Updated site layout ready?

[AF]

me thinks your perception of the thread has been clouded by emotion, tldr posts, and many many pages

[Forboding Angel]

me thinks your perception of the thread has been clouded by emotion, tldr posts, and many many pages

Emotion, not really, because I don't have a personal stake in it tbh, just certain people and their haughty, holier than thou, attitude pisses me off.

I like the tl;dr posts. I'm prolly the only person here who reads them, but meh.

Many many pages, well there's probably some merit in that. I think I stopped caring about 6 pages back when I realized that 99% of the world's population are "ignant".

[AF]

meh people seem to think I'm a hard line radical imposing my will here, rather I'm a guy stating my opinion followed by a kthxbai and a trip to the ------- cupboard for more snacks. Perhaps people should turn down their thermostats.

[Forboding Angel]

Lets start arguing again... This thread is getting waaaay too civil.

I'll start:

Your best friends mom is packing a harbl.

Your turn.

Edit: Oh and "666, Devil Man... Dirty jungle of love!"

[Wolf-In-Exile]

Forb: Explain why my comments are of little substance and 'full of crap'. I'm not feigning ignorance, and if I don't know what i'm talking about please enlighten me.

If its just the attitude of my posting, then too bad, because the lack of respect I see in this thread for the Spring devs and the engine's heritage pisses me off.

[Forboding Angel]

JK already summed it up wolf. Those "Engines" must be started from scratch

OSRTS/command engine anyone?

[Wolf-In-Exile]

Yes, you have to write a shitton of code to support an RTS but my point was its 'doable'.

The fact that Spring is specialised as an RTS engine and already has a considerable code infrasture is something to be thankful for, is it not?

And before you criticise other people of being haughty and holier-than-thou, you should keep it out of your own attitude.

[Forboding Angel]

Look wolf. I can mount a V8 on a mountainbike. That's doesn't mean that it's a good idea (though that would be 30 forms of awesome and omgwtf?WIN).

Yes spring is somethign to be thankful for, but without content devs, this place would have died quickly.

It all goes back to what I said earlier

Devs, content devs, community.

No 2 can exist for very long without the third (in this particular instance).

[Wolf-In-Exile]

Yes, content devs are important as they bring in new material and bolster the engine's development, I agree. In Spring's case, it aids greatly in the shift away from OTA content which it is heavily based upon.

The thing is, the Spring engine has been sustained by *A mods for most of its life, and only comparatively recently has found new, original and, completely different content from projects like Kernel Panic, PURE, Eternal Struggle, CA and total conversions based on existing IP like SWIW, Battletech so forth, so its not exactly true that it'll die so easily without them.

But like I said, there are limits as to what devs, content devs and community can dictate upon the other respective elements, and one of those is the site in question.

As I put forth in a previous post, the dev team have no right tell content creators or community site of how they design their site if they have one, because its not their decision to make, and the same applies in the opposite direction.
While I understand content creators are eager to get more publicity and recognition for their hard work, they should respect such limits.

It is the dev team's decision whether or not projects using their engine should be showcased on their engine's main page, and if so, what limitations and rules govern the submission of showcase material.

Besides, content creators who have their own sites give a higher impression of credibility, and a very much reduced chance of people getting distracted by other mods as their attention is focused solely on one project, and complete control over content and layout.

On a final note, I realise I came across in a negative manner, and if anyone was offended, I apologise.
My intention was a positive one, which was stopping the arguing over the site's layout, but anger at some posts which I had read was reflected in my own posts, so no hard feelings guys.

[AF]

Can we make a clear distinction here? The term community is subjective and based on context as shown in this diagram.



You see the engine devs have a community of content developers around them.

The players are on the other hand your community. Engine developers develop the game engine that you use, you develop the games the player plays. If the players desert, its you whose buggered not the engine developers. Relying on the developers to draw in players is like asking the president to do basic civil servant jobs and make cups of coffee.

These content developers are what the spring site is supposed to be aiming at yet theyve gone to great lengths to pull in players. This is not ebcause it is the responsibility of the engine developers to do so, but because most content developers refuse to do so, and as a result the whole eco system is flawed.

This is a stopgap to prevent the whole situation collapsing in on itself and as a result it severely strains the potential spring has. Dedicated websites for individual content would be orders of magnitude more effective if done correctly, and could pull in more users than a site such as this one could ever hope to amass without multi million dollar deals.

[Forboding Angel]

You realize that spring is BA right?

[LordMatt]

Nah. BA is Spring.

[smoth]

Forb snip I didn't say I don't have time to read. I said I didn't have time to make good shots at the time. snip Also just because jk said wolf was wrong on one thing doesn't make all of wolfs posts wrong.

snip

Edited for Flames -- LordMatt.

[Forboding Angel]

Hmmm

BA is spring is BA

or

Spring is BA is Spring


Ooooo the quandaries

[SwiftSpear]

Mockup:



Note how the arrangement draws the eye right to the Welcome message, btw. Might work.

It's too ugly. Just leave it the way it is, and then sure, add that mod box with screenshots and what not. Structure it so clicking on it brings up larger screenshots and a bit of text space, and make it a bit larger to begin with so we can have some text space under that.

The text body of general spring information and introduction can be put above the news section, and there's no need to have it remarkably large anyways, we have an 'about' link in our master bar. Basically that whole right side collumb can be left to game links, screenshots, and descriptions.

I don't mind the main banner being a mod/game showcase. The reality is that basically everything really cool about spring has to be credited to modders and game builders. I'd like to keep it the way it is, with the standard 18 font and 12 font text on the banners. (with a little room for artistic creativity if it looks really good and not gaudy). I'd prefer to just let modders submit as many screenshots as they want, and then handle the scrolling of them algorithmically so that every mod gets showcased equally on the frontpage. It'll just be nice for you if you have 30 images, because you get to show off more of your game. We need to add some sort of hyperlink to the top right corner anyways so people can click on the link and be sent to the game's website if it has one. The only qualification I'll stand frim on is that the banners have to look good.

[REVENGE]

So, why can't the big mod screenshot cycle through a couple of different ones every few seconds? With a nice little fade in between?

[SwiftSpear]

So, why can't the big mod screenshot cycle through a couple of different ones every few seconds? With a nice little fade in between?

It probably can, at very least it will be different every time the page is accessed/refreshed. That is already in place.

[clericvash]

So, why can't the big mod screenshot cycle through a couple of different ones every few seconds? With a nice little fade in between?

It probably can, at very least it will be different every time the page is accessed/refreshed. That is already in place.

Yeah but not everyone knows that, some people may get a picture they deem boring and leave.

If we have it change quickly then it can keep people more interested.

[Warlord Zsinj]

I thought something like the top banner here would be excellent: http://www.scifi-meshes.com/ (I wouldn't include the image browser, just the changing images and the flashing image changer. The fact that when you mouse over it, it gives you an image source is very nice though)

Of course, those are flash based - I can do the basics of flash, but I don't think I'd be able to handle the advanced actionscript there - it seems to be loading the images dynamically from a pool somewhere (which is how it would need to work). I'd just be able to make a series of images that rotate as an animated gif or something.

[REVENGE]

I thought something like the top banner here would be excellent: http://www.scifi-meshes.com/ (I wouldn't include the image browser, just the changing images and the flashing image changer. The fact that when you mouse over it, it gives you an image source is very nice though)

Of course, those are flash based - I can do the basics of flash, but I don't think I'd be able to handle the advanced actionscript there - it seems to be loading the images dynamically from a pool somewhere (which is how it would need to work). I'd just be able to make a series of images that rotate as an animated gif or something.

GODDAMMITT!

Sorry, you know why Warlord.

But yeah, can't you do it with Javascript instead?