Originally Posted by DviddLeff
Best thing to do would be to simply say you have to have a 100x100 .png image or whatever and upload it via the website for approval.
Making an in game editor seems like a waste of time as people would still be able to make inappropriate designs.
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Look into Flying Lab Studio's system for Pirates of the Burning Sea sometime. It's very much like this.
The flag and sail decal dimensions are published, and you can submit .pngs through a web interface. Once submitted, your designs are entered into a system that presents other users with 2 submitted designs at random, and asks them to rate the "better" one. The community has been instructed to rate via a set of standards, which essentially are designed to ensure that the graphic is a) not copyrighted; b) bug-free (stray pixels and the like); c) fits the color palette of the game (also laid out with public guidelines about saturation and such); and d) fits the spirit of the game, from a setting/period standpoint (no rocketships in the Age of Sail, etc.).
The system tracks ratings, and if a submission breaks some threshold over a couple days/some number of views, it will either be automatically entered or automatically flagged for rejection. Ones that don't generate a very one-sided response with the ratings will get passed on to the user created content team to manually sort through and pass/fail. All failures come with brief notes explaining why they were rejected.
Users are encouraged/incentivized to rate others' content in two ways: it allows the ones serious about the UCC community to self-police and help others' work improve, and it's also required to rate some submissions if you want to submit multiple pieces, yourself.
All I know is, after a little tinkering, the system they worked out works *really* well. You go into the game, and everything blends with the models, the lighting, the sail-tinting system, and the world around it just fantastically. You'd swear that most of them were created by the dev team's artists and just sold in-game as-is. I think in over a year of playing, I might have reported 3 sails that slipped by the system and just plain didn't belong in the game. And only one of them was truly offensive, the other two were more nitpicks on period-appropriateness (one used a gradient in the image, which just isn't an effect that sail makers were able to achieve at the time, the and another referenced a college sports team and logo, IIRC).
2011-07-16, 06:24 PM
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