize everything and we dont have to setup a database because everything is first posted here on the forum. I was thinking about updating the whole mod package weekly with paints, or whenever a new version of a mod is coming out.

Example : Right now we have all the bikes centralized into one mod package and database. If a new version of the R6 is coming out, i will update this as usual, but this time include all the new R6 paints that have been posted in the paintst thread. I can easily see which are new due to the date posted and i don`t have to wade trough alot of weird paint names wondering which are R6 paints.

The bottom line is, everyone who is up to date with the bike mod, will be up to date with the paint thread....
It`s just a matter of starting over and willing to take that step. Like i said, i`m willing to rename the current paints we have, but i can`t do this alone..

[iVolution]

The bottom line is, everyone who is up to date with the bike mod, will be up to date with the paint thread....

This basically is the ideal situation. I guess most people are not going to install (ALL) seperate paints all the time since for some it might not seem like an added value to do so. As said before, the main objective of a centralised system is that everybody can see   your personal paint, so the less beautiful have to be installed as well.

The way to do it in my opinion is:
- Have a locked and pinned topic in the paints section explaining the procedure, naming convention and to whom it should be send to. The administrator(s) should check the naming and maybe even the design. If something is wrong a message is send back to the creator stating the needed changes.
- If all is ok the paint is added to the bikemod's next release and is thereby distributed to all players downloading the mod.
- The already existing paints have to be renamed first to comply with the naming convention, deleting not used or irrelevant paints in the process.
- If someone wants to update their personal paint, they just send it in again and the old version is overwritten.
- Since there are two types of paints, personal and general use (replica, fictional etc.) i propose we should have a naming convention for each. To keep it as clear as possible, the name should be as short as possible. Since each paint will be placed in the correct bike folder, stating the bike's name in the paint seems unnecessary. Since i think we should pose a limit of 1 personal paint per rider per bike (to limit the size of the database) version numbers will be irrelevant as well.

The naming would then look something like this:
For personal paints: NUMBER_NAME_TEAM (Since not everybody has a team it should be the last one)
For general paints: NAME_NUMBER_ADDITIONAL (Since all general paints have at least a name it should come first, this also sets it aside from personal paints in the selection menu since all paints starting with numbers are personal ones. Aside from this it makes it easy to find your own paint and for others it is clear which numbers have been taken. Not all general paints have numbers so this should come second. If there is a conflicting version of the same paint from different creators, the ADDITIONAL can be used to uniquely identify them).

The only problem is with the database becoming too big if the number of people playing GP bikes increases a lot. We would then have to provide the paints seperately from the bikemod.

P.S. Since piboso mentioned all paints will become corrupt when version 1.0 is released, we maybe should wait with putting in the work now

[JamoZ]

Ivo might be right. If everything would become obsolete, it would be best to start fresh at 1.0 with the right paint names/database/threads. Or else we`ll be doing double work.

[Hawk]

Seems all the talk is about paints for the MOD Bikes? I do hope your going to include the organisation of the paints for the default bikes too? It would be a crime to disregard them, don't you think?

I think that the organisation of a database(preferably via the MEGA Site) is essential for future proofing the large amount of skins that will eventually be created, and indeed are already created if you include the default bike skins into the equation, and to limit the number of skins allowed just so you can keep all paints directly in the Bike Mods paint files to reduce download size is a crazy idea; this would only lead to fragmentation of the paint organisation by others just posting their paints on other threads, and we'll end up back were we started with paint files all over the place. You need a place were anyone can find all paints for all bikes(MOD and Default) in one place.

Seems to me that you guys are making this all too complicated to the point were it will either not get off the ground or it will fail. Keep it simple guys.

- The already existing paints have to be renamed first to comply with the naming convention, deleting not used or irrelevant paints in the process.

I agree, if your going to have a file naming format then existing files will need to be renamed. But who is going to decide which paints are no longer in use or irrelevant, and how would that decision be made? 

[Hawk]

Ivo might be right. If everything would become obsolete, it would be best to start fresh at 1.0 with the right paint names/database/threads. Or else we`ll be doing double work.

GpBikes 1.0 could be 1 - 2 years away, maybe even more. Lol

You should look at it this way; use the time now to get a database up and running, and then by the time 1.0 comes along you will know exactly how to organise this really well. 

[JamoZ]

Seems to me that you guys are making this all too complicated to the point were it will either not get off the ground or it will fail. Keep it simple guys.

No offence Hawk, but I don`t think you completely understand what we`re trying to do. I will include paints to ALL bikes into the mod ( adding pre made Murusama & Varese etc folders with paints only so that it`s just drag and drop like everything else). I`m calling it a mod, but actually it will just be one big package of up to date everything. Paints, versions, you name it. Every new mod bike will go into it, as will every new version of that bike. So if we manage to let everyone grab all the new versions from that one centralized "mod", like most of them are already doing, all the included up to date paints will automatically be downloaded aswell.

It`s already working. While you guys probably didn`t noticed it, i`ve included some updated paints into the Piaggio & R6 folder. With the 0.8 update that came out, everyone already grabbed those new paints without probably even knowing. I`ve seen it work as i`ve already seen those skins online. So that part of the idea works.

Next step is to let everyone post their skins into one thread, so i can include new skins every week if needed. So as a user you will experience one of the 2 following scenario`s :

1 : You want to enter a server, but you see that 1.3 is the server version of the mod and you are on 1.2. That means one or more bikes have been added or updated. So you go to the mod link and you see that the R6 is updated to version 0.9. You download that 0.9 and you don`t have to worry about any new paints because they are already included.

2 : You know that on friday new paints are always being added to the mod, so you go ahead and grab the seperate paint only folders i will provide.

Either way, eventually everyone is going to end up with the same paints whether they like it or not, you HAVE to update everything in order to keep playing on the modded servers and knowing that the package is always up to date, why not grab it form there to be sure?. 

[Klax75]

I have to say. I think MOD-Bike packs should just have default paints. It needs to be up to the people to get the paints they want not for some one to choose what paints they put in the mod bike pack.

This keeping file size low. Now if I want the unofficial/official paint packs, team packs, then that should be it's own thing not forced on me.

So MOD-Bike might have ever bike and default paint.

Then sub packs for bikes. Some people aren't going to care if they see the default on everyone.

[JamoZ]

Sorry but I'm not gonna try and cater towards the few ones that have bandwidth problems. We live in 2014, downloading a package of paints shouldn't be a problem, and if it is they can always grab bike updates from the author themself in the corresponding thread and grab their own paints from the paint thread. I'm not forcing anyone to use the pack, it's just a way for the ones that DO want everything centralized,  organized and installable with one drag and drop action.

[Hawk]

Hi JamoZ.

Thanks for explaining your plans and making it clear as to what your actually intending to achieve. I now see exactly what your actually planning and attempting to implement with the organisation of the paints for all bikes including the mod bikes. Thank you for that.

Sounds like now all you need to do is settle on the file naming format, post the procedures in a specialist paint thread, and then things can press ahead to get this fully up and running on top of what you've already done.

Sounds like a good idea so long as there are no restrictions on the number of paints to include in the database, and as I understand from you there would be no restrictions as there would also be a separate paints folder with other organised paints that the community can decide to download or not, separate from the paints folder included for the Mod Bikes(I hope I've got that right. Lol)?

I apologise if I seem a little pushy about this, JamoZ, but having organised and run the previous paints database, I really would like to see this new paint database up and running as soon as possible.

[HornetMaX]

Either way, eventually everyone is going to end up with the same paints whether they like it or not, you HAVE to update everything in order to keep playing on the modded servers and knowing that the package is always up to date, why not grab it form there to be sure?.

I have to agree with Klax75, this is a bit too much for me too. Paint files are not huge, but you're gonna end up with a lot of them.

One thing I'd strongly advise is to include in the MOD only some common paints for each bike (modded bikes and default bikes). By "common paints" I mean a few nice and representative paints (5 to 10 per bike is probably enough), and no personal paint. Personal ones can go in a separate pack, if you want to manage them. Or we could create a forum section with personal paints: each message would have a standard template to make it easy to find the personal paint of a given rider.

No matter the bandwidth problems, I'm not sure many people will like to download a thousand personal paint files just because they "have" to.

Personally I think that personal paints make sense only when you're racing in events (where everybody can download an event-specific pack of paints): on public servers if one wants to be sure to be seen correctly he should use one of the "common" paints provided with the bike mod.

MaX.

[Hawk]

@Max:

Hi Max.

As I understand it, JamoZ is basically going to do that by having majority of paints in a separate paints folder for others to decide if they want to download them individually or not.