CVGM.net - Chiptune, Retro & Video Game Music

Greetings!

There have been a large number of site changes made for those who havent logged in over the last couple of days! This post will attempt to go over most of them in an attempt to familiarize you with them. As always, comments and feedback welcome

First, i'll go over the main database changes

Artists Have Flag / Location Data - All artists on the database now have their own unique flags and locations!! Existing artists can be modified by any moderator to apply the data, which consists of a flag (same format as user profiles, with country codes like gb, ru etc.) and a town. This has also affected the [artist] template naturally, which displays a flag. As an example: Michiru Yamane (山根 ミチル)

User Profiles Have location - Just as user artists do, user profiles also have a home town field. Just go to My Profile and add it and save. Easy as pie!

Production Labels - This has many different uses depending on which site it's used on. I'll go over this in more detail further down this post.

Dedicated Wiki Links For Artists / Groups / Labels - All artist/group/label objects now carry a wiki link field. This is a full URL pointing to a wiki page. AS wiki gets more and more popular, more artists have them and so it seemed appropriate. System templates will show a link such as 'View Artist's Wiki Page' and direct you to the link. This is also available on most of the creation templates.

Modified Template Fields - Most of the complex fields used when uploading have been modified to show some help text to explain what they are. This should stop people from being fearful of using them.

Release Date - ALl songs now support a 'Release Date' feature, so the author can be specific about the time/date when a song was released. This is also reflected in the templates when viewing a song.

Ultimate song - All users can now specify the SongID of their 'ultimate' song on the site. Please, don't all add He-Man all at once! When set, anyone who can view your profile will see your ultimate song and be presented with a button to queue it, if it's available. I plan to expand on this in the future.

New BBCode - [ label ] - Again, see below for more details on the specifics of using Labels.

Now for a list of new features / stuff to watch for on the site. I like to make changes!! :

Modified 'Now Playing' Templates - The 'Now Playing' templates shown on the far right and in the main queue window have been adjusted to show a little more data. If available and used, they will show any related song labels, and any compilations the song is featured in with links for the viewer to learn more about that compilation.



General Display Updates - Several templates have been corrected or mdified to show minor details, such as fields like 'Created By', dates and so forth.

Moderator Preview Player - Moderators can now preview any song on the site without having to go through the hassle of clicking the Edit Info, saving the file, them comparing it to something else for dupe purposes. Just click the play button and hear it right from the page.

I have also fixed a bunch of minor bugs and stuff, most of which are too trivial to mention here

New Feature - Labels
Labels were supposed to go in the last big update but never did make it, so I saved this for now! Labels and their use will vary greatly depending on which type of demovibes server that they are ran on.

On a site like CVGM that produces music made by mostly the video game genre, Labels will refer to the production companies involved in the games that the music is taken from, which would be big names like Sega, Konami etc. as well as smaller software houses like Shiny Software.

On a site like Nectarine, labels may be used if the musicians from the demoscene had commercial music published, or released under their own labels.

Sites that produce real music, like the kind of stuff you'd hear on your normal radio in the car, they would use Labels to represent the record companies, like EMI etc.

Like normal entries, labels can be created by anyone. If it doesn't appear on the main Labels list the link can be clicked to make a new entry. A moderator then can approve or deny it based on criteria.

Once labels have been created, artists and songs can be linked to them in much the same way that an artist is linked to groups or songs. Add them to the boxes in the Administration screen and hit Save. New uploads can also specify label association with any songs. For example, if someone chose to upload a game track that was released by Sega, they can specify Sega as the Label at the time it's uploaded so a moderator doesn't have to come back and do it later.

Labels also carry a new BBCode tag [label] which can be used with the number of the label (1, 2, 3, etc.) or the name, so using [ label ]4[ /label ] is the same as using [ label ]Sega[ /label ], both producing Sega

Other Planned Changes
As always, im planning on making lot's of other changes at the same time I am working on others. Next update will see Artists be informed of comments to their songs, if they have linked profiles to user ones. I'm also planning some changes to the user forums once again to allow features like replying with quotes etc.

As always, comments and suggestions are always welcome; You as our users are important to us