Nimloth_Cu

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So it's free image hosting for gamers, plain and simple. Okay well that sounds fine, can you tell us what the maximum compacity is for file size, how large can we uplink, and will you offer flash, and or video in the future?

Photobucket allows multple sizes, does the coding for us if we want to link the url, image or html itself. Would we have the ability to manage our own gallery of images, make folders within those galleries?

Congrats on the business, I'm all for gamers giving back and keeping it going. As I see it, your site is as you say, not Deviant, so as an artist I probably won't use it as much as a regular gamer wanting to share screens.

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Video is already supported but is in Beta, hense the no link to it. If you visit Video section BETA you will be able to upload and view videos just like with images. Specially to be noted is that when you do upload a video, it is compressed twice in two versions, one very high quality / resolution, and one "above standard" quality/resolution. The HQ version of video's is something that is a part of a feature we plan to release down the line.

There is NO LIMIT for filesize or bandwidth, at all. Upload a 5mb .BMP if you wish, it won't be taken down or get disabled from bandwidth use. The same goes for videos, there is no limit to the length or size of a video you should chose to upload.

As for actual image sizes, when you upload the file gets saved in 3 different versions. 1: Thumbnail size. 2: Preview / embed in page size. 3: Download size which is the original resolution of the image you uploaded.


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Categories and keywords you can search for for posted art would be great.

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This functionality is already implemented backend, all we need to do is make a page template for it. It will be up relatively shortly.

So that is some suggestions that we will be adding. As for Fan-Art sub-categories, could you make me a list of what to add and I will get that done a.s.a.p. Please feel free to come with more suggestions, prefrably as bulletpoint list so I can easily forward it to our developers!

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1. Registration and uploading issues. See the other thread. I don't really have things to *upload* right now, just pointing otu what was said.

2. Everything seems to just go into "Ye Olde Pile of Fanart." Categorization beyond "Screenshots" "Renders" "Fanart" and "Wallapper" would be one place to start, namely having sections by game. (I have no interest in WoW.)

3. I don't *see* a space for any sort of commenting, by the artist at least, or most have not chosen to take advantage of it. Keywords are not comments.

4. Don't take this as snark, but... "Curse Gaming?" What's with the name? Is the founder's name Curse? Are they mostly involved with a game with curses? (As in "Magic with a negative effect," not "Swearing.") Are they calling gaming a curse, or cursing gaming? Admittedly the same could, to a point, be said for "Deviant Art," but given how many people would call anything the slightest bit non-mainstream "deviant," there's reasoning there. The CG name *does* throw me a bit, but if there's reason for it - even if it's just "We're being smartalecs," say it somewhere.

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1) Registration was (untimely) broken when we implemented some anti spam-bot code last week. Our appologies for that.

2) Categorization beyond the standard is something I can simply add in the admin panel and have it available within 15 minutes. Key point for now is we haven't had a need for it yet so it hasnt been put up!

3) Commenting is possible on just about everything. This Image has some commentry done by myself as an example. You will also notice that the background of the comments area varies in color, where blue background = author / owner of image, orange = Curse admins, white = everyone else.

As for sorting images by game, this is already implemented, but perhaps not fully as visible as I'd wish it is. Allow me to explain; Curse has a database listing games. Some of these games have a dedicated portal. Accessing the image gallery for that portal will only bring up images from that game. So what about other games that does not have their own portal yet, like CoH? Well, it's implemented for that too. If you select the game on the left menu, and click the images tab, you will see a list of images and a link below that says: Browse All Images. In City of Heroes' case, it takes you to a page where you can submit and browse images.

I should point out that while only one category is showing (with only listed 5 images), there is more to it than that. The way our system is designed is around very heavy traffic. Because of this, we cache almost all database queries on our website, and we don't use queries that are not needed (like showing an empty category). If, say, I now was to upload an image under the "Renders" category for City of Heroes, in a few hours when the cache rebuilds itself the category would automatically be listed.

4) I actually should respond to this in detail.

Curse-Gaming.com started out as a guild website for a DAoC / World of Warcraft guild. From there it expanded to being interface / addons website for wow (which it still is the world leader for).

Last year, the core team behind the website decided we wanted to do something more with both our lives and our website, as we had - up til then - been a bunch of gamers doing something as a hobby project.

Fast forward to today, we have re-built Curse CMS from scratch. Every piece of software on the website from forums, to wiki, to game databases has been built by our developers. Curse is now a funded corporation with employees and work all catered around creating a one-of-a-kind web2.0 ultimate gamers portal. We are located in San Francisco under the name Curse, Inc.

The name just has been inherited from our past, although I believe now is a good time to mention we are going to be re-branding our name around our recently aqquired Curse.com in the near future with a brand new clean and streamlined design.

Now, before I end this post, please let me point one thing out:

We (Curse) are not trying to be another deviant art. We are not trying to be a replacement to the art community you have probably been a part of for years. What Curse does, is more along the lines of free image hosting sites like imageshack. Except, everything on our site is related to gaming and the games you play. What we are offering is a place to host your files, link them out to thousands of people, plug them with embed html code, rate them and comment on them, etc.

That is not, however, to say that we won't look to improve our functionality based on your feedback. You are gamers as well as artists, and if we can offer / create / improve on our site in a manner that makes it more valuable to you, then that is what we will do. In the end, we are about strengthening a community, not ignoring it's wishes.

I will read more on the commentry on this thread later, until then -

Peace.

Oh, forgot to add. You can zip all the files you wanna upload and put them up at once, so re-uploading older stuff is easy too!

We are working on getting officials from game development companies to frequent the site, so if working with art is something you like, this is also a chance to get to show off stuff to people in the industry! =]

Hello guys,
I've been lurking for a while reading your responses. You know, one thing struck me as I was summarizing your opinions... why not use both? This way you have a second target area where people will give you feedback? Fellow gamers from pretty much all sorts of mmo's, etc. You know, think about it, your stuff also gets seen by a lot more people

Lets not dispute the quality that is deviant art, but rather work on broadening your audience and feedback possibility =]

- Nimloth