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 (SS Kits possibly?).

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