New Miniature Categories Are Coming

Discussion in 'Miniatures and Scale Models' started by HenrikRydberg, Oct 6, 2016.

  1. HenrikRydberg
    HenrikRydberg Shapeways Employee Design Team
    I love the discussion here, all your suggestions, and how plans are improving.
    While there's good questions and additions of the filter types, what I see working is the overall categories.

    So by the end of this week, we will split up our current Miniature categories to the ones suggested in the beginning of this thread. Filters will follow soon, so we have some time still to go over the details.

    ----------

    And on to the question about countries (which is a great one).
    What @czhunter describes about Miniature trains‚ that those scenes are built to be in a country and time seems to be how that scene operates. I blatantly took this thinking to other miniature categories, and maybe that's wrong. So how do you feel about this:
    - In Trains and Scenery, we call "Country" -> "Country of the scene"
    - In Vehicles, Aircraft, and Ships we call "Country" -> "Manufacturing country"

    Thoughts?
     
  2. HenrikRydberg
    HenrikRydberg Shapeways Employee Design Team
    Small updates to filters:
    Vehicles -> Type: Added Trailer

    Scenery -> Type: Added Track and Signal
     
    Last edited: Oct 13, 2016
  3. 3401_deleted
    3401_deleted Well-Known Member
    -I would like to be able to select several epochs for miniatures (train). A lot of equipment was introduced in epoch 4 and is still used today. I would like to select 4, 5 and 6 at the same time.

    -Country should be optional. Some equipments (accessories) aren't really tied to any country and can be used in several places.
     
  4. czhunter
    czhunter Well-Known Member
    Btw, for the trains again, there is one big (at least in Europe and Japan) category missing:

    for vehicles like Stadler RS1:
    http://www.novinyvm.cz/obr/nvm/201110/i2-2845.jpg

    It is diesel, but its not locomotive, neither "multiple unit".
    Motor coach is the right name in English by Wiki?
     
  5. reducedAircraftFactory
    reducedAircraftFactory Well-Known Member
    Henrik, I think that's where the confusion is coming in, and the consensus so far seems to be that "country of use" or (eventually) "country of printed paint job" will be more natural than manufacturing/designing country. But it will certainly have to be a multi-choice box rather than a single-choice selection.
     
  6. Carlos2k10
    Carlos2k10 Well-Known Member
    Piggybacking on this topic,

    question for Mitchell or Henrik, as filters are going to rely on tags,
    Will you provide a way to do a bulk retagging/recategorizing of our models?

    Something along the lines of the recategorizing CSV file that was sent a while ago?
     
  7. HenrikRydberg
    HenrikRydberg Shapeways Employee Design Team
  8. HenrikRydberg
    HenrikRydberg Shapeways Employee Design Team
    @reducedAircraftFactory, @czhunter:
    Only one of the Filter values can be put on a product (like Bus or Truck). The only exception is Variants, which will each work as a Filter values (say you have a airplane in two scale variants: 1:200 and 1:144, the airplane would show up with both of those scale filters).

    Currently we haven't planned to make a "country" a variant. It's possible, but I'm not sure it's helpful.
    I'm starting to feel it would be best to just drop the countries for now.

    Or... ?
     
  9. Carlos2k10
    Carlos2k10 Well-Known Member

    After the results of the automatic category change on my shop, this question is now even more relevant Will we get any tool for bulk retagging or recategorizing?
     
  10. Carlos2k10
    Carlos2k10 Well-Known Member
    Well I have bitten the bullet and gave the Category CSV tool a try and it put all my models in their rightful places :)

    So fellow shopowners if your models are under the wrong category go to Make/My Shop/Shop settings/Category CSV Wizard and follow the instructions there.

    Regards
     
    MitchellJetten likes this.
  11. AotrsCommander
    AotrsCommander Well-Known Member
    Okay. There are several issues with this new system, specifically with the filters.

    One: No notification. Again. I am on the shop secrets newsletter, yet once again, I only discovered this major change when I came to release some models today.

    Two: Probably most importantly, the CSV wizard does NOT include any of the new filters. I carefully set three of my models to the new filters, so I could copy/paste in XL... And the wizard has not been updated. It has "Category," "subcategory" and "custom category" but nothing else, and the filters just set for those three models doesn't show up. This should have been in place to be released at the same time as the changes.(Fortunately, as my models all fall into "sci-fi" and "vehicles", so there are no issues there, and I have caught the only cople that were not in the right category).

    As it stands, there is simply no way I can afford to spend the time to go through every single one of the 366 model pages in my store to add the filters.

    Three: The Filters are somewhat lacking, to put it mildly. No 1:10000th scale on scifi, the Era section on the vehicles could really use "Cold War" and "Moderns" in addition to the year categories (as we have "WW1" and "WW2") and the Countries section having only five entries on it is... baffling. No Russia? No USSR? No arabic? Isreal? "NATO" or "Soviet" one would have thought would be at least the bare minimum. (If you were not sure what to allow, perhaps allow the users to define their own categories - or at least submit a request.)

    Again, this could have been addressed ahead of time if the shop owners like myself had actually gotten some notification.

    I don't come regularly checking on the forums for announcements; your newsletter system is either inadquate (if no announcements was sent out to shop owners) or buggy (if one was an it hasn't reached everyone that has that box ticked).
     
  12. Roolz
    Roolz Well-Known Member
    OK...
    Questions/feedback:
    - Regarding SciFi Category : What's exactly the difference between a starship and a spacecraft? This is confusing to me.
    - When I click on "Edit model", the existing description totally disappears. That's a bug I've never seen before. I won't change anything (including refining the categories) if I'm not sure that the description won't be deleted after saving.
     
  13. stonysmith
    stonysmith Well-Known Member Moderator
    Currently, the shop owners are the only people who can see the new "Facets". You won't see the feature anywhere else on the site, like search, etc. The feature needed to be released in phases, and this is just the first step. It's not time yet to do a "call to arms" for shopowners to do mass updates (yet). But, getting just this little bit out there allows us to get a first look at the feature, and to supply comments before the system goes live. Several of the notes above indicate that there will be other changes before the feature goes live.
     
  14. AotrsCommander
    AotrsCommander Well-Known Member
    Right. Thank you. It probably would still have been better to gve us some warning, rather than come to our model pages and wonder what was going on. Until your post here, it wasn't clear this was a non-live beta system.

    I also noted this bug on one model out of three of the models I was dealing with yesterday. If I made no changes to the page and clicked "view product," the decription was visible on the product page, but no visible or editable on the editing page. I set the model for sale (and hit save) and the description disappeared. However, when I edited, the decription box was once again functioning (and because I had left the prior View Product page in another tab, was able to copy-paste the description back.)

    Whether this is related to the filters/category change is anybody's guess.
     
  15. Freakazoitt
    Freakazoitt Well-Known Member
    How about non-fraction miniature scales such as 25mm, 28mm, 32mm, 40mm?

    And "props" sub-category for miniatures.

    upd: I found there is a new "tabletop and wargaming" in "games" category. Maybe we should move 28mm figurines there instead.
     
    Last edited: Oct 26, 2016
  16. CybranKNight
    CybranKNight Well-Known Member
    Probably the same idea behind the difference between a speed boat and a cruise ship, it mostly comes down to the scale. So a single seat fighter would fall under 'Spacecraft' while a Battleship would likely be a 'Spaceship'.
     
  17. stonysmith
    stonysmith Well-Known Member Moderator
    Humor: The Mercury capsule from the '60s was a spacecraft.. NCC-1701 is a starship <grin>

    I would say that it has a lot to do with size versus distance the vessel is able to travel.

    And then, there's the TARDIS.
     
  18. Roolz
    Roolz Well-Known Member
    Mmmm. So in which category do I put the spaceship and the starprobe models I've just designed? I also have a rocket and a shuttle... They are all very big. Or tiny. It's scifi so I can say that their scale is 1:1: or 1:10000, depends on which game I use the model with... And they can travel very far. Or not. Not sure if I remember which engines I modelled... ;)
    Thanks for your help guys, but I'm still dubious about the usefulness (or lack thereof) of having such very similar subcategories...
     
  19. Roolz
    Roolz Well-Known Member
    Thanks for the info. This new "tabletop and wargaming" should actually be under the "boardgames" family. Technically, boardgames cover any game played on a table, from cards to miniatures games. A huge amount of boardgames now use miniatures (fantasy & historical tabletop miniature wargames are a rather small niche of boardgames using minis...) Just saying...
     
  20. glehn
    glehn Well-Known Member
    I think every starship is a spacecraft, but not all spacecraft are starships. Starships travel to the stars.