Artwork Development through the Gallery

Posted by Db0 on August 4th, 2008 filed in Artwork, Ideas and tagged as Collaboration, Gallery.

Hail Wesnothian! If this is your first visit you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Enjoy!

Since the recent server meltdown there has been no place for people to continue working on artwork and this is likely to continue while the servers are being restored to working order. The official news seem to imply that it may take a while more for things to get back to normal.

To this end, I thought I’d propose an alternative solution. The Gallery.

Currently the Journals and the Gallery are setup in such a way so as to allow people to easily register and have their own personal space to post their artwork. Every new user registering gets automatically their own album in which they can upload as many images as they like, including videos or other media files.

The gallery also supports many other functions like commenting, ratings, RSS, tagging etc, which can greatly enhance the content. A Quick example is the Art of Wesnoth, which is a custom tag I’ve created to showcase some of the best content that already exists.

How can this help in development? Well, first of all, you can use it, while the fora are down

However I think that this is more powerful than the fora. In the gallery, artwork designers have their own public sandbox where each piece of art acts like a different thread without clutteting (as would happen in the forum). This way the discussion can move from “thread” to “thread” fluidly and more organised. You can see a short example I did here. (Please disregard “content” of the example).

Furthermore, because by uploading to the gallery you have automatic classification, there is no more reason for bots or hacks in order to somehow grab the artwork before it is lost (as is what was required with the graphic library). Uploaders can tag their art as soon as they put it up which will then make it searchable. Edits from other devs will not be confused with actual artwork. People can subscribe to their favorite artist through RSS to get immediate updates and then collaborate etc.

As a last small bonus, anyone can use the artwork in the gallery for a  blogpot.

Generally, I feel that there’s a lot of potential in using the gallery software for this. Here is an opportunity to see if it is as useful for you, as I think, while allowing you to continue with your contributions. I can only hope that people like it enough to consider taking it on officially as part of the wesnoth project.

Give it a go and see what you think. You’ve got nothing to lose.