SpringInfo "Player Portal"

[Warlord Zsinj]

I wasn't complaining, I think you've done a great job, and Spring will be better off with your site. I was merely saying that you seem to be duplicating information that should be hosted, imo, on the spring website (the first point of contact for any noobs). I think your method/architecture of doing so is successful, and, unlike the spring site, is actually in existence, and so should be used there.

Anyway, I've got my thoughts across here, and I don't intend to rile anyone up, so I'm exiting left.

[SwiftSpear]

I've said it before, and I do not know how to make it any clearer. It is simple truth that the main spring site will never be awesome for players. Adequate, but not much more.

THere is too much info to crawl through for a new user. The spring site tries to serve Engine Devs, Content Devs, and Players. Any wild guesses as to what it is the worst at?

SpringInfo is devoted to the playerbase, therefore it can be VERY good at that purpose.

THe purpose of modpages is NOT to update them every single day... YOu could, but I dunno what the point would be. THey are just an advertising outlet to lead an interested user to your website.

News posts are where it's really at. Post your juicy stuff there and it will get seen.


Course, people could just sit back and whine, which is pretty much par for the course for some people around here.

Eventually I'd probably like the player portal on our server... basically just so that we can be sure it's up when the lobby server that links to it is up.

Currently lobby clients will have to implement all, if any, information coming from the portal site independently. Eventually I'd like it set up so that the server can tell the lobbies what advertisements they put where (of course it won't be enforced, but the idea is that you can update lucidly on all clients, as well other entities using our server/lobby system can run their own servers with their own advertisements)

[Forboding Angel]

Font size on that site is way, way too small and needs to be bumped up a few notches.

Ctrl+mouse wheel, use it with pride and distinction. In Soviet Russia, browser learns you!

Eventually I'd probably like the player portal on our server... basically just so that we can be sure it's up when the lobby server that links to it is up.

Dreamhost has been down all of 2 days in the past year...

Currently lobby clients will have to implement all, if any, information coming from the portal site independently.

All they have to do is point it to an http address. It's really not difficult.

Eventually I'd like it set up so that the server can tell the lobbies what advertisements they put where (of course it won't be enforced, but the idea is that you can update lucidly on all clients, as well other entities using our server/lobby system can run their own servers with their own advertisements)

And on the 8th day, god created iframes, remote linking, random rotations, and a million other useful things.

[koshi]

Eventually I'd probably like the player portal on our server... basically just so that we can be sure it's up when the lobby server that links to it is up.

We'd also be sure it's down when fnordia's box is unreachable, which has happened 4 or so times over the last 7-8 weeks iirc. There's always been great confusion about where a backup lobby is running, what the issue at hand is and such in those cases. Having another information source is a very good idea imo.

[smoth]

THe purpose of modpages is NOT to update them every single day... YOu could, but I dunno what the point would be. THey are just an advertising outlet to lead an interested user to your website.

Modpages should only have news updates where there are significant things to communicate with the players. A new release, map or project related stuff. Constant updates are pointless. The player needs to come there find out what they are downloading maybe a guide and get to playing.

Other sites can discuss the rest. Kinda what forb is trying to do if I understand it right.

News posts are where it's really at. Post your juicy stuff there and it will get seen.

YAY FOR MODDB!

Forb if you could move the text up further on the page. By the text I mean the text you have placed below the banner could be on the banner image. That large banner could be reduced to about 70-60% of it's current height.

[DemO]

Excellent work forboding, quite impressive effort there.

One suggestion I have is a quickstart guide that is very concise but still intuitive enough for new players. Put it on a seperate page rather than being part of the "Getting Started" page.

Simple fact is that the vast majority of casual players will not be interested in reading blocks of text before understanding how to use Spring and its clients.

A single page with some images and small amount of text should be sufficient to get people started. Once they've done that at minimal effort, they may well return to read more detailed information on your site about Spring, the mods, clients etc.

[Forboding Angel]

I think you have a good point Demo, however, I am lothe to add another page for it cause even though the site wraps, at 1280 I'm running out of real estate for it.

To that end, getting started quick start now gets right to the controls and stuff. So the quick start deal should be a bit more, well, concise. I also realized the the multi and single sections of quickstart were quite redundant (and old) because of the multiplayer and singleplayer pages.

Still needing content devs to register and do their mod pages nice and pretty. It's super simple to format your pages... Let me put it this way... It's easier to do here than editing a wiki, if that adds any enticement.

Furthermore, Mapmakers, register! Post your map screens on the front page!

And above all, help spread the word. This should be a great outlet for new and even experienced players.

[NOiZE]

Any reason why TA mods are not shown?

[Forboding Angel]

From the first page:

Well TBH I had a significant amount of trouble finding info in one place for CA and BA that was useful in this context. They aren't excluded for any other reason than that tbh. The Idea is that saktoth and noize would register and get access to create their own pages. I honestly figured it would be best this way.

The majority of the other mods already had info set up in a way that I could do copy pasta and have most of the needed info already there.

That said, many of those pages need to be redone in a prettier fashion. It was a lot of content grabbing, so I didn't take the time to make them super pretty. That is the modder's job. Notice that even evolution's page is jsut a copy pasta of the about page on http://evolutionrts.info

The point is, There isn't some devious plan to exclude *A mods, it's just that they have very little info available in 1 nice coherent place.

[AF]

Can you link us to the BA site noize?

[NOiZE]

http://spring.clan-sy.com/wiki/Balanced_Annihilation

Best i could come up with =)

I guess i could write something sometime

[AF]

If you need a webhost..

[NOiZE]

I need someone to write something =)

[AF]

request threads ftw

[Forboding Angel]

Maek register!

http://www.springinfo.info/wp-login.php?action=register

[el_matarife]

Font size on that site is way, way too small and needs to be bumped up a few notches.

Ctrl+mouse wheel, use it with pride and distinction. In Soviet Russia, browser learns you!

Yeah that's a proper solution to fix a site where the body text is all of 7 pixels tall. Here's a photo so you can see exactly how it looks in IE and Firefox on my 22" 1680x1050 monitor.



Text size resizing doesn't even work in IE6 for the site either.

[clericvash]

black background with loads of white text = fail and bad on the eyes

[Forboding Angel]

Oh, and clicky here.

[Forboding Angel]

Text size resizing doesn't even work in IE6 for the site either.

IE6?

Lolz?

[koshi]

some nitpicking:

• empty tooltips should not be displayed
• the big rss icon seems to have unclean rounded edges
• due to the background image i find the month's shortname a bit hard to read
• the font used for subheadings, for example on "Getting Started", makes '(M' look like a single char (gets a bit better when enlarging the font size tho)

How about mentioning SpringLobby more explicitly? I know there's the danger of confusing the newbie, but i feel it's warranted, especially on the Singleplayer page. Seeing that you can't place bots freely on the map with TASClient and SpringSP has no support for LuaAI (chickens!) (and modoptions?)