ideas Site Suggestion Box

[Cyclone Boom 16,829]

59 minutes ago, matias93 said:

Admin-hatted people, how hard would be to add one or two fields on the STEX files for georreferencing them?

It would technically be possible to add new custom fields in addition to the descriptor.

For categorising content, I wonder if using tags would be the more ideal solution? Fields themselves currently have no capability to be searched from the front end, and so they're really only useful for visual display purposes. Also unless doing so directly via the database, it'd need files to be individually edited which needlessly updates a file's modified time. Maybe an idea is to have tagged terms unique enough, and so they'd only retrieve other items that match the same themes. That way for certain geolocations it could have a numerical identifier like "NYC 001" with another such as "geo theme" as the blue tag prefix, and then other items can be tagged similarly with the master index viewable.

Just an idea of what can already be done with moderator tools using the "quick tag" function.

[Propfam 2,286]

2019 Simtropolis Proposal

This is my repost from the PM. Corrections are in parentheses. Sorry for my repost.

 

Hello,

I'm Zaydan and I started to using my account again. I want to talk about how if we develop our YouTube channel. This is the followup from my post, but there are some realistic but kind of lacking optimism (replies). I'm not offending the poster but I think we should be optimistic. The proposal is in the next paragraphs.

Background

YouTube is the largest video platform in the world, before Instagram TV and Vimeo. Currently, YouTube is growing, proved by number of new users, videos' views and channels' subscribers (or subs) growing everyday. This growth should be used by us. YouTube allows us to share our content that people never know about. YouTube allows us to engage new people that we never know about and makes the community grow even bigger, possibly popular by average people. We can even set up our community on YouTube to reap up more benefits. This positive growth is beneficial and only growths everyday as the YouTube grows. In the end, our community will be growing and people will be benefited, and we just focusing on the content and adaptations.

Challenges

But, there are challenges before we can start YouTube. To be simple, let's we categorizes them: the staff, the content, and the engagement. Great staff allows us to create great content. But, great staff isn't easy to find. Great staff is consisted from pro and creative people. Although we have lots of them, unfortunately for our YouTube, we have only few of them. One of the lacking pros is video editors. Video editors are considered to be important, especially in this today's world. Quality content without quality editing will result on videos being marked as "low quality videos." Quality editing doesn't mean we have to use complex animations etc, but it means that even simple but proper editing is useful. We can train ourselves to be video editor, especially simple ones. But, if we want to be fast and/or complex editing, we should hire pros. But, there is a catch, hiring pros needs a lot of money, both short run and long run. The solutions maybe using some of our donation to hiring pros, making a crowdfunding, finding members that have the appropriate skills, or even ask our friend that have the skills to join us. For the creators, we will consider members that are creative and pro in the field. Same thing goes to the admin, management, etc.

After forming the quality staff, the next thing is (the) content. In the last polling, tutorials followed by showcases are the most voted content. Again in the poll, SimCity (4) is the most voted game before Cities: Skylines. I think the polling is (kind of) incorrect since only a fraction of the member are voting. So, how about if we make a poll again? But this time, almost all the members are participated. This makes the decisions clear and making the concepts faster. After the polling completes, we just making the concepts and paths. They will be what things we need to do.

After the concepts and paths done, now we are thinking about the engagement. In this context, engagement means engaging our existing subs and engaging new subscribers. Engaging the existing subscribers can be done by the YouTube's Community features. Also, we can try interesting features such as live streaming, premium content, etc. We can invite the existing community members to subscribing to our channel. But, engaging new subscribers is also important. Courses in the YouTube Creators are the first step to learn how to engaging new subscribers along with other important info like copyright. Also, we need to promote our channel. This can be done in many ways: word of mouth, making interesting content, or even placing some ads on the street. With quality engagement, we will get long-term success and it means that our channel is well established.

The future

After we got long-term success, we can move entire community to YouTube. We don't need the website except for things like STEX and this means that our site operational costs is going down, including licensing fees of Invision Community. We can grow the channel and eventually making milestones: 100.000 subs, 500K subs, 1M subs, 10M subs, etc. We can adapt our channel to other platforms, including IGTV and Vimeo. We can skip installing ads, and sign up for sponsorship and cover our costs. We can improve our production studio. Lots of things can be made if we success. But, we need to stick to our ideals, otherwise we will easily influenced by factors like the environment, other channels, etc.

 

That's my proposal. Sorry if I have mistakes. I hope this will be considered. Thanks.

[Lucario Boricua 7,026]

There's one aspect of city journal pages that bothers me--every time a user visits a CJ page, or each entry, counts as a view, including the visits from the CJ author. Is there a way to fix the view counter such that it does not count repeat visits separately, and thus provides a more authentic idea of how much exposure the CJ actually gets?

 

EDIT:

And before I forget, could there be a few more Trixie reaction faces? I'm in particular wanting one expressing surprise or amazement

[Propfam 2,286]

Hello,

I have a slight complaint: I think we should rename Chief of Staff because it's misleading. I've included the screenshot on the attachment (I can't access Imgur). For instance, people may think @tariely is a staff due to the title, but as you can see below, he/she isn't a staff. So, there's a little bit of misleading, especially there's "staff" on it. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Thanks.

[CorinaMarie 29,556]

9 hours ago, chfzdn said:

I have a slight complaint: I think we should rename Chief of Staff because it's misleading.

I apologize for any confusion that may cause you. However, I feel there is no need to change it. If anyone is in doubt we do have the Staff Directory.

And it so happens @tariely shows the qualities we like to see from staff. She's helpful, polite, and conscientious in her posts and contributions to the STEX.

[Propfam 2,286]

NOT PLANNED - 

---

Hello,

Simtropolis is a beautiful website. Everything is organized. However, there are some elements aren't look right, especially in a HiDPI screen. One of the elements is the Simtropolis logo. I would like to see a higher resolution Simtropolis.

Thanks.

  Edited July 25, 2020 by Cyclone Boom  
Added "Not Planned" tag.

[CorinaMarie 29,556]

7 minutes ago, chfzdn said:

I would like to see a higher resolution Simtropolis.

Hiya, @chfzdn. Thanks for the suggestion, ofc. However, higher resolution images would mean greater file sizes which would add a wee bit more lag to site responsiveness. This would be more noticeable for peeps with slower connections.

We'll keep the logo and other image elements as they are.

[Propfam 2,286]

1 hour ago, CorinaMarie said:

Hiya, @chfzdn. Thanks for the suggestion, ofc. However, higher resolution images would mean greater file sizes which would add a wee bit more lag to site responsiveness. This would be more noticeable for peeps with slower connections.

We'll keep the logo and other image elements as they are.

But, can we just serve the image based on the connection and resolution of the device? I'm sure there are ways to do it, both from server side thru CDN and device side thru HTML, CSS, and JavaScript combo.

Note: I use 5 Mbps internet on home and as the time of posting, I'm on mobile data with these speeds.

Spoiler

 

[Cyclone Boom 16,829]

8 minutes ago, chfzdn said:

But, can we just serve the image based on the connection and resolution of the device? I'm sure there are ways to do it, both from server side thru CDN and device side thru HTML, CSS, and JavaScript combo.

While this might be possible, I'm afraid it is beyond the scope of what we're technically willing to implement. Yes it would be nice to have a higher resolution DPI for the logo, although for the minimal benefit it has for those types of devices, we feel like it's not worth investing the effort to research at this present time.

Maybe someday if ever there'll be a new logo, but for now as Cori said it's going to stay as it is for the foreseeable future.

[Propfam 2,286]

5 hours ago, Cyclone Boom said:

While this might be possible, I'm afraid it is beyond the scope of what we're technically willing to implement. Yes it would be nice to have a higher resolution DPI for the logo, although for the minimal benefit it has for those types of devices, we feel like it's not worth investing the effort to research at this present time.

Maybe someday if ever there'll be a new logo, but for now as Cori said it's going to stay as it is for the foreseeable future.

Another factor that affects the time taken to render the site is the server location. I'm in Indonesia and the site can take up to 21 second to load with the last 2 second only to render the site. CDN will greatly reduce the time to just 2 second by caching the site on another sides of the globe. So in my case, the server will be in either Indonesia, Malaysia, or more commonly Singapore.

Speaking of logo, I think we should change it. The buildings in the logo will be filled instead of an outline. And maybe, the bottom line will be removed. The Simtropolis text can be slightly modified or revamped.

Speaking of the DPI, I think we should reconsider. Most people in the first, second, or even third world own phones with high density display. Midrange phones now comes with it. I can only imagine only budget phones come with it and the number is decreasing. For instance, for just under $100, you can find phones with 720p, though not as sharp as the midrange or flagship counterpart, or flagship from couple years ago with 1080p display. The PC world is different, though. As far as I know, the standard resolution for desktops and laptops is 1080p. This can be either sharp or not, depending on the where the display is placed. Lots of people, at least in my country, own laptop instead of desktop, meaning the demand for higher resolution logo high. I think we should make the logo available in higher resolution, at least when we are revamping the logo.

Thanks.

Author edit and opinion: according to Steam, 1080p is standard. However in practice, there are still many laptops, even midrange ones, shipped with 720p (more specifically 1366x768). The current trend is steadily declining. I hope that in the 2020s, laptops should ship with at least 1080p for budget and lower-midrange ones. Upper-midrange and high-end ones uses 4K. It might be overkill for now. But it's like 4K on phones, first overkill then norm in flagships.

By the way, thanks for labeling my idea as such.

[kschmidt 6,150]

Forum Threads Oversized Split ?

Some threads on Simtropolis are so large,they run years, pages overloaded with lgraphics or the thread leavves such way of diversity there no end to come. Examplary thred like Show whath your're working on have gameplay, bat.lot development and some less necesary stuff. Size  of loading one individual page of such thread takes ages and already there's a general messag of administrator to not use uncompresed graphics. Recently there;s another advert item introduced wich doesn't improve website speed All need to be rethought to have a enjoyable community site.

Members posting messages in subsequent threads must be about a specivic thread so showing city building gameplay into one thread, bat-lot-mod development into another. More links to personal pages from a specifc thread so it won't get overloaded, so no more unnecesary large graphics on specific threads like 1200x3000 size, only a limit of four graphics per post and no repetition of related posts in short sequence.

Hope some discusion about the way some threads are run may start, so the sometime slugish site response time may go down. Now writing this on my Dot Net 1.6 Ghz site response allready slugish of lower system transfer rate, this system obviously not very well equiped to view pages like Show what your'r working on or Can't find what your looking for,  some thread wich has become heavely graphic dependent thesse both need a fresh up in postin rules !

Sincerely yours,

Kschmidt

[Propfam 2,286]

On 7/12/2020 at 8:18 AM, kschmidt said:

Forum Threads Oversized Split ?

Some threads on Simtropolis are so large,they run years, pages overloaded with lgraphics or the thread leavves such way of diversity there no end to come. Examplary thred like Show whath your're working on have gameplay, bat.lot development and some less necesary stuff. Size  of loading one individual page of such thread takes ages and already there's a general messag of administrator to not use uncompresed graphics. Recently there;s another advert item introduced wich doesn't improve website speed All need to be rethought to have a enjoyable community site.

Members posting messages in subsequent threads must be about a specivic thread so showing city building gameplay into one thread, bat-lot-mod development into another. More links to personal pages from a specifc thread so it won't get overloaded, so no more unnecesary large graphics on specific threads like 1200x3000 size, only a limit of four graphics per post and no repetition of related posts in short sequence.

Hope some discusion about the way some threads are run may start, so the sometime slugish site response time may go down. Now writing this on my Dot Net 1.6 Ghz site response allready slugish of lower system transfer rate, this system obviously not very well equiped to view pages like Show what your'r working on or Can't find what your looking for,  some thread wich has become heavely graphic dependent thesse both need a fresh up in postin rules !

Sincerely yours,

Kschmidt

I agree that topic should be split, but not for performance reasons. But for topic railing reason. Some topics are a bit off from their topics, like the famous Sharing Plugins Folders: Discussions.

For the second paragraph, there is a mandate to use JPG for on-site hosting. I honestly "circumvented" the restriction by hosting my images on Imgur, which is quite reliable. But, I don't think the use of JPG lightens the client load especially in significant amount, instead it's for the site space.

That's my opinion. What do you think? Thanks.

[kschmidt 6,150]

1 hour ago, chfzdn said:

I agree that topic should be split, but not for performance reasons. But for topic railing reason. Some topics are a bit off from their topics, like the famous Sharing Plugins Folders: Discussions.

For the second paragraph, there is a mandate to use JPG for on-site hosting. I honestly "circumvented" the restriction by hosting my images on Imgur, which is quite reliable. But, I don't think the use of JPG lightens the client load especially in significant amount, instead it's for the site space.

That's my opinion. What do you think? Thanks.

Thank you, site space equeals text, banners, picturesl overhead database access. First text won;'t be ever a problem, banner and pictures do mattter if I see long pictues like korver it naturale something as you may conscider better to host on a personal page. Spliup excisting groups won't be any use , better we start a dedicated new thread like  Show your're gameplay, Show your're  Customs Development. Last point making the site faster, with somekind subscription for registered user is a issue for the community to deicide, less adverts more support. Discusion about that should be there as LEX for now seem to can live without these, surpirsingly !

Sincerely yours,

Kschmidt

[CorinaMarie 29,556]

9 hours ago, chfzdn said:

For the second paragraph, there is a mandate to use JPG for on-site hosting. I honestly "circumvented" the restriction by hosting my images on Imgur, which is quite reliable. But, I don't think the use of JPG lightens the client load especially in significant amount, instead it's for the site space.

As I mentioned elsewhere, there are two aspects to this.

First is that large PNG images take much, much longer for members with slower internet connections and that makes the site seem laggy. It does not matter where the images are hosted to cause said slowdown. As a courtesy to those peeps, compressed JPGs are much better.

Second, server storage space is a consideration. While we did a lot of tweaking such that it's not a dire problem like we believed about a year ago, it's also our preference to not use more of the space when it's not necessary. A JPG image at 85% quality appears to the human eye just as good as a non-compressed PNG (which is significantly larger). That is the reason the message was added to the upload image dialog box.

It could be Windoze 10 defaults to PNG for screenshots and that might be why we are seeing more and more peeps using them. Should that be what's happening, peeps need to find a setting to change to compressed JPG. Now, ofc, there are times when a PNG image is ideal and that's when the picture is of text or when there are simple colors like a UI panel. The PNG image in that case will still be relatively small and will appear sharper.

So, the preferred method is to use compressed JPG images and to let them be stored on the Simtropolis server. Should Imgur or any other photo hosting site go the way of Photobucket or the old ImageShack, the images will not disappear if hosted here on ST.

[Propfam 2,286]

1 hour ago, CorinaMarie said:

As I mentioned elsewhere, there are two aspects to this.

First is that large PNG images take much, much longer for members with slower internet connections and that makes the site seem laggy. It does not matter where the images are hosted to cause said slowdown. As a courtesy to those peeps, compressed JPGs are much better.

Second, server storage space is a consideration. While we did a lot of tweaking such that it's not a dire problem like we believed about a year ago, it's also our preference to not use more of the space when it's not necessary. A JPG image at 85% quality appears to the human eye just as good as a non-compressed PNG (which is significantly larger). That is the reason the message was added to the upload image dialog box.

It could be Windoze 10 defaults to PNG for screenshots and that might be why we are seeing more and more peeps using them. Should that be what's happening, peeps need to find a setting to change to compressed JPG. Now, ofc, there are times when a PNG image is ideal and that's when the picture is of text or when there are simple colors like a UI panel. The PNG image in that case will still be relatively small and will appear sharper.

So, the preferred method is to use compressed JPG images and to let them be stored on the Simtropolis server. Should Imgur or any other photo hosting site go the way of Photobucket or the old ImageShack, the images will not disappear if hosted here on ST.

Oh I'm mistaken for client computation load and network load. I mean the former but the latter is true. Sorry.

[spiritualfire 138]

Hello all.

I thought of an idea for the site just now, and forgive me if it’s been suggested in the past. I don’t want to steal anybody’s thunder.

Let’s say someone like me who is a pretty average SC4 player is building their city and plops a custom lot that uses a good number of BATs from various creators. Let’s say that this lot they plop is missing a dependency like a building prop. And by some mistake can’t find the name of this custom lot in their plugins, but they do know the name of one or two of the BATs being used in the lot. 
Google and Bing are helpful if you want to find a specific BAT in question on the site. And sometimes the site’s search bar doesn’t exactly help much further.

So the idea is this: how about linking single building models to custom lots? Like a link they can click to see where else a particular model is used in, so a player can find not only the name of the custom lot but also direct them back to what dependencies they may be missing? (I.e. link could be positioned near download button with hypothetical title: “See where used in custom lots”)

This way it kind of closes a loophole: we have dependencies listed on the pages and the Readme for custom lots, but not much of a way to find the custom lots they’re used in.

[matias93 7,535]

Sounds like a good idea, but a very work-intensive one, mainly because the STEX isn't a structured database: a human reading the description of a file can know which files are its dependencies, but the site's software cannot, and as such, it cannot go backwards and say which files are depending on a given STEX entry.

@Cyclone Boom understands more detailedly how the site's software works, and how difficult would it be (or not) to implement something like this.

***

On the same topic, and only if it's possible, I would *love* to see a field on which we could include geographic coordinates to replicas of real-life objects on the STEX, and even a map on which to search plugins by location.

[Cyclone Boom 16,829]

6 hours ago, matias93 said:

Sounds like a good idea, but a very work-intensive one, mainly because the STEX isn't a structured database: a human reading the description of a file can know which files are its dependencies, but the site's software cannot, and as such, it cannot go backwards and say which files are depending on a given STEX entry.

Alas, you've summed it up perfectly there.

The biggest dilemma about improving the accessibility of STEX files is the manual effort needed to for staff and volunteers edit each. Since this would have to happen manually, it'd be a very arduous task to complete. At least with current capabilities at our disposal, there is also no way to automate this process. As such it would take a very long time to go through and index over 20,000 items of SC4 content. Even more so than a files tagging project which didn't succeed due to the work involved.

 

6 hours ago, matias93 said:

On the same topic, and only if it's possible, I would *love* to see a field on which we could include geographic coordinates to replicas of real-life objects on the STEX, and even a map on which to search plugins by location.

While I'm not too sure about the map part, the coordinates (as a text box input) would be possible to implement via an optional custom field. A bit like the field which allows links to source models to be posted for items. Perhaps it could then be linked up to search a service like this one for latitude and longitude coordinates.

[matias93 7,535]

4 hours ago, Cyclone Boom said:

Perhaps it could then be linked up to search a service like this one for latitude and longitude coordinates.

I'm unsure, but I think there is an OpenStreetMap API that allows to embed a map interface on which coordinates can be represented as position markers. I guess there is something similar with Google Maps, but the last time I saw, their API is blocking the usage of their map images elsewhere but on their site.

Another option would be to create a KML file from the coordinates of a group of files (those are basically XML files with some formatting specificities), and load it into whatever map app the user wants.

[Haljackey 17,241]

Suggestion- different reaction llamas!

We very rarely see some of these used like 'no', 'sad' and 'confused'.

 

It would be cool to see some new ones one day like- 'whoa!', happy face/smile, sunglasses/cool, etc.

[spiritualfire 138]

On 3/16/2021 at 9:17 AM, matias93 said:

Sounds like a good idea, but a very work-intensive one, mainly because the STEX isn't a structured database: a human reading the description of a file can know which files are its dependencies, but the site's software cannot, and as such, it cannot go backwards and say which files are depending on a given STEX entry.

@Cyclone Boom understands more detailedly how the site's software works, and how difficult would it be (or not) to implement something like this.

***

On the same topic, and only if it's possible, I would *love* to see a field on which we could include geographic coordinates to replicas of real-life objects on the STEX, and even a map on which to search plugins by location.

@matias93 @Cyclone Boom Alas, I understand now. Too much time to spend weeding through so much content to determine which file is used as a dependency where. Moreover, I was not taking into account of how hard it would be on the site. Clearly I don't want to put strain on the site, much less on any team member.

Personally (and selfishly) I was hoping there was something in the idea because I literally have a handful of custom shopping centers and strip mall lots in my Plugins that use various buildings from SimGoober and SimRabbit, to name a few. I have had little to no success in tracking down the names of these custom lots. No Readme or results online that I can find when searching each building I'm able to identify. Just one of those things I should've done when I installed them: organization.

[Ducio 285]

Sometimes when I look at the STEX there are files that I love and are great but don't necessarily fit into the region I'm playing at the moment. It would be neat if I could tag them for later, something akin to "save for later" or like "add to my library." And then in my profile, there could be a place to see what I've tagged. 

Of course, I realize it would be easy just to download everything of interest, but I don't necessarily want to download a lot of content unless I'm actively going to use it. Just thought I'd put this out there.   

[SIM-ple Jack 17,444]

20 hours ago, Ducio said:

 

Of course, I realize it would be easy just to download everything of interest, but I don't necessarily want to download a lot of content unless I'm actively going to use it. Just thought I'd put this out there.   

If the WZ thread teaches you anything, it should be "Get it now, because it may not be around later."

[Cyclone Boom 16,829]

@Ducio

I like your suggestion, and it just depends whether something like that could be implemented in the board software.

Perhaps at least in the meantime, it might be worth installing a browser addon like this article explains for Chrome, and also this one for Firefox. Other browsers might have options to allow this too, and it lets any page be saved to view another time. I don't use these myself, but I suppose they're a bit like an advanced bookmarks feature. How they can keep track of those saved pages which are viewed, and others which still are unread. Seems like there's sorting options too for organising them.

Just thought I'd mention these in case it's useful.

[Ducio 285]

Thanks! Yes, good idea, I should look into that. I suppose there's nothing stopping me from keeping track of files another way.  Fair point about downloading files I'd like to keep while they are available too...

[kschmidt 6,150]

Advanced Search B more review !

Simtropolis search options are generaly good, yet their some points wich could enhance the search specialy the files area. Could the  file exchange categories be added to the search options, only show link to file of the creator: no member references wich double. Topics header may also show several times with each entry, this is hard as this is event driven. Some times there no sample picture in the results. SC4Devotion  search category  like. Tille

Populair search directory by view maybe put in seperate tab with more STEX disk like features categories.

Last a creator orientated gallery would be nice where players can have a idea o f what kind of Bat´s lot´s are created, maybe some categories added like housing, commercial, traffic, mod related.

Hope this may suggest some improvement !

Sincerely yours,

Kschmidt

[Pakistani890 122]

Can we please have something like a download history or something like ''u have downloaded this item before'' something like that like there is on SC4 Devotion

Please implement this because it helps keep me track of the dependencies i have installed or the stuff i have downloaded. It would be super helpful interm's of organization

[CorinaMarie 29,556]

5 minutes ago, Pakistani890 said:

Can we please have something like a download history or something like ''u have downloaded this item before'' something like that like there is on SC4 Devotion

That would indeed be an ideal feature. However, it is simply not an available option in ST's site software. It works over at Devotion because they have custom written code.

[Cyclone Boom 16,829]

@Pakistani890

Also see our replies here and here for more info about why it's currently not feasible to implement.

It might be possible someday with upgraded or different site software, but not right at this moment in time.

[Pakistani890 122]

3 hours ago, Cyclone Boom said:

Also see our replies here and here for more info about why it's currently not feasible to implement.

It might be possible someday with upgraded or different site software, but not right at this moment in time.

Ok got it but please whenever it's feasible please do implement it