Is quality being appreciated?

I know I'm joining the conversation a bit on the late side.... Sorry.... first week on this forum :D But I did read this whole tread.
Had a long long talk with arti on the chat and on discord about that and I don't exactly agree with him. On my side I had nothing but support from the community. Sure, I also get 2 DV almost as soon as I post an asset, but I figured those are from the peeps that were against the toolkit items in the first place. We do agree on the fact that there's always more work done than peeps think - good or bad = if you are a beginner, even a bad model and bad texture will take you a while just to learn how it works.

But this is not a marketplace like the unity store or UE4 marketplace nor should it be. Quality is not a requirement for publishing user content. Since we're all artist, we can all apreciate artistry of any level and welcome it to the community with kindness... benevolence. That, my friends, is all up to us! And like any game mod, we mostly hear the bad stuff. Giving rates on the workshop while you shop for items is not exactly the best way to get legit feedback for your creations. How many will actually test them and go back to comment. They will either look, rate and comment (not even subscribe to it) or subscribe, download and never be heard from again. Be honest, we all do that... the interface is not exactly designed so that good feedback can be given. If only the thumps up was directly in game, that would be different (i.e. on the thumbnail). But we got what we got. And having user content is better than not having it.

Been doing mods and that kind of stuff for years, so I guess that's why I'm not really phased by this unbalanced appreciation.... on modding site, you look at 2 info to gauge quality : downloaded / bug reports. Thumbs up, votes, nice comments and other stuff dont mean anything just because of the way feedback is aquired and... the internet.


Like you and others have said in this thread, it's not only the appearance that is important, but also the technical design, such as the polygon count, well-optimised LOD's and textures. Unfortunately, not everyone realises this, which in turn can be one of the reasons why community members may express their negative opinions about specific items, simply because they do not realise how much work and time it costs to make an item for the game in a way that it is both good looking, usable and also causing no (or minimal) negative impact on game performance.

What Planco COULD do tho is be careful to name the creators of toolkit items on their own streams and highlight better what's been created what's good about them... Seen the community park stream with chanté massively use one of my creation but never mentioned it (they covered their treasure lava cave in coin piles and I'm super happy about it) ... maybe because they believed to be from the game, idk.... The planco stream could be a great place to actually give a bit of knowledge about the design of assets. You could get someone from the art team on the stream once in a while to make a ''toolkit wonderland'' and comment on the very nice creations already in the workshop and give good info about what was done by the artists... highlight the special love put into each creation, just like they do for blueprints.
 
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The planco stream could be a great place to actually give a bit of knowledge about the design of assets. You could get someone from the art team on the stream once in a while to make a ''toolkit wonderland'' and comment on the very nice creations already in the workshop and give good info about what was done by the artists... highlight the special love put into each creation, just like they do for blueprints.

I agree, i think they should dedicate one of the Streams to the Thememaker Toolkit. I know they kinda sorta did that already, but recently it died down again. If they showed a TMT item it was just a little Bonus Game of "find the TMT Object in this Blueprint" they played on Stream. There are certain Things about the TMT i would love them to do:

1: Showcase it more on the Stream, and not always from the same Creators. Also, importantly explain WHY TMT Items tend to be "bigger". I think this hasn't sunken in yet with the average User of this stuff. Explain why those items are bigger than Blueprints or Park Saves (to compare those with the TMT Objects makes me Facepalm so hard every time)

2. Make the whole submitting Process more smooth. Sometimes it takes ages just to test something because you are waiting for it to be processed.. This takes a whole chunk out of the time you could be spending on doing creating more stuff. Hopefully they give us a slimmed down Offline Testing Tool. One that is just for preview purposes to see if everything worked out as intended. I think this would speed stuff up a lot. I don't think we will get a proper Offline Tool (for various reasons) but i think at least a 3D Preview Thingy would help :)

3. Have some Streams about the technical Aspects of the TMT Stuff to help out newer Creators. Use the Hour of Stream time to go over the different Materials and show what they do and how to use them best. Maybe on one day it is the Materials, maybe on another how to use the different Effects like Roughness, Smoothness and stuff like that. Or have some Tutorials up, from start to finish. Model a simple Object, show how to LOD properly, show how to apply Materials, show how to Unwrap etc. This would make the whole Thing less intimidating and more People would try their Hand at it. This way People that would never ever try it because they think it is too complicated, would give it a shot. And maybe some untapped Talent will surface. This would be a win for everybody involved.
 
Yes I agree completly @Crowdpleaser , but I dont really think much can be done to slim down the time to process other than buying more servers to process them. I feel like it's the good old days of programming when half the time was wasted compiling! It's a either / or situation, either we get an offline tool, but wayyyy more complex and extremely heavy to run on our home machine, or we get an easy streamline process where you just send your images to be compiled on some server. One thing is for sure, the site lowers the requirements on your own equipment.

If your not really afraid of new stuff, you can use Unreal engine to develop your textures and materials, it's easy to reproduce the material workflow that the toolkit use, it's very straight foward.
As for making more guides and videos to help peeps, I think the community has got that part down. MissRedNebula, daddy poe, arti and some others are already making very good quality tutorials to help anyone that wanna try. Written tutorial (wich I prefer cause they can be more easyly used as reference while you create) are not really popular in the planco community.
 
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