Topic: widelands-media better findable/useable

Hi,

I am not very familiar with widelands and its development and as such, I have the viewpoint of a typical potential future contributor. However, I just had quite a hard time figuring out where to find the blender files. Everything seems to be on git nowadays and the mirror-bot is cool, but after quite some searching, I found a short note on a widelands git help page that everything "but widelands-media" is now on git. That lead me again after some digging to some old bazaar repos and finally to what I wanted:

https://launchpad.net/widelands-media

I hope this is correct, is it?

Now my real question and a few remarks:

• Could you not move the files there to git, too? The way things are currently, potential contributors might know git already, but most won't know bazaar, and some would have to get to know two version control systems for working on the media.
• Please make the location of things a little clearer. There are quite some places that speak of the 'widelands-media' repo, but do not link to it and do not mention where that lives in the first place. Most people would assume right beside the widelands-repo, but will not find it that way.

Please do not take these points as complaining. I just wanted to put some of my first impressions while looking "behind the scenes" into writing in the hope it helps to improve things that might naturally not be visible to long-term contributors.

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The reason to keep the media-repo on launchpad was just the size of the repo (~9GB). As far i remember github didn't allow to store such a big repo for free. If i understand this correctly github allows only 500MB for free.

Regarding finding where all the media is found: It's in our wiki, Graphics development. This page can be found by e.g. clicking on "Development" (on the above List) -> "Contribute" -> Chapter "Graphics".

Edit: Just saw that you modified the wiki yesterday and added the links. Very nice, thank you!

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The main problem with the media repo is that it's so big that it's practically impossible to check out. So first of all it should be split into manageable segments. I don't know the sizes of music and sound, but I know that graphics must be further split up for each tribe and a general section.

The second, still quite big problem is that media files are not well fit for version management, but we shouldn't throw away history either. At least the blender models went through several sweeping automatic or semi-automatic updates without actually checking whether they still render properly, so they do need the history, at least until they are all tested and either repaired or reverted to the last working version.

My re-export efforts help with the last point, but my repo grew bigger than desirable too (for different reasons, mine has too many intermediate files). And I really need to convert it to some automated build system.

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I have the media-repo here, unfortunately updated in year 2019

Anyway, checking the size of directories shows:

$:> du -h --max-depth 1 | sort -rh
5,2G    ./graphics
24M     ./sounds
7,6M    ./.bzr
1,7M    ./music

So the biggest part is the graphics directory (5,2GB) and sounds needs just 24MB. Digging in the graphics directory tree:

$:> du -h --max-depth 1 graphics/ | sort -rh
4,7G    graphics/tribes
290M    graphics/worlds
81M     graphics/website
57M     graphics/user_interface
49M     graphics/stock_sources
40M     graphics/campaigns
22M     graphics/Misc
7,4M    graphics/tools
68K     graphics/immovables
20K     graphics/wiki

graphics/tribes is the biggest directory, and there:

$:> du -h --max-depth 1 graphics/tribes/ | sort -rh
4,7G    graphics/tribes/
3,1G    graphics/tribes/frisians
656M    graphics/tribes/barbarians
555M    graphics/tribes/atlanteans
381M    graphics/tribes/empire
32K     graphics/tribes/worker level indicator icons

graphics/frisians is the biggest directory.

Not sure if this repo can be split into smaller parts.

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If no development happened on sounds/music for that long, the number by @kaputtnik should still be accurate and then we talk about 26 MB compared to 14 GB. I don't think it makes sense to split this off at this point.

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