Hey everyone,

I'm hoping this is the right place to post this, and it won't be considered spam

I'm the founder of Nibbits, which seems to have made its way to the top of the SC mapping databases pretty quickly. Strangely enough, I started this as strictly a WarCraft 3 mapping site, but there wasn't a really "good" site to find maps for StarCraft so I figured it couldn't hurt cataloging those as well. We've been doing some cool things with it lately, and I wanted to get everyones feedback (and to see how many of you guys here host there).

So the idea of the site, is to make it simple to share your creations. We do this by automatically parsing the map and generating map images from it. It's a pretty simple solution, but I think it's working really well. You simply upload the map, and tag it (with keywords), and it figures out how many players it is, the tileset, the name, author, description, and a decent thumbnail.

We've also been rewriting the thumbnail generation, and the new one is pretty sweet. It now generates units on the thumbnail, like start points, and resources.

Anyways, I wanted to take the time to introduce myself here, as well as get some feedback. If you have any suggestions, or feedback on the system, please feel free to let me know. Hope to see all of you in SC soon!

(If this isn't the right place, could a moderator please move it?)

Welcome to SEN (Staredit Network if you didn't know this already,) zeeg! Good job on the site zeeg, it seems fairly large and seems to have some quality maps on the site.

The only thing I might suggest is getting author's permission to put their maps up Personally, I don't mind you putting my map on there (or if not you, whoever submitted it), but some map-makers might actually care.

just uploaded mine (which could be worth it)

BUT I created an error with my "Diablo 1 v.demo1.scx"...
Is it a problem that it is insane huge? 30k triggs, many (unused) sounds? over 12.4mb?

Does your automatic system handle protected maps well?

Damn ahli, 30k triggers!?

I like the simple layout of the site, the rating seems like a good idea to have. What does "discovered on" mean? Does that mean the day the map was uploaded to the site?

Right now, it might not matter so much, since there aren't too many maps, but when the search results show up, maybe you should list them by highest rating or most downloads by default, and allow the user to change the way it is listed.

Why the hell is fastest possible the most downloaded???

Wow, thanks for the feedback everyone!

Ok so the way the map works, is its more of a discovery engine. It's just like putting your map up in SC, it allows people to download it. This is why we don't force the author to upload. It actively watches some locations for new maps (such as getdota.com) and automatically discovers those. I will add a solution for authors to take down their map however. It should parse both protected, and unprotected maps. For WarCraft 3 it does without much of a problem. For StarCraft there's a few minor issues (hopefully worked out when we put the new map previews live). It does not however support campaigns yet.

For the Diablo map, there are some issues with the map parsing which may cause some to fail. Did it give you a specific error on it, as I didn't receive an error email. 12.5mb may be over the limit (but I can adjust that)

The search results have some weighting on them. The exact formula I don't quite remember, but I believe it's based on the downloads_daily (which is where the real popularity comes from), as well as the date added, and of course what you search for (which includes map name, description, and tags). The rating system is still a bit experimental, but I hope to be able to add it's scoring into the popularity ranking as well.

I take it back, I do see the error email. Do you have somewhere I can download your map to see what caused the problem? It's happening in the parsing that's causing it to error.

It's here in our database.

It is simple enough, but the top rated map being Fastest Map possible... ugh..
It needs to incorporate types of maps .. like arena and such
but the simpleness does make it userfriendly..
and sm1 uploaded my maps too .. but not Temple Siege for sm odd reason =o

EDIT: ur site proves useful for SC pubbies, but not too useful for SC 'junkies' like us
Starcraft.org used to be like ur site too.. until they changed for SC2, and SUCKED.
It also proves how ignorant pubbies are//how arrogant junkies are. ><"
If fastest map possible is ranked one, that means all the noobs are going WOW STACKED MINERALS HOLY CRAP... lol there's no hope ><"

Very good site tho .. could do some work on the skin.. it so .. white O.O.. but that's only my preference :S

Well, first thing is to do our part and vote that sucker down. Eventually that'll be important in the popularity. Or, at least the search, though it should be both. dl's per day does not mean popularity so much as it means there was good advertising. I mean why in the hell would someone download it more than once (except for obvious dishonest reasons)? Popularity in that sense could only be thought to be seen in coming updates, if anything. Rating should weigh in to account for pretty naming and stupidity.

One main problem I see with this site though, is that most maps don't even make use of AI or SFX, and yet we are basically encouraged to vote for them. For all we know, they're required for our vote to show. If everyone says "well, I'll just vote a 3/5 then," then you will never achieve a full 5 overall. If you say "i'll just rate it 5 then," you end up rating up maps that you hate. The only solution for us users currently is to rate those "empty" votes as if it were the overall vote that we want. This way the impact is minimal.

I say that partly because I want to encourage you to give fastest maps a '1' rating in those categories that don't matter, as you probably would for the ones that do. In the future, perhaps the site could include a N/A vote. And if there are enough N/A votes (and enough %), then that aspect of voting will be taken down permanently, unless the map maker complains, perhaps, in which case it's an executive decision. Another issue with voting is that the "overall" is a nice concept, but it's rather inaccurate. The Overall rating should be a rating itself. If you want to list an average rating, then sure, but make Overall rating something people give as a rating of how much they think the map is GOOD overall. You can make that clear too by having a little description.

Also, not having any room for a wiki-esque description is very bad. The "description" the site takes is a tiny string that can't be made larger. That is simply not nearly enough. You could even have a section for the map makers themselves to have a part not editable, but that's preference.

I've tried to stay away from categories, simply due to the fact that it's not something that is very automatic. This is however, where tags come in. I could make a sort of browsing pane based off of the tags. For example:

Singleplayer and Multiplayer (due to an import) are some of the most popular, so we'd start by showing a page which let you break down the most popular tags. So you click into Singleplayer. Once you're on this page, I could show the most popular tags within singleplayer, and you could break it down even more. Or you could simply just browse all of them that are tagged as such.


Very good feedback. Thank you! For the ratings, I struggled with how to do this as well. You're not "required" to vote for any of them. You vote for one and the vote is recorded. I was considering just removing the AI rating because it doesn't always matter, but it seemed like a useful rating when it did. I will take your advice on the overall rating, and possible change that soon. It really does make sense to not use the average as overall the more I think about it.

As for the description, I could provide the optional field to fill in which could override the default description, which could be useful. One thing I had been working on is a sort-of project hosting. It's not public, as I haven't finished it yet, but the idea was that you simply associate your maps with a project. This then lets you get a combined total of downloads, ratings, comments, etc. You can see an example (thats not complete) here.

Haha! That's awesome, about 5-6 days ago I went here when searching for the Little Billy maps, and now it's posted here The one thing I didn't like about it was when trying to download many maps at once, it's annoying since you have to go through 3 different pages to get to the actual download link.

It doesn't let me upload my maps... What restrictions are there on uploaded maps?

Probably intentional...The user views more ads >>>> more revenue for server.

Anyway, site is nice.

Oh, I didn't see the ads, since Firefox is too sexy for ads.

Strangely enough, I did it because many people were linking to the download page and I was trying to get users to use ratings more. As well as a place to show a "heres what you do with the map, newbie ".

I think maybe a small side button to directly download would be nice, I understand trying to get people to rate and such, but it's so annoying to have to go through 3 pages just to download the map when you're trying to download lots of maps.

Server error? vv

Layout looks clean. GJ.

Ya the server choked in the middle of the night, no idea what happened.