Alpha Centauri 2

Community => Council Room => Topic started by: Alpha Centauri Bear on May 14, 2021, 04:34:27 AM

Title: Draw traffic to this site
Post by: Alpha Centauri Bear on May 14, 2021, 04:34:27 AM

All,
I feel like fewer people visit this site every year. At the same time I see some active AC-er at reddit, for example. Is it everybody's feeling or my view is just skewed?

Anyway, what are ideas to draw traffic to this site? I am right now thinking of integrating reddit to it. Like maybe posts here automatically cross post there? This will save people choice which resource to visit more often. They will get two in one.

Title: Re: Draw traffic to this site
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 15, 2021, 08:32:16 PM

I know someone who could speak to the people politics at reddit - but no idea how you'd even begin to implement that technically...

Title: Re: Draw traffic to this site
Post by: Alpha Centauri Bear on May 15, 2021, 10:29:36 PM

I have no idea either but this is minor. Anything can be implemented.

Title: Re: Draw traffic to this site
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 16, 2021, 12:04:48 AM

It's not minor if we can't talk Draz into it...

Title: Re: Draw traffic to this site
Post by: Alpha Centauri Bear on May 16, 2021, 01:13:34 AM

I meant on our side. Of course, we need some interface with them too.

Title: Re: Draw traffic to this site
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 16, 2021, 01:47:39 AM

I meant on our end - it's way over my own tech level.

Title: Re: Draw traffic to this site
Post by: Alpha Centauri Bear on May 16, 2021, 03:32:07 AM

Well, I was thinking I can contribute on our end.
😛

Title: Re: Draw traffic to this site
Post by: Buster's Uncle on May 20, 2021, 02:04:26 AM

Draz?

Title: Re: Draw traffic to this site
Post by: DrazharLn on June 07, 2021, 10:49:18 PM

I don't think it's a good idea for everything that gets posted in AC2 to be cross-posted on the reddit or vice-versa, I think that would just be annoying for both communities?

I am happy for interesting threads and content on AC2 to be posted on the subreddit, but I don't think that needs automation.

Title: Re: Draw traffic to this site
Post by: Alpha Centauri Bear on June 08, 2021, 12:57:26 AM

Not everything, of course. Some cross post mechanism that user explicitly set to be cross posted. Could be one-directional like from reddit specific communities with specific code that tells to also cross post in AC2 in specific topic.

Title: Re: Draw traffic to this site
Post by: bvanevery on September 17, 2021, 05:37:50 PM

I don't think automating cross-posts is actually a benefit.

The only good subreddit for our content is r/4Xgaming, because it has a relatively large number of subscribers.  It's got good moderators who understand game promotion and are proactive about it, trying very much to drive traffic to their own 4X gaming review website.  And as comes with a well-run sub, it's got a tagging system, expectations of structure and participation, it's not a mouthpiece for anyone's specific agenda, it's got a few rules, etc.  I don't think we can automate into that, and I'm not interested in disrupting the political relation with the mods, which frankly is the best I've got anywhere on Reddit.  I usually don't get along with Reddit moderators and this is one of the few exceptions, where the show is well run.  It is best to let sleeping dogs lie, and just have a presence there "by hand", like you and I have both been doing.

Meanwhile, r/alphacentauri is a depressing backwater of 1.7k subscribers.  I don't get along with one of the mods at all, I think u/nonsense_factory.  I washed my hands of that place long ago.  I got treated like pretty much some kind of nobody troll, even with all the previous effort I'd spent trying to drive traffic there, so I'm very much done with that.

Reddit suffers in general, from a great difficulty in trying to grow small groups.  I don't think there's any realistic way to get "surfacing" or recognition for a Reddit sub.  I've read articles, I've searched the internet some about it, I've come up with nothing.  It seems all you can do is show up in various places, talk, and hope people come.  I think the Reddit admins probably tightly control any other method, as a matter of their business model.  The product they're probably trying to sell, is advertizing venues.  That gives them a vested interest in consolidating traffic around a few key foci.  Not allowing anything to spread out, gain more attention, and thereby diffuse the number of "big whales" they can offer a paying advertizer.

In the limit, this leads to 1+ million subscriber groups.  Where the original ethos of a group often gets completely watered down, and there's no sense of community because it's just a lot of random people talking and making noise.  The whole trajectory of Reddit is for some groups to get "big", as a kind of pyramid scheme.  This is about gathering eyeballs, not making communities.  I'm pretty sure the problem is not exclusive to Reddit, it is a general trend and business model of monetized social media.

I think we need to be clear, that this site attempts to build a community.  Although there may be overlap with the methods used to build monetized social media platforms, there's a point at which these concerns inevitably have to diverge.

People on Reddit are mostly conditioned to be kinda lazy.  You're given this smorgasbord of supposedly all this great stuff, all these subs to choose from.  Well frankly I've narrowed my subs down to a pretty small list over time.  I seem to be very much in the minority in this regard.  Most Redditors are using it as this kind of big addle-minded aggregator feeder, where they have spam spam spam spam spam coming to them all the time.  In the mental sense, of driving their eyeballs with way too much attention and distraction.  Not the literal sense of spam marketers.

So for a person to make a transition, from that kind of addle-minded attention deficit sort of internet existence, to a community they can be more focused on, takes some kind of personal decision or gumption.  Not just clicking on the next sub to see "what's up".  That's very much like channel surfing when watching a big cable TV package. Or browsing a Netflix catalog endlessly, trying to find something "good".  These consumer behaviors aren't accidental, they're conditioned.  You don't want consumer behaviors.  You want community behaviors.

One of the most basic barriers to community participation, is whether you're gonna make an account on this site.  It's too bad that such a barrier to entry, is kinda necessary.  I'm sure it causes lots of people to disqualify themselves.  I'm always really pleased when someone actually gives feedback about my mod, because it usually means, they bothered to make an account to do so.

There are plenty of other problems with making communities.  I mean heck, like whether key actors get along.  I don't have a magic wand about communities.  I've got some pretty severe ideas about governance and administration, that were actually proven in practice a long time in the past, on my co-moderated gamedesign-l.  But none of it has quite risen to the bar of building my own website, yet.  And I'm not sure how may of those ideas, are applicable to improving things around here.

I've semi-accepted the reality that I've worked on a very old game, that although a great thing, has a limit as to how much attention it can get.  It just doesn't have the corporate backing, the full time pay scale, to be otherwise.

And my "super community best practices" website, someday, is probably going to be for the benefit of my own commercial gaming effort.  So that when I put in those long, difficult necessary hours to drive traffic and make a better community, I actually get paid for it.

I did start trying to learn about Search Engine Optimization the other month, as some kind of piece of this puzzle.  But I quickly got bored with it.  You read about people with the worst sort of ideological mentalities, reading that stuff.  They all want that big eyeball money.  As a socialist, I want to jam up their surveillance capitalist works.

The irony is, I'm going to need some eyeballs too, if I ever expect to make money.  But at least I can make the committed decision, not to be evil, since I'm not some Suit that graduated from Harvard Business School or whatever.  Nor am I some jerk from Silicon Valley vulture capital financing.  I would have moved there long ago, if that's what I wanted out of life.  Not like I wasn't duly informed back in the days of the dot.com boom.  I steered clear.

Title: Re: Draw traffic to this site
Post by: bvanevery on November 20, 2021, 12:08:07 PM

I started another thread about Search Engine Optimization.

Title: Re: Draw traffic to this site
Post by: Buster's Uncle on November 20, 2021, 07:19:48 PM

You did indeed.  https://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=21745.0

-And because it's all part of an intricate web of interconnected facets:  Building a Community (https://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=2293.0)

---

-I'll note my strong belief that by far the single most effective tool we had for building this place in 2012 was GotMs.

I worked the creative/packaging/promotional end, lacking any interest whatSOever in actually creating scenarios, though many were generated around custom factions I (or someone else less often) had created.  I struggled a lot with the writing of accompanying stories, though I find many cases where something I felt no confidence in at the time -notably the one about Cha and Miriam's daughter- really hold up well now.  The art/frontispieces we regarded as less optional -for obvious basic marketing reasons not least- and I'm usually way more comfortable with that part.

The bottleneck has always been on the scenario-generation end, and I believe few, if any, of the people on that end of things in the past would cite problems collaborating with me as factors in drifting away from the GotM team.  I'm sure there would be a strong consensus that my bells-and-whistles/creative-end contributions added considerable value.


-Point being, if there was a hypothetical modder or two who, very intelligently, took an interest in the general good health of AC2 for reasons of his own ---  those same reasons might be served in multiple related ways if, say, scenarios were generated featuring someone's hypothetical mod and we workshopped the kind of thing I add in the hidden GotM Team folder --- slickly-packaged scenarios ought to prove the best-possible bait for promoting both this particular community at this particular forum, AND the best possible way to get people to actually PLAY whatever hypothetical mod...

Title: Re: Draw traffic to this site
Post by: bvanevery on November 20, 2021, 08:10:50 PM

Where did people uptake GotM from though?  People already on this site?  Or people being drawn to this site from other places?

I've created tons of content in the form of After Action Reports.  I've pretty much mastered the "screenshot and text" form now.  I don't get the feeling they're pulling much traffic in here at all.  Part of my ongoing SEO effort is to verify the degree to which that is so.

Although I could certainly make scenarios... given that I have piles of back content that nobody's even looking at or knows about, some of which is still perfectly valid content, I'm presently more inclined to find out the reasons why that is.  And do something about it, if there's some clear advertizing path I haven't taken.  In other words, I don't believe in "build it and they will come", because I already built a lot of stuff.

It's not for lack of appearing on the front page of this site.  I did notice The Tree Hugger went up.  That was probably one of my best ones.

I'm not sure if people regard AARs as an old fashioned genre and (foolishly!) want YouTube Let's Play videos, or they just don't want AARs of SMAC.  The study on that would be figuring out whatever Paradox's site is doing.

Recycling old GotM scenarios is certainly possible BTW.  If nobody's looked at them since 201x, it's all new to whoever.

Title: Re: Draw traffic to this site
Post by: Buster's Uncle on November 20, 2021, 09:52:33 PM

Wellll - AARs are wonderful content.  -But-

Maybe -it being a passive read-the-content format and all- it inherently requires a higher critical mass of readers to get regular healthy comment conversation going.  I dunno.

sisko was always highly focused on GotM-as-a-contest, and very sensitive to low participation; I felt like the contest part was value added, but not a great-super-lot of value, and beside the point that it was promotional bait of the most effective kind I know, for whatever reason.

And Yo; I'm talking, say, if you happened to be a hypothetical modder who generated a scenario, it would, hypothetically, be a SMACX AI Growth mod-based scenario with SMACX AI Growth mod included in the package, leading directly to people actually playing SMACX AI Growth mod.



Promoting at other places was most of the point (though content for resident MPlayers to solo-play was +, too).  The minimum typical promotional spread -you helped, via commenting, w/ the Fusion is NOW thread at CFC, so OPs like that w/ art and any story, linking back to a host thread here w/ the actual file attached- would be threads like that at Apolyton, CFC, and WPC, plus whatever was feasible on Facebook that week -according to how Facebook changes how stuff works all the time- in several places there -and how much time and enthusiasm I could work up-.

Early, sisko would hit a bunch of marginal places, not least, foreign-language sites in German and Polish that at least used to have live communities --- and you know, there's quite a few stone-dead forum(ish) sites still out there that it's appropriate to spam your link, not really expecting to get a single link-clicking person, but worth a tiny effort just exactly for that tiny contribution to Google ranking...

-Late, I frequently pestered BlankW to post at the GOG AC sub, worth hitting for sure if you're not averse -as I am- to signing up at yet another place just for that...

Title: Re: Draw traffic to this site
Post by: bvanevery on November 21, 2021, 04:50:08 AM

Per the SEO thread though, forum links are generally marked "nofollow".  Whether or how much they can contribute to a Google rank is unclear to me at this time.  It seems like their actual contribution may be the people who actually click on the link and check out the content.  The link itself may be doing very little for rank, because of the "nofollow".

My alternate hypothesis is that Google's content analysis has gotten sophisticated enough, that they can somehow tell if a link leads to something of value.  The study on that would be Paradox's forum.  I have not yet undertaken the study.

The prejudice against forums is that anyone can put links in them.  So link spammers do so.  I recently read a bunch of stuff on a Black Hat SEO site, about the tactic of going to old school web forums, like a Simple Machines Forum.  If one has an old account on such a forum, and the ability to edit one's old posts, then one can add very new links to one's very old posts.  Usually without admins noticing.  Understanding just this one instance of such technique, informs me as to how / why Google would put the kibash on an entire range of forum links.  They don't have a default reason to regard forum links as "authoritative" on a subject.  Rather, they have every reason to suspect that they're spammy garbage.

But they may have gotten good in various instances, at detecting the quality of surrounding content.

Title: Re: Draw traffic to this site
Post by: bvanevery on November 21, 2021, 05:02:42 AM

Quote from: Buster's Uncle on November 20, 2021, 09:52:33 PM

And Yo; I'm talking, say, if you happened to be a hypothetical modder who generated a scenario, it would, hypothetically, be a SMACX AI Growth mod-based scenario with SMACX AI Growth mod included in the package, leading directly to people actually playing SMACX AI Growth mod.

I'm aware that I can do it.  In fact I'm better situated to do it than the other 2 major mods, because I don't require binary distribution of any kind, to make my mod work.  I can put everything in a scenario folder and it's Done.  But... I already advertize SMACX AI Growth mod periodically on r/4Xgaming.  It clearly has the most new blood available, and people thereby coming to this site.  If my mod itself is not persuasion enough, I'm not exactly seeing why a scenario would be.  It might increase retention of people who checked out my mod once already, but that's a theory only.  An alternate theory would be, 4X gaming is about randomly generated maps, not scenarios.

I can't really explain your previous empirical observation of "scenario success".  I don't deny that it seemed to work for you then.  But I am concerned that we're dealing with now, in the age of YouTube and mobile devices.  It changes things.

A depressing SEO ranking issue, is that Google now evaluates your site first and foremost, according to how it looks on mobile.  I see this as complete monopolistic scummery on their part, a shameless desire to push more Android phones.  I have no idea how this site comes across on mobile.  I categorically refuse to own a smartphone.  I call them dumbphones.  Heck right now I don't have any phone at all, a sort of pandemic fiasco, but that's another story.  If I did, I sure as hell wouldn't be connecting to the internet with it.

I'm a laptop guy.  I pretty much expect games as complicated as 4X TBS, to be played with a keyboard.  That said, out of necessity I've become pretty good at touchpad dragging, because I don't have a full size numeric keypad anymore.

Well, maybe learning how Paradox copes with and overcomes these various issues, will shed light.

Title: Re: Draw traffic to this site
Post by: Alpha Centauri Bear on November 21, 2021, 02:17:28 PM

I might miss it but what are we fighting for in term of SEO? When I search "alpha centauri forum" this one comes third. I think it is good enough.

Title: Re: Draw traffic to this site
Post by: bvanevery on November 21, 2021, 03:15:38 PM

I'm still trying to understand the oh so many facets of SEO.  This morning's exercise is, what free tools are available for analyzing keyword searches and website traffic?  So far I don't have anything to recommend, and I've learned some scummy things about Google.  I'd like to know who looks for an "after action report".  It seems that Call of Duty players do that, and that's about all I've got so far.

Who says people search for "alpha centauri forum" ?  It's not "good enough" if you don't even know what the behavior of actual game players is.

Another issue is that searching for things, isn't the same as clicking on the links that result from the search.

Title: Re: Draw traffic to this site
Post by: Buster's Uncle on November 22, 2021, 12:55:05 AM

[shrugs]  YouTube had already taken over the world before I even got a fast internet connection, let alone nearly ten years ago when I was accumulating my empirical experience.  Phones, I can't speak to at all, and that does bother me.

-But I'd submit that the age of the game is way more of a problem increasing difficulty level of playing forum-growth at all.  We were always too focused on a single game too old for our own prospects/good - and did it anyway, and it worked about as well as anyone could practically hope for.  Dunno; for the nearly-13 years I've been around the greater Civ-family online community, people have been bemoaning the decline of same as some irreversible trend that - I think they're probably right, ultimately, but it doesn't give enough credit to Owner Burnout.  I mean, a lot of the quiet around AC2 I actually blame myself for, for not trying as hard as I used to, and at that, Solver tells me I'm getting very close to outlasting everyone (forum owner) ever but Thunderfall, if he even still counts.  I certainly think it's more useful to blame the parts I could do better at than the things I can't control, anyway.  (That I have some ferocious mood swings complicating the long haul effort doesn't help.)

On spammers - y'all may have noticed that spam's quite rare here, and never lives anything like 24 hours; they certainly try, but I don't get so lethargic that I don't eyeball every single signup and ban many instantly for sufficient reason, being careful to show mercy where I'm much less than 100% sure.

The noparse, I assume is something about how Google works, because we have something like two threads marked noparse, and they're both personal threads in Rec Commons.  -Connected, I understand that any links you manage to get on Wikipedia are internally marked noparse, which is definitely a pity, but you know, SEO is only a big part of the toolkit, not the whole toolbox - our Firaxis AC Site rescue is linked in the SMACX article for five years so far, said site featuring linkbacks to this forum three places on each page.  Neither the mirror, nor that Wikipedia link, represent trivial effort, but more than worth it, I think.

---

SO - honestly, GotMs definitely worked back then, but I don't think we ever achieved anything like their actual potential as bait, never having actually sustained the schedule right there in the name for six months straight.  -And I can't imagine that happening now, for sure, which is a pity, because I've always been confident that steadfast reliability was key to building a steadfast following.  Notwithstanding all that, I'd certainly be all-in should an ambitious modder -who certainly stands to gain more from the deal than this forum does- decide to try scenarios as a promotable marketing tool.

For me, they always told me, back when WPC started out, that Content Is King, and Activity Draws More Activity.  My experience in the 13 years since is that it's nothing but true.  Every single forum post helps a little.  Every mod, every AAR, every addition to the AC Wiki, certainly every single link to anything here posted anywhere else, helps.  A little extra effort to engage all newbs DEFINITELY helps, as AC2's always done a lot better on the Content Is King end than the Activity Draws More Activity.  I particularly thank Brandon for a LOT of conscious effort on that last, to a fault.

-And thanks, by the way, to both of you just for taking an interest.  I've noticed since the beginning here that activity levels show a good deal of correlation to how much activity I generate myself, and it does a lot to motivate me in ALL the work when I don't feel so doggon alone.

P.S.  I note that we've never done anything promotional on YouTube, and that's missing out on one leg of the Triple Crown of Free Internet Promotion, the others being Facebook and Wikipedia.  So, if anyone managed to generate a Let's Play or two w/ heavy linkbacking...

Title: Re: Draw traffic to this site
Post by: bvanevery on November 22, 2021, 02:55:57 AM

Previously I was talking about nofollow, not noparse.  Noparse seems to be a way to suspend the interpretation of BB code.  Like perhaps if you wanted to explain how [noparse]italics[/noparse] work.  Heh, well that didn't work. ;lol

I'm still trying to figure out if "after action report" is actually a concept that some chunk of the internet cares about.  I did look at Google's word search thing (sorry, my investigations are currently a blur) and the historical trend since 2004 was way down.  Still haven't really dug into Paradox's site.  Last exercise I did, was looking over a bunch of "free" SEO tools that I think were all mostly really "gimme money", not very convincing.

I think many hours long Let's Plays are the most boring things on Earth.  I have a really hard time visualizing why anyone bothers with that.  I'm aware that people actually do.  One thing I learned awhile back, is how a video sounds is often more important than how it looks.  Because people are turning on this stuff as background noise while they multitask at something else, like preparing or eating dinner.  Personally, I think that's no way to live, but at least I can wrap my head around people doing it. 

In other words, YouTube videos should probably be thought of as a form of voice acting.  An illustrated podcast where the viewer is presumed to not be paying very good visual attention.

I've never made a YouTube video.  The only thing I could imagine making, is something short.  It would have to be a limited vignette in a narrow subject area.  The most immediate thing that leaps to mind, is Planet Buster Porn.  I've done the screenshot version of that.  It actually takes a fair amount of finger dexterity to capture all the different frames.

The #1 thing that noobs or even veterans in r/4Xgaming complain about in SMAC, is the UI.  There's a crowd that's under the perception that it sucks for some reason.  Because it's not imitating modern 4X UIs or something.  I don't really get it.  It's not the art assets of the UI in my opinion; in fact I think that's one part of the game that holds up better than a lot of other things.  It's something about how the UI works, that people are objecting to.  On the other hand, I also think 4X as a genre breeds whiners.  Like if something isn't "just so", you're going to run into the kind of borderline OCD person who really throws a snit about it.

I should probably bring up the subject of "old UIs" on my r/GamedesignLounge.  See what others think.

Title: Re: Draw traffic to this site
Post by: Buster's Uncle on November 22, 2021, 03:04:14 AM

What CIVilians have always told me is that the fungus colors -thus pretty much the whole game- are butt-ugly.  "Retina burning", one said.

That would be reasonably easy to mod, actually.

Title: Re: Draw traffic to this site
Post by: bvanevery on November 22, 2021, 03:31:45 AM

Well it's true that the landscape is ugly.  I used to think so at some point in the distant past, that it was chunky even compared to games of the period.  Then over the years it became my new normal, and at least the color choices are functional for the most part.

But I was somewhat under the impression that the UI gripes weren't about how things looked, but about how you clicked on stuff to do stuff.  I guess I'd have to review posts on r/4Xgaming to see if anyone clarified themselves sufficiently, for it to be intelligible / actionable.

Just web searched for "after action report".  There's a fair amount of CDC biowarfare kind of stuff about that.  It's not an unused term in government planning.  You have to get more specific with "after action report game" to yield anything we'd recognize one.  And I didn't find anything on Paradox's site that way.  You kinda have to know what you're looking for already.  And from an "attract noobs" standpoint, that could be considered a problem.

Going to Paradox's forums, however, I see that they do very exactly write AARs.  One of them had 290k views.  Some monster of historical discursion and fiction, complete with period illustrations.

Title: Re: Draw traffic to this site
Post by: Buster's Uncle on November 22, 2021, 03:46:14 AM

Google "Octopus Overlords" -possibly w/ "Eliza Cuthbert"- for an AAR I hear referenced a lot.  Protip: it's not a serious AAR, but I don't have to tell you that a good AAR is more than a simple report.

Title: Re: Draw traffic to this site
Post by: bvanevery on November 22, 2021, 04:03:08 AM

I'm actually having trouble pinning that down.  I had to add the person's name to get anywhere with it, and it's still just giving me references to it, some of it NSFW stuff.

A consistent theme of my organic investigations of "things AAR" so far, is that I already have to know what I'm looking for.  That doesn't make it an inherently searchable and rankable form of content.

Title: Re: Draw traffic to this site
Post by: Buster's Uncle on November 22, 2021, 04:18:45 AM

-And I meant to mention, somewhere in the long post I made above, my long-standing philosophy underlying promotion and everything:

Most people who like SMACX in particular, and Civ and turn-based 4x more generally, don't know we're here.  Job One, just for making up for natural member attrition, let alone growing, is Getting The Word Out.  Everything is a numbers game where we might get some percentage of people to click on a link posted elsewhere, some percentage of that to look around the forum after they download whatever bait, some of those sign up, and some of those actually participate significantly.

I haven't the faintest how many thousands of people have bought SMACX over the last 24 years from Firaxis, SOS or GOG - but it's got to be a number quite a bit in excess of one, and I think the overwhelming majority of the kind of people who like that kind of game are on the nets and we just have to make it easy to find us.  Still, all these years later.

-'Cause we ROCK - a literate, mature, chilled-out community of Their Kind Of People.  We do not suck at all for content; we merely need to reach a critical mass of activity-sustaining activity, and every participant counts.

Title: Re: Draw traffic to this site
Post by: bvanevery on November 22, 2021, 02:24:44 PM

"The Word" needs venues.  r/4Xgaming is the best I found.  Admittedly I refuse to use Facebook.  I don't really understand YouTube as a venue, because you can't just type stuff.  What else is there?  I have trouble visualizing a groundswell on Pinterest.  The traditional SMAC web fora, they're mostly moribund.   That's why I stopped bothering to announce on those sites.  I used to do it routinely, but it never felt like it translated into either more downloads of my mod, more people showing up here, or even more people talking on the web sites I'd posted on.  The only thing that obviously worked was r/4Xgaming, so I've stayed there to own it.

Title: Re: Draw traffic to this site
Post by: Alpha Centauri Bear on November 22, 2021, 02:38:22 PM

Quote from: Buster's Uncle on November 22, 2021, 03:04:14 AM

What CIVilians have always told me is that the fungus colors -thus pretty much the whole game- are butt-ugly.  "Retina burning", one said.

That would be reasonably easy to mod, actually.

It's ugly only in comparison to usual Earthly game view: green pastures, yellow sandy beaches, gray mountains with white snowcaps, blue ocean and rivers, and the such. Not ugly but unusual.
Maybe it would benefit from more brighter colors because at times it is pretty difficult to spot the landscape details. Like make rainy tiles more brighter green, etc. Sometimes text on a map or faction background it is also not contrast. Like Hive's black text on their deep blue background.

Title: Re: Draw traffic to this site
Post by: bvanevery on November 22, 2021, 02:48:18 PM

Lots of computer displays also aren't that great, as far as their available contrast levels.  And people turn their brightness down too low.  I haven't heard nearly as many complaints about "I can't see what's going on" as "it's ugly".  I always thought it was the repetitiveness and rough squarish edges of various shapes, that contributed to the feeling of ugly.

There's no way I'm going to re Art direct this though.  That kind of effort is pretty much a brand new commercial game.  I also don't need to make my reputation as a game graphics retoucher.  I'm not seeking an art job in industry, and there's not basically any consumer cache for taking on that task.  Whereas with my current modding work, at least I can say hey I'm a game designer.

Frankly the only production value I can see myself putting effort into, is voice acting.  Because for a long time, I've thought I can do it, and I've already researched the basics of it.  But I still weigh it against all other facets of getting an indie 4X game done, which is my real goal.

I do think not enough is done for the art direction of 4X maps.  There's a repetitive sameyness that just doesn't sit well with me.  One obvious contrast is hand crafted HOMM3 maps, which are vastly superior works of art.  Worrying about the map, is the intersection of 4X with the Builder game genre.  SMAC is like halfway there.

Title: Re: Draw traffic to this site
Post by: Buster's Uncle on November 22, 2021, 03:03:00 PM

On YouTube - linkback in the description.  The place has a lot more potential than Facebook or Wikipedia to have something with your link attached go viral.  You just have to post videos people like.

-It's always a numbers/skimming game, and everything promotional I talk about is extremely unlikely to amount to much absent energy, persistance, and a decided lack of shame.

Title: Re: Draw traffic to this site
Post by: bvanevery on November 23, 2021, 12:53:06 PM

YouTube happened to send me updated Terms Of Service today.  This bit is rubbing me the wrong way:

Quote

Right to Monetize

You grant to YouTube the right to monetize your Content on the Service (and such monetization may include displaying ads on or within Content or charging users a fee for access). This Agreement does not entitle you to any payments. Starting November 18, 2020, any payments you may be entitled to receive from YouTube under any other agreement between you and YouTube (including for example payments under the YouTube Partner Program, Channel memberships or Super Chat) will be treated as royalties.  If required by law, Google will withhold taxes from such payments.

Searching the web, I'm seeing it has rubbed many content creators the wrong way as well.  It's a recent change.  Went into effect March of this year.  I think this will probably cause me to kick these surveillance capitalist pigs to the curb and completely forget about them.

Title: Re: Draw traffic to this site
Post by: Buster's Uncle on November 23, 2021, 06:18:02 PM

Oh, I've got a YouTube [fuddle-duddle]ery story - and a really long one about Wikipedia editor politics, and about a million -mostly minor, but constant- ones about Facebook sucking in a million ways.  But, you know, that's just the price of doing business; and no use dwelling on that, because it doesn't change that they're the Triple Crown of free internet promotion.  The idea was never to make money directly off YouTube, anyway.

Title: Re: Draw traffic to this site
Post by: bvanevery on November 23, 2021, 06:24:42 PM

The terms of the business are bad enough for me to consider other ways of doing business.  Including lobbying Congress to break Google up.  And Amazon.   But in the meantime, I'll probably up my conversations on r/SocialistProgrammers.  I'm sure someone has thought about the video streaming problem before, but I don't know what people have managed.

Epic Games Store's 12% cut starts to look positively benign compared to Google's recent "we'll monetize you, dilute you, and not pay you" stance.

Title: Re: Draw traffic to this site
Post by: bvanevery on November 23, 2021, 06:37:09 PM

What the hell is up with Twitch?  I'm pretty clueless about it, but it's a gamer centric video outlet.

I'm more familiar with Discord.  I really don't like it.  I think it's badly organized, and basically I dislike all things "chat".  But again, a gamer-centric venue.  I think I'm even nominally subscribed to some SMAC stuff there, or at least I used to be.  I was way too bored to keep up with it.

I know that Discord very recently is trying to rebrand itself as not exclusively about gaming.  But its gaming roots are still very much apparent in the art direction of its web layout.

Another major venue I have no experience with is Twitter.  My historical prejudice was, I don't want to hear about the minutiae of Ozzy Ozbourne's day, as he takes a dump.  Then at one point I was mildly interested in the ongoing opinions of a few game developers.  But they had a bad habit IMO of not sticking to anything important or relevant, just yabbering on about whatever was going on in their life and came into their minds.  So I quickly ditched them.  I couldn't understand why anyone would want to listen to a stream of mostly drivel, even if there was some higher quality signal in there somewhere.  Too much noise.

Title: Re: Draw traffic to this site
Post by: Buster's Uncle on November 23, 2021, 09:22:25 PM

Chat channels of all sorts couldn't be a lot more useless for promotional purposes, and I share ignorance of all the other venues you mention here.



Anyone interested in actually collaborating on some variant SMACX backgrounds?  Potentially marketable and otherwise useful content, and we could do more than one.  Start a thread in Modding and we'll talk.

Title: Re: Draw traffic to this site
Post by: bvanevery on November 23, 2021, 09:42:11 PM

By reading wikipedia articles, I've also learned that Twitch and Discord chat have been vehicles for alt-right hate speech and cyberbullying.  I forgot how difficult it is to control how people communicate when they want to express hostility.  Haven't worried about those problems since the text-based MUD days.

What's a SMACX "background" ?

Title: Re: Draw traffic to this site
Post by: Buster's Uncle on November 23, 2021, 10:21:13 PM

Fungus and ground textures/colors are specifically in mind - but I've a vague-ish notion that the look -not arrangement/positioning, but the boxes/borders the buttons and displays are in- of the user interface could be modded.

Title: Re: Draw traffic to this site
Post by: bvanevery on November 24, 2021, 12:24:32 AM

I thought the display elements stuff was the stronger stuff, art asset wise.  It's the map colors that are really bothersome.  Without the long term appreciation that is.

Title: Re: Draw traffic to this site
Post by: Buster's Uncle on November 24, 2021, 02:12:13 AM

Terrain textures could definitely be made brighter, though I think the mini-map being so low-contrast with too many faction colors would take some .exe coding.