AuthorTopic: Tzigla Rocks!!!  (Read 130788 times)

Offline Commander Gizmo

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Re: Tzigla Rocks!!!

Reply #90 on: January 19, 2011, 11:20:56 pm
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.

Offline evilchelu

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Re: Tzigla Rocks!!!

Reply #91 on: January 20, 2011, 12:00:45 am
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.
http://tzigla.com/ - collabs & exquisite corpses, y'all

Offline Commander Gizmo

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Re: Tzigla Rocks!!!

Reply #92 on: January 20, 2011, 07:08:17 am
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.

Offline Geti

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Re: Tzigla Rocks!!!

Reply #93 on: January 20, 2011, 08:03:38 am
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 :)

Offline Gamer36

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Re: Tzigla Rocks!!!

Reply #94 on: January 20, 2011, 09:40:07 am
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?
« Last Edit: January 20, 2011, 10:13:13 am by Gamer36 »
Pixel Art, what (mostly) all of us are here for.

Offline evilchelu

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Re: Tzigla Rocks!!!

Reply #95 on: January 21, 2011, 01:28:52 am
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.
http://tzigla.com/ - collabs & exquisite corpses, y'all

Offline evilchelu

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Re: Tzigla Rocks!!!

Reply #96 on: January 21, 2011, 01:30:22 am
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.
http://tzigla.com/ - collabs & exquisite corpses, y'all

Offline evilchelu

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Re: Tzigla Rocks!!!

Reply #97 on: January 21, 2011, 02:04:19 am
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.
http://tzigla.com/ - collabs & exquisite corpses, y'all

Offline Mathias

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Re: Tzigla Rocks!!!

Reply #98 on: January 21, 2011, 03:04:07 am
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.
« Last Edit: January 21, 2011, 03:05:48 am by Mathias »

Offline Commander Gizmo

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Re: Tzigla Rocks!!!

Reply #99 on: January 21, 2011, 05:24:29 am
@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?