Hi Mike,
Thanks for getting back to me on these things, sorry for the delay, been super
busy myself too.
3. Thanks for your feedback on which maps to include and not include. Sadly no
one else came forward so I've pushed ahead and finalised the list (removing
duplicates, European maps & inappropriate ones like GTA). I had to come up with
another new size classification system due to all the crazy sizes in play! But
here's my forum post with all the details:
https://sourceforge.net/p/freecol/discussion/141200/thread/9eb4fbdf/?page=2&limit=25#b431
I've submitted the pull request and its ready for when you're next putting some
time into the project here: https://github.com/FreeCol/freecol/pull/65
I've made a number posts about the maps across forums and social media to
generate some interest and new visitors too!
4. "if I see messages here from at least two regulars saying that <url> is
ready to go as a replacement for {SF front page, screenshot, whatever} I will
make time to work out what has to be done. Time is the issue, I never used to
do anything with SF admin, and it always takes me a while to work out what does
what."
Oh no, I didn't mean anything like that!! I've seen fancy custom SourceForge
front pages and they're cool but who has time to make one of those? No one lol!
What I'm talking about is simply pushing some buttons in the admin screen and
pasting some text into some boxes that's fast and dead easy, no programming
required (otherwise I wouldn't be able to do it haha), real basic stuff.
Unfortunately I doubt anyone else will come forward and say "yeah the front
page needs updating" as things are pretty quiet these days and I don't think
anyone else cares as the front page changes aren't for existing members,
they're for attracting new members! Oh well either way I've written up some
guides in the forum on how to do what I'm talking about so if you ever do have
a few spare mins for it then they'll be there ready and waiting to help make it
as quick and painless as possible lol.
Guide 1: Updating the Features
section:https://sourceforge.net/p/freecol/discussion/719661/thread/42b0844f/?page=1&limit=25#4619
Guide 2: Updating the screenshots section: (I've selected 6 nice shots and
attached them to the post)
https://sourceforge.net/p/freecol/discussion/719661/thread/42b0844f/?page=1&limit=25#05c9
5. I'll look at making some of those freecol.org website updates in the coming
months adding screenshot updates there and some videos.
6. "No idea who originally created it. If it needs an "official" owner, you
are it Blake."Hahahaha no worries, I thought you might say that. Yup I'll take
care of the modDB page. :) Wish I had admin access to it though. It looks like
a number of people had control over it however I can't see who they are as
their 'company' dev group page was removed. Which possibly means even they have
lost control of it if they logged in. I dunno... I might try messaging some
site admins to see if I can take control over it, but god knows how much red
tape there is to prevent hijacking.
7. Social media. All good mate, most game devs I speak to don't go near fb so
I'm not surprised haha. I was just keeping you up to date on my efforts to grow
these groups into Col communities that we can promote your project to. Even
since my last email about them the groups have grown quite a bit more so things
are going really well! :)https://www.facebook.com/groups/ColonizationGame/ was
50 when I last msg'd you, it's now 75 meaning its increased by a full half
lol!https://www.reddit.com/r/ColonizationGame/ was 24 members in last msg, now
its 50 meaning its more than doubled!https://discord.gg/CHcH75s has gone from
11 to 18 but that's still in very early days haha..
Even without me promoting several others have posted about their Freecol games
in them which is a great sign for the future. Anyway I'll keep at it with them.
Whenever something cool happens I post it in the groups and then share that
group post with various retro gaming groups which A advertises FreeCol and B
advertises the groups to capture people for future project announcements.
Regards
Blake
On Tuesday, 28 April 2020, 08:08:58 pm ACST, Michael T. Pope
<[email protected]> wrote:
OK, bit more time to go through the mail.
> 2. As for Rafael's changes and storing Author and description in the map
> file...
The issue here is that we can not store the description in the map
iteself because it needs to be translated. The author is fine.
Currently we effectively do neither. Rafaels patch does both. If we
can get the author into the map, a bunch of the stuff you have been
wrangling in the strings file can go from:
map.Africa=Large Africa by J.Bloggs
to
map.Africa=Large Africa by %author%
which does not help your work much now, but is more maintainable.
There would have to be code support of course to pull in the %author%,
but that is straightforward.
I have a note on the todo list to think more about the whole
translation setup, but that is post-release. We already have extra
standalone FreeColMessages.properties files in the mods, which are
currently not getting translated AFAICT. If we can fix that, we can
probably handle having similar files in the .fsm map bundles. That
would probably be a better design than having the above map.<foo>
entries in the master strings file. The major concern with any change
to how we do translations is to not mess with the volunteer
translators. Keeping things easy for them is mandatory.
> 4. Regarding Sourceforge improvements...
Yeah, I suspect front page hackery may be locked to the main project
admins, which means I probably have to do it. The offer is: if I see
messages here from at least two regulars saying that <url> is ready to
go as a replacement for {SF front page, screenshot, whatever} I will
make time to work out what has to be done. Time is the issue, I never
used to do anything with SF admin, and it always takes me a while to
work out what does what.
> 6. As discussed in past emails I overhauled your old FreeCol ModDB page
...another thing I had never sighted. No idea who originally created
it. If it needs an "official" owner, you are it Blake.
> 7. [Social]
Please do not interpret my absence from the facebook bit as disapproval.
I just do not use it, deliberately. Getting time to work on FreeCol
is hard enough lately, I do not need more time sinks. Perhaps I will
look at the discord channel... eventually. Nevertheless, thanks for
pushing this stuff forward.
Cheers,
Mike Pope _______________________________________________
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