A lot of guess work
My thought is that all the cars in the league are shown and you (hosts) upload a photo of variants not already listed. So if there is a red, blue and green one shown but you have a yellow, you'd upload a photo of the yellow. Each listing would also tell you the chassis build because as far as the game is concerned, a metal/metal is an entirely different car than a metal/plastic even if they are the same model...make sense?
Same thing goes for wheels...that's the kind of stuff that will be up to you guys uploading variants. If there's a green car listed with lace wheels and you have a green with ultra wheels, that's up to you to say "my car is different" and upload the UW photo. However, I will be spot checking uploads (and might recruit some of you to help) so there is some reassurance that the uploaded cars are really variants that they claim and so there aren't any duplicates.
As far as when the variants show up in the game...my plan is to have that all happen automatically for entering cars and picking brackets. You (as a host) select which variant of a car you will be using as your track's "official" version, in our example, the yellow car. Since the variants are then tied to your track's category, when players click to enter cars and make picks the game will look up to see which variant belongs to which track and the pictures will change automatically. So when a tournament is hosted on your track, the yellow car will show and when a tournament is hosted on my track, the red car will show.
The end result should then be that the car you see on the screen is the car racing down the track, which is only true half the time now. There will only be one rating per car still but the win/loss history will continue to be available per track as it is now, but that too will show appropriate photos.
Any of that sound weird or wrong?
Right now we share almost 300 cars between our 'racing' collections. So what I would do is go to the Partner Collection Manager, compare the picture shown to the car I have(will be racing) and if mine is different from the car shown in the PCM, I would take a 'Brian-like' photo of my version to later upload into the database.
Then will the PCM be the master database that will show all the versions between all the hosts?
Yes, you got it.
The PCM will show all the cars and the variants that are associated with it. If the variant you have is shown (even if it's not your photo), you'll click on it to link it to your track and you're done.
If the variant you have isn't shown, that's when you'd go in and add it yourself, then link it to your track.
You'll only need to upload a variant photo if it hasn't already been uploaded by someone else.
All the variants I have in my personal collection will get uploaded so by the time the Variant Upload tool gets to you guys there should be a good pool of variants for many cars, in which case you might not have to upload many of your own pictures at all.
If you want to browse through the variants I have you can and maybe save you some photo shooting.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/themorning ... 990278302/
And while I know it's probably a lot to ask of folks, I'd really love to see "Brian-like" photos of cars being added for variants. Just the cars at a quarter turn, enough to show the wheels, on a plain background.... I know some will fall short but as long as people aren't uploaded photos of carded cars or something like that I think we'll be good.
The more I think about this the more I like that we'll be tracking variants at a very simple and limited level, colors and wheels is really all we're going to be tracking but that's plenty for many people, I think. It is for me.
What is the picture size/format that is needed?
And Pics must be the white background?
I started a new thread for all things about the Variant Database.
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=964
Please continue this discussion over there. Thanks.
So are you thinking it will be as simple as the host uploading only pictures of the cars that are a different build from yours? Example: your car has a plastic base and mine has a metal one. Or can we as host submit pictures of our cars if they have a different wheel type? Example: your car has lace wheels and mine has ultra hot.
Also, will players be entering cars for the tournament according to our pictures, or will our pictures only come into play when they submit their bracket picks?