Community Content Creation - We Want Your Feedback

Community Content Creation - We Want Your Feedback

MaSzyna has always been developed not only by programmers, but also by people creating rolling stock, scenery, 3D models, textures, sounds and many other parts of the simulator.

We are currently looking at ways to make community content creation easier to discover and easier to get into. This is not a recruitment post requiring you to become a permanent member of the development team. Even a single model, texture, sound, scenery improvement or small fix can be valuable to the project. We would like to hear directly from players who might be interested in creating something for MaSzyna.

What would we like to know?

If you are interested, please tell us in the comments:

Would you be interested in creating content for MaSzyna?

For example:

• 3D models

• textures

• sounds

• scenery

• rolling stock

• configuration files

• technical or railway-related data

• other improvements

Have you ever tried creating or modifying something for MaSzyna? If yes, did you ever consider submitting it to the official project?

If you wanted to contribute but never did, what stopped you?

For example:

• I did not know where to start

• I did not know what the project currently needed

• I could not find the documentation

• the documentation seemed too complicated

• I did not understand MaSzyna's formats or tools

• I did not know how to submit finished work

• I did not know whether outside contributions were accepted

• I was unsure whether my work was good enough

• I didn't even know I could edit simulator files

Would a public list of tasks for contributors be useful? We are considering marking tasks with information such as:

• estimated difficulty

• good for beginners

• reference materials available

• mentor available

Would shorter, beginner-oriented documentation help?

Instead of asking a new contributor to read all of the technical documentation immediately, we are considering providing short guides containing only the information needed to make a first contribution, with links to more detailed documentation where necessary.

What skills or tools do you already have?

For example Blender, Photoshop, GIMP, audio editing, GIS, scripting, railway knowledge or anything else that could be useful.

Most importantly: what would make you more likely to make your first contribution?

How does contributing work today?

The existing contribution system already allows community-created content to be submitted for inclusion in MaSzyna. Files can be uploaded through: https://upload.eu07.pl/ After uploading a file, the author can select "Publish for testing" and provide a name and description. A test thread is then created automatically on the MaSzyna forum. New content normally remains in testing for:

• at least one week,

• or two weeks if nobody reviews it during that time.

After the testing period, accepted content will be added to the official SVN repository by a maintainer. The content and asset issue tracker is also publicly available here: https://git.eu07.pl/eu07/maszyna/issues

One of the ideas currently being considered is making suitable tasks much easier for new contributors to find there.

Why are we asking?

There are still many people playing and following MaSzyna, but over the years fewer people have been regularly creating community content.

We do not want to change the existing system simply for the sake of changing it. Instead, we would first like to understand what is missing from the perspective of someone who could contribute, but currently does not.

You do not need to answer every question above. Even a short comment is useful. For example:

I know Blender and I would be interested in creating infrastructure models, but I do not know what models are currently needed or what technical requirements MaSzyna uses.

or:

I have modified MaSzyna before, but I did not know that my changes could be submitted to the official project.

Feedback from both experienced content creators and people who have never contributed before is welcome.

If you wanted to create something for MaSzyna tomorrow, what would make getting started easier?

Please let us know in the comments.