Suggestion: RayTextures

[Rock_TBT]

I believe a RayTextures section should be added, since textures from Rayman 1, 2 and 3 have been extracted from the game archives, which will make it easier to access the textures. The textures should first be structured by game, and then structured based on role, such as GUI, characters, effects etc. All textures should also be visible on the page, instead of requiring a link to the be pressed to see the texturres, which would make it more convenient to download a desired texture.

Is this idea reasonable, feasible and viable?

[RibShark]

More and more people keep asking for textures, so it seems enough people are wanting them. It would be cool to create a site with them all, but I don't know whether I would be capable of it. We also can't extract the textures of certain versions of certain games yet.

[Rock_TBT]

We also can't extract the textures of certain versions of certain games yet.

Which are you referring to?

[RayCarrot]

I believe we can only extract textures from Rayman 1, 2, 3, Origins and Legends. Some emulators allow for extracting of textures displayed on screen, though that's a very time consuming process to extract all of them that way.

[Hunchman801]

Has anyone got the textures for all those games? We could always patch up a simple website with links to those.

Ideally, there would be a search feature that would return individual textures. Ideally.

[Adsolution]

Whoa, I didn't see this before; I love the idea. For Rayman, I've extracted all the textures from the PS1 version, and PC has been done before so it should be easy to do again. It'd be nice to have the Jaguar textures as well, but analysing ROMs is a nightmare.

All of the textures have been extracted from Rayman 2 and 3 as well, but I'm not sure about Origins and Legends.

[Droolie]

I've got the following (all complete) texture packs:

• Rayman 2 (N64)
• Rayman 2 (PC)
• Rayman 3 (PS3)
• Rayman Origins (PC)
• Rayman Legends (PC)
• Rayman Arena (GC)

So combined with Ad's Rayman 1 (PS1) textures I believe that's definitely a good collection to start with
Structuring the ones that didn't already have a good folder structure sounds like a painful task, and the site would mean more copyright breakery for RaymanPC, but regardless it sounds like a cool idea and it would reduce the amount of PMs I get about textures!

[PluMGMK]

Speaking of copyright, isn't RayTunes still technically on the wrong side of that too? I wonder why this hasn't hampered the community's liaisons with UbiSoft staff in the past.

[Hunchman801]

Well, we've got the textures, it's a matter of what sort of website we want to build now.

[Lysol]

I'm for because it was first my idea.

[Adsolution]

Well, we've got the textures, it's a matter of what sort of website we want to build now.

Well I think we should have it feature textures from the various Rayman games.

[Hunchman801]

Well I think we should have it feature textures from the various Rayman games.

Thank you for your insightful answer, Ad.

I was obviously referring to the features we want the website to have, e.g. should it simply be a static page with download links for texture archives or do we want to have a searchable database of individual textures?

[RayCarrot]

I've got complete textures for Jungle Run (iOS and PC), Fiesta Run (iOS and PC) and Adventures (iOS version 1.9 and above) as well. Although it's worth noting that they tend to change with updates.

[Rock_TBT]

Well I think we should have it feature textures from the various Rayman games.

Thank you for your insightful answer, Ad.

I was obviously referring to the features we want the website to have, e.g. should it simply be a static page with download links for texture archives or do we want to have a searchable database of individual textures?

I suggest that they should be visible and searchable inside the website, while having the textures structured according to their games and then structured based on their function and roles in the respective games, and have the entire packages downloadable for those who want to download them as zip-files.

[GOT4N]

Adding to what Droolie, Ad and Carrot already have, I have Rayman Legends's WiiU textures and VITA Rayman Origins textures

[Hunchman801]

I agree, however it goes without saying that building it from scratch would take a hell lot of time. Any thoughts on image gallery software, such as Coppermine?

[Rock_TBT]

I agree, however it goes without saying that building it from scratch would take a hell lot of time. Any thoughts on image gallery software, such as Coppermine?

Although I am unfamiliar with any image gallery software, Coppermine does seem to have an effective layout.

This is how the images could be displayed on the website using Coppermine: http://i1-linux.softpedia-static.com/sc ... mine_2.png

[Master]

Hmm, while it's not the main purpose of the software, I know the Wikipedia Foundation uses a dedicated Wiki,
Wikimedia Commons, for images and other media. We have experience with MediaWiki thanks to using RayWiki. As such, using a MediaWiki setup for a RayTextures archive might be easier for the community to work with, and MediaWiki does have features, in particular; categorisation capabilities, which are perfect for this sort of repository.

[Hunchman801]

Well, MediaWiki is a rather heavy application and it sounds overkill for a gallery project that just needs categorizing. In any case, we should define all features here before we even decide to go for a technical solution.

[Droolie]

Hmm, Coppermine looks a bit on the heavy side for this as well. It seems to have comments, ratings and votes, but I don't think any of that is really necessary here. Unless you can disable that? I'm imagining something where you can select an archive and get a simple folder tree of textures where you can choose to download the whole archive or a single texture and search all subfolders. They'd be displayed like the lightbox image gallery here I suppose, but with a folder tree on the side, a search feature and filenames displayed under the thumbnails? It would be nice if there was a solution that did something like that and created thumbnails automatically.