Updated site layout ready?

[Crayfish]

Haha :) Precisely!

Adjudicator is a good idea. Because of what SpikedHelmet said.

Benign dictatorship with discourse is the best government / project management strategy in my opinion. Pity power corrupts and most people have an agenda.

[aGorm]

Can't you just let that go Warlord?

Perosonly most of the new banners that have been added need to be removed... that sounds harsh but alot of them are just not up to scratch.

Also, with the grey overlaying the banners on the site most everything looks bad. So I would take that off. The original plane one is cool, and we need more like that. (Also, personly the way the plane comes out the banner was one thing that sold the page design to me in teh first place... so why drop it?)
Also, I think this has been agreed, but no extra text (liek mod name) on the banners right? Thats just confusing.

On the welcome images, some of the images are better, and personly I think its fine to have the Mod's logo on there, however It would be nice to have some consitancy in quality. It would also be nice if all mods were represented equalaly.

Personly I think it would be fine to say 5 or 6 images MAX per a mod, And I don't honestly see why people would want more. Any more than that and your just abusing the system to get you mod displayed more than the others.
(Not that we should make taht a hard definate rule I'm just thoughing out sugestions)

Also... the box behind the text ius cool, but doesnt work all teh time, and as such should be droped. It should be part of the page, not part of the image, just use a semi-trans div of black that will resize when the text is displying at diffent sizes, give it a rounded edge with a small image, and wola, no-one will have to worry about adding a box to the image, or it being the wrong size.

Also, I don't mind doing QC on images, that is if peopel would be ok with trusting my judgment.

Also, once I have moved house ( <-- this is my currnt reason for being so darn busy) I will probably sit down and do a bunch of banners and welcome images for all the mod's.

aGorm (wow thats a long post)

:::EDIT::: If you read that and have decided I'm saying ALL TEH BANNEZ IS CRAP, then please dont take it that way. I just ment they could be great but most are currently Meh...

[Warlord Zsinj]

nevar agorm, your textures were amazing, we want you to come back

[Peet]

I think I managed to split out most of the drama without destroying the flow of the thread. Do try and be civil.

[Hoi]

launch the site, its alot better than this one, you cant wait forever!
and stop deleting my posts

[Forboding Angel]

Personly I think it would be fine to say 5 or 6 images MAX per a mod, And I don't honestly see why people would want more. Any more than that and your just abusing the system to get you mod displayed more than the others.
(Not that we should make taht a hard definate rule I'm just thoughing out sugestions)

Agorm, you just defeated your own argument. if you had say 15 or so per mod, the images would be truly random. The more selection you have, the more random results you will get.

As a half ass working example, make a winamp playlist with 3 different albums. 3 songs from each album for a total of 9 songs, and pay attention to how often what gets played.

Now take 10 songs from each album and put it into said playlist for a total of 30 songs. Much more erratic is it not? That's why more is better.

Obviously in winamp that example only works so well considering that winamp is designed not to play the same song until the rest have been played whereas a php script just picking a file at random from a directory doesn't care. But the concept is still applicable.

I am perfectly willing to compromise at 18pt font (bolded) for the game logo/name.

@WZ, the problem is, what you posted is a perfect example of a credit, not an advertisement. The stuff needs to pop out to some degree at the user. Now, it doesn't need to slap them in the face, but it definitely needs to be noticed within a split second.

[Peet]

Well the banner system is perfectly fair if every mod has the same chance of being displayed, instead of just randomly choosing an image from a group with different mod proportions. It'd be pretty trivial to implement, using a directory for images for each mod, or mod name prefixes in the filename, etc.

[Machiosabre]

I can easily list 10 mods who will in all likelihood make banners, 50 pictures seems plenty random, hell it's almost double as random as your random example.

[Forboding Angel]

Well the thought did cross my mind to keep a database that recycles itself, but tbh, that seems like a bit of overkill.

Edit: It would be quite trivial to implement essentially a text database of images that have been displayed. THe only issue I see is that the script would need to know how many total images there were, then if # (of displayed images) < total # of images, pick one randomly as long as the filename doesn;t match any in this list that we refer to.

It still seems like massive overkill to me tho. Not like it would take more than a millisecond of server/rendering time if even that, but it seems like jumping off the deep end.

[Hoi]

Well the banner system is perfectly fair if every mod has the same chance of being displayed, instead of just randomly choosing an image from a group with different mod proportions. It'd be pretty trivial to implement, using a directory for images for each mod, or mod name prefixes in the filename, etc.

this is what im saying all the time

[Argh]

Well the banner system is perfectly fair if every mod has the same chance of being displayed, instead of just randomly choosing an image from a group with different mod proportions. It'd be pretty trivial to implement, using a directory for images for each mod, or mod name prefixes in the filename, etc.

That's a terrible idea. It just rewards the lazy. Why should some guy who couldn't be bothered to make 10 images be given equal time with the guys who did? That's not "fair", it's actually incredibly unfair to the guy who did more work.

[Hoi]

we are in a loop here, get out of it base images on mods not on images

[Machiosabre]

Well the banner system is perfectly fair if every mod has the same chance of being displayed, instead of just randomly choosing an image from a group with different mod proportions. It'd be pretty trivial to implement, using a directory for images for each mod, or mod name prefixes in the filename, etc.

That's a terrible idea. It just rewards the lazy. Why should some guy who couldn't be bothered to make 10 images be given equal time with the guys who did? That's not "fair", it's actually incredibly unfair to the guy who did more work.

sure it's fair, why should the ability to make a bunch of images have anything to do with whether your mod is on the front page of spring?
it's not like anyone gives a damn if a mod has 20 different images on the site or 5

[Argh]

sure it's fair, why should the ability to make a bunch of images have anything to do with whether your mod is on the front page of spring?

Because we're the ones providing the visual variety that helps sell people on the idea of downloading and using the game engine, that's why.

[Machiosabre]

you don't need 200 images for variety. you need it for wasting a lot of time for no reason.

[Crayfish]

Sure. Make 10 really good ones. I don't see that anyone should be rewarded for making more banners - the mod cycling is obviously the fairest way.

[Forboding Angel]

Dude... you can make a psd template like I did, and then simple paste the images into the template. Your arguments are ridiculous.

Working example of 18pt font followed by 12pt font

[Crayfish]

That looks good FA.

[Peet]

sure it's fair, why should the ability to make a bunch of images have anything to do with whether your mod is on the front page of spring?

Because we're the ones providing the visual variety that helps sell people on the idea of downloading and using the game engine, that's why.

By that logic, if a product's magnitude of marketing is to be based on the authors' contribution to Spring, the banners should consist entirely of the TA demo recorder, old versions of xta, and other projects lead devs are involved in such as bzflag.

[Machiosabre]

Dude... you can make a psd template like I did, and then simple paste the images into the template. Your arguments are ridiculous.

exactly, more images have no incredible value.