Tzigla Rocks!!!

[ptoing]

OK then, evilchelu and his girlfriend are awesome and are doing this Tzigla (former Patratzel) web application which will allow people to do Hexquisite corpse collabs much much easier. Atm only square collabs are possible but there will hopefully be Hex collabs and iso stuff as well in the future.

So here goes. The first collab will mainly be for testing, but that does not mean it should be poop, right?

Palette will be C64, because I did not feel to make one atm
Ideally if all works as planned you will have to use exactly these colours, any other colour and you will get an error on upload.



CLICK TO SIGN IN TO TZIGLA and then select board 2.

If it does not sign you in properly (you are if it says "signed in as [username]" in the top bar) try to click the little Pixelation icon in the top right and that should work.

From there it should be pretty straightforward. Don't neglect your Secret Santa gift making if you partake in this

[setz]

I've been quietly following this in IRC (which more of you should come to), I'd be glad to help this out.

Edit: Finished up, I haven't used those colors in a long time, it was very fulfilling

[Argyle]

Wow, this is stupendous!  This page will now be gracing the short list of tabs I open every time I open my browser..

[Jakten]

Yessss, I am definitely joining in. Thanks for this evilchelu it looks awesome! Now to wait for a free square 

[ptoing]

Lots of free tiles 

[setz]

Are there any restrictions on doing multiple tiles? I wouldn't mind doing a few more.

Although its pretty small and I'd hate to tear the opportunity away from other pixelers.

[Reo]

Are there any restrictions on doing multiple tiles? I wouldn't mind doing a few more.

Although its pretty small and I'd hate to tear the opportunity away from other pixelers.

There's over 40 tiles left I don't think you have to worry.

[evilchelu]

I'd say you can have another one.

A feature that we'll probably add (based on ptoing's suggestion) is reservation timeouts so that you can't just take another tile immediately after you finished one. Also, a penalty timeout (kind of like a temporary ban) in case you hog a tile and don't deliver.

ps: Unrelated, I was thinking that it might be a good idea to disable all seed tiles if a certain amount of tiles have already been done because it's probably more interesting to work next to a tile that to just start from scratch

[ilkke]

ps: Unrelated, I was thinking that it might be a good idea to disable all seed tiles if a certain amount of tiles have already been done because it's probably more interesting to work next to a tile that to just start from scratch

I don't see the point of limiting people's choice. Leave it as is.

[dira]

After the "no tiles" crisis it seems we got to the "so many free tiles" crisis 

There are 3 free seed tiles and about 5 ones connected to an existing drawing. So, go ahead and take one!

http://tzigla.com/boards/3

-- dira. anxious voyeur

[Mathias]

Wow, nifty.

*lurks some mo

[setz]

After seeing some of that abandonment I feel no remorse for hogging up a second tile, maybe a third down the line too

[Gemini166]

Well, I would get a tile, but it would probably look out of place next to, you know, the good tiles. But I do wish some more people would grab these tiles, as I would really like to see the outcome of this project. It could come out looking very... I guess groovy would be the word? Psychedelic? Trying to mash up the surrounding tiles while still being original would make the end product look... unique, to say the least. So come on, people! Grab a tile!

[evilchelu]

@gemini166: I think you could get a tile in. Ptoing can then see it, offer some hints and send it back for more work instead of approving. Don't view it as a competition, it's called a colab after all.

ps: if you really don't want to try on this board, there's another one that's not all pixel and and has random people from the intertubes. You could give that one a go to try your hand out: http://tzigla.com/boards/1

[Geti]

That was fun Looks like there's going to be a few radical shifts in style across the board, which should make the end result interesting.

[Argyle]

The Hex collabs were just like this in nature, Geti and Gemini, and they looked awesome even though everybody worked at different styles and skill levels.  Check 'em out if you haven't already!

Links:
Hexquisite Corpse I (same palette as current Tziggla board)
Hexquisite Corpse II

[Geti]

The Hex collabs are wonderful, it was nice to revisit them. I suppose you're quite right about the differences in style throughout, I was merely commenting

I'm keen to see the outcome of this. I might grab another tile at some point but I'm chewing through time these days and shouldn't just yet; pixelling is such a time sink..

[dira]

    20% done - soon to be 30% after the 5 reserved tiles are done. Yupii!    

[Lizzrd]

It would be cool to have the finished toles have a mouseover with the cerator's name on it in my opinion.

[dira]

It would be cool to have the finished toles have a mouseover with the cerator's name on it in my opinion.

Actually, they do

Check it out on the website http://tzigla.com/boards/3

[Lizzrd]

At me it only shows on the reserved tiles 

Great job nontheless in making collabs much easier.

[dira]

At me it only shows on the reserved tiles 

Great job nontheless in making collabs much easier.

Hm, try holding the mouse for a couple of seconds on top of a drawn tile. A text like "Lizzrd - waiting to be revealed" must appear on top of the tile.

(nice timing though, we are working right now to make this easier to use )

[Geti]

Just fyi lizard you submitted the image incorrectly I think; there seems to be odd stretching of the image. You have to upload the image with the "borrowed" borders intact, tzigla takes them away when it's integrating it into the map.

[Argyle]

Just fyi lizard you submitted the image incorrectly I think; there seems to be odd stretching of the image. You have to upload the image with the "borrowed" borders intact, tzigla takes them away when it's integrating it into the map.

Does not look strange on my screen at all. Especially considering there are clean diagonal rows of pixels that are intact in the visible portions of the image.

[ptoing]

I don't see a problem either. Not now and not at the time of submission.

[evilchelu]

Just fyi lizard you submitted the image incorrectly I think; there seems to be odd stretching of the image. You have to upload the image with the "borrowed" borders intact, tzigla takes them away when it's integrating it into the map.

FYI: Tzigla rejects tiles that are not the correct dimension and does no stratching whatsoever. If an image is not tile_size+2*border_size it's not accepted.

[Lizzrd]

Hm, try holding the mouse for a couple of seconds on top of a drawn tile. A text like "Lizzrd - waiting to be revealed" must appear on top of the tile.

Oh, didn't notice that, thanks

[Tidbit]

I'll be joining as well, I hope I'm not too rusty, I haven't done any thing with spriting for a while.

[Argyle]

Not sure if it was already planned, and I would rather stuff you are working on implementing be worried about foremost, but it would be cool if there would be a little comment feed for each board, or a discussion tab or whatnot. Not only would it be fun to toss messages around while the collab is still in progress, like "holy hell, I can't even imagine what could possibly be hiding under that tile's cover with crazy borders like that..." And after it's done, all the people that had worked on it, lurked watching it come together, and discovered it after it had already been completed could rave about the majestic spectacle that got blended together on this tiny corner of the internet.

Food for thought

[Geti]

O_o I just had another look and it's looking fine now, but looking at how the page creates the image that really shouldn't have changed. Perhaps it was just late and I was out of it or something

Regardless, the sudden surge of uploads has made me very keen to see the result already, I love these things. I think I'll do another tile on the flight over to Aus or something.

[HughSpectrum]

I finally have internet at home so I took a tile spot (then realized I could have done this from the library).  The process was very painless for someone like me that worries that I may screw up something, so props to that.

Slightly off topic but the C64 palette is powerful, heh.

[evilchelu]

Hey pixies!

Huge update to tzigla today. The old tzigla was kinda thrown together and especially the sidebar and the popups were kinda bad for user interaction. So, we updated all that and also rewrote a lot of the browser code to make it really easy to add new features in the future

For the moment we just deployed to a staging server so we can test things out.

It would be really nice if you had time to check it out and try clicking around, reserving, releasing, uploading, etc and let us know if things still work, or if you think there is something wrong, or if it behaves unexpectedly, etc.

http://tzigla-staging.heroku.com/boards/3 - checker collab c64 board
http://tzigla-staging.heroku.com/boards/1 - quack quack, pixel duck board

NOTE1: Only twitter and facebook authentication work, sorry
NOTE2: You cannot break the live board, everything here is just a copy and anything that you will do will be discarded, so don't worry, go crazy, click around

If nothing major is broken, we will hopefully be deploying to the live server tomorrow.

Thanks

ps: when reporting an issue, it would be really helpful to mention the browser and operating system you are using
pps: we'll be adding badges to users and one of them will be the beta tester badge
ppps: thanks to Setzer and KittenMaster on irc for helping out with the initial testing 

[sakket]

so these are just test ones right? so I wont get yelled at if I participate? also am I right in assuming the duck one is digital painting opposed to just pixel-work? because id be all over that..





bawwww! it said i had the bottom middle one reserved so I made something really nice and I clicked upload and then I waited a bit and reloaded the page and somebody had already drawn something there!
NVM! yay!

[evilchelu]

Hola,

After the huge wave of beta testers, we concluded that nothing was broken . Therefore, we've just deployed to the live server. Hurray!

Check it out at: http://tzigla.com

This release is mainly about the UI revamp and also a major code rewrite underneath. It makes pretty for you and allows adding new fun features so much easier for us, yay!

Since a lot of stuff has changed, please let us know if something doesn't work anymore. Our supported browsers are: Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Opera.

Happy pixeling!

[evilchelu]

so these are just test ones right? so I wont get yelled at if I participate? also am I right in assuming the duck one is digital painting opposed to just pixel-work? because id be all over that..

bawwww! it said i had the bottom middle one reserved so I made something really nice and I clicked upload and then I waited a bit and reloaded the page and somebody had already drawn something there!
NVM! yay!

First, chill. If anyone screams at you I'll personally kick their ass

Second, it seems you confused the staging application with the live one. You reserved a tile on the live quack board, then looked at the staging quack board. And they are completely different. Sorry about the confusion, we should have put a big sign to differentiate them

Anyway, don't worry about that. We deployed the new version to live, where you still have the tile reserved. You can go ahead and upload it there . I'm the admin for that board, not ptoing. And it's a very newbie friendly board, as you may have noticed

Have fun: http://tzigla.com/boards/1

ps: APPROVED! It's gorgeous! One of the best tiles on that board btw

[sakket]

ps: APPROVED! It's gorgeous! One of the best tiles on that board btw

i am loving this project so much.

[sakket]

aw shoot, you know what would be great? if you made the ends loop to the other side, so you could scroll in one direction indefinitely!

[dira]

aw shoot, you know what would be great? if you made the ends loop to the other side, so you could scroll in one direction indefinitely!

That would be fun indeed, and it is already in our to do list (somewhere around version 4.0 )

[sakket]

aw shoot, you know what would be great? if you made the ends loop to the other side, so you could scroll in one direction indefinitely!

That would be fun indeed, and it is already in our to do list (somewhere around version 4.0 )

yesssssssss! could lead to some very cool animated gifs.

[evilchelu]

aw shoot, you know what would be great? if you made the ends loop to the other side, so you could scroll in one direction indefinitely!

In our 160 line TODO file, there are 15 lines mentioning new board types we thought of adding.

Wrap around boards is one of them and it'll most likely be the first (ok, maybe the second) one we do since it's the easiest

[Mathias]

First of all, evilchelu, dira, thanks for spending so much energy on something so awesome and unexpected for our little community here. It really is a great thing. I hope you keep going.



Some ideas/thoughts now:

1) Wrap-around board, always fun to look at when it loops and loops. For this, have a viewing option where the browser goes full screen and the entire viewable area is the completed collab, repeating on all sides, then change the cursor to a "panning hand" (typical open-palm, flat hand, ya know. . .) and allow for click & drag panning. I'd maintain the rollover info when hovering over each tile, if possible. I suppose a "Leave Fullscreen" button floating somewhere would be wise UI.

2) Arglye's idea for commenting on a certain board I must second! Having a thread here for each collab is fine, in the meantime. Instead of typical forum commenting capability, like we have here, how about a chatbox type thing instead?

3) In a collab's page, add a list of artists that have submitted tiles so far. Include how many they're done, total. Maybe an avatar associated with their name, though that'd probably take up too much room. This would be a low-priority chunk of information in your UI, IMO, TTYL, OMG, LOL.


___



A) Before doing any intensive work on upgrades/add-ons to your tzigla concept, it may be wise to run the idea by the folks here first, or other users, whoever they are. Certain ideas will be strongly favored over others.
It's your baby, but if you were to give us a little more power to influence the development of tzigla I think it would benefit everyone. For instance, expose your to-do list, keep a live copy of it somewhere for us, like a change-log to be, and allow voting to determine the priority of things. This way, the most desired things have a better chance of being added the quickest and therefore the appeal of tzigla rises as fast as possible for the majority of users. It only makes sense. How much of the dev you want to "share" is the question.

[BrandonD]

Hi I just submitted a tile, it's my first time joining one of these projects. You guys are awesome artists, thanks for including me (if it passes inspection!)

[dira]

Hi Mathias,

thanks for your ideas! We're super excited to see you guys using the site, giving us feedback and creating wonderful drawings (and so anxious to see the first complete board )

We definitely want the users' help for prioritizing our to do list, and we'll ask you when we have the time for developing a new major feature. Probably in the near future we'll have a poll about which new type of board to make next, or to choose between commenting and a new kind of board.

In the meantime little suggestions are super-welcome. Your idea nr 3. is good, we just have to figure out how to best integrate it in the interface.

A) Before doing any intensive work on upgrades/add-ons to your tzigla concept, it may be wise to run the idea by the folks here first, or other users, whoever they are. Certain ideas will be strongly favored over others.
It's your baby, but if you were to give us a little more power to influence the development of tzigla I think it would benefit everyone. For instance, expose your to-do list, keep a live copy of it somewhere for us, like a change-log to be, and allow voting to determine the priority of things. This way, the most desired things have a better chance of being added the quickest and therefore the appeal of tzigla rises as fast as possible for the majority of users. It only makes sense. How much of the dev you want to "share" is the question.

[Argyle]

Holidays + Secret Santa = Waning activity for Tzigla.  I'll make another tile or so on one of the boards after the smoke clears <3

[evilchelu]

Yo homies,

We just deployed new version of tzigla on the live server.

Practically no new functionality has been added, but we worked about a week to improve the sidebar design and overall look and feel. We also added some help and texts to guide new users towards on the path of becoming a great tziglar!

Check it out at: http://tzigla.com, and especially http://tzigla.com/boards/3

Happy pixeling!

[Mathias]

Some good changes. I like your minimal UI thinking. Though, I did like the percentage complete being visible by default; not requiring a rollover. Seems like pertinent enough info to not be hidden.

Further on the percent complete  - it would be cool if not only a number was used, but along with a numerical percentage, a progress bar (pbar) subdivided into as many segments as there are tiles total, in the collab. Segments of this pbar representing completed tiles would be a different shade than the ones representing incomplete ones. You could even use a 3rd shade for tiles currently checked out.
This pbar idea adds a nice functional visual representation of collab completness/incompleteness for all the visually-oriented people that will visit Tzigla. The difference in how left-brained and right-brained people prefer to get information can be humorous sometimes.


Are you really purposely revealing completed tiles landlocked by other completed tiles? Yikes, that nearly ruins the fun, and surely spoils any element of surprise and anticipation as the collab progresses. We dealt with this issue during the Hex Collab here. We pretty much all decided to keep it hidden, until the very end. The surprise at the end is astounding. I strongly suggest keeping everything hidden from sight until all done.

A serious web programmer friend, and myself, attempted to reveal your blacked out tiles in both collabs, and were unsuccessful, so good job. Yer doing some server-side magic to keep everything under wraps, and it works.

Familiar with the exquisite corpse site/collab, Start a Story?

[ilkke]

Actually I think the percentage complete would be mroe useful on the main overview page showing all the boards, as once you've selected a board, it's easy enough to rollover.
Not that this severly impacts the usability or anything, tzigla is just fine the way it is.

[evilchelu]

Thanks for the compliments

Because of the minimal things, we took the percent out because it was not essential and had too little info (we want to bring it back with a few more stats). Other UI updates coming today, btw. Thanks for the progress bar style idea. W might implement it another way tho, maybe as a bg for the header or such.

We have two options that control the revealing of tiles:

1. never show tiles until the end, even if all neighbours are done (defaults to false)
2. always show tiles, even if neighbours are not done (defaults to false)

The C64 board has the first option set to true, which is exactly what you want, and the quack board uses the defaults, which makes the game a bit more palatable to people new to the tzigla concept. The second option allows us to support the pixeljoint style collabs (for which we still have to allow saving WIPs and rereservation of already done tiles).

As for the visibility of tiles, it would be pretty difficult to break that since we upload by default as private to amazon s3, and we only make them visible once they have to become visible (based on the logic described above). Thanks for trying tho . We would appreciate if you find any security issues (except issues involving social engineering).

Some good changes. I like your minimal UI thinking. Though, I did like the percentage complete being visible by default; not requiring a rollover. Seems like pertinent enough info to not be hidden.

Further on the percent complete  - it would be cool if not only a number was used, but along with a numerical percentage, a progress bar (pbar) subdivided into as many segments as there are tiles total, in the collab. Segments of this pbar representing completed tiles would be a different shade than the ones representing incomplete ones. You could even use a 3rd shade for tiles currently checked out.
This pbar idea adds a nice functional visual representation of collab completness/incompleteness for all the visually-oriented people that will visit Tzigla. The difference in how left-brained and right-brained people prefer to get information can be humorous sometimes.


Are you really purposely revealing completed tiles landlocked by other completed tiles? Yikes, that nearly ruins the fun, and surely spoils any element of surprise and anticipation as the collab progresses. We dealt with this issue during the Hex Collab here. We pretty much all decided to keep it hidden, until the very end. The surprise at the end is astounding. I strongly suggest keeping everything hidden from sight until all done.

A serious web programmer friend, and myself, attempted to reveal your blacked out tiles in both collabs, and were unsuccessful, so good job. Yer doing some server-side magic to keep everything under wraps, and it works.

Familiar with the exquisite corpse site/collab, Start a Story?

[evilchelu]

Actually I think the percentage complete would be mroe useful on the main overview page showing all the boards, as once you've selected a board, it's easy enough to rollover.
Not that this severly impacts the usability or anything, tzigla is just fine the way it is.

I agree, it's severely lacking from the front page.

We're a bit nuts with tzigla so we think it's lacking quite a bit of usability (especially for first time users) so we'll keep working on that. We actually had 3 average joe web users try it out and found out some pretty interesting things

[evilchelu]

Ho, ho, ho!

Just deployed a new version. It contains mainly changes for not signed in users (help, better sign in texts, hints, etc) and a bunch of new texts.

It also has an even more streamlined sidebar, that manages to actually add more info in less space, yay

As always, see it in action at http://tzigla.com/boards/3

Happy pixeling!

[ultagod]

I'd like to be able to re-upload/edit my tile until the CollabC64 is over. I have a tile that I've done about 80%  and it will take me another couple of days to finish, not 14hours. Is this possible? 

[dira]

Yes, it's possible. Upload it now and let ptoing know that you want to work more on it; he will sent the tile back to you to complete it.

I'd like to be able to re-upload/edit my tile until the CollabC64 is over. I have a tile that I've done about 80%  and it will take me another couple of days to finish, not 14hours. Is this possible? 

[Mathias]

Oh, got a sweet idea for you: animated final revealment. Sequential revelation. Chronological unmaskinate.
Once the thing is all done. Give an option to unhide the collab in the order each tile was submitted, or approved and added to the board. This matters, because when you view the final result in all it gestaltual glory you want to know who's responsible for that bad transition or who was brilliant enough to so seamlessly his tile so it matched the adjacents so well, etc. Plus, it's fun just to watch it unmask slowly.

Hit the links in the description I got there.

[evilchelu]

Oh, got a sweet idea for you: animated final revealment. Sequential revelation. Chronological unmaskinate.
Once the thing is all done. Give an option to unhide the collab in the order each tile was submitted, or approved and added to the board. This matters, because when you view the final result in all it gestaltual glory you want to know who's responsible for that bad transition or who was brilliant enough to so seamlessly his tile so it matched the adjacents so well, etc. Plus, it's fun just to watch it unmask slowly.

Hit the links in the description I got there.

Thanks for the idea. It's already on the list

But thanks for bringing it up again, I just realised we can start with a way simpler version that what we had in mind! We can't do those options yet because we don't save those times (we can only guarantee creation time and last update time), but we will start saving those intermediate times soon.

ps: Your hex tiles look great, please make some for ccc64

[Mathias]

Thanks. And glad I helped lead you to a better solution for the idea.

LiGhTbUlB: There should be a way to instantly find a certain artist's tiles. I keep scanning over the entire thing looking for certain artists with the rollover effect to see which/how many they've done. I imagine a list of contributing artists in the UI, you can click a name and their tiles highlight somehow. Perhaps each artist name is a toggle button that highlights or unhighlights their contributed tiles. When multiple artist's names are clicked, you can keep them differentiated with randomly assigned color coding. And maybe this only works in "artist mode" (or something), which when activated places an overlay of information on the whole collab, such as name, etc. Because normally, you'd want clicking an artist's name to bring up their profile-ish info.



Ya know . . . I was going thru the last Hex Collab thread. Such a dramatic event, lotta excitement bottled up in it. But with the Tzigla thing now, the enthusiasm just isn't there. And I wonder why. There's no sense of urgency about it among participants.
I don't know exactly why, but if there was a Hex Collab 3 going on I would've already jumped in. I'm not nearly as compelled with Tzigla. Bringing this up because I suspect most feel the same way. I don't know if the Hex Collab's appeal was due to it being all handled by ptoing, a local resident admin, and it being more Pixelation exclusive, a more local thing, whereas Tzigla certainly feels like you're leaving Pixelation and going somewhere else entirely. Is it because it's squares? When I first caught wind of Tzigla, I was actually a little disappointed that a 3rd party would be handling what I perceived as a Pixelation novelty. It's like something rare, fresh, new and inventive being snapped up by a corporation, bottled and sold on shelves, in bulk. Is there a degree of that sold-out feeling? Am I just a freak? Eccentric about it. The collaborative spirit is still there, it's just not nearly as electric anymore. I would like Tzigla to have that. But since it's so intangible and hard to define, I can't tell you how to get it.

[evilchelu]

Thanks. And glad I helped lead you to a better solution for the idea.

LiGhTbUlB: There should be a way to instantly find a certain artist's tiles. I keep scanning over the entire thing looking for certain artists with the rollover effect to see which/how many they've done. I imagine a list of contributing artists in the UI, you can click a name and their tiles highlight somehow. Perhaps each artist name is a toggle button that highlights or unhighlights their contributed tiles. When multiple artist's names are clicked, you can keep them differentiated with randomly assigned color coding. And maybe this only works in "artist mode" (or something), which when activated places an overlay of information on the whole collab, such as name, etc. Because normally, you'd want clicking an artist's name to bring up their profile-ish info.



Ya know . . . I was going thru the last Hex Collab thread. Such a dramatic event, lotta excitement bottled up in it. But with the Tzigla thing now, the enthusiasm just isn't there. And I wonder why. There's no sense of urgency about it among participants.
I don't know exactly why, but if there was a Hex Collab 3 going on I would've already jumped in. I'm not nearly as compelled with Tzigla. Bringing this up because I suspect most feel the same way. I don't know if the Hex Collab's appeal was due to it being all handled by ptoing, a local resident admin, and it being more Pixelation exclusive, a more local thing, whereas Tzigla certainly feels like you're leaving Pixelation and going somewhere else entirely. Is it because it's squares? When I first caught wind of Tzigla, I was actually a little disappointed that a 3rd party would be handling what I perceived as a Pixelation novelty. It's like something rare, fresh, new and inventive being snapped up by a corporation, bottled and sold on shelves, in bulk. Is there a degree of that sold-out feeling? Am I just a freak? Eccentric about it. The collaborative spirit is still there, it's just not nearly as electric anymore. I would like Tzigla to have that. But since it's so intangible and hard to define, I can't tell you how to get it.

Thank you so much for taking the time to write this. You make some very good points and we've spent all day today busting our heads on how to fix things. We now realize we've been doing a lot of things wrong and that we didn't think enough about the people that will actually use the site.

One enlightenment in particular is that the hex collab was more about the conversation than the board (until the board was over) while tzigla is all about the board, and zero about conversation at the moment. I think this one of the main reasons for the feeling of coldness and impersonality.

The board should probably be a very tiny bit of the interface (even tho it's the actual tech behind it that makes running a collab easy) and most should be about what those people did and what they said. We were probably so proud of our collab enabling code that we forgot about making people happy :/.

We didn't realize this before your post (maybe we were in denial?) so thanks for bringing it up. We've definitely invested a few hundred hours (a lot of them instead of doing paid work, heh) so we really want tzigla to be used and loved and make life easier for collab happy people.

We'll be back tomorrow with ideas and start working on making tzigla a place for people, more than just a place for cold rules, image stitching and palette enforcing.

[Mathias]

Exactly!
I was hoping my little dose of reality would be well met. Gladly, I've communicated my thoughts to you in a way you can understand them, I was worried I might demoralize you guys there. But, I can see you're too mature and realistic for that. My kind of programmer.

I do think you've nailed it. Tzigla needs to be enriched with the "human element". Allow for chit-chat and who knows what else. Of course, this bloats the scope of the whole beast quite a bit.

I'm glad we're able to bounce thoughts off of each other here. This is what Tzigla needs. I wish others would say what's on their minds, too. Tzigla could be something really great. Would be so awesome if Tzigla could be packaged up into a "plug-in" that a forum could natively host. Just a thought. An independant Tzigla deployment.

Much more going on in my brain's 'Tzigla Future' corridor, but you guys can only do so much at a time. I'll stay present in this thread as long as you do I expect. Too bad I got so much going right now, it's hard to devote to actually making some tiles. Though, right now, my bigger concern is Tzigla's dev and how it's shaping up.

[Lizzrd]

Just add a chat on the side where you see everyone online, and can also talk to em.
What Mathias said would also work.

[Mathias]

Just add a chat on the side where you see everyone online, and can also talk to em.
What Mathias said would also work.

But a mere chatbox per collab isn't really enough. Tzigla needs something beefier. Something familiar and user-friendly. Something that encourages communication. Though, the wheel doesn't need reinvented; forums already exist. Important thing is that the means of communication is native and tightly incorporated into Tzigla itself. How to do this I cannot say, I'm no web programmer.


In the quack quack collab, when you hit a tile (I think), it says, "100px tiles with 10px of context". This is confusing. I did a tile and was somewhat confused by where to actually draw. More explicit directions may benefit future collaborators. Color the area a participant  needs to draw in as some pink or green color, instead of black. That would help to clarify a bit. The 10px outer buffer, surrounding the whole collab is a little confusing. Each edge tile has a 10px transparent side, since each chunk of art is 100x100, yet the file is 120x120px. Little odd.



-TILE IDENTITY-
How do I specify a tile? With the Hexquisite collab, each tile had a number. Does Tzigla have a provision like this? If I want to comment on a certain tile, how do I do it? Describe it's general position? Each tile should have an unique identifier.

[evilchelu]

Just add a chat on the side where you see everyone online, and can also talk to em.
What Mathias said would also work.

But a mere chatbox per collab isn't really enough. Tzigla needs something beefier. Something familiar and user-friendly. Something that encourages communication. Though, the wheel doesn't need reinvented; forums already exist. Important thing is that the means of communication is native and tightly incorporated into Tzigla itself. How to do this I cannot say, I'm no web programmer.


In the quack quack collab, when you hit a tile (I think), it says, "100px tiles with 10px of context". This is confusing. I did a tile and was somewhat confused by where to actually draw. More explicit directions may benefit future collaborators. Color the area a participant  needs to draw in as some pink or green color, instead of black. That would help to clarify a bit. The 10px outer buffer, surrounding the whole collab is a little confusing. Each edge tile has a 10px transparent side, since each chunk of art is 100x100, yet the file is 120x120px. Little odd.



-TILE IDENTITY-
How do I specify a tile? With the Hexquisite collab, each tile had a number. Does Tzigla have a provision like this? If I want to comment on a certain tile, how do I do it? Describe it's general position? Each tile should have an unique identifier.

1. Regarding commenting. Briefly, our current idea is to have latest activity (reservations, uploads, etc) mixed in with recent comments instead of the current sidebar. Also in the sidebar in another tab we'll have all current participating artists so you can click on them and highlight their tiles on the board and maybe show some more details about those tiles somewhere.

2. The 120x120 thing is for consistency. All tiles are border size + tile size + border size (edge tiles don't get special treatment), so yeah, little odd for edge tiles but not so bad. Btw, we might add wrap around boards so having edge tiles the same as the rest would help

3. The tile number, reference is indeed missing. With the new commenting system and revamp of UI (coming next week) we'll add ids below tiles (where you have the artist's name now). You'll then be able to just refer to a tile as #1-2, or #1,2, or maybe #67 (just a number like the hex collab) in a comment and that would be clickable and select the tile. And the other way around, we'll probably make it so you can see all comments about a tile easier and such.

[evilchelu]

Hey, pixel people... this is a personal appeal from that silly avatar founder of tzigla /end-wikipedia-joke

Pretty please grab some tiles on the checker board, it's really looking great so far and we're sad to see it stalling.

We promise we're working really hard on making tzigla more friendly and usable and we'd really really be encouraged if you'd keep using it. We're not getting anything out of all the hard work we're putting into it more than seeing people do nice tiles.

Also, this week we're starting work on brick style boards which are the intermediary step towards hex tiles. But I'm actually scared of working on that too fast since I'm afraid this board would die off and all the tiles worked so far would go to waste.

[Mathias]

1. COMMENTING.     I would definitely keep separate 'board events' and 'communication'. I can see your logic in combining them, but then I can also see a person wanting to see just one or the other. If you included a filter, or toggle, or something like that it might jive (you got a stream of comments and board events in just a big cascading pile, hit a button to hide either events or comments). Kinda depends on how your UI is being set up, though.


I know it's best to have all the parts and pieces laid out, and organized, before you start building anything. We seem to keep tacking on parts and pieces as we go. That's not a good way to go about it. Don't wanna end up with an unprioritized frankenstein mess - Like an old company web site from the 90's that never got a 2.0 redesign, but rather just keeps getting modified and added to. As you know, the typical result is a usability (and usually aesthetics) hazard for visitors.


LiGHTBuLB - Artist Description. Allow each artist a place to write a personal commment describing/explaing his/her tile.
Maybe only at upload time. Would you be able to modify your comments even after respective tile is uploaded? Would you need text filters for this?
Just plain text would do (no hyperlinks, formatting, etc available).
You already have a great place to put the artist description, when you click a tile and the left info bar appears. Right therr. Hide artist descriptions for still hidden tiles.

[Mathias]

Complaint - Not a huge fan of the name Tzigla. Don't know how married to it you are. Names ambiguous to pronounce correctly can be trying. I suggest a more user-friendly name. I want Tzigla to have mass appeal. The name is mighty important. Just a thought I've had for a while.

COLLAB IDEA - You're adding bricks soon. What about a collab type that comes in layers? Layers of submitted images stacked onto each other to create the final result. It would require alpha using images of course. Someone may create a background, then others foreground objects/gfx . . . I dunno.
Just an undeveloped idea scrap. Not sure what else to add to it, or even how it's useful. Anybody wanna expand on it?

On the upcoming Hex tile type, is it not just a matter of offsetting the top,left corner of each image by a certain increment?

[evilchelu]

1. COMMENTING.     I would definitely keep separate 'board events' and 'communication'. I can see your logic in combining them, but then I can also see a person wanting to see just one or the other. If you included a filter, or toggle, or something like that it might jive (you got a stream of comments and board events in just a big cascading pile, hit a button to hide either events or comments). Kinda depends on how your UI is being set up, though.


I know it's best to have all the parts and pieces laid out, and organized, before you start building anything. We seem to keep tacking on parts and pieces as we go. That's not a good way to go about it. Don't wanna end up with an unprioritized frankenstein mess - Like an old company web site from the 90's that never got a 2.0 redesign, but rather just keeps getting modified and added to. As you know, the typical result is a usability (and usually aesthetics) hazard for visitors.


LiGHTBuLB - Artist Description. Allow each artist a place to write a personal commment describing/explaing his/her tile.
Maybe only at upload time. Would you be able to modify your comments even after respective tile is uploaded? Would you need text filters for this?
Just plain text would do (no hyperlinks, formatting, etc available).
You already have a great place to put the artist description, when you click a tile and the left info bar appears. Right therr. Hide artist descriptions for still hidden tiles.

re: commenting. I'm not a big fan of options so we'll have to figure something out. We might just let reserving/uploading take a comment so they might be the same thing at some point. We'll see.

re: artist description. We had tile titles in mind, but if we end up doing the above, it might not matter anymore

[evilchelu]

Complaint - Not a huge fan of the name Tzigla. Don't know how married to it you are. Names ambiguous to pronounce correctly can be trying. I suggest a more user-friendly name. I want Tzigla to have mass appeal. The name is mighty important. Just a thought I've had for a while.

COLLAB IDEA - You're adding bricks soon. What about a collab type that comes in layers? Layers of submitted images stacked onto each other to create the final result. It would require alpha using images of course. Someone may create a background, then others foreground objects/gfx . . . I dunno.
Just an undeveloped idea scrap. Not sure what else to add to it, or even how it's useful. Anybody wanna expand on it?

On the upcoming Hex tile type, is it not just a matter of offsetting the top,left corner of each image by a certain increment?

re: the name. We had another one we liked but everything was taken so we changed to tzigla. At the moment I don't feel we have the energy to change the name so we'll try this one for a while. We recently realized that most US people are saying it like zigla, sigh.

re: collab idea. that's a completely different direction which we're most likely not going to pursuit. We're into tiles, baby!

re: hexes. Hexes are like bricks, not like a checker board with respect to number of neighbours and such. Also, we have to do code to stitch them together, extract contours, generate the tile you download, etc, it's not just a matter of offsets

[Mathias]

re: commenting. I'm not a big fan of options so we'll have to figure something out. We might just let reserving/uploading take a comment so they might be the same thing at some point. We'll see.

I know what you mean. Less gadgetry; more simplicity. But if you did separate commenting and events that's just an idea on how to do it.

re: artist description. We had tile titles in mind, but if we end up doing the above, it might not matter anymore

Personally, as an artist I wouldn't really care to come up with a title per tile, but I would probably have a few sentences to say.
These collabs are really fun to look at when done, and having some goofy or explanatory stuff to read about each tile would be nicely complimentary to just viewing them.

re: the name. We had another one we liked but everything was taken so we changed to tzigla. At the moment I don't feel we have the energy to change the name so we'll try this one for a while. We recently realized that most US people are saying it like zigla, sigh.

Let's see, you guys are in Romania, right? I'm located central USA, I pronounce is that way. As far as I know, that's the logical way to pronounce it. Silent T.

re: collab idea. that's a completely different direction which we're most likely not going to pursuit. We're into tiles, baby!

Tiles. Yeah. Having layers pretty much shatters your mold, I see where you're coming from.

re: hexes. Hexes are like bricks, not like a checker board with respect to number of neighbours and such. Also, we have to do code to stitch them together, extract contours, generate the tile you download, etc, it's not just a matter of offsets

I annoy my programmer friends by explaining dynamically rich code-intensive functions in an over-simplified way all the time.

[Mathias]

For whatever reasons I find these types of collaborative exercises very compelling. Here are some ideas that will evolve Tzigla more towards my ideal concept of collabs/challenges, which is hopefully shared by the majority.



Ranking/Rating. There's an issue with all art collabs that Tzigla could tackle, if it wanted to (Tzigla is now it's own entity apparently. . . I dunno). To illustrate it, think of boxing. Why are the light, middle and heavyweight classes in place? To prevent this:



Pitting Mike Tyson against mini-me might be amusing in the NES's Punch-Out game, but in real life it would simply not be fair. That's why the classes are there. In Taekwondo, does a white belt spar against a black belt?

Similarly, when artists combine forces and create collaborative imagery, such as with Tzigla, is it not equally awkward when your 8 year old brother makes a tile juxtaposed to a more experienced/skilled artist? Both tiles end up looking bad; your little brother's tile is put to shame by the rembrandt wanna-be and rembrandt's tile looks totally out of place, almost comical.

I'm hesitant to bring this to light, but it's a thought in most of our minds anyway, I'm just voicing it.

So, ranking/rating now. What am I getting at? Give people something to compete for and at the same time compel all involved to put forth max effort - Allow rating of tiles, maybe 1-10 stars possible. With this in place, you can now host invitation only collabs. Quite possibly only allowing artists with an average rating of 7-10, for heavyweights. Or hold a newbie competition for those maybe not as skilled, rating requirement 0-4.

Tiles could rated on multiple points - seamlessness, concept, how well the adjacent tiles were continued, etc.

What happens when someone logs in with multiple accounts? I could use my Pixelation and Twitter (which I don't have) account to contribute tiles to the same collab. Now one person is viewed as two, this is misleading.




Awards. For artists per collab: Highest rated artist on collab, artist with most tiles contributed, etc. This probably runs against the current Tzigla log-in mechanic, probably requiring a native Tzigla account. One person having multiple access accounts facilitates abuse too much.


Team Collabs. Two team captains pick their teams of artists, and these two teams compete against eachother, trying to get the highest user-rating once it's all done. Who does the next tile is decided by each team's rotation; all members take turns in a set order.
This is more in the spirit of digital art duels. Something I miss. Things like this could really boost the userbase because now it's not just a casual thing; kinda adds a layer to things. People like to compete.

[evilchelu]

Thanks for the long post and ideas!

First, tzigla is definitely its own entity. One that loves to integrate with others . It would suck to have it closed and just available to only one forum.

re: ranking/rating. I think that instead of making tzigla a competition and having newbie users feel sad that their stuff is not as loved, I'd rather have the admin pick a skill level for the board then handle people out of line through moderation. Newbs would probably not enter high end boards and high end artists won't enter newb boards by themselves. Less automated policing, more human interaction.

re: awards. We were thinking about badges or achievements or such, but that might again turn things into a competition. We will probably add some sort of simple like/favorite/start button. But its main use would be that so you can keep a list of things, raking tiles by it will be a distant second and most likely there won't be a top 10 or such.

re: team collabs. Same things as above about competitions. But teams might allow for more fun things tho

I agree that competition is a very good driving force, at least it is for me, but we'll be very careful about how we add it to tzigla, since having other motivations besides making nice things might push some to optimize for gaining points/badges/awards instead of making nice things. Competitions also mean that someone loses, and this is not what a collab should be about.

We're might even go in the other direction by adding some PixelJoint style collabs with all tiles visible, WIPs, CCs, allowing people to edit each other's tiles, etc.

After this week, when we'll finish the commenting/activity stuff and UI revamp, we'll then add hexes and then think about this kind of things.

[Mathias]

Ok, so you get my point at least. We seem to have a somewhat different point of view towards competition, which is fine. I think your philosophy is still going to take Tzigla in a successful direction, regardless.

Hmm, on the quack quack collab, you can't reserve a tile diagonal from one of your own? Hmm, I can see the logic, but I dunno. . .

(VICTOR+MATHIAS TAGTEAM ACTION!!!)

[evilchelu]

Hmm, on the quack quack collab, you can't reserve a tile diagonal from one of your own? Hmm, I can see the logic, but I dunno. . .

It's beeen dabated if the corner would influence much but the only downside is that the boards will be a bit slow in the beginning. And that's not so bad.

PS: quack quack board is 73% complete!!! wee

[RadiationGloves.Drugs]

I want to do a collab again (actually, I want to do anything again) but I'm away for the next four days, so I'll have to wait.

[Mathias]

No, it's not that bad.


TILE MASKING. As a contributor on the quack quack board, someone that's watched it unfold, I find it odd and inconvenient that as tiles are approved, the masks change. I'm not referring to tiles being revealed once all adjacent tiles are approved, but rather the tiles that are still masked, the 10px strips come and go.
For instance, I'm working on the top-right most tile right now. The tile just to it's left, by "matthewgarret" previously had it's lower portion visible. Now, since Sakket turned his in, it's covered up. Before getting masked over, with no warning, it contained what I considered to be a key reddish blob I was contemplating propagating over into my tile for an added sense of continuity. Had I not already screencap'ed, that pixel information would lost. Do you see the problem?

Why not just consistently mask only the inner 80x80 area? Our previous Hexquisite collabs did this. It seemed to work great.

Further, you look at the C64 Checker Collab, it's slowly being taken over entirely by pure black. I think artists should have a better sense of what "might" be going on in the black area. It is valid for reference when making more tiles; I don't just look at adjacent tiles when making mine.

[Argyle]

Gotta concur with Mathias on the masking thing.  Sure, the idea is that you should only need the borders that touch your tile, but I feel that creativity and continuity both flourish when I can look at the tile's entire border when deciding what to draw.

And btw, I chose to sandwich between your two tiles on Quack Quack for grand reasons!

[evilchelu]

The problem with showing all the borders all the time is that it looks very ugly

Here's how it looks with our development data (which is based on some old tiles.ice.org board)



Also, I think that having all the borders makes it less random since as you say, it will allow people to see more than what they need. But I understand where you're coming from, you saw something that's related to your tile but now it's gone.

Because of the ugliness, I don't really want to show all the borders all the time. But we're thinking about how to make it somehow temporary? Maybe we should show all the borders of the surrounding tile when you click on an available tile (one with a plus)? Or, maybe have it as an option once you reserve a tile?

ps: the commenting and activity stuff is coming along great and we'll probably deploy something today!
pps: we've figured out why some tiles had shitty colors on the quack board. tech explanation: it's because of browser handling of embedded color profiles in png files. we'll start removing color profiles from uploaded files so things will blend

[Mathias]

Hmm. Sure it's not beautiful, but it's really not any more "ugly" than what the current method gives us to look at - temporary black blocks arbitrarily covering up content everywhere.
I like your idea to only unhide the margin areas when you click or do something else. Not bad. Didn't think of that.
But still, to me, it's important to show samples of the entire board as it unfolds. It keeps it interesting and allows people the chance to make guesses what's what. Part of the fun really.

Here's an augmented method for you - reduce the 20px margins between approved tiles to the standard 10px margin, using only a 5px masking strip attached to each relevant central black block (not sure how you handle corners). Because you're right, that may show just a tad too much visual information, even though different artists did either side of the actual tile border






Just gave that upper-right corner tile, last one I'm allowed to do according to current proximity rules, to a friend since he wanted it. Now all I can do is wait for the final result. (why is there pixel art in quack quack . . ? eh, crazies)

And btw, I chose to sandwich between your two tiles on Quack Quack for grand reasons!

Oh no!

[evilchelu]

Hola!

Great news. We finished the new UI revamp and stuff! For now we're deploying this on the staging server so we can all play with it and find bugs! Tomorrow we'll deploy on live.

The test staging server is here: http://tzigla-staging.heroku.com/

Please let us know if you find any bugs!

Don't worry about breaking things. The test server uses a copy of the data so you can't break anything. Go crazy!

ps: you can now link directly to your artists or tiles on a board (just copy the url in the address bar):

* artist: http://tzigla-staging.heroku.com/boards/3#!/artists/42
* tile: http://tzigla-staging.heroku.com/boards/3#!/tiles/4-3

mini changelog:
* better ui
* comments on board and tiles
* activity log for board, artists and tiles
* bookmarkable urls for artists and tiles
* better homepage (thumbnails are manually generated for now, working on making them dynamic)

[evilchelu]

YAY! Deployed to live!

http://tzigla.com/boards/3

http://tzigla.com/boards/1

Since yesterday, based on feedback and earlier requests, the following changes were made:

- option to show only comments in the board activity stream
  - events are also dimmed so they don't stand out
- artists in the header are sorted by the first tile they reserved
- borders are now visible for the ccc64 board
- we also log an event when a tile becomes visible (only applies to quack board)

ps: Thanks to Mathias for the wake up call that let us know these things were really needed!

[Mathias]

And a big thanks to you, and any others behind the scenes, doing all this!

An organized ball of feedback is headed your way. Don't have the necessary requirements to do it right now, stay tuned.

[evilchelu]

Here's an augmented method for you - reduce the 20px margins between approved tiles to the standard 10px margin, using only a 5px masking strip attached to each relevant central black block (not sure how you handle corners). Because you're right, that may show just a tad too much visual information, even though different artists did either side of the actual tile border

This idea is logically correct. However, it's even uglier than the thick borders imo. Those poking out corners are really nasty :/

Also, it has a serious flaw in that it does not respect the argument given earlier that the borders are disappearing randomly. In this case, just 5px would just randomly vanish instead of 10px.

So, I'm holding off on this "improvement", the thick borders are a good solution.

[Mathias]

Also, it has a serious flaw in that it does not respect the argument given earlier that the borders are disappearing randomly. In this case, just 5px would just randomly vanish instead of 10px.

Heck, you're right, good catch!

[evilchelu]

WOW, the activity on the quack board is totally AMAZING! 87% done!

Probably because the visible tiles make discussion possible.

I really think that the next pixelation board should have the same format! Just saying

[sakket]

idea! what if there was a mode so instead of just squares it was L-shapes? like 3 squares connected. that'd make for some odd combos, im sure.

[Mathias]

idea! what if there was a mode so instead of just squares it was L-shapes? like 3 squares connected. that'd make for some odd combos, im sure.

Like L-shaped tiles, or an L-shaped board?

[setz]

how about a board made from random tetris pieces, worked bottom-up endlessly, you just chose the piece you want to place.

Sounds interesting to me anyway

[sakket]

idea! what if there was a mode so instead of just squares it was L-shapes? like 3 squares connected. that'd make for some odd combos, im sure.

Like L-shaped tiles, or an L-shaped board?

tiles fitted together, but an awkwardly shaped board would be fun too

[evilchelu]

Crazy shaped tiles are not coming so soon. Crazy shaped boards are not as difficult tho.

We basically want to add "void" tiles at some point, which would allow for non square boards, or even boards with holes in them.

[Commander Gizmo]

Just my two cents: It might make hiding the center of each tile look better if, instead of black, the background for the board showed through.  Much less intrusive.  Then it appears that the portion of the tile visible is added to the board, not just peaking from behind a block of color.  The eye is drawn to the positive addition of color, not the negative black void that appears to be interrupting it.  It's all perspective really.

[evilchelu]

Just my two cents: It might make hiding the center of each tile look better if, instead of black, the background for the board showed through.  Much less intrusive.  Then it appears that the portion of the tile visible is added to the board, not just peaking from behind a block of color.  The eye is drawn to the positive addition of color, not the negative black void that appears to be interrupting it.  It's all perspective really.

That sounds quite nice.

I'm worried about the pixelation board tho. Not sure if that stone texture will fit in nicely in those black holes.

[Commander Gizmo]

Might I suggest a better background color/texture for pixel board then?  It would also set them apart from the painting boards as well.

[evilchelu]

Might I suggest a better background color/texture for pixel board then?  It would also set them apart from the painting boards as well.

You may

[Commander Gizmo]

Another common feature with dynamically updated sites is highlighting where changes have occurred since your last visit.  This can be accomplished quite easily by storing a time stamp per board when a user last updated the page and comparing it to the time stamp of the last change.  A simple icon or border color to denote which boards have changed since the homepage was last loaded would be sufficient IMO.  Highlighting comments which are new since the last visit via a brighter text color would also be convenient.

Additionally, using a cookie to remember that a user has logged in between visits would be nice. I have my pixelation account set to stay logged in, and it would be nice if tzilga respected that choice as well.  Since the site that the user uses for authentication can worry about keeping me logged in, it seems to make sense that your site only has to either bind my session to my login credentials, or remember how I was logged in and attempt to renew it when I return.  If I have the option set at my authentication site, the attempt will work.  If I am not logged in, you can fail back to a guest status.

[evilchelu]

Another common feature with dynamically updated sites is highlighting where changes have occurred since your last visit.  This can be accomplished quite easily by storing a time stamp per board when a user last updated the page and comparing it to the time stamp of the last change.  A simple icon or border color to denote which boards have changed since the homepage was last loaded would be sufficient IMO.  Highlighting comments which are new since the last visit via a brighter text color would also be convenient.

Additionally, using a cookie to remember that a user has logged in between visits would be nice. I have my pixelation account set to stay logged in, and it would be nice if tzilga respected that choice as well.  Since the site that the user uses for authentication can worry about keeping me logged in, it seems to make sense that your site only has to either bind my session to my login credentials, or remember how I was logged in and attempt to renew it when I return.  If I have the option set at my authentication site, the attempt will work.  If I am not logged in, you can fail back to a guest status.

Thanks for the suggestions.

re: changes since last visit: Nice to have, but we have bigger fish to fry at the moment. Putting it on the todo list

re: remember login: Interesting idea. But I'm not sure how I feel about the idea of automatically trying to log you in on the provider site. We might make our cookie permanent cookie tho. But this would create problems when you change your avatar, as we won't be able to know about it.

[Commander Gizmo]

re: remember login: Interesting idea. But I'm not sure how I feel about the idea of automatically trying to log you in on the provider site. We might make our cookie permanent cookie tho. But this would create problems when you change your avatar, as we won't be able to know about it.

Forgive me if I am stating the obvious or running down the wrong path with this one.

I was actually thinking that you would basically store a cookie on my system and then, upon returning to your site, you could use the cookie to match me up to my last used user in your database.  Said database could store the site I last used to log in to Tzigla, which data could then be used to simply simulate my having clicked the button for said site.  The difference over my actually having clicked it is that upon a failure to find me already logged in to the partner site, you simply recognize me as a guest and let me worry about what buttons to click.  Or perhaps you can't prevent the partner site from showing a login screen?  In that case, you could simply have your own 'stay logged in' feature which removes the need to re-authenticate upon returning to the site for x number of days (two weeks?).  I can always sign out if I want to log in as someone else.

On the other hand, I may just be lazy.  The need to click a separate item to log in each time you click a link to Tzigla is certainly, at least in my mind, a big reason it doesn't feel like a smooth transition from Pixelation.  Thus it may have a rather large impact on how much your site is seen as an extension of this community or a separate entity.

[Geti]

I want to see our tiles

I should do another one or two then, I suppose

Nice to see all this progress made in my absence.

I'm confused as to why "crazy" shaped tiles are labelled difficult here.
Obviously you have to fetch the data a different way but if you overlay the images with alpha you only need to know the 2D offset at which the tiles tessellate and if that alternates. For iso tiles, you use placement_x = ((coord_y - coord_x) * block_pixel_width / 2) and placement_y = ((coord_x + coord_y) * block_pixel_width / 4) where the block_pixel_width is the "diameter" of the tile from the furthest apart opposing corners. Similar rules can be made for hex tiles and the like (though hex tiles have an alternating x offset each row), and I'm sure the same could be said for "crazier" shapes. The person setting up the board could be able to define the shape to be used with a mask (1 bit image) and the offsets, and have an example presented to them as to what the server would tessellate those objects as with the rules provided so they could tweak that beforehand.

Sure, it's not as nice as just multiplying the numbers but programmatically it's not much worse, and could make for some awesome collabs. The hexquisite tilesets could be emulated with the "void" tiles you described earlier

[Gamer36]

May I ask what this is about and why there are big black holes in each of the pictures? Nvm I got it, but does all of it have to be pixel-by-pixel or can we use the brush tool?

[evilchelu]

re: remember login: Interesting idea. But I'm not sure how I feel about the idea of automatically trying to log you in on the provider site. We might make our cookie permanent cookie tho. But this would create problems when you change your avatar, as we won't be able to know about it.

Forgive me if I am stating the obvious or running down the wrong path with this one.

I was actually thinking that you would basically store a cookie on my system and then, upon returning to your site, you could use the cookie to match me up to my last used user in your database.  Said database could store the site I last used to log in to Tzigla, which data could then be used to simply simulate my having clicked the button for said site.  The difference over my actually having clicked it is that upon a failure to find me already logged in to the partner site, you simply recognize me as a guest and let me worry about what buttons to click.  Or perhaps you can't prevent the partner site from showing a login screen?  In that case, you could simply have your own 'stay logged in' feature which removes the need to re-authenticate upon returning to the site for x number of days (two weeks?).  I can always sign out if I want to log in as someone else.

On the other hand, I may just be lazy.  The need to click a separate item to log in each time you click a link to Tzigla is certainly, at least in my mind, a big reason it doesn't feel like a smooth transition from Pixelation.  Thus it may have a rather large impact on how much your site is seen as an extension of this community or a separate entity.

Don't worry about suggesting too many things, I love that finally people are speaking their minds

Yes, that cookie can be done, but not like you said. The problem is that you can't really know if a password has been requested without just assuming the auth request should return in a number of seconds (because the request would have to be made in an iframe, and you can't access windows of other domains from js to know wtf happened). We already do this kind of weird dance in an iframe for the tile submissions to s3. But it just feels hackish for auth. So, technically we can do it, but we'd rather do other things at the moment.

We'll most likely do one of these semi-permanent cookies as you mention.

[evilchelu]

May I ask what this is about and why there are big black holes in each of the pictures? Nvm I got it, but does all of it have to be pixel-by-pixel or can we use the brush tool?

If a board does not specifically say it's pixel art, it's not. Also, I assume that most pixel art boards will have a fixed palette.

[evilchelu]

I want to see our tiles

I should do another one or two then, I suppose

Nice to see all this progress made in my absence.

I'm confused as to why "crazy" shaped tiles are labelled difficult here.
Obviously you have to fetch the data a different way but if you overlay the images with alpha you only need to know the 2D offset at which the tiles tessellate and if that alternates. For iso tiles, you use placement_x = ((coord_y - coord_x) * block_pixel_width / 2) and placement_y = ((coord_x + coord_y) * block_pixel_width / 4) where the block_pixel_width is the "diameter" of the tile from the furthest apart opposing corners. Similar rules can be made for hex tiles and the like (though hex tiles have an alternating x offset each row), and I'm sure the same could be said for "crazier" shapes. The person setting up the board could be able to define the shape to be used with a mask (1 bit image) and the offsets, and have an example presented to them as to what the server would tessellate those objects as with the rules provided so they could tweak that beforehand.

Sure, it's not as nice as just multiplying the numbers but programmatically it's not much worse, and could make for some awesome collabs. The hexquisite tilesets could be emulated with the "void" tiles you described earlier

Thanks for the suggestion.

Briefly: crazy shaped tiles are just "nice to have" and yet give ample opportunity for doing other things than collaborations, aka yak shaving

At the moment, people are not even drawing square tiles. And that worries me more than crazy tiles at this point.

Anyway, besides just placing tiles on top of each other there are several other things that happen:

* actually have "tesselatable" tiles
  * someone needs to make/test them, we'd most likely have to make some editor
* know each tiles neighbors
  * this affects tile availability for reservation
  * helps know whether the tile is just done or actually should be visible
  * allow people to work only on tiles that do not touch one of their other tiles
* know how to add and extract the borders
  * you have to add outside borders when a person gets a tile
  * remove the outside borders when they upload
  * extract inner borders that would be given to others as outside borders
  * highlight non-square things when the board is hovered with the mouse
* teach people to make tiles correctly - harder than you think
* oh, and unit tests for most of the above
  * and a pony

Most of these things are what my brain wants to do as well, and I strongly disapprove because my brain likes premature optimization while the real world doesn't. It's making the general case before the particular case. I'd rather manually add square and hex tiles then worry about making it generic enough.

[Mathias]

chelu, these are just a few things in the way of proposed improvements, ideas. Take them as you will.



1 )  Scrollbar style. Default scrolbars lookin' tacky.
2 )  Rollover tile highlights (DONE)
3 )  Remove "showing all" and "showing only comments" text, use more minimal buttons instead of links as well  -OR-   could be one toggle button that changes per state.
4 )  Format artist list into columns (truncate usernames to minimum char count so cols can be standard widths?)
5 )  Live updates, w/o reloads - Auto-update comments/events, even artist list and tile quantities, every minute or so  -OR-  when something changes only.
6 )  When artist is clicked, show each graphical tile done, along with tile name.
7 )  Precede board events, in comment window, with a relevant icon, indenting them. My concern is better differentiating them from comments, since comments are most likely the higher priority when looking through that comment window list.
8 )  Tile names are great to have now but they still don't really allow you to quickly locate a tile when you only have it's name. Maybe number rows and columns, with little numbers at top/side of each col/row. Furthermore, hex tiles pretty much defy rows and columns. I don't see how a column-row naming convention will work for them. I suggest plain old numbers, ie: 01, 02, 03, etc.
9 )  Add time/date stamps to board events/comments
10 ) Thumbnails on main page are a nice touch but don't seem to help much if not up to date.
11) Imposed themes. Not sure about imposing themes to begin with really. You may've noticed that I completely disregarded the quack ducks pond theme for the first collab. It simply didn't appeal to me. Without doing this one might think that all collabs will just kinda look the same, which is probably not true. I can see the logic in having a theme - something to provide unity for the whole thing. Thinking more about it, I guess I'd like having themes, if I actually liked the theme; if it worked for me.
Some collabs theme ideas: Aliens/monsters VS. Robots,   Vegetables VS. Fruit (cartoon chars at war),   Underground,   Underwater,   Sky.
12 ) Convert links to clickable hyperlinks in chat.
13 ) Gotta remedy those color issues. Top-right of quack quack collab has obvious issues especially where there's blue on both sides of the tile seams in question.


-Great job on everything! You've really proved you're going the distance with this project and it's not some little random pet project born impulsively on the spur of the moment with no motivation behind it to see it through.

-Love how half-typed comments text stays put while clicking around on different tiles, instead of the typing window resetting/deleting what you've typed.

-I don't mind the black masks covering the approved tiles. But here's how using the bg texture would look:






Structured Collab Themes. With this type of collab the physical "structure" or "landscape" of the board is imposed, but only very generally. Only to give direction, or "structure".

Two pics to 'illustrate' the idea here:

#1


Imagine a painting of a simple horizon. A typical landscape. Sky on top, earth on bottom. Now divy it up into sqaures and let random people fill them each in, like we do with Tzigla now. But bind each artist to sticking to content indicative of either sky or earth. Those doing the transitions have freedom to include both, but in a logical way, where in the end the final result maintains a visual separation of sky and earth.


#2


Same thing going on here but there's an added layer of complexity. In the middle of the landscape there's a building, a castle. How in the heck this would pan out is beyond me, at the moment. But I foresee good potential for this idea.
People may be confused at first, but simply show them some visual examples of what expected of them and surely the idea would become clear and they'd jump in.

This concept adds more depth to the whole effort and gives all contributors a common goal of painting the picture. The same structure template could be used over and over and get wildly different results each time.








Tetris Tiles. Odd-shaped tiles using the shapes of tetris blocks. 'Nuff said.

If a board does not specifically say it's pixel art, it's not. Also, I assume that most pixel art boards will have a fixed palette.

Yes, all pixel art collabs should definitely have a pre-defined palette, or color quantity limit.

[Commander Gizmo]

@Mathias:
I think a few of your ideas might be possibly the responsiblity of the moderator of the board.

For example, I like your idea of structured boards.  If a rough image, much as you demonstrated, were placed as the background texture and the moderator simply enforced the requirements, wouldn't it work as the system is now?

[Mathias]

@Mathias:
I think a few of your ideas might be possibly the responsiblity of the moderator of the board.

For example, I like your idea of structured boards.  If a rough image, much as you demonstrated, were placed as the background texture and the moderator simply enforced the requirements, wouldn't it work as the system is now?

What is this Sec Specs? haha. (SUPER SECRET REFERENCE)
Actually Gizmodic I strongly disagree with my fists clenched as I type, which slows my typiing dramatically. Try it for second, you'll see what I mean. Allowing this feature but expecting the mod to custom create his own bg image in an image editor vastly reduces it's convenience. Non-artists are going to have a heck of a time creating a gridded image using the same grid as the collab. It has to be pixel perfect. The tile given for artists to download will need to have it's respective chunk of the bg image. Among other reasons.

But, here's how I see it working:

Mod is given a config page:
1 ) He chooses number of rows/columns.
2 ) Chooses how many tiles per row/col, which determines tile total.
3 ) If chooses structured theme, he then gets  a page where he creates his own custom grid.
4 ) He's presented with a level designer of sorts. 10 or so slots he labels and chooses a color for.
5 ) Then each tile can be color-coded as any of his labels.
6 ) So, on the board when it goes live, the artists see the grid all color-coded along with the color key and a description of the theme so they know what's what.



___________

When a board is complete it should register as a board event, therefore getting an entry in the comments panel. Maybe with a special green background so it's easy to find. Maybe the Tzigla account could even post the notification, but it should occur instantly, as soon as the board is done.

Concerning the comments panel, it would be nice to be able to temporarily "reset" the board back to the state it was in when each comment or listed event entry was made. Could be done by including a link or button in each comment panel entry you could click or rollover to momentarily re-mask the tiles as they were when the entry was made.





Board Creation. Will non-mod's, like me, ever gain the ability to start their own board? And, will they be able to make private boards, which are invitation-only?

[Argyle]

I just now found the original thread for Patratzel near the bottom of the first page of the general section of the forums.  I feel like kind of a jerk for not having taken notice of it until now, since I check Tzigla almost as much as I check my e-mail, haha.  Thanks for keeping up the dev work on this so ambitiously, even though the interest in it appeared less than what it might have been, just based on the reply count of that first thread.  <3 There's so many sticky threads that it's pretty easy to miss something new on the general boards I guess.

[evilchelu]

Mathias, thanks so much for the praise and ideas. You rocks our socks! Replying below:

1 )  Scrollbar style. Default scrolbars lookin' tacky.
Meh, kinda agree but on the other hand I don't mind so much => in todo, low priority

2 )  Rollover tile highlights (DONE)
YAY

3 )  Remove "showing all" and "showing only comments" text, use more minimal buttons instead of links as well  -OR-   could be one toggle button that changes per state.
Indeed, this bit of UI will improve, it was just added fast to please people

4 )  Format artist list into columns (truncate usernames to minimum char count so cols can be standard widths?)
Disagree. Having them structured will attract more attention from the board than having it look like text. We might add an option to sort by most tiles tho.
We're also thinking of putting them someplace else tho.

5 )  Live updates, w/o reloads - Auto-update comments/events, even artist list and tile quantities, every minute or so  -OR-  when something changes only.
Agree. On the list already as part of... optimization, if you can imagine

6 )  When artist is clicked, show each graphical tile done, along with tile name.
Disagree. It just doesn't fit in the interface without cluttering, well, unless we take the events stream away when viewing an artist.
Might not be needed since we'll be adding a separate profile page soon, then we'll have a links that says, open full profile in a separate page.

7 )  Precede board events, in comment window, with a relevant icon, indenting them. My concern is better differentiating them from comments, since comments are most likely the higher priority when looking through that comment window list.
Agree.

8 )  Tile names are great to have now but they still don't really allow you to quickly locate a tile when you only have it's name. Maybe number rows and columns, with little numbers at top/side of each col/row. Furthermore, hex tiles pretty much defy rows and columns. I don't see how a column-row naming convention will work for them. I suggest plain old numbers, ie: 01, 02, 03, etc.
Actually, whytf aren't we just highlighting stuff like 5-6 already (without the #, that is). It's not like people normally type 4-3, 7-2 and such in normal conversation.
Might add the little numbers, tho I'm not yet convinced they add that much. Would probably make more sense to have numbers directly on the tile, but that's too noisy. Maybe temporarily add numbers to all only when a tile is selected or hovered.
Hexes can be numbered almost the same.

9 )  Add time/date stamps to board events/comments
Will probably add just to comments. Events will be in context and they're less important.
Also, we'll probably add "2 minutes ago" style timestamps since everyone is on another timezone and absolute time is bleh.

10 ) Thumbnails on main page are a nice touch but don't seem to help much if not up to date.
We're annoyingly practical. It took less time to make some screenshots than to implement the feature We'll be making them work for real soon tho.

11) Imposed themes. Not sure about imposing themes to begin with really. You may've noticed that I completely disregarded the quack ducks pond theme for the first collab. It simply didn't appeal to me. Without doing this one might think that all collabs will just kinda look the same, which is probably not true. I can see the logic in having a theme - something to provide unity for the whole thing. Thinking more about it, I guess I'd like having themes, if I actually liked the theme; if it worked for me.
Some collabs theme ideas: Aliens/monsters VS. Robots,   Vegetables VS. Fruit (cartoon chars at war),   Underground,   Underwater,   Sky.
Debatable. I think themes must be generic enough and not really enforced. But it's nice when there's at least some sort of common idea. You theme ideas are better than ours

12 ) Convert links to clickable hyperlinks in chat.
Soon, but then we have to worry more about security. People can link to bad things, etc.

13 ) Gotta remedy those color issues. Top-right of quack quack collab has obvious issues especially where there's blue on both sides of the tile seams in question.
Already fixed for quack board, as you know. Working on a built-in fix right now.

re: the seethrough instead of black
My reply to gizmo saying "you may" meant... give me a suggested texture for the pixel boards cos i can't come up with one. But maybe ptoing or somebedy else that does pixels is a better idea, since gizmo only participates in the normal boards I think (hi gizmo )

re: structures boards
Already on the list. But high demand means we might work on it faster than we thought
First, I just want to say: really nice mockups!

But, I agree with gizmo. Uploading a pic is the simples solution that gives most of the desired features. You're trying to put too much structure on it.

Not every joe user will be an admin, so sketching something is decent is kinda easy. The sketch doesn't have to fit exactly on tiles. We'll just cut it up when a user downloads the tile and give them whatever happens to be there. If the idea is decently explained in the description (we might add a bigger field for that), people will kinda get it that they're around the castle, grass, underwater, sky, etc area. And the point of it's that it doesn't have to be exactly that, maybe someone decides to have a ladder starting from the castle and continuing up to the stars, you never know

re: board completed event
Nice to have, probably useless in practice. It'll quickly be overwhelmed by comments and fade away

[evilchelu]

I just now found the original thread for Patratzel near the bottom of the first page of the general section of the forums.  I feel like kind of a jerk for not having taken notice of it until now, since I check Tzigla almost as much as I check my e-mail, haha.  Thanks for keeping up the dev work on this so ambitiously, even though the interest in it appeared less than what it might have been, just based on the reply count of that first thread.  <3 There's so many sticky threads that it's pretty easy to miss something new on the general boards I guess.

Don't worry about it, it's all in the past. We eventually made it through that phase because we're crazy and just didn't give up. Thanks for loving tzigla!

btw: the best way to show your appreciation is making more people happy by encouraging them to make tiles 

[evilchelu]

ptoing is the first moderator and the only one for pixelation (unless he wants to propose more) and we love him cos he always believed in tzigla and helped us get off the ground .

Anyway, let's talk about non-pixel boards.

The problem with creating/moderating is that you shouldn't draw more than one tile (the first one). There's no real technical restriction preventing you to make more tiles, but you'd have an unfair advantage then. Also, it's unglorified work. You have to look at tiles fast, have accounts on twitter/facebook/pixelation, then contact people to nicely tell them why you sent back or rejected their tile, etc. It's practically more customer support than having fun.

We really want to have other people be moderators tho, but not too many because we don't want to have 10 boards going in parallel.

Now that I scared you, we really don't want to be moderating boards and we'd love someone else to do it.

Also, the actions of an admin will reflect upon tzigla, so for us is important who gets to be a mod.

Are you willing to put in the work? To promote your board nicely without spamming (as this reflects badly on tzigla), to try to find users for you board, to be nice even tho people are being nasty/hateful?

We have only two advanced boards(2 and 4) and one newbie board(5) up for grabs for now. And I don't want to add too many "in progress" boards so until we have enough users to make enough tiles on tzigla, we're not going to let you create boards yourself, just by request.

So, who wants to be a mod?

[Argyle]

With all the horrible tear jerking reasons NOT to be a moderator that you just listed aside, and even though I love Tzigla oh so much, I'm not consistently available nearly enough to justify volunteering.  Hope somebody comes along to free you up from having to do it AND develop at the same time though!

[Commander Gizmo]

Two more interface suggestions for you.

• Create a toggle button to hide the side bar with the event stream.  This allows a much more epic view of the actual board when desired, and helps when on non standard resolutions (like my tablet/phone).  You might also make he width sizable using the mouse. (Hello jQuery!)
• Create a slide out selector list of the boards when viewing a board.  It would probably work best with smaller thumbnails and the text names or maybe just the text names.  If a person is interested in several boards, it might be nice to switch back and forth, or check for progress quickly once the thumbnails are automated.

[Mathias]

• Create a slide out selector list of the boards when viewing a board. . .

Yayuh. Just a simple drop-down box with collab names would be a great usability improvement.

(check that list tag formatting!)

[evilchelu]

Two more interface suggestions for you.

• Create a toggle button to hide the side bar with the event stream.  This allows a much more epic view of the actual board when desired, and helps when on non standard resolutions (like my tablet/phone).  You might also make he width sizable using the mouse. (Hello jQuery!)
• Create a slide out selector list of the boards when viewing a board.  It would probably work best with smaller thumbnails and the text names or maybe just the text names.  If a person is interested in several boards, it might be nice to switch back and forth, or check for progress quickly once the thumbnails are automated.

<3 gizmo

re: toggle-able sidebar: Might do that, but probably just for the complete boards. We actually had a version a few weeks ago with this type of sidebar and it kinda sucked.

re: mobile version: We had to break the mobile version to get the new sidebar in place, but we'll fix it soon. It might be that on mobile stuffs you'll just be able to see either the sidebar or the content, but not both since they most likely won't fit properly.

re: slide out selector of boards: Definitely! I want that too.

We're currently working on the homepage (which truly sucks, btw) and it's tough since we're not really designers

ps: what's up with the pixelation board? It makes me really sad that people seem to have given up on it. As I said earlier, it would really suck for all the people that worked on it already to have it die off

[Commander Gizmo]

A few more suggestions, because it's easier than actually implementing them:

Homepage

• Beef It Up
  The interface seems too minimal.  It almost feels like the site is empty or being swallowed by the void.  Perhaps the following suggestions will help?
• Categories
  The boards could be sorted by categories, such as Skill Required, Pixel/Painting/Theme, Progress (percent completed), etc.
• Board Description Wrapping Text
  If the text over the thumbnails wrapped around the status text things would look much more fluid and much of the wasted 'void' space in the layout would seem to disappear.
• Color!
  I like dark base colors on a site as much as the next guy (more probably), but Tzigla's home page could do with a splash of color.  Not so much that it detracts from the board thumbnails though.  It needs to say, "Come on in and join the fun!"  I'm guessing some brighter elements would make it feel more active and vibrant.
• A Drop of Community
  A listing of the most recently added users or a stream of the most recent events (+comments?) would add a lot of community feel to the homepage while also making it feel active and busy.  A global chat box would probably be too much, but maybe it's worth consideration.

Boards

• Grab'n'Pan
  I would love to see a way to grab the board and drag it like you can in PS.  Those scroll bars are pretty annoying.
• Pop Out View
  It would be cool to have a button that triggered a 'pop out view', shrinking or expanding the board to the largest possible size that will fit in the browser window without cropping any of the board.  This would be a great way to view the over all board and take in the entire masterpiece.

[ptoing]

To anyone who might be interested.

I love Tzigla, it is a cool system and evilchelu and dira have put an assload of work into it. Now the question I am having is why is no one participating in the pixel collab one? Because it is not Hex? Why? let us know. It does not help the people involved staying motivated when no one uses their stuff?

[Batzy]

I really like this project and how much you have worked for it please continue doing so  also Mathias dammit with those looong crits/ideas sometimes even i'm too lazy to read them.

I don't really know why other people including me doesn't use tzigla and that is really a shame  but i know that it would really help if you would spread out some word about tzigla i dunno if there is any topic at pixeljoint but that's a nice place to start  also before you ask why i don't use tzigla? i'm going to make one or two tiles soon to tzigla i hope i've been watching the progress till now

I don't have any crits/suggestions now how to make tzigla better but i do have a tiny suggestion for pixelation i think it would be really great if there would be a link to tzigla similar to that donate link cause i would really like quickly get to tzigla watch the daily progress and not always try finding a link to tzigla from my bookmarks or from this topic etc.

[BrandonD]

To anyone who might be interested.

I love Tzigla, it is a cool system and evilchelu and dira have put an assload of work into it. Now the question I am having is why is no one participating in the pixel collab one? Because it is not Hex? Why? let us know. It does not help the people involved staying motivated when no one uses their stuff?

I love Tzigla also, this is the first collab that's ever motivated me to get off my butt and contribute - I'd contribute more tiles but I'm working on a contract project currently... and also since this is my first collab effort I don't wanna be annoying and make a ton of tiles.

But I really do hope that this collab gets finished, I'm very excited to see the final product!

[Mathias]

How is Tzigle being exposed? How can we boost awareness?

[Commander Gizmo]

Somebody make a youtube video of quack quack coming together and write a blog post or 3 about it quick!  That should stir up some attention.  I would, except that I don't have a blog and I'm up to my chin in travel plans.

[32]

I think the reason I and possibly other people aren't as interested in this collab is because it's so disconnected from the forum. I mean there wasn't a whole lot of communication in the other threads but I could see it progressing on the forum which I'm already visiting every day and there's a sort of drive to reserve a tile when you can see them being taken. The only way I can see this being the same for Tzigla is if I had bookmarked it and were visiting it regularly but I'm not so interested in the collab that I would do that. The other thing I was thinking was that this is the Tzigla thread not the pixelation tile collab thread, so I come in here expecting talk about Tzigla rather than the collab, which again isn't particularly interesting to me so I don't read the thread, and without having the collab on my mind I probably won't be itching to participate.

I can't really say how to solve this but by taking out the human/community element the whole thing just seems less interesting.

Edit: Maybe a postbot or something which could post the comment box activity in the forum. Just a thought.

[evilchelu]

Hey peeps!

Testing version deployed on staging! If all goes well, tomorrow we'll deploy on live. There are some crazy internal changes so please help us test it.

http://staging.tzigla.com

Changes in this deploy:

* thumbnails are generated when the admin approves a tile
* much nicer homepage (dedication to gizmo)
* signing in/out redirects back to the exact location you were viewing
* smaller sharing buttons
* automatically removing color profiles from tiles
* done tiles are now the exact size (since we're now removing the extra uploaded margins)
* a lot of invisible code changes that were needed so we can generate the thumbs because of stupid standards

Coming soon (most likely tomorrow):

* jump to board selector
* save full image as png/jpg
* tiles instead of activity stream when selecting an artist
* more

[Mathias]

Cool, a redesign!

K, so far I see only the homepage altered, so commenting only on it . . .


I design do sites, so some things come to mind. Earlier you said you guys are somewhat disadvantaged because you're not designers. So, let's see. . .

-Complete lack of flair. Bland. It's all grey. On one hand I like that it's neutral because it by default channels focus to the crazy colorful collabs, but on the other - a dull site is a dull site. This site is host to intense creativity but it's design seems to think it hosts resources for accountants to prepare tax returns. It's design style is tasteful, not having that dreaded novice vibe to it, but there's so much room for improvement!

-A strong bold masthead graphic is mandatory here. I'd do it personally if you wanted to do that. It needs to match the style of the site too, of course. And yes I'm going to boldly assert that Tzigla needs a REAL logo now. The current one is . . . yeah. Nobody likes it when I tell them their branding sucks, but if thing is going to take off it needs something better to do it with.

-The 765 content width oughta be updated to 990px, which is the modern fixed width. Your 765 width accommodates the old most-common resolution of 800x600. Target 1024x768 instead, as a minimum. 800 is obselete. Making things handheld/phone compliant is not my specialty so I don't know much about that. Giving it a fatter width will make for less vertical scrolling and give it a more contemporary feel. Remember, you're trying to attract users.

-Homepage, as I see it, is divided into 4 distinctive parts - Masthead,  Featured board/News,  Current WIP boards,  and General info, at bottom. Yet, they're all just kinda lumped together into the same grey column; not much visual priority going on. Highly functional, yes. But, not very compelling. Create some distinction. I see a much different looking site in my head for Tzigla. With an actual color scheme. I suggest a mega footer for the general info region.


-And while there is a need to promote and get users, it would be best if all the dust is settled before this thing is really trafficked hard, so that when people discover it they see the true shining wonderful attractive Tzigla. One good thing about the Tzigla name is that is searches really well. Very easy to find if searched, since such a unique word.

I want this thing to take off, just like you do. Above are some things, based on my experience, that I think may greatly improve Tzigla.

[evilchelu]

Hola again pixies

Deployed a new version on staging. We're leaving it only on staging for now so we can test things some more.

Current known bug: as admin, updating of thumbnails for the board doesn't work in opera. use safari, chrome or ff for now.

http://staging.tzigla.com

So, instead of the board selector, save full image and tiles instead of activity stream for artists we did some completely different things

* major thing for admins when sending back tiles!
  * admin can send a PM on tzigla
  * the artist can now see what the admin saw when it was sent back
  * this is very cool and important because the admin no longer has to send a message on facebook, twitter or pixelation, and the admin also doesn't have to manually make a screenshot anymore, wee
* option to allow max N tiles per artist per board
* we also nuke the transparency away from uploaded tiles

[evilchelu]

Again, thanks Mathias for the ideas and for being the only one that actually looked at the staging server ...sigh

re: 765 content width: It's actually because the ipad is 1024x768 so this would fit just fine in a portrait ipad. And we wanted to escape having to design a special one just for that in the future

re: bland and boring design: Of course, we totally agree. However, as developers, the only way to have something that doesn't look totally crap is to use as few colors as possible . Therefore, dark and the occasional yellowish highlights have resulted. Also, there was a lot of work put into thinking about UX instead of design we couldn't have done anyway.

We'd obviously love to have a design, a logo, some identity and consistency. But, that's a ton of work for a designer, and also a ton of work for us to coordinate with said designer and maybe to implement some quite big changes. Not to mention paying said designer. We've already kinda invested about $40k in development time on tzigla without any  plan to get that back. So, theoretically, it should be a no brainer to pay a designer, but invested money through spent time seems cheaper than invested real money, for some reason.

re: waiting to get it really nice before looking for users: Totally disagree! Perfect is the enemy of good.

We've launched tzigla to the forum after about 50 hours of work or so. We're now probably at 5-600 hours of work. We would have never, ever worked that much without feedback and/or some sense of motion. Not to mention it would have been way worse than it is now.

So, regardless of how good it looks, having more users is way better than the very few users we have right now.

re: offer about design stuffs: awww! <3

Please hit me up on gtalk/jabber IM. I'm evil@che.lu

[evilchelu]

Somebody make a youtube video of quack quack coming together and write a blog post or 3 about it quick!  That should stir up some attention.  I would, except that I don't have a blog and I'm up to my chin in travel plans.

Actually, now that we have the event stream we're planning on adding board playback in the browser and also maybe automatically generating movies and uploading them to youtube. Baby steps

[evilchelu]

I think the reason I and possibly other people aren't as interested in this collab is because it's so disconnected from the forum. I mean there wasn't a whole lot of communication in the other threads but I could see it progressing on the forum which I'm already visiting every day and there's a sort of drive to reserve a tile when you can see them being taken. The only way I can see this being the same for Tzigla is if I had bookmarked it and were visiting it regularly but I'm not so interested in the collab that I would do that. The other thing I was thinking was that this is the Tzigla thread not the pixelation tile collab thread, so I come in here expecting talk about Tzigla rather than the collab, which again isn't particularly interesting to me so I don't read the thread, and without having the collab on my mind I probably won't be itching to participate.

I can't really say how to solve this but by taking out the human/community element the whole thing just seems less interesting.

Edit: Maybe a postbot or something which could post the comment box activity in the forum. Just a thought.

As with most new things, some adaptation is needed.

We could do a tziglabot that would post the activity from tzigla to a special thread. The bot could even impersonate the user that did the action/posted the comment.

However, it's more custom work for what appears to be just lack of interest, or maybe people are overly busy. So, I'm personally not convinced that that would stir up much more activity. I'll have  a look at implementing this tho, and if it doesn't take too much time, I might even do it. But, again, it seems kinda odd to invest time in this when there is hardly any activity on the pix board .

[Commander Gizmo]

I also looked at the staging area.  I was preparing a response with some demo images but, as it turns out, Mathias's post covered it much better anyway.  I completely concur with Mathias's first 4 points.  I can see pros and cons to getting a larger user base now vs later.

Chelu, Mathias is right.  You need more flair and pop to your site so it feels fun instead of drab.  It needs to add energy to the project and motivate your users.  It does none of those things right now.  If someone is told about it or finds it on google, they are probably not going to look around very long before they form their first impression of dullness.  Inaccurate or not, they'll never learn the truth if they aren't motivated to stick around.

32 makes a good point as well, even if he can't pick a good forum name.  You would likely get a great deal more response from the forum communities you are connected with if there wasn't such a huge distinction between the community and your site.  There are lots of ways that have been used in the past to close this gap, and there are probably plenty of new and innovative ways as well.  A few suggestions after a quick brainstorm:

• Theme Matching
  You could set up your site to allow for multiple themes which, with your partner site's permission, closely follow that of the partner site.  This would make the transition very seamless, but obviously has many challenges and a ton of work is involved.
• Postmortem
  You might start a thread with the idea of reviewing what was liked or disliked about quack quack, your only completed board.  You could also invite comments on the artwork itself.
• Board Specific Threads
  You could start a partner site thread for each board you start on your site, or at least the boards you think they'd be interested in.  Having discussion within the community about a board in progress spreads awareness, encourages community interest, and helps greatly to knit the partner site and your site together into one community.  It may also demonstrate what progress is occurring, thus driving further progress.  Having only this thread about the inner workings and theory behind your site doesn't really perform any of those tasks.
• Ask Them
  Why not start a thread asking the community what they want to work on?  Perhaps the right type of board will generate more response.  The folks here might prefer a particular palette or theme for example.  I realize that is what this thread is kinda for, but it can be intimidating for someone to make a suggestions about what type of board they want when there is so much backend and UI discussion going on.

Welcome to the World Wide Web
Unfortunately, the truth is that making a cool site that attracts tons of users on it's own is very rare and usually takes a very long time.  Strong communities on the net don't usually just happen on their own.  Now that you are a webmaster, you need to be a salesman for your site.  You have to network (good start with the partner sites!), create buzz, and generally spread the word.  Since you have chosen such an unusual and unique name for your site, you have some extra work to do to get the name out there.  Is your site using search engine optimizations (SEO), and is it linked to from any blogs, news outlets, or youtube?  Who knows about it, and who do you want to know about it?  You may consider searching out some of the larger artist enclaves round the 'net and approaching them to become partner sites.  The bottom line is a cold hard fact: Someone has to take time away from development to build the community.  And unless you can find someone else to do it, that someone is you.

[evilchelu]

Thanks gizmo for the suggestions. We really appreciate that you and Mathias care about tzigla to post so many suggestions

We're painfully aware that tzigla doesn't have a cool design. Unfortunatelly, as I replied to Mathias, that's kinda the best we can do. It has however seriously improved since the beginning, I guess .

The problem with communities is that they don't really want to make the work to integrate with tzigla, and even if they would, they don't have the people to code the really tiny bits that glue it (I did it myself for pixelation, btw, even tho I don't do php).

I'm assuming they're all afraid tzigla is going to steal their users and make millions off them or something. So, deeper integration with a huge number of forums isn't something people seem to be craving. The idea for tzigla was from the beginning that it has to revolve around existing communities and make their life easier, but it seems to go this way:

1. we don't know where these communities are exactly
2. if we get to them, maybe someone will post a tiny post about tzigla
3. they will love the idea
4. nobody will actually care about the integration or running a board

We really really want to have other people be admins, but the communities don't seem to want or trust tzigla. When I'm really sad about this I'm thinking it's because it's completely free and so I assume they all think "there MUST BE something wrong with this, why would anyone do it for free" or "nice, but then all our users and ad revenue will go away". I don't even want to begin to think how sad it would be that if this were actually true (for them, because they have such a low expectation of the world).

About your specific suggestions

re: theme matching: Even if it would be seamless, someone has to do the work. Then we have to keep up with supporting themes, making sure they still work when we change stuff, etc. However I think this would just feel a bit like uncanny valley since we'll never actually be integrated without quite a bit of work from the partner site as well.

re: postportem: You mean go around on art boards and post the quack board and ask for opinions? For some reason I'd feel a bit sleazy. I'd rather go and just tell them about tzigla, not try to sneak in. But maybe I understood wrong what you suggest

re: board specific threads: Where would I post all the other 5 boards we have now? There's no other community part of tzigla right now. And pixelation wouldn't have been either if ptoing wouldn't have been so believing in us. He really wanted this to happen. Most people you have to chase around and still they don't care. Again, I'm assuming that since it's free, most people instinctively associate free with zero value and don't invest much real thought in it. As I replied to 32, I could theoretically do a tziglabot for pixelation that could impersonate users and post your tzigla activity in a special thread. But, why? There is almost no activity on that board so what would that help.

Then, as I was saying, other forums I've contacted like the tzigla idea, but they're not even going through the work to implement signins, which is about 15 lines of code. I'm positive they won't go through the process of implementing securely posting as the user from tzigla, which is more complicated work.

re: ask them: Ask who? On pixelation? Of course people would want different shaped boards, hex boards, iso boards, tetris boards, rotated boards and all sorts of other cool ideas. But it's very easy to want, then it's even easier to not to put in the work. Based on historical evidence, I strongly believe it's not the lack of an exact board type that's keeping people from participating (for example: lots of people asked and lots were convinced that activity and commenting would help; yet it's clear they didn't)

re: welcome to the www I'm totally aware of that. I think I've proved that I didn't expect this to be an overnight hit and I'm putting in the work to back it up.

Starting up, we didn't even consider wanting to have a tzigla community. We wanted to have tzigla help existing communities. But maybe that's a bad plan. Maybe tzigla should be parallel and completely separated and not even try to integrate, since existing communities seem afraid to get too close to tzigla.

Let me tell you what we tried already.

We've tried to create buzz and spread the word. It worked! But within our circle of influence, which is developers and programmers.

We've posted a question to hacker news and it made the front page for about 4 hours. In that day we had about 200 unique visitors from there, and about 3000 unique visitors because people posted on twitter. The result was about 15-20 people reserving on the sandbox and then abandoning tiles, and 4 people actually have made a tile on the newbies board.

I've also posted to a deviantart forum section, I'm not really sure it was the correct one. Zero visitors came from there, so I'm assuming that nobody reads that section, but pimping your project in another category I think is not allowed so, meh. We'll be making a deviantart tzigla account to post the collabs there, but we kinda need to finish some collabs first, heh.

We've contacted the pixeljoint people over a month ago. Admins said they love it and want to do something with it. I've sent them really really clear details about how to implement auth so that their users have their logo on tzigla next to their name, etc, same as pixelation. Everything went silent.

We've found the iCE facebook page (from tiles.ice.org fame) and dropped a link there. After a few weeks, somebody noticed it and said, "nice!", we should redo tiles.ice.org again. Then they went silent. Except a guy who decided to post a link to his own site even tho he doesn't care to update it anymore.

I've personally contacted the original author of the original tiles.ice.org. He was so excited about tzigla, then there was silence.

I've found the #ice irc channel, some people loved the idea. But then silence.

Plans for the future

1. Make a tzigla account on deviantart and post about the collabs - probably with screenshots at 25, 50, 75, and 100%. Unfortunatelly, the tzigla name is taken and unused and I can't reach the owner so he can transfer us the username, sigh.
2. Make a tzigla youtube account - post videos of board, but we need boards
3. Start emailing again all those people that i've already contacted.
4. Actually find people who would write about tzigla. Lots of people seem to love it, they post on twitter, nobody posts on facebook, nobody seems to have a blog. Also, as I said in the hacker news thread, the artist type people don't share, and I don't know where all these art forums that would be insterested are. Our active users don't seem to like tzigla enough to spread the word either. Also, once something gets to some sort of community where designer type people hang around, nobody cares anyway, most likely because of all the "not really part of our site" issues from above.

What people who love tzigla can do

Help us find moderators, preferably moderators that come with a community attached

Also, tomorrow morning we'll deploy the new version on the live server and we'll start again to find people to tell about tzigla and try to get more users.

So, if by any chance you want to spread the word, please wait till tomorrow!

Conclusion

Sorry for the rant, but I wanted to make it clear that it's hard for us to spread the word to artist communities because we don't have any artist friends. And it always comes across as a genuine recommendation if someone that's already part of the community makes the offer instead of the site's authors. So, if people that love the site don't spread the word, we're kinda swimming against a strong current.

Hugs y'all!

[evilchelu]

Yay! New version deployed on live!

http://tzigla.com

Changes since last deploy on live:

* thumbnails are generated when the admin approves a tile
* much nicer homepage (dedication to gizmo)
* signing in/out redirects back to the exact location you were viewing
* smaller sharing buttons
* automatically removing color profiles from tiles
* done tiles are now the exact size (since we're now removing the extra uploaded margins)
* a lot of invisible code changes that were needed so we can generate the thumbs because of stupid standards

* major thing for admins when sending back tiles!
  * admin can send a PM on tzigla
  * the artist can now see what the admin saw when it was sent back
  * this is very cool and important because the admin no longer has to send a message on facebook, twitter or pixelation, and the admin also doesn't have to manually make a screenshot anymore, wee
* option to allow max N tiles per artist per board
* we also nuke the transparency away from uploaded tiles

* feedback form

[evilchelu]

Hola again!

Shiny new version deployed! Thank dira for the code, cos I didn't do anything for this release.

http://tzigla.com

Changes:

* PLAYBACK!!
  * only for complete boards and for boards where the borders are being shown (only the checker collab c64, that is)
  * http://tzigla.com/boards/1
  * http://tzigla.com/boards/3
* better small-thumbnail generation for opera
* admins can now hover a tile they have to approve to see what margins this tile will leave for others

Huggies!

[Mathias]

We appreciate the long explanation there, chelu. And the upgrades are nice!

I want to make some more tiles in the coming week. Been having trouble buckling down; stuff going on over here. Poor 1-3 is probably feelin' pretty dejected. I better paint her up real nice to make up for it.

@ both of you, Dira & chelu, keep up the awesome work!!!

[evilchelu]

Hello peeps,

We want to announce a potentially confusing change we will be adding to tzigla in the next days. A license!

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

This is the same thing that wikipedia uses, and also lots of people on flickr choose to use.

The main goal of the license is to make sure proper attribution is given to the artists, and to tzigla, when people post a picture of the whole board or tile. It also allows anyone to take the tiles and make a better visualization or form of art with them and makes sure the tiles are not "locked" into tzigla.

Here are some reasons why we're adding this license and what we want people to do with it:

* if someone posts a picture to their blog, we want them to put a link back to the board or tile
* with or without a license, people will make a screenshot of the board, and try to sell posters (this happened to the tiles.ice.org boards)
  * people will do this anyway, but if we have a clear and simple license, they will at least put a link back to the board on tzigla
* we love to work on tzigla, and we want people not to take advantage of our work
* we want to encourage others to create even nicer things from the boards in tzigla. some examples:
  * nicer visualizations of a board being revealed (we have a play button, but a person with video editing skills could make a much better one)
  * calculations and computations based on the tiles. concrete examples: number of colors used, percent of red in a board, average number of attempts for a tile, etc

We hope you agree with us and we'd love to hear any opinions or advice regarding this.

Thanks!

[dira]

For those wondering about the state of the Pixelation collab, it's coming together very very nice. Can't wait to see it fully revealed!  

There are only a few tiles left, so you should grab one and show your pixel power while there is still time:

[Argyle]

Finally got some closure on my curiosity about the name you chose for Tzigla.  In romanian it means "Roof Tile" - did Google inform me properly?


Revelation: Oh hey, these two separate boards are collaborating together to form a single image that looks like the work of iLKke

[evilchelu]

Hey pixel people!

We've just deployed a quite nice version of tzigla, if I do say so myself. Check it out here:

http://tzigla.com

Sweet changes included:

* quick board navigation (we're trying to score major points with gizmo since we're implementing all his suggestions)
* you can now set a title for your done tiles (titles become visible when the tile becomes visible)
  * example (first tile ever on tzigla, first one with a title): http://tzigla.com/boards/1#!/tiles/1-3
* artist profile which shows all tiles across all boards: http://tzigla.com/profile
* account editing where you should set an email for notifications NOW: http://tzigla.com/account
* random board on homepage
* cc-by-sa license
* lots of bugfixes and nice ui stuffs

Enjoy!

[evilchelu]

Finally got some closure on my curiosity about the name you chose for Tzigla.  In romanian it means "Roof Tile" - did Google inform me properly?

You are most correct. The generic word for tile is dala, but it sucks

[evilchelu]

In other related news: The Checker Collab C64 board only has 11 tiles available!!

http://tzigla.com/boards/3

It's gonna be epic when it's done and I'm sure you're gonna be rather bummed if you don't get at least a tile in

[Mathias]

Keeps getting better and better. Fantastic work you guys.

Yeah I can't wait to see the slick C64 board done.

[Grinner]

I'd love to participate in this, but only recently have I really gotten into pixel art, and I'm not that good. I know it's no competition or anything, but I just don't want to epicly fail on my first go, but I'll definitely try to get a tile in!

Also, I really like the site, great layout and concept and everything, I'd gladly reccomend it to some of my artsy friends. Also, a good place to spread the word for the site would be Conceptart.org, but I'm sure you already know about that

[evilchelu]

@grinner: no dude, we had no idea about conceptart.org and we generally have no idea about lots of places where we could pimp tzigla.

If anyone is active on another forum, some pimping would be greatly appreciated

[Mathias]

Sujjerschun: toss in a link to the Tzigla homepage in the top-left dropdown collab selector. Current link to Tzigla homepage too obscure and it's not always there.

[Argyle]

Sujjerschun

I had to google that just to have google ask me if I meant "suggestion" before I made the connection. Robots are the only ones that can read your strange hybrid german gobbledygook.

(also I second that notion, I can not find the homepage link unless I use my bookmark)

[dira]

It will come in the next deploy.

[evilchelu]

Hallo!

As with most recent deploys, most of the code in this one was actually made by dira.

We've just deployed a new version to the staging server. As always, any help finding bugs is appreciated. Tomorrow we'll deploy on live.

http://staging.tzigla.com

Changes in this version:

* PIXEL EDITOR!!!!11oneoneeleven
  * uses the board's palette
  * 4x, 2x, 1x views - all drawable
  * shortcut keys: cycle colors, cycle brushes, right or shift click to pick color
  * undo/redo - 100 history states
  * saves as draft in your browser after each stroke (so if your browser crashes or you're on ios, you don't lose any work)
  * saves as draft on the server when you close the editor
  * please let us know how you feel about the editor and if something really important is missing

* iphone/ipad compatibility (nothing special, but at least it can be used now)
  * pixel editor is touch compatible!
* email notifications when your tile is moderated (if you have added an email to your account)
* db optimizations

Huggies!

[Argyle]

Holy cow, epic addition guys!  Seems like it would make the collaboration more accessible if there was a pixel board not geared at higher-end pixelers, like this community, who wouldn't know how to or would not be comfortable with doing it in their own editors.  For people doing it on computers not of their own or, like you mentioned, people on iPhones and whatnot, it sounds pretty cool!  Will have to see if my DSi using Opera will be able to handle it.  Probably not since it has like useless amounts of available memory to save undo and image data history, not to mention all the other gooby issues - but would be interesting to at least try! Will let you know.

One quick note - the cycle colors and cycle brushes shortcuts are mis-labeled or mis-bound.

It says:

cycle colors: q, w
cycle brushes: a, s

But what is actually happening when I use it is:

cycle brushes: q, w
cycle colors: a, s

[evilchelu]

@argyle: Yay! You poked at the app. Thanks!

Thanks for the bug report... fixed.

re: boards Yes, we'll have a newbie pixel board and most likely a newbie sandox board. And for the pixel sandbox we might even make registration optional to get more people interested.

re: opera mobile Definitely won't work. It only works on webkit/safari based browsers because the mobile version is practically the exact one from the desktop, so it needs a very good browser. And, we don't actually own any devices, and we've just tested with the ios simulator

re: editor Would relly love to know how you feel about the brushes, if there are any other you might need, etc. At the current feature set, I think it's actually usable even for pro people like you so do tell if something really important seems to be missing. If not, tell us why you won't use it.

/we hugs Argyle

[Argyle]

One thing I notice being a bit of a turn-off for me is not seeing a real-time display of what the pixels I'm about to place will look like snapped to the pixel grid before I even click the mouse.  Sort of like my pointer will still hover smoothly, but the brush icon/display would snap only to absolute integers.  No idea how to word it, haha.  Graphics Gale, ProMotion, and Grafx2 behave in the way I am trying to convey if you have access to any of those for a better idea. This does not render the applet useless to me, but it is something I have grown to be accustomed to from my favored editors.

Another thing that would be very handy would be a line tool of some sort at the very least.  It would be very necessary to have a real-time representation of what the drawn line will look like before you let off the mouse button, though. Oval and Rectangle tools, whether outline or filled, would also be good basic features nearly all editors come with that are useful for blocking in initial concepts.

Maybe a flood fill/paint bucket tool?

It is entirely usable to get the necessities down of the raw pixel goodness - pixel art's nice in that it's easy to do with simple tools.  But we are creatures of comfort, after all, and some editors have all the padding of their tools and other features that make them VERY comfortable to the point that you don't notice until you try to lie in a different bed

{late edit} Checked it out on my old Mac running OSX 10.4.11 using both Firefox 3.6.13 and Safari 3.0.4 (523.12) - Results were that I could not even see the brush patterns until I was clicking to draw when I selected one within Firefox. On my systems running Windows, though, I WAS able to see the brush cursor in the shape selected.

Within Safari I could not, for whatever reason, get any of the boards to load the actual tile section of the different boards - just the creative commons message, the comment box (only the field you type in to leave one) and the header with the log-in info. This Safari problem I was getting with the live server version of the site as well.  Might be something on my end?

[evilchelu]

Hey, quick update. Still on staging.

http://staging.tzigla.com/boards/3

PIXEL EDITOR IS KICKING ASS WITH BRUSH PREVIEW, DITHER MODES AND FILL

ZOMG!!!

Also, you might not care, but the whole editor has been refactored inside

[evilchelu]

@argyle for the record, we only support pretty recent browsers

Partly because we use some high tech stuff and partly because we don't have time to fix everything.

Therefore:

* Safari 5
* Chrome - no clue what version, but a relatively recent one (I have 9, for example)
* Opera 10.6 and Opera 11
* Firefox 3.6 (4 works but the betas have random broken stuff, so ymmv)

[Argyle]

Haha, k.  I haven't used the mac I was checking that on for a long time, my wife just uses it to check facebook when we're in the living room using firefox, so I figured it was a pretty old build of Safari.  Will have to take a look at the new editor though, good deal!

[evilchelu]

Another version deployed on staging.

http://staging.tzigla.com/boards/3

Changes:

* clear canvas button
* permanent remembering of sign in
* custom cursor (except opera/ff3 which suck).
* crazy optimization (especially on ipad)

[Argyle]

Just noticed this, and it might have been that I didn't see it before because there were only 4 items in the shortcuts list and I know there are more now (checked it the first time from a larger resolution display) - check the bottom right of the screenshot, anything below the first few items on the list of shortcuts gets cut off.  My laptop's display resolution is 1366x768 so that's as big as I am able to make my window without hiding my tab bar and bookmarks bar.  You've disabled scrolling capabilities purposefully I take it? Perhaps if you made the shortcuts in a scrollable list?  Or a rollover link similar to how the quick-board-selector list works in the top left of the header? Wouldn't want people not noticing the commands or assuming the capabilities weren't available.

[evilchelu]

OHAI!

Deployed yet another version on staging.

http://staging.tzigla.com/boards/3

Changes:

* editor fits better on short screens
* editor fits better on tall screens
* zoom buttons
* some ipad specific tweaks

Hopefully, tomorrow morning we'll finally deploy this bad boy on the live server!

[evilchelu]

Hey hey hey! 

Deployed kick ass editor and stuff on live!

http://tzigla.com

Recapping all changes for people who missed them:

* PIXEL EDITOR!!!!11oneoneeleven
  * uses the board's palette
  * HUGE zooms
  * ordered dithering modes: 25%, 50%, 75%
  * undo/redo - 100 history states
  * shortcut keys: cycle colors, cycle brushes, cycle dithers, undo/redo, right click to pick color, shift click to fill
  * saves as draft in your browser after each stroke
  * saves as draft on the server when you close the editor
  * works on ipad in landscape mode. doesn't work on iphone because it's too slow

* permanent sign in
* email notifications when your tile is moderated (if you have added an email to your account)
* google auth
* db optimizations

Huggies

[evilchelu]

Request for help #1

We want to make a newbie pixel board. Any ideas for a theme, a palette?

About the theme we were thinking that a city or building is easy and fun enough for newbies and they won't run out of ideas.

About palette, we were thinking about arne's palette, but maybe more colors would be better for newbies?

We were thinking to make the tile size 50x50 so they're not so intimidating like the 100x100 ones, and yet not so small so things can be made inside.

Any ideas and suggestions are welcome

[evilchelu]

Hey ho!

We've just made the pixel editor available as a separate thing so you can just play with it.

http://tzigla.com/editor

For now it only has arne's palette for you to play with.

Have fun and please let us know if you do something cool with it

Toodles!

Oh, and there's also a newbie pixel art board now, moderated by the great Argyle

Check it out here: http://tzigla.com/boards/8

[Argyle]

The greatness is leaking all over the place, oh god!

[evilchelu]

'lo

We've just deployed LAYERS with 10 minutes before we go on vacation for 3 months

Fortunately, only on staging for now. We'd really really really love some feedback on the layers so we have a chance of putting it on live in the next days before we sell our laptops

http://staging.tzigla.com

Check it out: undo/redo across layers should work, transparent color should work, drawing, filling, saving, loading, refreshing without closing the editor, submitting a tile, etc. All should work.

Pretty pretty please let us know of any bugs. We want to deploy this on live but don't want to break the site for three months

Huggies, have fun, and we hope we didn't put a silly bug in just before leaving.

weeeee

[Mathias]

Can't believe the pixel editor. Really cool work, ya'll.

One huge problem though, it's so laggy I simply can't stand to use it. Even dragging the mouse around the canvas occurs at like 4 frames per second. . .

[ptoing]

Not laggy at all here 
What kinda connection are you on?

[Mathias]

Not laggy at all here 
What kinda connection are you on?

A pretty good cable connection. No conn issues elsewhere. Good system in general - Windows 7, AMD athlon dual 4800+ 2.5ghz, 2.5GB ram, blah blah blah . . .

. . .

hmm ok, tested in FF, IE and Chrome.  FF is the laggy one. IE it doesn't even appear. Chrome works great, though.

[adcrusher524]

I'm confused I took a tile and it says I only have an hour to upload. I thought we had three days.

[ptoing]

you took one on the staging board.

[evilchelu]

Can't believe the pixel editor. Really cool work, ya'll.

One huge problem though, it's so laggy I simply can't stand to use it. Even dragging the mouse around the canvas occurs at like 4 frames per second. . .

That sucks and shouldnīt happen!

We have some ideas where to improve the editor speed overall since weīve just added those layers really really fast, but it would help if you gave us your exact browser version and exactly what you are doing when it happens. Also, what zoom level does it say on top and, are you zoomed in or not?

And another thing. Is it slow for you also on the live site or just staging?

Thanks

[evilchelu]

@Mathias: Deployed some speed fixes to staging. Please test and let us know if it's still slow.

[evilchelu]

Hey peeps!

We've deployed the layers to live!

http://tzigla.com

Enjoy, we're off to the jungle in a few days... back in 3 months!

Huggies and them boards better be finished till we get back

[Mathias]

Geeze, you guys know how to vacation!

I'll do a set of cross-browser tests and post my feedback here for ya.

[Argyle]

We are 6 tiles away from completion and everybody several insubordinates keeps claiming tiles and neglecting to make anything then abandoning it.  Anyone that's been waiting to make a tile - now's the time to do it if you want in on the collab and we'll get to see its unveiling.

[setz]

We are 6 tiles away from completion and everybody keeps claiming tiles and letting neglecting to make anything then abandoning it.  Anyone that's been waiting to make a tile - now's the time to do it if you want in on the collab and we'll get to see its unveiling.

Don't say everyone, I've never abandoned a single one 

[big brother]

We are 6 tiles away from completion and everybody keeps claiming tiles and letting neglecting to make anything then abandoning it.  Anyone that's been waiting to make a tile - now's the time to do it if you want in on the collab and we'll get to see its unveiling.

I never abandoned one either! And I was only responsible for one of the curses.

[Argyle]

You guys are right, and you guys are also awesome, so I'm sorry - I reworded that bit. 

And it's okay, bigbrother, because one of my tiles is part of the sandwich that made that same curse - I figured your tile would have done nothing but provide an easy way around making mine actually!

[StaticSails]

I kept trying at same damn tile. I couldn't make it work. Don't plan on trying again either, only because I'm too busy with "life".

That's all I had.
(Dear Mods or whomever, if you think I shouldn't post that then just nix it or ask me to remove it.)

[setz]

Well, I've officially done all that I could do.

4 left, up to you guys now 

[Geti]

Done. I'm hoping the text is okay, if not I'll change it but as I said on the site, I figured it'd be nice to have a label, and didn't want to resort to texturing randomly to fill the space; the piece already has a focus.

[Geti]

ptoing where'd you go? :< only 1 approval away from completion!!

[Geti]

Huzzah! Complete! I'm pleased with how this turned out, watching the reveal on tzigla was well worth it.
Link to completed image.

[StaticSails]

Huzzah! Complete! I'm pleased with how this turned out, watching the reveal on tzigla was well worth it.
Link to completed image.

Beautiful.
I feel pretty good about my pig, the squid is clearly subpar though. Glad to see someone took care of that dinosaur butt tile.

A lot of great gems in there!

[setz]

Turned out pretty nice guys

Glad to finally see it finished!

[Grinner]

Noticed something with the Tzigla homepage, not exactly a problem - I'm just nitpicking
There appears to be some kind of overlay on the featured board displayed at the homepage, as darker tiles have oddly coloured grains. Not a big issue by any means, but It detracts slightly from the pixel-arty-ness.

[evilchelu]

Grinner: Yeah. Thatīs because the image is scaled down and is a jpeg. Itīs not supposed to be color accurate and it canīt really be.

[evilchelu]

Hey peeps! So glad the C64 got awesomely finished!

Just popped in from vacation to let you guys know about a new feature we've just released

REMIXES! http://tzigla.com/remixes

You can now download a zip file with the tiles and some data about them and you can stitch them together in other ways, make animations, stuff, whatever.

We'd love to see what you come up with

Hugs y'all!

[robalan]

I'm not sure how active Tzigla is these days, but Pixelation authentication appears to be broken. The authentication link just takes me to the Pixelation front page.

[evilchelu]

A few boards have been finished and some new ones appeared. We don't get much traffic but everything still works and new users are signing up and tiles are being made.

We didn't have much time to work on tzigla the past year and the pixelation forum got moved/updated a while ago the tzigla integration broke in the process. Sorry. There weren't any complaints it was not working anymore so I thought people here just don't use it. However, if you guys want to make another board, I'll look into fixing it.

In the meantime, if you have tzigla account that you made from pixelation, and you want to be able to access it (to make more tiles under the same account, comment, etc), here's what you need to do to:

1. Make a new tzigla account using facebook/twitter/google. If you hate all of those, the simplest way is to make a twitter account and only use it for tzigla.
2. Go to your pixelation profile and add the user id of the new account somewhere. That's the only way I can confirm you own both accounts I will be merging.
3. While logged in the new tzigla account, use the feedback button on tzigla to request a merging into the previous account. Make sure to include a link to your pixelation profile.

After I merge them I'll send you an email to let you know. You'll then be able to sign in with your new account and have your original user id, username and tiles attached to it.

Happy new year everyone!

[robalan]

Shiny. I was new to Tzigla so I just made an account using my Google login. The merging should be useful for other Tzigla users, though!

[Quise]

I;m not sure if im do it right. I make account on Tzigla by my google account, and add profile id from Tzigla on my signature, and this is all what i needed to do?

[evilchelu]

I;m not sure if im do it right. I make account on Tzigla by my google account, and add profile id from Tzigla on my signature, and this is all what i needed to do?

Sorry, I didn't write the instructions clearly enough.

You only need to do that if you already had a tzigla account made with pixelation.

If you didn't already have a tzigla account made with pixelation, you don't have to do anything extra, just sign up as normal with facebook/twitter/google and get pixeling.

[Quise]

Ok but can i now connect this account made from google with pixelation?

[evilchelu]

Ok but can i now connect this account made from google with pixelation?

Nope, sorry. Because the integration is broken that can't be done anymore.

However, in your profile there is a field where you can enter a link to your pixelation profile if you want.