djpretzel

What did you think? Post your opinion of this ReMix.

What did you think? Post your opinion of this ReMix.

UPDATE: I'm moving this to our announcements forum so it will be preserved indefinitely.

Darryn King, Online Editor for 3D World, Australia's largest electronic music publication, recently conducted an interview with me regarding OverClocked ReMix and the game music scene. You can read it at: http://www.threedworld.com.au/content/view/4937/69/ It's not too long, but he asked some good, unique questions, so it's not a duplicate of similar pieces. It's great to be getting more coverage from music-oriented publications, in addition to the great coverage we get from the gaming press. I'd like to thank Darryn for the opportunity; hope everyone enjoys reading.

There's a whole project dedicated to this that should see the light in the next few months. As a side note: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=249460 vBulletin 3.7 has some awesome new stuff that should make everyone very happy

FYI, we played pieces from these at the Anime USA panel, and they seemed to go over very well - cool stuff!

I'm starting this thread so those who wish to can express their condolences to Reuben Kee's family. Please refrain from discussion and only direct your post to his family Responses will be compiled and, if/when logistics allow, communicated to Reuben's family UPDATE: I've contacted Reuben's father with printouts of this thread as well as a link. If you haven't commented yet, please still feel free, as we will leave this thread up as an announcement indefinitely, for all to see.

What did you think? Post your opinion of this ReMix.

What did you think? Post your opinion of this ReMix.

What did you think? Post your opinion of this ReMix.

What did you think? Post your opinion of this ReMix.

There are two environments on planet earth that seem to bring out the worst in people: driving, and the Internet. Of the two, the Internet at least also results in as many if not more positive developments, and rarely causes fatalities. Driving is friggin' scary, period. I'll drive considerably slower or faster just to get away from a crowd of cars, because quite simply, I don't trust people on the road. Whenever anyone talks about how risky ANYTHING is - skydiving, bungie-jumping, cholesterol, etc. - I almost always counter with the fact that, statistically, driving is more dangerous. I'll share a story that happened just last week: I'm driving along I66 at about 20mph in the far right lane - there's tons of traffic, it's rainy, things are moving very slowly, etc., plus my exit's coming up, so I've no desire to merge over to the "fast" lanes just to merge back in a couple miles. I've got my lights on, my wipers on, am following at a safe distance... doing everything one should. I look in my rear view mirror and notice that a gasoline tanker is following VERY close to my car. Say, two feet away. That's too close for ANY car, much less a large truck, so I'm wondering what this dude's deal is. Let me stop and say something about truck drivers: most of them are far BETTER drivers than everyone else on the road. They do this for a living, they care about safety, and in general they don't drive overly aggressive OR overly tentative. This guy was a major exception, however. He kept following 1-2 feet behind me. Literally, I look out my rear view mirror, all I see is a truck grille and "MACK"... and I can literally feel the truck's engine. He's either sleepy, or fucking with me, or playing some sort of game to amuse himself ("see how close I can come to hitting this car without actually touching it")... I'm trying to change lanes, but it's congested, and there's nowhere to go. Suddenly I feel a lurch and hear a bump - he finally got too close and hit me. Now, I can't safely accelerate or I'll hit the car in front of me. My first reaction was to break, and the dude KEPT moving forward, pushing my car along. I laid off the accelerator and laid ON the horn, trying to get him to STOP pushing my car. I don't know if any of you have ever been forcibly pushed along by a gasoline tanker, but it's not fun. Anyways, he DID pull over afterwards, and - miracle - a cop when you need one! A state police officer was right behind the whole thing and gave the dude a ticket. The truck driver apparently tried to argue that I cut him off... I tried to indicate to the officer that this guy wasn't safe on the road, that he was either high, sleepy, or had massive psychological issues, but no dice. The dude DID get a ticket for "following too close" which is apparently a big enough deal that he'll have to show up in court, but still... tailgating someone for a minute, hitting them, then pushing them along for 15-20 feet seems like it should be reckless, to me... I didn't get hurt, and my car's surprisingly in decent shape as well, but it was definitely HIGHLY disturbing. I mean... a GASOLINE tanker... seems to me that, even among truck drivers, these guys should be EXTRA careful. Bottom line... people do absolutely crazy things on the road. Drive defensive.

Well, I thought about it... the other thing removing it accomplishes is that it buys back vertical page space, so 1024x768 people can see more of the initial reviews, plus four of the options on the nav bar are available via the drop-downs and sidebar... Anyone else wanna chime in? I wanted to streamline these pages (reviews, judges decisions) as much as possible...

Implemented. If anyone has concerns or objections, please let me know; I think it's a big improvement that makes reviews/decisions in particular more readable.

Robert runs ocrmirror.org and currently isn't denying requests for MP3s that have referrers different from ocremix.org, or no referrer at all... he might object to bandwidth ultimately being sucked up from such gadgets, widgets, etc., I don't know... it'd be interesting to see what type of an impact it has. I suppose I'd prefer to develop one myself, or take over development, or have some say, if it were to be "official" in some way, but currently it's not doing anything wrong that isn't being done elsewhere, I'd imagine...

Good idea, with the blogs; I'll look into that. As far as coding goes, our M.O. around here is to move slowly and deliberately, gradually adding stuff we think people want and like, without breaking the site or adding too much administrative/maintenance overhead. I've been making some progress with an improved administrative backend, and have been investigating several neat things we can do with vB, but one of the reasons we've been around pretty darn long, with pretty minimal downtime, is that we heavily rely on integrating open-source packages like vB (commercial OSS) and MediaWiki (free OSS) as opposed to rolling our own site from scratch. We've got a lot of cool stuff planned though. One of the things I think we're going to do soon is have a dedicated "Site Feedback, Issues & Suggestions" forum, or something of that ilk, instead of relying on this single thread...

Nice, but... artists might want to maintain/alter that, which adds a degree of programmatic complexity. Maintenance always kills the fun. On another note, since we seem to have people reading this thread today, I've got a notion to create a sub-template of our main forum skin specific to the remix reviews and judges decisions forums that would: Be mandatory - even if you'd selected the default vbulletin skin, in these forums, it'd not be available. Remove some of the standard forum navigation, specifically the "User CP - FAQ - Members List - Calendar - Search" etc. bar and the thread header column. Remove forum signatures Remove most of the profile info (group icons, potentially avatars, etc.) The rationale would be that, specifically in the reviews and judges decisions forums, being able to see everything that everyone's said very quickly is more important, that those threads should always be more about the mix in question than about someone's cool sig, and that it'd be nice if those forums were more integrated into the remix detail pages, which seems more natural when there's less "forum-type stuff" present. Thoughts? I think it's a good idea... we could always put it to a poll, but before that, I'd like to see what people think. I could potentially do some mockups later tonight...

Well, the site's scope is almost inevitably going to be expanding... the equivalent of OCR 5.0 is in the works, and it's focused more on content than design. I wouldn't think of putting it on the judge's panel, but if a separate group of ReMixers and/or members of the community were up for it, perhaps it'd be doable. For example, would you be interested?

Clearly I need to train my subservient underlings better... 30 lashes! Going back to AnSo's comment, and since you're around Dhsu, I sorta like the idea of doing sheet music specifically, but perhaps allowing for ReMix "attachments" in general... for sheet music, one question would be whether we started a sheet music archive, or JUST allowed such files when they correspond with an existing mix or to-be-posted mix...

Well, let's not kid ourselves.... a lot of sites would meet this definition of "dictatorship"; ultimately, as long as one person or entity owns the rights to the domain name and/or business name and/or trademark, the illusion of democracy can persist to varying degrees, but ultimately the decision-making authority is vested in the entity with legal ownership. So it becomes a matter of degrees. Frankly, you can characterize OCR as dictatorship, oligarchy, gerontocracy, etc. all you want, but on a great number of important site decisions, community feedback has been heavily solicited and given a great deal of weight.

Agreed. Also note that turning DFD on and off can be finicky; perhaps, before, when it worked, you actually DID have it on, and just didn't know...

Great game so far... I didn't preorder, I got to EBX 10 minutes before close last night, they had two copies... BAM. It's genius. I also recently started BioShock, which I think is ridiculously well done. I'm hearing good things about Assassin's Creed now, as well... I dunno, 2007 has been a juggernaut year for gaming. It's almost scary how much quality is out there. Galaxy, however, does EXACTLY what the reviews say it does - redefines a genre. Often you can do that without making a playable, enjoyable game at the same time, but this is Nintendo, and that clearly didn't happen. I'm a happy pretzel.

What did you think? Post your opinion of this ReMix.

Indeed. Sidenote: the implementation of reviews on remix detail pages has changed somewhat; I'm using javascript to recreate some of the tabs on mix detail pages on the review threads, so you can bounce back and fourth between the two. The eventual plan is to move to actual links for downloads, lyrics, etc., i.e. "www.ocremix.org/remix/OCR01000/download/", and at that point the forum tabs could also have more than just "main"... the contextual tabs (lyrics, at the moment) would be a little problematic... also, the judges decision forum will have these links and identify under the "reviews" tab, which is still kinda accurate, though a preferable solution may present itself. If you've got no idea what I just said, that's cool, but if you do, let me know what you think...

What did you think? Post your opinion of this ReMix.