Eric - what are the badge levels? Is there a list somewhere?

The levels are:
10k, 100k, 500k, 1M, 2M, 5M, 10M, 25M, 50M, 100M, 250M, 500M, 1G, 2G, 5G, 10G

Yes I like the idea of some badge or count status for the decic and septic and coming octic counts. The Amicable numbers has this for the number of amicable pairs found in addition to the total score.

---

Yes I like the idea of some badge or count status for the decic and septic and coming octic counts. The Amicable numbers has this for the number of amicable pairs found in addition to the total score.

I will try to do this in the next few weeks. We put the octic idea on the back burner for now, but decics and septics can be done.

Argh, Eric if you have time to spend on badges system, it means you can't optimize more anymore any of the apps?
Or perhaps you've got in mind that having a brand new badge systems may attract more people/machines so it may help to crunch more and you may be right badfully...
I mean, the important thing is to finish all the calculus the quickest way possible not to accumulate some medals/badges which are collected not thanks to some intellectual/physical working but only thanks to the machine time (and of course perf of the machine) we devote.

Argh, Eric if you have time to spend on badges system, it means you can't optimize more anymore any of the apps?
Or perhaps you've got in mind that having a brand new badge systems may attract more people/machines so it may help to crunch more and you may be right badfully...
I mean, the important thing is to finish all the calculus the quickest way possible not to accumulate some medals/badges which are collected not thanks to some intellectual/physical working but only thanks to the machine time (and of course perf of the machine) we devote.

Improving the badges takes a relatively small amount of time compared to optimizing apps, hence it's an easy task when I have a couple hours to spare.

I think the best way to get more compute power would be to port the current code to other platforms. I could easily port the GPU code to intel GPUs, and then I was thinking porting it to ARM processors (so it could be run on android phones and tablets). I am open to any other suggestions.

Oh, I'm pretty late with this, but it would be super cool if you didn't remove the diamond-badge, because I was just working to archieve that because it looked so cool and now it's replaced by a rather non-trophy-looking-like patch of grass ^^ I didn't like the old badges, but this diamond was pretty cool. Maybe you should include some diverse colorful badges ^_^
And now World Community Grid changed their badges as well. if this continues, saturation of badge-signatures will likely decrease and in 100 years there will only be grey badges or pastel ones

Oh, I'm pretty late with this, but it would be super cool if you didn't remove the diamond-badge, because I was just working to archieve that because it looked so cool and now it's replaced by a rather non-trophy-looking-like patch of grass ^^ I didn't like the old badges, but this diamond was pretty cool. Maybe you should include some diverse colorful badges ^_^
And now World Community Grid changed their badges as well. if this continues, saturation of badge-signatures will likely decrease and in 100 years there will only be grey badges or pastel ones

Unfortunately, it's hard to please everyone. Many people complained about the "christmas tree lights". The other problem with the old system, was it was hard to add new levels. Sounds like your main issue is that the badges are too generic and look too similar. You are not the first (others have sent me pms with the same complaint).

Swapping out the badge images with a new set is not hard. The problem is coming up with a system that appeases everyone and then making the images. If anyone wants to do that, I will gladly swap out the current images.

Yes, I agree with that. I have done some research on badges ^^
There are different styles of Badge-categories:
image, stars and numbers, minimal


Option 1: Create a Badge that just changes the color sheme:


Option 2: Change Images:


Option 3:
Just increase numbers or add stars

Option 4:
combine them or do something creative

I think the first two options work really well. Even those minimal badges use the changing background colors.

Shapes:
Most are round or rectangles. some unique shapes like hexagon or asteroids are also possible

I think first we should define what we/you actually want for the project.

Shape: []Circle []Rect []Other
Style: []Image []ColorChange []Stars []Numbers []Minimal []Other


My personal thoughts: The current theme is grass like "fields". Maybe there would be an option to have different/colored flowers on the field.
I could imagine something like this:


This orthographic pixellated design would be very unique. The shape alone would feel pretty good as a badge I think ^_^
If you want to, I could give it a try and create something like that. I could also use that tiled design to maybe create a new banner for the project site so it fits. But it is your project and I feel like I have already imposed too many decisions on you now and too many of my own thoughts about stuff.

---

One thing to keep in mind is the size of the badges (if using the builtin BOINC mechansim) is 48x48 pixels. See this:
https://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/BadgeDoc
If your grass images were shrunk to this size, they might not look so great. If sticking with the grass theme, I think it best to stay with the current images, but they could be enhanced. Maybe adding some fireworks to the current images, or flowers like you suggested? Some animation would be cool, like fireworks exploding over the fields which would get bigger and brighter at the higher credit levels. But I'm pretty sure the current BOINC badge system requires static images. This could be a fun project for anyone who wanted to delve into the BOINC code to add support for animated badges.

For reference, here are the current credit levels: 10k, 100k, 500k, 1M, 2M, 5M, 10M, 25M, 50M, 100M, 250M, 500M, 1G, 2G, 5G, 10G. That's a lot of images to generate, hence why I just chose a number on each badge to represent the credit level.

My gut feeling, based on responses in this thread, is that there are very few users who have a strong opinion of the badges. It seems like a waste of time to keep changing the badges around when I have plenty of higher priority tasks. Especially since I don't have much free time these days.