....
yeah.
i agree with this message
Reviews for "The Portal - A Message"
I know you're trying to say but...
To all the veterans in NG I might seem like a newcomer, but I love this site as much as they do.
I saw the message you were trying to get across but It just didn't hit me, I didn't think "Oh shit he's right".
I think this entry was a poor execution to a big problem and that's probably why your'e not getting your point across as strong as you wish you could.
But I agree with what you say.
Tom has a BIG point...
Bad portal submissions happen, so stop whining. If a portal animation sucks, it'll just get booted off the site like all the rest. Instead of wasting the time writing a complaint, why don't you spend it storyboarding or animationg a piece of content worthy of a high score.
And on another note, take the time to learn more about the fine art of finessing your flash. Tom made a great point in saying that animations should be as small as possible, and since flash is a vector based animation program, it shouldn't be difficult to cut your file sizes down by a couple 100k.
-OPTIMIZE your art, it will only save space and lower the CPU hit for every frame. Meaning there will be fewer skipped frames.
-Keep your MP3 compression to 24 Kbps or lower. The main reason why file sizes are so big is due mostly to audio. Choose music loops as opposed to fully orchestrated soundtracks, edit out any dead sound in your sound effects.
-Keep tweening to a minimum if you can. Learn the art of keyframed animation for character movement.
Keep on, keepin' on. I've seen some great work come out of the public. Let's keep it going strong.
:)
James
james@ idearage.com
Ok... First of all, I don't want this review to come across as insulting. I appreciate that you are being supportive of NG.
Our bandwidth problems aren't primarily the result of crappy Portal movies. Crappy Portal movies merely take up hard-drive space on the server - of which we have plenty.
What does cause bandwidth problems is movies that are much larger than they should be. All of my Flash movies are 100-600k. Pico, for example, is just over 300k. Your movie, which was mainly text with a music loop, was 705k. It made it into the top 5 of the day, which means it will probably get more visitors than Pico for the next day. So yes, your movie is adding to the bandwidth bill by 2x the amount of someone playing Pico.
Again, I don't want you to delete your movie or anything - I'm just pointing out the irony of the situation!
As for crappy Portal submissions - yes, they are annoying. However, I think there are people who enjoy being on the same level as us (the site operators), and they enjoy seeing everything that we would see, and voting on it as we would. If we "privatized" the TOP 20 MOST RECENT list, it would still exist... except only an "elite" group of users would be voting on what stays and goes.
If someone wants to avoid crappy Flash, they can view the top 20 of the week, or top 50 of all time. No one is forced to view the TOP 20 MOST RECENT. There are people, however, who want to help run the site - and running the site means viewing a ton of crappy Flash movies every day. I salute everyone who helps us determine the daily top 5! Even if some of the movies use lots of bandwidth!
-Tom
Gripe on your own damn time
All though we all have the same gripe about the horrible movies posted on NG, there are other ways that can be humorous, and still get their point across. This almost seems like you, are trying to win points by re-establishing our already affirmed plight.
Look this is not how to gripe, if you want to see a good current example of a gripe, go see NG Sticks.
For all I know you're one of those guys causing the NG problem and you're using a different name.