L3DT users' community
Large 3D terrain generator

Community building ideas

It doesn't hurt to ask...

Community building ideas

Postby BigYak » Fri Oct 20, 2006 8:20 pm

Aaron,
I have a few ideas for L3DT that might be relatively easy to implement and add some extra "bling" to the interface.

Problem: I'm not sure what plugins are avaiable. I'm not sure what terrain types are available.

Problem 2: When I first show someone L3DT, they don't know what it is. IT takes a good 5 minutes to get them to the "ah hah!" moment where they understand it, and possible uses. I've found that showing images produced with it is one great way to promote understanding (usually from the IOTM gallery).

Suggestions solution: Add an RSS feed that L3DT shows when first loading the app. Pull down 10 or so posts from the announcement part of the forums, maybe with an associated icon for each. Maybe have an RSS thread for available plugins or terrain files, or whatnot (or maybe have it just parse out from the main feed though sub categories).

Also have an RSS feed for winning IOTM that get shown in the bottom of the opening screen.

To save bandwidth from your server, you might even have them pull from Flickr... should be easy to set up. Then, have files saved in a L3DT/startup_content/ directory and show those. Pulling from the feed could be turend off, and would degrade gracefully when no connection is available.

An extra easy option would be when saving an image to export it to that /startup_content/ directory, and then have a screen saver or something pull from that directory when L3DT is idle...

Nothing critical, but would help us all build Situational Awareness of what's out there, especially for those who don't check the forums...
BigYak
New member
 
Posts: 9
Joined: Mon Oct 09, 2006 3:27 pm

Postby Aaron » Sat Oct 21, 2006 11:32 am

Hi BigYak,

Thanks for your suggestions. I see where you're coming from on this. What I think I'll do is make a new landing page that fetches the latest posts from the announcements section of the forum, shows some selected screenshots, and links to some topics in the user guide. This would be launched in a browser from the last page of the installer.

I don't think I'll bother with a dedicated RSS feed for this, as bandwidth isn't a huge concern of mine right now. In a week or two I'll be moving the site onto a new hosting account that has a download limit of 1,000Gb/month (currently 250Gb/month, of which I use not much anyhow). Also, the page will be shown just after the user downloads the L3DT installer, which is about 5Mb right there, so I don't think there's a need to be precious about saving HTML.

Regarding plugins and not knowing which are available - I'll add a forum for plugins soon (also mirrored to the landing page), plus wiki page listing the available plugins. Each plugin could have their own sub-pages in the wiki for info, help, etc.

Does this sound OK?

Cheers,
Aaron.
User avatar
Aaron
Site Admin
 
Posts: 3696
Joined: Sun Nov 20, 2005 2:41 pm
Location: Melbourne, Australia

Postby BigYak » Sat Oct 21, 2006 7:05 pm

Sounds great!
BigYak
New member
 
Posts: 9
Joined: Mon Oct 09, 2006 3:27 pm

Postby Aaron » Sun Oct 22, 2006 1:52 pm

Hi BigYak,

Part one: The plugin site. This is in the user-editable wiki, so anyone can add their own plugin pages, like this one. The direct link to the page is the 'Downloads->Plugins and API' option in the site side-menu.

Now for the plugin forum and the new landing page...

Cheers,
Aaron.
User avatar
Aaron
Site Admin
 
Posts: 3696
Joined: Sun Nov 20, 2005 2:41 pm
Location: Melbourne, Australia


Return to Feature requests

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 4 guests