UnrealSP.org update status

[Buff Skeleton]

Slowly moving forward. Here's how my sandbox .html file looks right now:



Do you think the menu should move along with the reader when scrolling down the site? Or is it fine if it just stays at the top?

Fine if it stays at the top.

I think you could remove that [Menu] tab at the top, though, as it's pretty obviously a menu :p

[ividyon]

By the way, since I am editing the file directly on my Dropbox account, you can always find the most up-to-date development version here. Watch out, though; my editing style usually involves breaking everything over and over again, so you won't always get to see the most optimal results!

Seeing as I've got a math test upcoming on Monday, I won't be able to divert as much attention to the site tomorrow. However, I'm on a roll right now and will probably remain so until the site is done!

[AlCapowned]

That looks great already.

[ividyon]

I think you could remove that [Menu] tab at the top, though, as it's pretty obviously a menu :p

Won't look quite as pretty without it though! Besides, I have a faint idea for another tab that might get added there. You know all these multi-page articles...?

Updated list of important goals I'd like to achieve:

• A nice and easy backend for adding new articles
• Notification tabs for new articles, subscribed threads, PMs, other important stuff
• Review & guest article submission forms
• Better chat integration (GET IN THE CHAT PEOPLE)
• Wider coverage of subjects (Single-player Unreal Tournament 2004, Unreal Tournament 3 & UDK projects/modding)
• Changes to project forum structure (why finished projects in "Projects in Production"? why hardly any attention to Upcoming Maps guidelines?)
• Current MOTW displayed on main site + maybe also on top of forums
• Review list sortable by alphabet, score, author, platform, reviewer, class (Large Campaign etc.)
• Alternate CSS styles (print version, less fancyness, etc.)
• Change random background system (remove entirely or bind background with cookies, for less frequent requesting of bulky data)

Also, so far the layout is HTML5/CSS3 validated. Hooray for clean work!

Right now, you have to download about 139 kb to completely show the site, 97kb of these being the background image (which, of course, will be cached for some time after first download). Everything's in the green, I think!

[TheIronKnuckle]

Please don't remove the background system. Get a leet cache algorithm happening instead.

I like the latest posted version of the logo. Scrolling menu would be nice

[jackrabbit]

Did you take that screenshot at 800x600 resolution? Things seem pretty overscaled, but if you have a dynamic resizer to scale everything up/down it should be fine. Just user browsershots.org to make sure whatever you use is compatible cross-platform.

[ividyon]

I don't really think it's overscaled. It's designed to fit into a horizontal space of 960px, which seems appropriate for today's standards. It will stretch beyond the screen on 800x600, however holding Ctrl and scrolling the mouse wheel down 2 ticks will scale it down sufficiently to display all content without scrolling, while remaining perfectly readable.

Older browsers will lose the rounded corners effect on the site, which I believe is tolerable. Besides that, it seems to work on most platforms... if the test page doesn't work right for anyone, they should report it to me ASAP!

[Raven]

Make use of new HTML 5 tags section/article/header/hgroup/nav etc. just add:

Code: Select all

<!--[if IE]>
       <script src="http://html5shiv.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/html5.js"></script>
    <![endif]-->

to header, and:

Code: Select all

/* HTML5 tags */
article, aside, details, figcaption, figure, footer, header, hgroup, nav, section { display: block; }
audio, canvas, video { display: inline-block; *display: inline; *zoom: 1; }
audio:not([controls]) { display: none; }
[hidden] { display: none; }

to css file.

[TheIronKnuckle]

Would be sweet if you could keep the background stable during text scrolling, like it is on usp now. And again, please don't remove the rotating images. Maybe just another call to bolster the collection? demand more shots? And find some way to cache effectively if performance is the issue.

[ividyon]

If we do another collection of background images, I'll have to enforce higher quality standards, because 1024x768/800x600 screenshots with jaggies just aren't quite sufficient to cover a modern screen anymore.

Updated the test html with a fixed background position, added the HTML5 thingamajig. My time is quite limited, so not much progress is being done this very moment.


Query: What do you think about text readability in the new design? Is it fine? As you can see, the old UnrealSP page uses a dark grey color for the background scanlines, which may make the white text easier to read, while I've gone with pure black for the new design... does the contrast hurt the eyes too much?

[Jet v4.3.5]

Query: What do you think about text readability in the new design? Is it fine? As you can see, the old UnrealSP page uses a dark grey color for the background scanlines, which may make the white text easier to read, while I've gone with pure black for the new design... does the contrast hurt the eyes too much?

Unless you just have to have it, then I'd say yes, it hurts my eyes a lot more than the subtle look of the old design. Back-of-the-eyes sort of pain thing from straining. And additionally, the scanlines always felt very nice and solid in the design. If you can't have them in the new version, that's understandable, but if you can, I'd suggest them.

[Raven]

Everything's fine. Once you finish design, I'd need few weeks (due to job and many other works) to implement CMS. I'll add automatic detraction of backgrounds. You'll just have to upload it. Beside it better google bot support, caching and other optimization's. Trust me - I'm doing that shit long time.

[ividyon]

Unless you just have to have it, then I'd say yes, it hurts my eyes a lot more than the subtle look of the old design. Back-of-the-eyes sort of pain thing from straining. And additionally, the scanlines always felt very nice and solid in the design. If you can't have them in the new version, that's understandable, but if you can, I'd suggest them.

Mind that the new design does have scan lines (this is a link) and they're just darker.

Everything's fine. Once you finish design, I'd need few weeks (due to job and many other works) to implement CMS. I'll add automatic detraction of backgrounds. You'll just have to upload it. Beside it better google bot support, caching and other optimization's. Trust me - I'm doing that shit long time.

Awesome. =) I'll try to get everything finished up sometime soon, then. You don't know how happy this makes me! I'd never have managed to code the new backend myself, no matter how much I wanted to.

[TheIronKnuckle]

If we do another collection of background images, I'll have to enforce higher quality standards, because 1024x768/800x600 screenshots with jaggies just aren't quite sufficient to cover a modern screen anymore.

I'm cool with enforcing higher quality, but personally I like the fact that the image only takes up a small portion of my resolution and fades into blackness towards the edges. We don't necessarily need to "fill the screen".

The site still looks great as it is. I always direct people who want to see an example of good, simple, effective, and aesthetic web design to the usp main page and then refresh a few times to demonstrate the background changing. I don't think there's any need to revamp the frontend "too" much. It's the back end that's been the issue this whole time. I've always considered USP to be the perfect website (from the outside at least, I understand that there are plenty of issues in the backend ). That's why i'm being so conservative, if it's not broken, don't fix it. If it's perfect, don't even touch it!

[ividyon]

Thanks to some awesome Raven code magic, [tags] in topic titles are now parsed into icons the same way as on the main site!
I'm considering to add an additional icon (a green checkmark) for the [released] tag.