The taint of *A

[FLOZi]

Maybe worth posting your forum overhaul doc here Smoth? I think it's relevant to the discussion.

[smoth]

it is in need of an update before I post it again. IIRC the version I sent you that I have is an earlier draft?

[FLOZi]

Yeah the feeling was that it wasn't the most recent version.

[bobthedinosaur]

knorke... i hate that meme but that was pretty good

[zwzsg]

Not MA's fault if the makers of other games do not put their video on frontpage.
If you remove the videos with *A content from spring page, you have no videos left. Yea, thats alot better.

http://springrts.com/media.php?type=videos

Not mine either. I can't even get the website staff to add a KP picture!

The ais are indeed problematic. ALL of them do not work for my project, the only ones that do are the chicken ai. I would love to have a way to deal with this on a project specific level. You have no idea how many emails I get about this shit.

My way to deal with it is:
- Make custom game installer were AI non working for a game is eremoved
- Make player use my own launcher (either Lua ingame one or custom exe one), instead of mutiplayer lobbies

I'm not sure it really work since many people still believe they need the installer from Spring website, or worse that they need to copy over data from their TA. And to make them use my own launcher, I first have to install it and create shortcut to it with my installer.

But maybe it could work if people went "I want to play Gundam RTS, let's download the GRTS installer" instead of "I want to play that Gundam mod of TA Spring, let's install Spring over my TA".

[knorke]

yes the moderators could do better imo. i know its all free time job but i see most mods posting regulary and accepting some "screenshots - contributions" should not take that much time?
dont need a forum overhaul doc to see why this is wrong:
http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=25066

[PicassoCT]

Who says a game needs to have cutting edge AAA level graphics in order to be fun and become popular?

Has to be TopNotch to be a big sella, has history tought you nothin?

[AF]

Website issues:

Go ask forb at how frustratingly long it takes to get from writing code, to deployed on live site. Even when done using git and a nice forked repo is setup and made available to pull into the main repo, the time it takes to get from that branch you setup to loading in my browser is obscene. It stifles and crushes any enthusiasm to contribute or even to fix long standing issues.

There are massive improvements that could be made but cant. The most mundane being letting this site take up a half decent width, its only 760px wide and table based! How are we meant to be taken seriously with a site whose design and technical capabilities are trounced by sites from 1999, and even then fail to make use of the full screen width of that era.

Why take the most succesful game out of this site? Wont it hurt us?:

Moving *A discussion and media to a subsite will not hurt BA, or splinter the community. It will help it. If the naysayers predictions are true and the community will die a death, why was there no damage when I setup AI forums on darkstars? Smoths FGJL? The Spring 1949 site? The AA website? (yes our primary gaming community has been based offsite before, so why should doing it again be such a disaster? )

Speed Metal

Although we displaced speedmetal with delta siege dry, in doing so we raised the graphical experience for 70% of the users, and we banished a whole playstyle that actively degraded a players ability to play any other kind of playstyle.

[FLOZi]

yes the moderators could do better imo. i know its all free time job but i see most mods posting regulary and accepting some "screenshots - contributions" should not take that much time?
dont need a forum overhaul doc to see why this is wrong:
http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=25066

Pretty sure that the ability is in fact limited to a small amount of people and is not actually available to all all forum moderators.

Also +1 to everything in AF's post, except that i like a fixed minimum width and I will kill anyone who stands in my way to keep it. (a rarity for us to agree so much, for sure )

[AF]

I was thinking more like a 950/960px fixed width design, something the phpbb theme can actually fit in.

[Forboding Angel]

999 has a habit of fitting beautifully with netbook screen resolutions (25 pixels for scrollbars, etc etc).

[smoth]

yay lets jack the thread and make it about non-standard widths because af wants to push his perspective on webdesign in yet another thread.

[Forboding Angel]

Go ask forb at how frustratingly long it takes to get from writing code, to deployed on live site. Even when done using git and a nice forked repo is setup and made available to pull into the main repo, the time it takes to get from that branch you setup to loading in my browser is obscene. It stifles and crushes any enthusiasm to contribute or even to fix long standing issues.

It was in relation to this smoth.

Yes I blame *A for a lot of issues, the fact that we can never get any progress around here is one of them.

[smoth]

Yes and we have had these debates, remember? Most people here do not want a text area that is very wide, it hurts readability. AF's crusade to see the website altered to his personal design preference has little to do with the issue that projects are stigmatized into being 12 year old models from ta.

[PicassoCT]

12 years old, you say?

[KDR_11k]

Guess he forgot TA's birthday.

[PicassoCT]

The cake, you ate the cake without me, betrayal off trust, that is what i got oh, the drama, how could you.

[smoth]

12 years old, you say?

just quoting what that dude said

[AF]

960px isn't a nonstandard width, most modern CSS frameworks are 950 or 960 its kind of the standard as its the largest that'll reliably fit on a 1024 screen while having the right dimensions to comfortably fit a useful number of grid columns

[smoth]

so what you are just going to put some crap on the side of the forum? I don't see any point to that. I also don't want a 900px wide text area. It still doesn't matter, you are just sidetracking the thread, af your want for a different site has NOTHING to do with the issue of people thinking all projects look like the current incarnation of *A, NOTHING.