Can we create a Resource Portal?

Something I've observed and admired over my years in the Unity community is how we all are so helpful to each other through donations of little bits of code or shaders here and there. The usefulness of these little scripts, shaders, and even assets is astounding and though often posted to help one person, end up helping countless others.

However, an unfortunate problem is that all this work, incredibly useful as it is, is not collated in any central space. It always seems spread out among the unity forums, unify wiki, unity answers, github, or the asset store. I'm currently working on a great package that I want to give out to the community when it's complete but I don't know where it would go:

• The asset store is unsuitable as it's not really a product I'm trying to sell and I also don't want the associated hassles of creating a seller account, artwork, keeping it updated, etc.
• The Unify Wiki is great but seems mostly inactive these days, and unfortunately has inherent problems in being a wiki which make it difficult to browse, difficult to foster discussions on pieces, the classically unfriendly wiki interface, and it's uploading assets to it is a challenge at best, impossible at worst.
• This leaves the option of posting it in the forums, the most popular place to contribute to the community, but due to it being a forum anything posted will get buried by date. It's sad to see so many great shaders and snippets of code get lost over time.

So here's my suggestion: Could we create a central Resource Portal especially aimed at collating all these community-contributed works? Something which takes the well-organized nature of the Asset Store but gives it the collaborative intent of the Unify Wiki, keeping everything categorized, user-friendly, and easily browseable? This would be ideal for collecting simple scripts and shaders, but also bigger packages and project files, such as the ultra-useful-to-anyone-who-knows-about-it Shadowgun Example Project along with the other learning sources Unity have been creating over the years. A place where users can have a discussion on a resource, and even submit updates for it. I guess in its simplest form it would be a new version of Unify that uses a more suitable and user-friendly CMS than the current MediaWiki, integrated with better community features. (Anyone know is such a system exists?)

I would be more than happy to donate to such a project, both with money and by donating future asset packs but I suppose it depends if people would find a use for it. In a perfect world Unity might be able to manage such a Resource Hub for us, as the value it could bring to all Unity users would be so valuable, but perhaps I'm overthinking the situation and people currently find the Unify Wiki more favorable of a system?

 

I think the Wiki is the best place. I visit it a lot.

 

Yes please. (been thinking something similar myself, but just lack of time..)

Might be good idea to first start small, for example shaders collection to test it out..
(with proper search filters for shader searching: "[x] SM2, [ ] DX11 [x] Pro Only [ ]... ")

And later have it as unity editor plugin for easy search also for submitting snippets..

 

That's a good idea. I think an ideal system would focus on tagging content, allowing categorization to be more automated and easily searched.

 

I've actually been working on developing a Unity-focused community portal for a while now. It hasn't been a top priority though as I wasn't sure if there would be much demand for it.

I completely agree - we need a central repository of snippets/assets/community-based content. The Wiki is great, but it's very limited - I often get lost trying to find something in there.

I might dust off the project today (unless someone else has one running already I don't know about ), any other feature requests? Project showcases maybe? Some kind of asset portfolio? Tutorials? The more content we can add to it, the more useful it'll be.

 

That sounds brilliant minionnz. I enthusiastically agree with the suggestion for extra features so long as we can keep scope realistic.

I suggest the ypes of categories would be something along the lines of…

- General Unity Tips, Tricks, and Optimization Techniques
- Tutorials
- Case Studies
- Example Projects
- Scripts
- Shaders
- 3D 2D Art
- Editor Extensions Frameworks
- etc.

So I feel a big hurdle that needs solving is how to structure and categorize it in an intuitive way. I think there are three keys to making it successful…

1. Ease of use for those wishing to contribute content;
2. Ease of use for visitors to find what they need;
3. A Focus on contribution teaching.

An approach for making it inviting for content creators could be to treat it similar to a blogging system like Gamasutra's Expert Blogs. An author will have their own posting account which tracks their submission history (thus automatically creating a portfolio) and every new submission will be pushed to the homepage, which can be followed by RSS. An author should find to easy to submit simply a new shader, or they can elaborate a bit further with some side notes, or even make it into an in-depth article. Perhaps there could even be encouragement toward postmortems and other articles which branch out slightly to other game studio topics.

Again though, it'll be important to keep the assets separate from the articles in some way so they can be arranged and easily browsable. Perhaps keep all physical assets on a distinct type of 'asset page', kept in a bright and shiny area kept away from the rest of the other articles.

An aspect that can help the site self-organize itself would be to give established authors the power to edit the tags of submissions and re-organize them as needed. Assets could also be sorted by user votes and have easy commenting.

I'm not sure if a website exists like this, merging community content with articles, so perhaps it could be something quite special.

 

Sounds like a pretty neat idea. Hosting costs might be an issue if its going to contain larger assets like textures and models.

How heavily curated do you think it should be?

- John A

 

Go ahead and give it a shot.

 

And that's the problem, isn't it? It's a lot of work to set up, it costs money to maintain, and then there's more work to keep it curated, even if you have volunteer moderators helping. Anyone sufficiently motivated to run this long-term would have started it already.

It's not that it's a bad idea, it's that it doesn't provide enough incentive for the creator. They need to monetize it or get enough out of it themselves to make it worthwhile. That could be usage of the assets, or publicity, or some other thing... But in general, no 1 person will get enough out of it to make it happen.

 

There are websites which can offer some free hosting, even allowing domain names. I think that would be a decent place to start. x10 hosting is one of them.

I think he'd get great publicity and such, and eventually money if anything good happens.

 

John, I think that most of the community content out there is primarily scripts and shaders. It would be great to allow larger assets too but hopefully the hosting costs wouldn't be an issue.

In terms of curation, I think it should be light. In the case someone puts something up that's similar to an existing asset, I think the community of other authors would notice it and determine which is the better version and mark the other as deprecated. In regard to article posts, I think curation should deal mainly with spam and anything deemed too off-topic or unnecessary.

Something that could be incredibly helpful, but I don't know how feasible would be, is to give each asset an "efficiency level", grading it from say 1-5 on how optimized it is. There would be an associated key that'll give a rough estimate of hardware requirements per grade which show where an asset is suitable for desktop or mobile and which generation of devices are recommended. The problem with this is that the definitions would change over time, so it's a bit more complicated but could be very useful. I think the most asked question I see is, "Does it work on mobile?"


Minionnz, how far did you get into your project? What kind of direction were you going in?

 

Couldn't people upload them to the asset store and just have them free? Or is their like a cost to put stuff on their or something?

 

asset store process is quite annoying and slow, and that search is no good, and .. and..

you can get hostgator (or similar) cheap hosting for ~4usd/mo.

for assets, would be nice to have rating system.. (so that broken assets wont come up first in search..)

also copyright/piracy would be one problem especially in 3D assets, textures, sounds..
people submit 3D models taken from "internet" as free to use, when they are not..

 

Is that would you truly believe, though wccrawford? Why do people help each other on StackExchange, Unity Answers, or these forums? Why do people post free assets, or write free tutorials, or create youtube video tutorials?

I have great content that I have made for my game. I want to donate some of the most advanced technology to the community so people can use it in their games, modify it, learn from it. I don't need money nor publicity. I just want somewhere to put it, in a place where it'll do the most good.

 

I don't think hosting costs will be an issue - I've got a spare Linode server that I can use for hosting for now and I'd probably look at moving larger assets/downloads to Amazon S3 once they become an issue.

Spent a lot of time brainstorming I've written quite a lot of code for it already and have the upload/share functionality working but haven't even thought about the theme/design yet - and I'll have to start thinking about it fairly soon.

I'm aiming to have a very rough concept up by the end of the weekend, so I'll let you know.

The creator of the free assets/shaders or the creator of the site? The asset creator could get good publicity and link to his asset store profile from the site - perhaps it will be a good way to drive sales. If you're talking about the site creator, then I'm sure the value of having a easy-to-browse repository of free assets available should be enough - only one way to find out

--

The grading/rating ideas should work well - and won't be hard to implement at all.

Should we require images/screenshots when a shader is uploaded? I think an image definitely helps when looking for a shader - but don't want to make the process too difficult for authors/creators/contributors.

 

So then I ask you: Which one of you is stepping up to create this site?

All I've seen so far is people saying that "someone" should do this and that, and throwing a lot of ideas around. Nobody has actually said they'd do it. Not even the ones claiming that the site creator would get so much out of it.

If it's so good, why haven't you started on it? It all goes back to my previous post.

When someone figures out how to get enough benefit out of running the site, *then* it'll happen.

For a rare few, helping the community is enough for them. That's all they need. For the vast majority, they need a lot more to take on something of this magnitude.

 

I could see what I can do if we get people in the community helping out.

 

Cool!

I will be able to contribute to the site and interface design so let me know if you do need any help. I already have a rough vision in my head but I'm interested to see what you come up with minionnz.

I agree, pictures would be nice but we also don't want to discourage contributors. I'd suggest a staged uploading process, similar to what many of the new website sign-up systems use, where they encourage optional info immediately after account creation. People like this system and it creates a captive audience funnel…


—— [Login / Create Account] ——
v v v v v v v v v v v v v v v v v v
—— "What type of submission are you making?" [Dropdown: Script, Shader, Texture, 3D Model, Article, Tutorial...] ——
—— [Upload Button] ——
v v v v v v v v v v v v v v v v v v
—— "Congratulations! Your submission was received. We require a just bit more info about the [Shader] you uploaded before we make it public." ——
—— "Please add at least two suitable tags to describe this [Shader]" ——
—— "Roughly what level of efficiency do you feel your [Shader] is closest to?" [Dropdown: Level 1 (Very efficient, runs on most mobile devices) .... Level 5 (Needs optimizing, runs on high-end desktops) .... I don't know]" ——
v v v v v v v v v v v v v v v v v v
"Thank-you! Your submission has been added to the library. An example image to go with the submission is highly encouraged. Would you like to upload one now?"
—— [Upload Button] ——

 

I found a variety of open / free CMS systems that could be a good base to work from, but I'm unfamiliar with all of them or which might be best-suited, hopefully someone else might have more input here…

http://www.joomla.org
https://drupal.org
http://radiantcms.org
http://www.silverstripe.org

 

Well, so far I've managed to get to this point with my attempt:


You can either upload/paste a shader or add it from an existing site (eg: Unity Wiki) in which case it'll provide a clear link back to the main source.

Using Wordpress as the back end so many of the features can be added using existing plugins.

Also, ignore the name/logo - it is just a placeholder and you won't find it online anywhere yet

 

That's looking excellent Minion! I didn't realize wordpress was so extensible.

What do you feel you need in order to get it to a testing stage, where some of us here can take a look and begin giving some feedback; suggestions, bugs, features, etc?

 

It's a pretty simple project to get going, and if you limit the upload size of things to be smaller, and do proper google indexing I think it can bring in enough in ad revenue to cover the costs of it.

You're not going to be able to become the next mark zuckerberg, but it will cover it's own expenses I believe.

Also, the hosting for the site in itself should be pretty cheap, so any ads on shaders etc will have a higher profit margin, hopefully balancing out the larger downloads.

I would also not use wordpress or any CMS like it as a backend, but rather code my own using a framework such as CodeIgniter or Zend or whatever floats your boat, simply because it has less risks (you're responsible for your own security, and public exploits of known CMS's wont be an issue) and also, more freedom to do what you want with it (I worked with Wordpress for 2 years, so I know it quite well, and I wouldn't use it for any serious project such as this).

 

Tough question It's mostly just a workload issue at the moment, trying to find spare time to get it done. I'm getting pretty close I think though, I'll put aside a few hours per day and keep you updated.

Hopefully it'll be able to pay for itself - I can probably just piggy-back it off one of my existing servers though so I'm not too worried (for now at least).

I've looked at a few other frameworks (Yii, Laravel, CI) - definitely a lot more customizable, but the amount of resources/plugins/themes available for Wordpress will save me a lot of time. May have been smarter/easier to go with an MVC approach but not much point turning back now, I'll concentrate on getting it up and running then re-evaluate frameworks - I've made sure that the code I've written is generic enough code to allow me to port easily later anyway (excluding wp-specific hooks).

 

OK, sounds good. And like I said, I truly feel the key is making it simple and easy for authors — if you can accomplish that, then you've nailed it!

And that would be great if you can keep us all updated! If there's anything I can help with, just let me know.

 

Great idea, even though I feel this should be made by unity and part of their community portal altogether.

 

I like the design quite a bit. Keep it going.

 

Have you had a chance to get any closer to a beta test, minionnz?

 

Sorry, been meaning to post an update for a while - I've been working on a couple of client projects for the last couple of months, so they've been sucking up all my free time but you can expect to see some progress in a weeks time.

Once I get it to an alpha state, I'll put it online - I don't expect it will be bug free, but should be enough to get the ball rolling and hopefully motivate me to put some solid hours into it.

 

Sounds ideal minionnz. But PFFT to client work when you could be changing the world of Unity developers everywhere!

 

Yes, sounds good.

 

There was sellbox but people dont "trust it", but you can upload to dropbox or google drive then use sellbox to sell it.

 

minionnz, are planing to have tutorials on the site?