See attached image.



(that triangular thing is a plane with trails over clouds)

Units/explosions in image come in from the left/right/bottom upwards diagonally via css transforms, all are defined in sets and will randomly change. The same is true of scenery. Alternate scenes involving different landscapes. Main site would be WordPress with the wiki given a dedicated styling as a separate 'documentation' site.

Design would be fully responsive. There would be no news or videos on the frontpage, and there would be a redesigned news page and media section (current media does nothing for us, it could have far bigger photos and organisation).

The logo would change to fit in with the new style ( same basic form but different context ). New installer icons would be necessary.

Discuss

No backsies!
Personally, I'm not a fan of animated web pages (or did i misunderstand?), they take too long to load and sometimes work slow on some browsers/OSs.

I'd prefer if we continued with the news stories front-page.

However...
It seems it's popular to put those animated pages in lobby clients.

*Animated includes both movies and presentation-like image shows.

The big question is of course:

which plane will it be?

As I said there will be:

• No videos
• No humongo animated gifs
• No flash
• No html 5 videos
• No APNG

By animations I am referring to CSS3 animations, they happen once, e.g. in that image, the plane would fly in from the side at the start then remain static, rather than just appear. Browsers that do not support CSS3 animations will simply show the image as is, with no movement.

CSS3 animations are lightweight, and are purely visual, e.g. http://darkstars.co.uk/blog/ the breadcrumbs use a css3 animation to fade in and slide from the left into place. The animation happens once, is 1 second long, and requires ~ 30 characters of CSS to implement, and is ignored by older browsers.

Here are more basic examples of CSS3 animations:

http://daneden.me/animate/

Also, there is little reason to post more than a link/title to the first news item on the frontpage. Cramming it in there complicates, and reduces the effectiveness of news items (especially when our news items aren't amazingly well composed, there hasn't been an image in a news item in a very, very long time, and when I've tried to make artwork for news posts, it hasn't even been acknowledged despite those making the posts knowing full well of its existence).

Latest News link/title would go in the cloud underneath the main tagline.

Any and all, it would be randomly chosen from a selection. Which selection is up to somebody else (it could be you!).

The same is true of the bottom scene. A 'set' of unit images would be randomly chosen each time. So one page load may show Core tanks, one page load Evo walkers, another showing Zakus and Gundams etc. What sets are available, and which units would be changeable at runtime, and not up to me, so long as they fit into certain design constraints such as angle of view and size of image.

This will not work.
More effort would need to be invested in those animated intro pages than in all games webpages&galleries combined.
Who would do these things when it is already a struggle to get screenshots or short videos? And now there should be some dynamic scene with units, explosions and things?
Imo better spend the time on improving/making games webpages.

Also http://theoatmeal.com/comics/websites_stop

This assumes that each individual unit, and each individual page, and each individual set, will need individual animations.

This is not true, because:

This assumes every single page, and every single post, on darkstars for every single combination or permutation of breadcrumbs required me to hand animate them all.

When actually I just added the classes 'animated fadeInLeft' to the breadcrumbs container elements, and hey presto, every single possible permutation of breadcrumbs worked.

Plane will always come in from the same direction. Units will always be left vs right in the same positions, just with different images. Units will fade in and move from the outside inwards, then remain static. The images will not animate unless someone is silly enough to put GIFs in there.

It will take ~5 minutes to implement and will only need implementing once.

I can see this isn't going to die and people clearly do not understand what I mean by animation, and they're ignoring the links I'm posting.


The script:

• Page loads
  
• Airplane moves diagonally from bottom left to top right, from transparent to full opacity.
• Unit set A slides from left to right, fading into view
• Unit set B slides from right to left, fading into view
• Page finishes loading
• Page is now static.

The entire animation occurs in 1 second.

It is always the same animation. There is no dynamic component, no movies, no ongoing battles, the whole thing takes 1 second. It's a transition effect, not a motion picture.

What exactly is this supposed to improve vs. current? There are far more valid things to worry about, like clearing pointless outdated crap off the wiki.

Pandaformer - the best panda I ever seen )))) nice

so a flash intro?

I think he does not mean an intro but just that some (banner) elements fly into place.
Basically this:


What are breadcrumbs?
The only animation I noticed was when I clicked http://darkstars.co.uk/projects/ai/ntai/ and the >1 MB .png got loaded from top to bottom.

don't know if I would want that. I did like the TAU easter egg for those of you who know about the "idle" commander

The fact that it would be wordpress would be a gigantic leap into the future. The current site is awful.

Moreover, not trying to shoehorn the wiki into the site would be amazing.

CSS3 animations just involve moving a static image around and fading it in/out.

Smoth, knorke's animation was supposed to be a funny example, not a literal interpretation.

The entire idea is painfully simple. Just a bunch of randomized images on top of each other. Quite ingenious really.

For what it's worth, you have my support AF.

This one obviously:

I prefer this site to the S44 or Evo sites actually.

S44 site would have looked a lot better if anyone had bothered to get me a decent screenshot for the banner (like I asked for time and time again ). God forbid that you guys bother to make a newspost more than once a year.

Didn't help that Koshi's server fought me tooth and nail every single step of the way.

S44 Site was a very special case. Also, I doubt you visit the evo site often enough to notice when I change things around and add stuff.



There are a lot of excellent reasons why it is used as much as it is. Just because you don't happen to like a site that is using wordpress is ridiculous. You can set wordpress up to be exactly what you want. Wordpress could be set up to look exactly like this site (though why you would want to do that I don't have a clue), but with much better backend and better management.

To make a change to the current site you have to make a commit to GIT. Captain Kirk is not pleased.

i don't disagree with the overall idea

having a unit slide sideways across the screen is maybe going to look a bit wierd and unnatural... tokyo drift style

you also sort of brannigans' lawed your logo design, which is cool, but don't go changing that shit now; i've included it in many things adhering to your style guidelines. "classic" logo must stay IMO.

suggestion: i would go as far as to say not to bother just sliding planes across; slide some nice wide panoramas of battles from our different games (labelled of course) so that people know what they're looking at. i assume css animations can include masks? i've used them before but never extensively

What is the point

The S44 and Evo sites may be WordPress but there are far, far, fancier sites that work much better than anything I or forb have ever produced so far that are built on top of WordPress and you would never guess.

Useless crap on the wiki is something somebody else can do, I never had any intention of trawling through mediawiki, I've made it quite well known my opinion of the wiki in the past, just try and figure out how to get the unit definition of a unit with the name 'armcom' in lua, it's horrendous, all the callouts are arranged into pages that are of no use to anybody but perhaps someone like Trepan or jk, it's not clear what is where unless you think hard, and a lot of stuff isn't there, the unitdef page is just a small paragraph and a reel of debug output, etc etc

Since mediawiki isn't going to go, I'm not going to waste my time trying to kill it off, give it its own design that fits in with the rest and make a path to it, and keep it there in its own silo, so that it can evolve in parallel. If something better comes along people will use it, else why swim against the current.


And yes, the NTai image is horrendously large. I'm more inclined to completely redo that section of my site, or rather the whole site. I've a new domain lined up anyway.

Also the transition would indeed look weird if it was purely movement, but if it was a fade then it would be fine