DarkeSword

Hey all! Just some quick updates I wanted to let you all know about. Site & Forum Updates If you're an artist, your forum profile now includes a link to your artist page. This also shows up in your little profile box when you post threads. I've been doing a couple of small style and layout tweaks to forum listings in an effort to reduce some whitespace. Guidelines for certain forums have been moved out of the announcements module to the forum's internal rules setting. You'll see a relevant link on forums that have specific guidelines. I did a pass on forum profile fields and deleted a lot of obsolete data (like the field for your ICQ number!). There are a couple of new fields too, like Pronouns and Discord. Make sure you head over to your account settings and keep that profile updated! Tagging has been disabled on forum threads for regular members. We (the staff) weren't seeing a lot of sensical or consistent usage, so we're in the process of cleaning those up. We may revisit forum thread tags later with predefined options. The Ready to Review process in the Post Your Game ReMixes forum has been retired. It served us well for a couple of years but after a while we found that people were not engaging with it, and it felt like another bureacratic layer to the submission process. We've gone back to the older, more open-ended format where you can just post your remixes for feedback. A similar process in the Recruit & Collaborate forum has also been retired. Vote counts on submissions in the queue have been moved out of thread titles and into tags for the purposes of some internal tooling I'd like to try, so you won't see those anymore on the Currently dashboard and I worked on fixing how that data gets pushed to the dashboard, so you'll still see vote counts. Upcoming Events Do you have OPINIONS about REMIXES? Join us this Thursday at 8:30PM EST on Discord where we run the first-of-hopefully-many Review Bombs! We're going to get a listening party going for OC ReMixes that have gone the longest without having any reviews and rectify the situation. I've heard of Metroidvania, but METROID VERSUS VANIA?! This Friday, we're kicking off the second run of Game Set Mash!!, our long-form team-based remix competition. This run features music from two legendary franchises: Metroid and Castlevania, and two teams will compete to see who can make the best Metroidvania Mashups. They'll have two weekends to get their tracks done, so check back at the start of February and get your votes in! Speaking of competitions, I'd be remiss if I didn't shout-out the People's Remix Competition, which just ended a legendary 20 year run under the stewardship of @Bundeslang. I remember back when PRC started back in 2003 (!!) and it's been a rock solid staple of OC ReMix since then, with a lot of musicians in the community developing and honing their skills through their participation. Absolutely incredible work from everyone involved over these past two decades. Make sure you check out the thread for the last round! Well, that's all from me for now. I'm still getting a handle on how everything works and fits together here, but slowly-and-surely we're going to continue to inch OCR ever-forward. Thanks! - DarkeSword

Folks, we are beginning our mixing stage this Friday evening. Choose one source from each game in your set, for a total of three sources. As stated before, don't choose the same song multiple times if multiple games share the song. When your team has settled on your picks, one person on each team should @darkesword in the team thread on Discord with YouTube links to the sources. Source picks are due by Thursday, January 25, at 11:59PM EST. Make sure you join the OCR Discord! That's where most of the discussion and team coordination is occurring!

? Keep those bangers comin!

Hey Rukunetsu. This sounds great, but please post one track per thread with an appropriate thread title which includes the name of the game and the title of your track you're sharing. :)

This is probably most relevant to the Unmod folks, so I guess I'll put it here. I've archived the Off-Topic forum, as the forums themselves have been pretty sleepy as a discussion space over the past few years; most of the forum activity happens in the Workshop sections. I don't feel like we particularly need a separate space for something as nebulous as "off-topic" anymore, so it's been moved to a read-only state.

We're starting at the end of the month!! Check the first post for details!!

This has been updated. Thanks.

Locking this thread in favor of having specific threads for specific issues.

I'll be driving down on Friday morning just for the OCR panel. I'll probably stick around for lunch or something after, maybe hit up Nando's, and then I've gotta drive back up to NJ. Best bet if you wanna see me is to hit up the panel.

Happy New Year, everyone! Just wanted to check-in and let you all know that we've got a new submissions process for remixes. Since the inception of the site, we've been asking you to host your file somewhere and send us an email with a bunch of information about your remix. This has lead to a lot of headaches on both your end and our end, but now we're finally moving forward with a more modern method. Introducing the new Submissions Tracking page! We've used our forum software to build out a custom form where you can upload your track directly to us. This post will get a status and linked to a decision thread, and it also features a comments section where judges can communicate with you about issues with your remix. Submissions are private, so only you and the judges can see them. In the coming months we'll be retiring the old email method of submitting remixes with an auto-response that'll direct folks towards the new system. This new form, combined with our recently revamped Currently in the Judging Process dashboard, will help you keep tabs on your submissions. A big shout out to all of the ReMixers and Judges who helped me test out this new system. I've had ideas for years for turning our submissions and judging workflows into a fully integrated piece of software, and while the limitations of our forum software prevent us from hitting that goal 100%, this is a huge step in the right direction. I'm looking forward to hearing what you all are going to send us. ? — DarkeSword

Thanks for the detailed report. This was another side-effect of adjusting some permissions with recent group changes. I've fixed the permissions for Guests to allow attachment downloading.

Co-signing this. I appreciate that you felt inspired by djp's words, but I don't believe that's quite what he meant. NO Override.

We recently got rid of the Contributors user group, which had certain permissions tied to it, but was vaguely defined on our end it didn't make a lot of sense to keep around. A side-effect of this was that upload quotas were tied to that group. I've adjusted the upload quota and permitted file types for Members. You should be able to upload again. Thanks for your continued participation in Workshop! Hope this helps.

I took a quick listen to this paying specific attention to the quoted section. I think djpretzel summed this up pretty well in the decision referenced by Brad above, and I think it still holds true. He wrote: This does indeed suck for the mixers, who've put together some good, enjoyable music, but I simply feel that posting this would be setting a precedent for even more liberal mash-ups, and the idea is to honor game music by reinterpreting it - while melding it with external sources is a creative and musical act, or at least can be as these artists have shown, in my book it doesn't jive with the site's mission statement, and is similar to our existing rule that popular movie themes like Star Wars which happen to be used in games don't "count" either. More than two cents, I know, but the music was good and the mixers deserved a more thorough explanation. In full agreement here, and while Dave was referencing a different work, it holds true here: I think this is a good arrangement but the non-VGM quotes are too substantial, IMO. The brief Strauss quote is fine, but the extended BTBAM quote just takes up too much of the piece. It'd be nice to see a revised version for OCR, but also I get the artistic choices at play here. As it stands though, it's a NO.

Might want to compare to tracks on the VGMix Archive.

Artist: WillRock I I was inspired by Gary Moore's The Loner. I went for a more guitar centric approach, with less shred and more of a slow, deliberate approach, with a big emphasis on MASSIVE 80'S SNARES. Pretty no nonsense. Hope you guys dig it. Revenge of Shinobi - My Lover:

This is a limitation of Invision's RSS feed implementation. They adhere pretty strictly to the RSS 2.0 specification, which states that the author field is meant to be an email address, which they will not expose in an RSS feed due to privacy concerns. I know it *feels* dumb but there it is. Apologies. I suppose in the future we'll sign our Announcements when they're first-person style.