You could politely ask people to photoshop your threads and find someone to make a video. If you want to do everything yourself, learn how to use free programs like GIMP and for for videos just use bungie render and then use Windows Movie Maker or some other free program. Capture cards are fairly cheap nowadays, I've got a regular dazzle dvc 100 and it puts out decent quality for what I need (though I'm thinking of upgrading to a hauppauge HD PVR because I use video editing frequently enough to warrant the 200$+ purchase). Spoiler Or you could just torrent programs..
Do NOT buy a Hauppauge HD PVR. They suck in regards to drivers, software, functionality and support. The only thing that semi works itself is the hardware, and even that fails due to heat and dust more frequently than a PC can do. For an external component, it blows **** hard.
its because we come here for amazing maps. we always see normal maps sp why would we care? but the stupid part idk. one little stupid thing kills your thread and it sucks
as far as the photoshopping aspect of the whole thing goes, dont feel overwhelmed. a simple resizing of images to fit on the page is the first step, this eliminates those ugly yellow "this image has been resized" bars on top of the image. i go for 600 px width all you really have to do after that is frame it and maybe find a nice font for a banner. you can go more in depth than this obviously, but even doing these simples steps makes your thread look way better and probably take about 15 minutes
Even simple color tweaks to an image can help. You may find that your screenshots are less vibrant on a PC than on your TV (as I did when I posted my probably-not-remembered-by-anyone-anymore map The Factory); making simple enhancements in a free image editor like IrfanView can fix the problem and make your map look just as good on a PC as it will when people actually play it.
Suggestion: For all future map postings do not put a real thumbnail image of your map. Instead go into forgeworld and create an object with a billion objects spiraling around or making some huge swirly object, or just something so ornate that it would lag like hell in game play. Then take a screen shot of it for your thumbnail image. Then you might get views and people saying it's totally awesome and super sweet. Additionally: You can't just say "looks great" in this forum because that's regarded as spam. So people usually just look and then move on. I would rather that rule be removed along with disabling signatures so that saying "looks great" would be acceptable.
I am also quite guilty of this, most of the maps I see are just a collection of walkways and bridges. to me they dont look interesting in the slightest! After I got a warning for saying somebodys map looked great and that infection would work great on it, I havent commented on somebodys map if i cant write at least two lines about it!
I can understand why a lot of people don't comment. I don't feel right commenting on a map unless I can atleast download and flythrough the map. This of course requires a lot of time and effort in total. So yeah I understand. I really appreciate all feedback, but the ones that are come from those that have actually tried the map are obviously the best. I'm just going to keep trying to make my maps better, and improve my posts. What I really want to do is to get some video flythroughs and gameplay videos. I am sure people will really see how much time and effort I put into my maps.
Everyone puts time into their maps and I'm pretty sure everyone gets that heart thumping feeling whenever they post a map. It's just damn discouraging when out of the 800 people who view it.. 6 or 7 of them reply. Like the other people said: You gotta capture their attention. Give them a reason to comment or "bump" your thread. Having said that, it's just a map. If you truly believe in forging then you should do it for the fun of it, not for the praise. Good luck.