Patreon: Milestone Goals

[tomaszkax86]

I still think it's not a good idea. There's nothing solid for us to strive for and that's what Patreon goals are. Goals are meant for us, not patrons. You can say, for example, that if you reach $100 you might buy professional graphics tablet so you can work better, or for $500 you can work full-time on your game instead of having other kind of job. Patrons don't have to care about that, it's just a small encouragement and it only works when they trust you. Patrons would be more interested in rewards. Patrons are very often offered something exclusive, something other fans don't get. But we can't actually promise anything. There are months of almost complete inactivity and there are months when we do ton of stuff. It's unpredictable. What could we promise anyway, quicker access to developer builds? HD textures? A letter from Epsitec CEO?

The only serious milestone we can put there is covering maintenance cost for better server and that's still something we should discuss before putting it as actual milestone. Everything else is childish and unprofessional. People won't take us seriously.

[Simbax]

Let's start with what we actually need money for right now. Servers, domain and render farms. Maybe premium GitHub   features like LFS? We should build the goals around this kind of things.

So, @krzys_h @zielmicha @RaptorParkowsky - name the prices.

Edit: Are you ignoring this thread on purpose?

[krzys_h]

Maybe premium GitHub   features like LFS?

LFS will be free to use but will have some kind of limit. We'll see when it'll be available publicly, or we'll get an invitation to closed beta (I did register colobot organization at https://github.com/early_access/git-lfs).

I don't know about the main colobot.info server and the domain - we'll probably have to email @zielmicha about that.

The krzysh.pl server (that was supposed to be my private server, but ended up being mostly secondary Colobot server) is currently about 25 zł / month (== ~$6.5/month). Keep in mind I still sometimes put small private projects there, so I think it would be fair if I still paid like 25% of it from my private budget.
If we wanted to upgrade it (like I said, I've freed enough space so we don't really need more right now, I'm thinking mostly about CPU for builds), the next tier is at 40 zł / month (~$10.5/month). See http://www.ovh.pl/vps/vps-classic.xml for exact specs.

[RaptorParkowsky]

I asked @RaptorParkowsky about that. Here is the result: using https://blendergrid.com/ rendering not fully done GOLD teaser (http://colobot.info/forum/showthread.php?tid=584) (2500 frames in 4k resolution) would cost... 897 USD (excl. VAT).

&&

So, @krzys_h @zielmicha @RaptorParkowsky - name the prices.

I naming the price then

GOLD-Teaser aka GOLD-Intro now:
4096x2160, 2500 frames (60 fps), 25 samples (625 AA), + caustics + motion-blur
With some optimization of light bounces (better than the last time, that would cost us 897 USD)
All frames into PNG files
At BlenderGrid with preferred render time 24 hours (max) would cost us now...

$253524.44 USD
...
...Em...
...

Okay, I screwed something with baking physics of stardust effect or maybe this whole animation is just unnecessary piece of sh*t that doesn't fit into professional CGI creations. After fixing physics:

$1192.62 USD
...
...Um...

Right, now I totally believe that's really piece of sh*t...

Well, It's hard to do this kind of CGI cheaper, I have still a lot things to learn about Cycles, nodes, post-processing, light bounces, baking physics etc. So if we're going to render this and other Colobot related materials, I would render it just using your computers (haha ) with CUDA and CPUs, even if this is gonna take a week or two with pauses.

Edit: Are you ignoring this thread on purpose?

Well, I'm tired with this topic. I don't like talking about money, I prefer just doing my stuff if there's something to do.

[Simbax]

So, one of the goals can be $15 and it will be for maintenance of the servers.

The cost of render farms seems rather to be a single cost than monthly expense, so no goal for it (maybe we should have goals also for normal donations?).

Still waiting for @zielmicha 's answer.

Well, we don't need that much money it seems. I have no idea what other goals we can make. A small, symbolic sum for motivation to be split between us? Post promotions on Facebook? Meh... There has to be at least two or three goals. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

[zielmicha]

colobot.info server costs me $5 a month. I've been told that the disk space is running out, so I will probably migrate it to atomshare.net infrastructure (OVH). Then the cost will be hard to estimate as I'm running a lot of VMs there. It does not matter anyway - I don't want money for hosting.

And, as I have written before, if you need moar serverz ask me via email (I don't read the forum too often).   

[tomangelo]

Bad news. I've searched if there are more communities like us on patreon and what they offer. And it looks like every one project has 0 patrons. There was only one, that had 2 patrons, and many others without any.
Looks like patreon isn't a good place for such projects like us, unfortunatelly