More observations on Custom Map downloads

[Karsten75]

I feel quite bad, every time I download a map I find even more criticism of the download page. I realize Virgil probably threw it together in a hurry and not anticipating the flood of maps he has to deal with.

On the sort options, there is "Time", but it seems more likely that this is "Date" (submitted).

There is a sort option on "Downloads," but there is no indicator of the actual number of downloads. Also, older maps from the days before many maps were submitted, probably are heavily skewed to the top, i suspect.

I wish that there were more selections and sort options within selections.

Virgil, are you storing the maps in a database? Is the download page a front-end to that database? Are you writing it in PHP/SQL/MySQL?

[knucracker]

Time is "Date submitted".  This is the default sort, with most recent shown first.

Downloads sorts by total number of downloads for the map (which is show to the right of each map along with the other info). For the most part, older maps have higher downloads since they have had longer to be downloaded.

I should probably also show the time:date that the map was submitted.

As soon as I get the next version of the game out (today or tomorrow I sure hope).  I will finish up the search function on the maps.  This will at least let people search for a string and filter the maps that way.

The maps are indeed in a database and I use php and mysql.

Other than filtering what other sorts  of things did you have in mind (some other sort option, or organization?). 

[betadata]

I am finding the comments written for the maps most valuable. maybe a search for maps with comments.
the maps that are a completed series could be zipped as a single download.
There does seem to be maps that are never played by the maker. some sort of victory confirmation could be required to be submitted with the map.

[knucracker]

I could see a sort option based on the number of comments...  not a bad idea.

The biggest thing asked for are probably options that somehow relate maps together into a series.  Right now, every map is an individual map and authors relate them by title alone (and there is no convention on this).  I'm sure that people might like some sort of view called 'campaigns', that showed maps grouped by campaign.  This could be done I guess, but I'd have to maintain it all manually as maps are uploaded.

Older ideas that have been suggested were to associate a bunch of attributes with the maps and provide filters for these attributes.

[Karsten75]

Time is "Date submitted".  This is the default sort, with most recent shown first.


The maps are indeed in a database and I use php and mysql.

Other than filtering what other sorts  of things did you have in mind (some other sort option, or organization?). 

I'm quite disorganized (others call me scatterbrained^*) and right now all the options that have come to mind are in my various threads here.

Having said that, reverse sort as well as the default sort order. Also filter by campaign name.

I'm proposing that all maps should have (even if it is blank for a one-off map) have a campaign field and then the order in that campaign since so many authors write campaigns. Once I download Aurzel's campaign maps, ofr instance, they show up as the name of a planet, so I have no way to get them in order or something.

Some of this probably implies changes to the "Custom game" dialogs on-game as well as on the map download page, I'm sorry.


^*Right before I came here to post, I was playing a map and I thought of something that was novel and has never been mentioned before. And now I just cannot remember what it was. I'm afraid that my greatest work will one day be a little annotation in the margin of a book that  reads "this theorem is quite trivial and can easily be demonstrated."
(Link to classical allusion included for the curious.)