Management of art assets.

Management of art assets.

Postby TheAncientGoat » 04 Apr 2010, 18:52

The current "pass a zipped file along in emails" is rather ridiculous, I think we all can agree. Personally, I think we should have all the art assets hosted in a central place, where everyone can have access to the most up to date files, skipping the whole "who has the latest media zip" game of hot-potato.

Peragro Tempus is working on a rather promising asset management system: http://peragro.org/node/51
WorldForge has also had Wombat going for quite a while: http://wombat.worldforge.org/
Using the wiki (again) might be a solution too
Having a seperate svn branch for the media could also work

What do you guys think?
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Re: Management of art assets.

Postby svenskmand » 04 Apr 2010, 22:55

I would also like a different way to get files on-line, the content I have made was posted in a link in this forum, which makes it hard to find. It is also annoying to re-upload a whole new zip-file just because one file changed.

I would suggest a ftp, as opposed to a CMS as it is bad for binary files :S

Does Sourceforge host ftp's?
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Re: Management of art assets.

Postby andrewbuck » 04 Apr 2010, 23:13

I looked, it doesn't appear that sourceforge offers FTP. Another possibility in addition to the ones outlined above would be to set up a collection (if that is the right term) on opengameart.org. I have not used that site much yet though so I don't know how collections are handled. Important features we would need to consider if we went that direction would be:

* Can the site make auto generated previews of .blend files, etc?
* Can collections be maintained by more than one person or can a group of people control what content gets into the collection?
* Can the site provide a .zip file (or similar) download of all the stuff in a collection, or would files need to be downloaded one by one?
* Is there an "abandonware" system in place where if the original creator of a collection or piece of content leaves permanently (without notifying anyone first) others can eventually take over the management of those assets?

As an aside, who runs OpenGameArt? Is it administered by the same people who run the forums here at FreeGameDev or is it a separate project?

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Re: Management of art assets.

Postby TheAncientGoat » 05 Apr 2010, 06:06

SVN really isn't so bad for binary files.. Git isn't as good.. Both are better than ftp.

OGA doesn't make auto-previews, collections, multi-users, collection zips, basically anything you mentioned. The software that I talked about does. It is run by different people.

Lips of Suna has a rather nice system: http://lipsofsuna.org/assets/ (stored in git)
Syntensity also has an asset management server, but doesn't do previews or anything like that, so I wouldn't recommend it right at this moment
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Re: Management of art assets.

Postby svenskmand » 05 Apr 2010, 13:05

TheAncientGoat {l Wrote}:...
Lips of Suna has a rather nice system: http://lipsofsuna.org/assets/ (stored in git)
...

I really like this system, at least from the users side when you browse it. But is it easy to upload new stuff as a developer, and is it easy to make a script that would compile a new media pack when we need one?
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Re: Management of art assets.

Postby andrewbuck » 05 Apr 2010, 14:09

The Lips of Suna system does look pretty nice. If Open Game Art doesn't support what we need then I think its probably not something we can use. That means its either down to the LOS system or one of the ones mentioned in the first post. One thing to keep in mind with any system we use, the sourcefourge webhoting has their 'php max upload size' limit set to 2mb and this cannot be changed. That is probably alright but if we use packed files in blender that could get to be a problem.

The only issue I could see with using git for the media distribution is that when a user checks out the repo they get the entire history of the git repo, not just the current snapshot (not sure if it is possible to do otherwise). If it is not then this makes git (and possibly SVN) a no-go. Either git or SVN does have the advantage that it is very easy to make a .zip of the content though since someone could just check out the repo and then run the script locally on their own machine.

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Re: Management of art assets.

Postby svenskmand » 05 Apr 2010, 15:26

As far as I know you can only check out snapshots :S, at least it is like this in SVN, I do not know GIT.
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Re: Management of art assets.

Postby TheAncientGoat » 05 Apr 2010, 15:42

Like I said, the LOS system is basically just a visualization of a git branch (it's a c app that generates HTML). No uploading or anything like that in the app. History isn't an issue, according to the dev. He also runs it from SourceForge, so it shouldn't be an issue for us
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Re: Management of art assets.

Postby svenskmand » 05 Apr 2010, 16:34

Then I think we should go with the LOS system then?
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Re: Management of art assets.

Postby TheAncientGoat » 05 Apr 2010, 18:12

I'd like to see skorpio comment on this first, as he's in charge of art and stuff..
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Re: Management of art assets.

Postby andrewbuck » 05 Apr 2010, 18:29

Yes, we definitely need to hear from Skorpio, also xapantu has been doing most of the web server stuff so he should be involved as well (unless someone else wants to set up this aspect of the web site).

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Re: Management of art assets.

Postby Skorpio » 05 Apr 2010, 19:19

I'm not sure which system we should use, I've got no experience with svn or git. LOS looks good to me, too, only the 2mb limit on SF sucks. Some of the bigger textures alone have a size of over 2mb, so we would have to resize them first.
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Re: Management of art assets.

Postby svenskmand » 05 Apr 2010, 19:33

Skorpio {l Wrote}:I'm not sure which system we should use, I've got no experience with svn or git. LOS looks good to me, too, only the 2mb limit on SF sucks. Some of the bigger textures alone have a size of over 2mb, so we would have to resize them first.

But as far as I understand LOS would have no filesize limit as it is really just a web-interface for the GIT-repository? Correct me if I am wrong.
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Re: Management of art assets.

Postby andrewbuck » 05 Apr 2010, 20:16

This is correct, the 2mb limit only applies if you are using PHP to upload files (i.e. through a web interface). The LOS system uses git or svn to do the file upload so that limit does not exist.

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Re: Management of art assets.

Postby TheAncientGoat » 06 Apr 2010, 07:28

The LOS system has no upload functionality. It isn't even an interface. All it does is generate a set of html files by looking at a directory tree. I am not completely certain how it links the content to the vcs and if it does this automatically, but I do know it is pretty barebones
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Re: Management of art assets.

Postby amuzen » 08 Apr 2010, 03:52

TheAncientGoat {l Wrote}:The LOS system has no upload functionality. It isn't even an interface. All it does is generate a set of html files by looking at a directory tree.


It doesn't really look at the directory tree that hard either, apart from searching for the XML file or files that list the asset files and their metadata. It does thumbnailing and page generation entirely based on what it sees in the metadata files so it's far from magical. It basically works like Doxygen, except that it processes markup on data files instead of markup in source code. As noted, it doesn't help you with storing and uploading the assets themselves.

Anyway, if you guys are interested in how git performs with data files, LoS currently has 62M of data files and the git directory is 92M. If it ever gets unbearably bad, there are a couple of ways to get rid of the history too. You'll probably want to create a separate repository for the data files if you ever plan to nuke the history. Of course, simply using svn would rid you of the whole problem, at least in terms of how much space it takes to check out the repository, since the history is in the server side.

As for all the online asset management systems, I honestly don't see the point unless you have a huge organization with several artists, managers, and whatnot. For a smaller crew that mainly just needs to sync data files and view them in-game, a VCS repository is a much easier solution in my opinion. You can bolt an easy hack or two on top of that to get the files thumbnailed and listed online if you want to showcase them, but it's pretty useless in my experience.

P.S. The new forum layout is rather awful for a casual lurker like me.
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Re: Management of art assets.

Postby svenskmand » 11 Apr 2010, 23:41

So should we do something about the Content system? The LOS system sounded like a good idea :)
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Re: Management of art assets.

Postby svenskmand » 22 Apr 2010, 00:06

There was talk about just using svn for the game content/media/artwork, which I think is also a good idea. We talked about it in this thread:
svenskmand {l Wrote}:
andrewbuck {l Wrote}:...
As a separate but somewhat related issue how should we handle the storage of source content for artwork (.blend files, etc.). I am thinking we make a separate SVN branch and have the normal (trunk i think it is called) branch hold the finished content (i.e. what the game uses) and the have a "development branch for those that are interested in the source material. This avoids users having to download the .blend files when they don't intend to do anything with them.

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Well I am not all that much into the VCS terms, but regarding the division between source material and ingame material I think we should have a source folder and an media folder for the game content to use in the game, then the directory structure should be something like this
{l Code}: {l Select All Code}
trunk/source
trunk/media
branch/source
branch/media

and in source we should make some categorisation to avoid clutter, but I do not quite know exactly what structure to aim at. One could for example take a look at my contribution zip, it contains allot of different things, so it could be an example of how diverse the source folders content could be.

So lets do that, Andrew will you activate the SVN and give us logins so we can upload the content?
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Re: Management of art assets.

Postby andrewbuck » 22 Apr 2010, 00:15

I plan on doing that, however I wanted to make sure we knew how we would do it before we go making a huge SVN tree because we are moving stuff around and creating/deleting stuff. I think we probably have it figured out though so I can try to enable it tonight. When I enable it, anyone who is a developer on the sourceforge project should have write access so if you already have that for git or whatever you should automatically get SVN access. If you don't already have dev access I will need to know your sourceforge username so that I can make you a developer.

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Re: Management of art assets.

Postby andrewbuck » 22 Apr 2010, 02:49

I got SVN enabled so it should now be available to any devs working on art assets. When adding things to SVN please DO NOT just recursively add directories as this runs the risk of pulling lots of stuff into the repository that doesn't necessarily need to (or even should) be there. Specifically, I think we should keep tracking the level files with git rather than svn since the levels need to match the code base exactly so doing a pull from git should update the code and levels together. Other than that the stuff in the Media directory should be fair game for an import but please try to verify that a given item really is necessary before including it. If in doubt we should err on the side of not including it as it can always be added later, but once things are included they are more difficult and maybe impossible to get rid of.

P.S. I know next to nothing about SVN so someone else will either need to manage the SVN repo or help me with getting it set up, etc.

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Re: Management of art assets.

Postby svenskmand » 22 Apr 2010, 14:48

andrewbuck {l Wrote}:I got SVN enabled so it should now be available to any devs working on art assets. When adding things to SVN please DO NOT just recursively add directories as this runs the risk of pulling lots of stuff into the repository that doesn't necessarily need to (or even should) be there. Specifically, I think we should keep tracking the level files with git rather than svn since the levels need to match the code base exactly so doing a pull from git should update the code and levels together. Other than that the stuff in the Media directory should be fair game for an import but please try to verify that a given item really is necessary before including it. If in doubt we should err on the side of not including it as it can always be added later, but once things are included they are more difficult and maybe impossible to get rid of.

Can you add me then, my username is svenskmand - when I login I use the OpenID option using my Google Account, so technically I have never created a SF account, but I think this should still work?
andrewbuck {l Wrote}:P.S. I know next to nothing about SVN so someone else will either need to manage the SVN repo or help me with getting it set up, etc.

-Buck

Well ditto on that one :)
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Re: Management of art assets.

Postby andrewbuck » 22 Apr 2010, 19:44

It says "user does not exist". I'm not sure how OpenID works, I would assume its possible to create and account and then somehow tie it to an OpenID account but I'm not sure.

EDIT: I just logged in as myself then went to "account" at the top right, and then on the sidebar on the right there is a "Manage my OpenID's". So you will just need to create "svenskmand" and then tie it to your openid.

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Re: Management of art assets.

Postby svenskmand » 22 Apr 2010, 22:21

Ok, now I have and account, then you should be able to find me :)
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Re: Management of art assets.

Postby andrewbuck » 22 Apr 2010, 23:00

You have been added.

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Re: Management of art assets.

Postby svenskmand » 22 Apr 2010, 23:08

Thanks. So regarding the directory structure, what should the layout of the source/ folder be? Right now I have my stuff organized into the following top folders:
{l Code}: {l Select All Code}
ConceptArt
GUI
Logo
WikiSkins
Mascot

Should I just upload like this or should we choose another structure?
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