Posts by Thrik

  • Grand Theft Auto IV

    Looks good, but the demon of the shoddy frame rate returns. I really hope it's just because of them having to take footage (kind of like how FRAPS slows you down a lot sometimes), because frame rate drops during driving like that would really annoy me after a while.

  • Safari web browser

    The magic of Firefox is really the extensibility. It's a browser that you can mould to do whatever you want, partially due to the huge community of add-on creators. Granted, Opera comes with a lot of stuff out the box, but it also comes with a lot of stuff most people don't need. Firefox on the other hand is leaner by default, but you can almost always get it to do anything you want.

    Opera is also a bit iffy in the visual department IMO. Doesn't even use your operating system's default scrollbar design for some reason.

  • New attachment settings

    Fixed a small bug with non-inline attachments, ensuring they're not clipped by the nasty default phpBB size limiter. Attachments were rebuilt so this may have affected ordering of attachments that weren't posted inline.

  • New attachment settings

    Yet another change: the automatic resizing Javascript now looks at your window size and decides the width at which resizing should occur based on that. If your resolution is sufficiently big to display the image normally, it will do so.

  • New attachment settings

    Attachments that aren't included inline (ie: appear in the white box) now display at their full height instead of having a vertical scrollbar. I noticed that HP's bong picture was showing the scrollbar and deemed it unnecessary.

  • New attachment settings

    OK, new solution is now in place. Similar to before, but any links applied to the original image are left alone and a bar is added above it instead. This means that it's now much more clear that the image has indeed been resized, and people can open the full-size version using their usual browser clicking functionality (middle click for new tab, etc).

  • The image rescaling

    Yes, it was causing some problems with certain configurations when people had their own links applied to the images, and also didn't allow Firefox and IE7 users to middle click the images to open them in new tabs as expected.

    I'm looking into modifying the code so it works properly for all browsers (including allowing middle clicking), but for the time being you can drag the image onto your tab bar (Firefox, IE7) or your address bar (IE6) to view it fully. I would have looked into it further last night but I wanted to go to bed.

  • MapCore Job Census

    I suppose utilising a front page for showcasing the best of the forums (eg: job census, cool WIPs, etc) is a good compromise. It's still relying completely on the forum-generated content rather than trying to become something else, but is a bit more structured and serves as a good introduction to what MapCore is all about if nothing else — and of course useful for people who can't check every thread.

    I definitely wouldn't want to see it so detached from the forums like the old front page, though. The consistent design of Interlopers is the thing I like most, while our old front page looked completely different to the forums.

  • MapCore Job Census

    lol

    I wasn't really responding specifically to you Frie, but more to the general notion of a front page. There've been a number of times it's been mentioned over time and I'm just addressing how I feel about it.

    It is something I've generally thought about and I do like the idea of a forum with actual page sections. Kind of like Interlopers, except without the front page (which I believe would be unnecessary for MapCore). Instead we could have spotlight entries and tutorials built into the header, which may or may not only appear on the front page of the forums (again, similarly to how TribalWar has news in the header).

  • MapCore Job Census

    The problem with the front page is that who's going to actually maintain it and make it interesting for people to go out of their way to look at? It's not like you need a front page for a successful forum community, as we've shown with LucasForums. Our forums do a great job of having an always-fresh front page that takes no work to maintain.

    I'm opposed to the idea of just having a front page because we can. As MapCore itself has demonstrated repeatedly, when we do have a front page it gets everyone excited for a few months and then becomes a stale, dead fossil. Even the news forum went totally dead and averaged three posts per year as of about 2005.

    I also prefer it when members (or staff) post new threads in the gaming discussion forum about news and hot topics (Which they did anyway, even when we had a news forum!), as it encourages discussion. By splitting it into a separate forum or area it just dilutes the conversation.

    IMO the forums are what MapCore is mainly about these days, and we shouldn't get distracted from keeping those as the focus — indeed, I almost put them on the top-level mapcore.net domain when I moved them. Another approach might be for me to work on a custom phpBB theme that is more akin to Interlopers, in that it has a top menu with links to areas that could be presented more like static pages rather than threads (but still be threads underneath), and contain our job census, tutorials, etc. These would of course be really nicely presented and look like proper pages, maybe with company logos, etc.

    So MapCore would effectively become a full-blown site with sections, but the forums would be the front page and focus — not some news page that nobody really cares about. It could be put on mapcore.net instead of forums.mapcore.net to reinforce this direction.