Title: My contribution: web developer Post by: brettalton on July 30, 2009, 04:25:03 PM Hello everyone,
My name is Brett Alton and I'm a 21-year-old web developer from Canada, currently trying for a B.Sc. in Computer Science (to start September '09) and I would like to help with your website. I've been playing OpenArena for many years on Ubuntu but since I'm not a modeller or a gaming programmer, I figured I could help with my first love, web development. I was previously the web developer for the game Black Mesa and did all sorts of updates on their website. I am no longer their web developer (only stopped due to time constraints at the time). Plans
References
I of course will be doing this as a volunteer, will release all my code, etc. as GPLv2 but I do work and have school and a g/f like everyone else, but I'll do as much as humanly possible. What do you think? Title: Re: My contribution: web developer Post by: pulchr on July 30, 2009, 05:34:01 PM it's very welcome. the current webpage doesn't look that appealing and a quick look at your sites gave me a very positive feeling.
i also think that a consistent look for wiki and main site is a good idea. nice screenshots and some quality youtube videos is a good way to showcase the game. Title: Re: My contribution: web developer Post by: schlorri on July 30, 2009, 05:44:56 PM THAT would be awesome! :)
So i think your welcome here! Title: Re: My contribution: web developer Post by: fromhell on July 30, 2009, 11:14:10 PM Hi
i'd like to see what you'd come with. The previous willing web developer suddenly faded into non-existence, and my new proposed design is really lazy and still ugly brainstorm. I'm not a fan of CMS systems though (Especially having to update them manually, it's bad enough I have to manually update SMF now). Usually it's enough for a SMF news forum feed to be the only real dynamic part of the site for function. Title: Re: My contribution: web developer Post by: Udi on July 31, 2009, 04:52:15 AM I think you should check out previous posts in the The official 2009 site design thread (http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=2985.0) and "The New Face of Sight" Project (http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=2598.0), you can find a lot of info there what kind of site the aim is/was.
Off: do you have any infos about the Black Mesa Source development? Is it completely halted or is it just the website which isn't updated anymore? Title: Re: My contribution: web developer Post by: pulchr on July 31, 2009, 06:12:25 AM udi: my friend is mapping for black mesa source and as far as i know it's not halted.
Title: Re: My contribution: web developer Post by: PaniC on July 31, 2009, 07:22:31 AM I'm not a fan of CMS systems though (Especially having to update them manually, it's bad enough I have to manually update SMF now). Usually it's enough for a SMF news forum feed to be the only real dynamic part of the site for function. Simplemachine's SSI functions (http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=14906.0) are very helpful to show dynamic & forum related stuff on a webpage. :)Title: Re: My contribution: web developer Post by: brettalton on July 31, 2009, 11:11:08 AM Okay, so I see a web developer has already offered his services and then has disappeared. This is common as web developers, well, can be very sketchy sometimes. I don''t know why, but if when I was running a business doing web development, every one was weary of me and my industry.
So let's take it slow and I'll build some mockups in GIMP/Photoshop and slowly build it to where we need to go. We need a design, logical navigation and then we can go into HTML mockups. The end user needs:
For us, we need the site to be:
What I need from you developers to make this as painless as possible:
I read the threads and saw fromhell's mockup: http://openarena.ws/newsiteproto/protoindex.html but the other web developers self-hosted mockup has been taken down, but I did fine someone's screenshots of it: http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2598.0;attach=1597 I'll start working on a mockup once I have the logo and some good screenshots of models. If you need an example of screenshots of models, take a look at your old website, which I have a screenshot of... PS: What happened to that old design? Title: Re: My contribution: web developer Post by: brettalton on July 31, 2009, 11:13:41 AM I think you should check out previous posts in the The official 2009 site design thread (http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=2985.0) and "The New Face of Sight" Project (http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=2598.0), you can find a lot of info there what kind of site the aim is/was. Off: do you have any infos about the Black Mesa Source development? Is it completely halted or is it just the website which isn't updated anymore? They were always slow at updating their website (they have no CMS and use straight HTML, which not many of them know), but if you want to look at their development, look at their YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/BlackMesaSourceMedia I know one of the modellers personally and I know the project is still very active. They have a private forum for their development, so it's hard to know what they're doing unless they explicitly tell you what they're doing. Title: Re: My contribution: web developer Post by: fromhell on July 31, 2009, 11:35:17 AM PS: What happened to that old design? I scrapped it because it was single column, linear, wasn't very modifiable and also it doesn't stand up too well to bandwidth hit rush as it used excessive amounts of PNG images with alphas. When a release came out with this old design, the servers paced like molasses and affected every site it hosts. The release was hosted seperately, it's just all the front page hits that strained. This is why the site is currently simple looking (though too 1999 looking) as of now. It also uses raw HTML for text and such due to some servers ago suddenly quitting php at random, but that's been solved some months ago already.Black Mesa is a 'surprise' development project. I think it's rude to ask about inside info about it here. Title: Re: My contribution: web developer Post by: brettalton on July 31, 2009, 01:43:35 PM PS: What happened to that old design? I scrapped it because it was single column, linear, wasn't very modifiable and also it doesn't stand up too well to bandwidth hit rush as it used excessive amounts of PNG images with alphas. When a release came out with this old design, the servers paced like molasses and affected every site it hosts. The release was hosted seperately, it's just all the front page hits that strained. This is why the site is currently simple looking (though too 1999 looking) as of now. It also uses raw HTML for text and such due to some servers ago suddenly quitting php at random, but that's been solved some months ago already.Black Mesa is a 'surprise' development project. I think it's rude to ask about inside info about it here. Okay, so that'll be one of the components of the site -- very resource efficient. I like being resource efficient! But I'll also make sure to give it some punch... at least on the home page. Would you be able to send me the logos and screenshots of characters and what not? Title: Re: My contribution: web developer Post by: brettalton on July 31, 2009, 06:41:45 PM I found a neat program that can query different Linux distros, asking them what version of a package they have...
Code: $ whohas openarena Title: Re: My contribution: web developer Post by: Rose Wine on August 01, 2009, 08:06:00 PM Quote Would you be able to send me the logos and screenshots of characters and what not? You can take the logo here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Openarena-logo.svg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Openarena-logo.svg) Also there are another logo: http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=1748.msg14802#msg14802 (http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=1748.msg14802#msg14802) Title: Re: My contribution: web developer Post by: mathieu on August 04, 2009, 12:29:37 AM brettalton you can check what we've done for the french community webstie : http://openarena.tuxfamily.org/wiki/
We've setup a wiki and a forum. You can have a look at the design. Good luck for this project. |