Community building ideas
Posted: 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...
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...