New requests system for Kits and Logos

We have plans to make a new requests system for FM Kits and FM Logos. This is an initial thread to try and give an overview of the plan and get feedback. It will be important to try and get peoples thoughts before development is completed and the feature released since modifying it afterward will be alot more stressful.

Please try and give detailed feedback and highlight any issues you foresee.

TLDR

We simply want to create a directory of images of logos and kits that any graphic maker can use rather than having new kits and logos in forum threads where they are hard to manage and organise.

It does not make sense for the creators of Metallic Logos, TCM Logos and FM Logos to all spend time finding good quality logos for every team in Africa. Nor does not make sense for the creators of FC Kits and SS Kits to both spend time finding source images for the Norwegian Premier League, or for the fan of a team to have to submit requests to both people in different places when a new kit is released.

We simply want to create a central area to organise all these source images that all graphic makers can use to reduce the time everyone spends finding source images.

The long explanation

The basic premise is to create something similar to the submission systems we have for backgrounds and cut out faces. However Kits and Logos differ from backgrounds and faces in a couple of ways.

1. Faces don't change on a schedule instead improved sources are found in the form of better quality photos or more up to date hairstyles.
2. Logos rarely change, but many source files are poor quality so improved versions can regularly be found.
3. Kits change around the same time each year. Improved sources are rarely needed though.
4. The same source image can be used for all logo and kit styles, this is not true for backgrounds and faces.

(4) is the most significant difference here. Where as the cut outs have one submission system that allows people to post comments, requests and completed images, it would not make sense to have the same system for every logo or kit style, since should Watford release a new kit and logo this would require separate requests being made in the submission systems for 10+ different styles. We want to avoid this.

Source Images Project

The plan is to create a seperate project for “Source Kits” and “Source Logos”. This will allow people to submit images of kits and logos that can then be used to create FM Graphics. This would work the same as the submissions system for backgrounds and cut out faces except people would not be able to upload completed FM Graphics directly to the project, only real life photos that can be used as a source to create FM Graphics.

For example, if Watford release a new Logo anyone should be able to visit the source kits project, see the “currently active logo” and if it's not the latest one they can submit a photo of it, which when approved will become the currently active logo. Older logos will still be visible in the timeline and people can also add comments which will be included in the timeline as well.

Then the graphic creators will be able to visit this page, download the source logo and create the FM Graphic. We will of course make it easy to find teams with updated kits and logos by having a timeline showing recently updated images and allowing bulk downloads of the past day/week/month.

A general overview of features

• The ability to browse source images for specific teams by Continent > Nation > League > Team.
• The ability to quickly search for source images for a specific team.
• The ability to submit source images via upload and submitting a URL.
• The ability to submit comments on a particular team.
• The ability to set what years a logo or kit was active for (thus allowing the submission of retro sources).
• The ability to submit fantasy logos and kits, which are tagged as such and kept separate from real sources.
• The ability to quickly see a list of recently updated kits and logos.
• The ability to download source images individually or in bulk labelled as the team name, the team ID or both.
• The ability to view source images alongside images inside that styles megapack or league pack for comparison.
• The ability to view stats for how many teams have images released for each style ("completion statistics")
• The ability to quickly see teams which have an image in that styles megapack or league pack which is older than the most recent source image ("pending update statistics").

Issues and thoughts

A few issues I can think of, off the top of my head.

Style specific requirements

Some graphic styles would like to have a submission system similar to the cut outs and backgrounds. But not all of them would like to use it the same. e.g. some would just like people to be able to submit completed FM Graphics but then collect them and build a megapack themselves, others would like automatic megapack building.

Some graphic styles would not want a submissions system at all.

Some might want to allow comments but not submissions.

Some might want to allow submissions but not comments and just have a forum thread for discussions instead.

This means the code for the project needs to be very flexible and this may affect the usability and speed of the project as we try to cater for everyone.

For now we're going to focus on the source images only and not try to implement submission systems and auto generated megapacks for all graphic styles.

Comments being posted in the wrong place

We will allow comments on the source images project, which will allow people to say “Hey this is wrong, the active logo was a one off 100 year anniversary, it should be reverted to the old one now”, which will be helpful.

However, we want to avoid people leaving comments related to styles like Metallic Logos and SS Kits on the Source Images project. It won't be helpful to say “The image on the metallic logos is poor quality” or “The SS Kit has the wrong stripes colour” within the Source Images project, these sorts of discussions should be kept seperate within TCM and SS Kit specific areas.

Similarly we don't want people commenting in a TCM or SS Kit area saying “Watford just released a new 3rd away kit”, this sort of comment or submission should go in the Source Images Project.

Users will inevitably get this wrong alot and it will require alot of moderation. But we don't want to exhaust people by giving them more work, the whole point of this project is to make things easier.

I'm not 100% sure how to solve this other than education, but I imagine even moderators will find the initial transition period difficult (everyone hates change!).

It may be useful to have a single “Watford” page that gives an overview of submissions, comments and active images for both the source images and every single style next to one another, with the prompt to add comments labelled as style or source specific.

Cutting out and cropping logos

For Logos there is an extra step which could be useful for the sources. Lots of logos styles take the same source image, that has been properly cut out, positioned and cropped and simply apply effects to it. However, not every style will necessarily want the logos cropped in the same way, but multiple styles may want the same cropping.

We could allow “crop requests” and “cropped responses” so that people can submit an image as it has been released by the club, in the wrong format and with extra content, and others can crop it so we are left with just the plain logo. When we speak of having a “new source image” this would only refer to the cropped responses, in a rather confusing way this means we would have sources for sources.

The best solution for different styles wanting things cropped in different ways might be to have the source be as large as possible, with the graphics right to the edge rather than a specific dimension. It should then be possible for any style creator to resize, expand and centre the logo however they see fit.

This probably isn't that big a deal, but something to consider.

This is not relevant for kits.

Scraping other sites

There are already a number of great websites that showcase football kits, we could write a web scraper that monitors these websites and automatically updates our source images project when they're updated, or to make it easier to find and search multiple of these sites at once.

Very nice @Footygamer! Is there a way for mods to moderate the kits? I found some listed under the wrong team (2013 & 2014 here)

And what websites do you have in mind? I could make something this week if it's not too difficult

I'm not an expert on websites there are, I just know they exist haha. That wouldn't be a priority to be honest.

The ones you linked to come from packs, there's no way to edit them without editing the pack themselves (that's one of the problems with the SS Kits pack based system)

This looks like an excellent plan! You're definitely right that there will be some growing pains (especially as people adapt to change), but I can see it being the start of a ‘golden generation’ of user-created content when people have the opportunity to not have to start from scratch with every project.

Any input from the kits community? This would be a pretty huge change for you guys.

This sounds great 👍 We been talking about a request/submission system for the Metallic logo project for years now 😉. I dont have the technical skill to add something right now, but I will be very active in the process and will help finding bugs and making things run as smooth as possible 😀  

With a little delay I come to respond to the community project proposal.

I'm only going to talk about the logo part, being concerned only with that.

This is a project that I initiated a few years ago (around 2013) when my TCMLogos site was called logo-world.net. His goal was to collect as many standard logos (original, without effect) with country and ID as possible.
A too ambitious project at the time which finally ended with the creation of the TCM logopack and whose website was then totally dedicated. I had this project because I was working on other logopacks before the TCMs and the longest part was not the creation of the logo itself, but the search for the originals.

Subsequently, I put together a team of members of the community who take care of the search for logos in addition to myself. Currently they can fill out a form on the site and I provide them with a list from a spreadsheet with all the clubs in the game, updated with each data update and where I integrate the list of logos present in the TCM pack to leave only the missing ones.

On the other hand, it does not work for the update of the existing logos of the pack and there another request form is present on the site. Submissions identical to what can be done on the forum dedicated to metallic logos. But if all the logo update proposals could be done intuitively via a form with acceptance by one of the staff members or logopack manager and public visibility, this will help these managers for future logopacks, the future creators of logopack which will find updated versions.

The idea is therefore good, but the result will have to be refined.
Let me explain: In TCM I am gradually reducing the presence of the "anniversary" logo. It's a choice on my part assuming that these are temporary logos and that on one game a "100 years of the club" logo will no longer have any meaning after a few seasons. Metallic logos or other packs may have a different vision.
So when submitting a logo, there should be several choices of "type of logo submitted": Main logo, anniversary logo, alternative logo and old logos (for those wishing to make retro packs).

Here is briefly (or not ^^) what I had to explain / propose and this project was also in the back of my mind for my site, but my web development skills are limited!

And sorry if some sentences or expressions seem weird, I am French-speaking and use google translate ^^

The Metallic logo project is in total agreement  about anniversary logos. I also try to keep them out of the pack due to their temporary nature 👍 

This project could hopefully add with that if logos are tagged as being for certain years they could be automatically excluded when the date has passed, or they could be offered as smaller alternative packs.

I think it's also interesting to onboard logo creators such as @schweigi into this discussion - as well as kit researchers as @Hajdučki sin.

Having a central place for source images is great, not only for the FM community but also for the PES and FIFA community. I think we need to clearly understand and make good decisions about how this area for kits will be different compared to other source gathering websites. That is mainly for kits, since for the logos it would be a different story. Could different logo styles be generated with scripts from a source image? (Standard, Metallic, Vapour, Stone - just all by uploading the standard logo, either PNG or SVG format and being moderated properly).

I really love the comment of @Kinmar about the logo type - being for example an anniversary one. It makes sense to let the user pick and choose. Maybe we can upload logos and assign a date start and end to them, so you could for example download 1992 logo's for that awesome datapack that I've seen around on Twitter.

For Kits specifically, I need a bit more thought on what this could look like. Maybe I'll do some mockups to better understand what a great flow would look like.

Potentially… Most of these happen through Photoshop actions and getting those to run on a web server. It's possible we could set up Windows running within a virtual machine and automate it somehow but certainly not the priority list and i'm not sure that's that much benefit.

Retro kits already works like this and this would be the intention yes

Regarding the TCM Logos, it seems complicated, since I use a paid plug-in in addition to standard script. For other styles if possible why not but not for TCM.

As for assigning start and end dates if the logo is no longer relevant, why not, this will allow the creation of alternative packs and/or users to download the desired version.
I remember that when I started with the old website (which I mentioned on my previous message), I had fun collecting all the logos of PSG or Olympique de Marseille.
One way to do such wikipedia when there are logos history.

I think the new plan for kits will work really well, my only concern would be what we see this time of the year with everyone requesting kits` uploading source images of unconfirmed kits so if the staff had the ability to moderate the kits before they are posted as a source image I think it will work well, apologies if this is already in the plans or if I missed it in the opening post.

Looking forward to the changes 

It all seems very nice .. but I think it takes "many" moderators because in a very short time you would risk having literally thousands of images (especially in reference to 2D or 3D projects).
A few months ago I started creating 3d kits, and I don't understand if this new project can include a "concrete" reference to the collection of images, logos and sponsors, which on average for a 3d project of a championship are about 350 Mb. All this "weight" of the images collected (season after season) could quickly create strong slowdowns in the navigation of the site, so at some point we should also think about eliminating the images that have served the purpose, leaving only the completed works, after obviously having carried out the project, or perhaps at the end of each season.

Furthermore, in order not to lose sight of important discussions like this one, this space on the homepage could be used to insert links to various important discussions which, like this one, have a "potentially" limited duration and require quick feedback from interested people.

I'm not quite sure I understand what you mean in regards the 350Mb. The site handles Petabytes of bandwidth and currently stores 8 Terabytes of files, I don't think you should be concerned about 350Mb slowing the site down.

Or when you say slowing down the navigation do you mean when actually using the site it would be annoying to see older kits rather than the actual speed?

I don't know how it works for kits, but for the cutouts, we get a huge amount of requests when a new game is released and wrong/bad requests have never been a big issue. If it turns out to be an issue, a system that locks teams that already has a valid request or a simple upvote/downvote could solve, or at least mitigate, the issue. Just my two cents 🙂

Tagging @Footygamer for visibility.  

Edit: As footygamer describes in the first post, we should be able to set up a scraper that gets kits from external sites (e.g this), and teams would get their source images from there. So someone has already done the moderation for us

My reasoning was referred to the pages that are turned over (as in this case - example 1) which, with many images and with the "weight" of each one that can vary depending on the photograph, can make navigation in this new fairly slow project. (although I don't know if the graphic layout of the new project will actually be like this). However, I am clearly not aware of the site's potential in this regard, so if you know that this cannot be a serious problem then forget what I said 😉

In any case, my reasoning was in reference to a very large "potential" number of images (which can lead to slowdowns in the display of the pages) especially for the creation of kits (2d or 3d) which unlike only logos, where you upload a photo per club (maximum two) requires much more graphic material, such as simple images of the kits, logos, sponsors. But I repeat, not knowing how the graphic layout will actually be created, maybe this report of mine will not have any feedback.

Always and only in reference to a potential project of archiving of images that are used for the realization of the kits, in this case 3d, I show you some examples of the number of images I collect and how much they weigh.

( You could also think (with reference to the images for the kits) to insert a dedicated space for one or more links to any videos where in some cases, in the absence of images, they are necessary to understand how the kit is made. )

You can see in the Cut Out Faces what the layout might look like: https://sortitoutsi.net/graphics/browse/1/292520/timeline?page=4 

Even when a submitted image is 2000x2000 and 1MB it gets cropped down to 100x100 and 8kb within the discussion, but of course if you download it you get the full size.

One of the problems with the current forum topic method is that random images are embedded from websites across the web and they can be huge and massively affect the load times, hopefully this new method would avoid that.

A source page for a club or nation will probably look like this: https://sortitoutsi.net/graphics/browse/2/128/timeline 

And for a competition like this: https://sortitoutsi.net/graphics/browse/2/263 

We could easily reduce the loading time of this page by only showing 100x100 previews. Is it slow for you right now?

One more important thing i've noted from your screenshot is that you have multiple examples for each kit. That is something I had not completely considered, in my head the examples would just be a single image like this but I may have misjudged that.

Do you think we would need 2-10 image for every shirt?

@Footygamer As for the speed of navigation on the site in general it is very good. On the other hand, when you browse the pages where there are a large number of images (logos and 2d / 3d forum kits) there is a slight but acceptable slowdown in loading the images, so even in these cases at the moment, and we hope for a long time, the browsing and loading times are good. (It should also be remembered that obviously a lot depends on the internet connection we have in our homes / offices 🙂 ). From here my report was born, because clearly to create an archive of images, which will then be used to create 2d / 3d kits as in the examples I have shown you, it may be necessary to upload many images .. but as you explained to me, in this website there is an effective image "lightening" system, so we hope that it continues to be so, at the limit, we must then understand how to create the layout of the pages on the site that will serve this purpose.

Images required for the creation of kits

There is no certain answer such as, for example, what is 1 + 1? 2. Unfortunately, the number of images needed to make a kit depends on several factors.

Let's start by saying that to make 2d kits you only need images that mainly show the front part of the kit .. on the contrary, when you have to make a 3d kit, where you need images that show the entire body of the player with the shirts for competition (front-back-right-left-socks-shorts).

The number of images then depends on other factors, such as the number of sponsors present in the kit, and consequently, collect the images that serve this purpose, and in many cases to understand all the details of the kit and the sponsors you may need to many pictures. In the examples I have shown you there are certainly some "too many" images but often many apparently "repetitive" images are used to better understand some details of the kit that you may not be able to grasp in most of the images, but only in some.
A simple solution is to perform a "selection" of the images to be uploaded to the site, but in some cases, you still need more images, sometimes even repetitive, to better understand the details of the kit. This is a problem that mainly depends on the quality of the images that are found, only from the "richest" nations can you find images of good / excellent quality where with a few images you can understand everything immediately, instead, as you go down the level the images are sometimes not of excellent quality, good, but not excellent, so you are "forced" to save more images to understand how to make the kit.

Much also depends on the kitmaker's experience in quickly understanding the details and reproducing them at their best without the need for "too many" images .. perhaps because he has a good eye for understanding details, or because in the past he has already made a similar kit and so he doesn't need to have a lot of images to figure out what to do.

Then there are the sponsors .. in some clubs you may have 1, 2 or 3 sponsors .. in others you have 10 or more, so you also have to decide if in this new project you will also have to insert the images of the sponsors or instead it will be the kitmaker to look for and edit them.

This is a big picture of the situation / to answer your last question, (Do you think we would need 2-10 image for every shirt?) The answer is "it depends". Sometimes, if you find "perfect" images useful for the purpose, you may need 5 or 6 images, but it is just as easy that you may also need 12 or 15 images for a single kit (or more 😀 ). If you want, to understand better, I can send you some packs of pictures of various clubs, where you can understand by looking at the pictures in person.

As for the images, you can also ask @hammer9  for an opinion 👍

I really like the idea, but I see a lot of problems. There should be some kind of “judge” or limitations in general. I mean I see a lot of false or bad sources uploaded everywhere (cut outs, logos, kit sources of wishes etc) which can't be used by creators or are even missleading. But who will verify all that stuff?

+ I agree with Humberto21 about his concerns, some kits need like 4 good pictures (each side) and others need like 20 to see every spot which has a local sponsor or a little special detail on it.

To add a special idea to this, I would prefer to have a sponsor library, some are very hard to find or need different letters/languages. Sometimes I even ask some ppl to translate something for me and write it in their language.

100%, I live close to east ‘countries’ and I'm having a tough time reading Cyrillic, and a lot of logos have cyrillic names on their logos. And about verifying - I believe logos are easier to verify than cutouts, so less people can be involved in that. A lot of countries have clubs from one city with a lot of different ‘affixes’ so clubs names look similar but they are different (hello Italy for example). I see some ‘reliable’ people who post logos so I believe they could easily ‘verify’ them and pre-accept.

It would indeed require a method of verification before publication by a "team" of members deemed to be reliable: the various creators of logos, the most important contributors and the staff of the site.

And in the event of too rapid validation of one of these or that the logo is ultimately not the right one, the possibility for a member of this team or that of the staff to come back to the erroneous proposal.

I don't think we need to stress too much about verification. The Data Update has far more “bad” data submitted than Backgrounds and Faces and it manages without too many problems and Logos and Kits will be far easier than Faces and Backgrounds because there's much less opinion involved. 

I'm not sure it's anymore of an issue than people having to moderate the requests threads in the forums, other than with a dedicated system it should be simpler.

So I really don't think it should be a major issue and the existing functionality we have in places for the data update, backgrounds and faces should be reusable.

For all and @Armamaddon @bigpole  / https://www.imagetotext.info/

for texts in languages that I do not know I use this site, it does not work miracles, but I often get good results even with low quality images, which then help me in the search for images. The site, as the name suggests, extract the text from an image which is then displayed in the language in which it is written in the image you have uploaded.

The peculiarity of this site is that you must first make a cutout of the part you want to "translate" because if you upload an image that is too large, the site does not recognize which part of the text must be "translated".

an example ..

Another thing to consider for this is the possibility of using the player backgrounds as source images for a facepack.

e.g. these images could easily be cropped smaller into a facepack: https://sortitoutsi.net/graphics/browse/17/138625/timeline 

There is already an action style facepack although it focuses on in match images which the backgrounds don't always do