Oekaki?

I can't believe I'm suggesting this, cause I'm more than likely making a mistake, but what are people's thoughts on if this site has an oekaki section? I mean, there are alot of sites that have them, and some people abuse it a little with scribbles of nothing, but they can be really fun.

Is anyone interested? I mean, BR doesn't need to do it, but it was a thought incase there was interest. You never know ^^

    That would indeed be a cool idea! An Oekaki would probably increase traffic to the site (meaning more members to join, which could be a good or bad thing), and also could add an intresting live interactive aspect to the site (besides the posting and commenting, of course.). Maybe we could even have an Add On Game feature... I don't have any programming skill or much site influence, or I would help make this happen. It's an intresting concept.

Hmmm- what I thought. But still, you get the people only joining to oekaki spam. I've seen it- seriously. I wonder if only members could use it and stuffs. and whether we could have a quality level on it where the pic must have taken longer than x minutes or have x level of quality. Donno...

I looked into trying to obtain the stand alone oekaki painter thing-a-ma-jig so that I could attempt to integrate it into my existing forum system. I'd REALLY love to have an oekaki system but only if it is integrated with the site and if it isn't too complicated to try and integrate it.

Does anyone happen to have info about the stand alone oekaaki paint program? It's possible that there is no standalone thing and if you want oekaki you have to use their whole forum system. I do not want to do taht because everyone will have different usernames and separate log ins and it would just suck.

I'll see if I can look into it again. Perhaps wikipedia will have some information.

Ok I've looked into it and found that some of these applets are available as stand alone paint programs, meaning I don't have to get the whole BBS software along with it. I just get the paint program and can integrate it into my own forum software. I found out about it through Wikipedia. Good ol' Wikipedia. My source for info on ANYTHING. I swear that place is awesome.

I've downloaded Shi-painter and it looks like it wont be too difficult for me to integrate it into the site. I chose Shi-painter because it was the only one that I found that has English documentation and it looks like a pretty flexible painter. It's interface is also somewhat customizable so I can make its colors match the PD site design.

Now the question remains, where should we allow usage of the oekaki? I'm thinking to start off, we can just open up a new forum and let everyone have access to painting in it and only that forum will have oekaki.

Perhaps later we could integrate the painter into the art comments for red pen crits but this may be a challenge to implement.

Another idea is to integrate it with the journals, making the journal a sketch blog.

By the way, Shi Painter comes with a basic and a Pro version. I will create a new section in the Members area called "Preferences" where you can set certain things such as time zone, etc. and one of the options will be which Oekaki painter you want. At first the only available options will be Shi Painter Basic and Shi Painter Pro. I will default it to Basic. Later, if we discover another oekaki applet that is better or worth installing, we can add that as an option as well so people can use whatever oekaki painter they want. Pretty cool huh?

Any thoughts or suggestions on this?

By the way, forgive me for abusing my admin rights to double post. I thought this was worth double posting for.

Could we make it part of the advanced crit? Like, it's copies a low res version of the pic and you can draw in the programme to crit? Or is that too hard?

That's what I said:
On Jun 10, 2006 7:59 am, BogusRed said:


lol. Yeah that will come later once I can get this thing working. I'm having a little trouble with it. I'm working on it now though.

:B Just getting ahead of yourself

Ok I spent like 4 or 5 hours working with this thing trying to get it to work. I was ready to give up because it is SO hard to find ANY sort of documentation on these things, let alone detailed. But I managed to chat online with the person who wrote the English documentation for shipainter and he helped me figure out how to access the POST data. Now I just need to figure out how to properly process the data into an image that can be saved. If I can get this to work, then it will be a definate YES on integrating oekaki into the site. I'm pretty sure I can get it to work.

Sorry but I am most likely not going to enable animation at this time. I just want to get the darn thing to save in PNG and JPG format.

We might as well start discussing how we want to use the darn thing. The obvious method would be to have it in the forums. But I think I want to restrict access to the Oekaki for active members. If someone wants oekaki access, all they'd have to do is put in a request and I'd look to see their stats. If they are active enough on the site then I will enable oekaki for them. I don't want random people coming to the site JUST for the oekaki.

Perhaps initially we will enable it only for betas and mods just to test it out. Then we can open it up to whoever is active and requests it.

On Jun 11, 2006 10:03 pm, BogusRed said:


*does victory dance*

Oekaki fun!! I haven't done oekakis in AGES!!

It is cool- did you get a multi user one BR? Like one that more than one person can draw at the same time in? Those are COOL

The painter I'm installing, shi-painter, is compatible with something called PaintChat3. In order to have a multi user painting thing, it will require me installing that other component, PaintChat3. I haven't looked into it to see if it's something I can easily integrate with PD's code.

Another thing to consider though is having a chat in itself is a resource hog on the server. Adding images into the mix will make it even more of a resource hog. If we did offer something like that, we may end up only having it for a short while and then have to take it away again because of lack of bandwidth.

It would be a really cool thing to have but I'm just going to work on getting the standard oekaki thing integrated.