Idea for atmospheric home page

[Noisycricket]

Ok, i know this probably isn't the right place for this, but its the most related section. I was just thinking about the fact that release is so close and about how people will receive the mod. I always loved the http://www.thief-thecircle.com/ home page and others that sort of drew me in. The mod will speak for itself, but I thought having a homepage that sort of represented the atmosphere that is trying to be acheived . So, my idea is just a small part of it and is just adding flickering light from a torch or light....and maybe flickering windows..... Yup, thats it...

 

 

But here some examples to help illustrate what i thinking of:

http://www.mobygames.com/images/i/20/14/627514.jpeg (whole scene flickers from animated fire)

http://stalker.zoo.co.jp/images/stalker_wp_02_1600.jpg

http://cosas.ttlg.com/

http://www.thief2x.com/default2.asp

[Fidcal]

Yes, it would be nice to have a good atmospheric webpage for the main download of Dark Mod plus FMs and other tools. The wiki pages for Den and St. Lucia are functional but not really atmospheric and limited as to editing. The main Dark Mod home page is fine so I envision a link from that page and a new page in that style. The actual downloads do not necessarily have to be on that server if not suitable. There will be other download sites such as Komag but we do need to prepare a decent main webpage soon.

[Darkness_Falls]

The team tinkered with the idea of a flickering candle and other ideas for the forum pages here years ago, but the thoughts were pretty quickly dismissed in favor of actually doing work on the mod itself. Would've been too much unproductive time.

 

I did some tiny candle flicker experiments... nothing special. I think oDDity did some experiments, too -- and his were probably, naturally, better. In the end, though, the idea just kinda fell by the wayside.

 

I just now uploaded my quick video tests to imageshack here. (Wow, imageshack sure degrades the quality when compressing. Not that the videos were very HQ to begin with, but one of these is atrocious.) Regardless, you might get the idea of some things we were messing with. (Before you click the play button, that's more like the original image quality of how the video is before imageshack compression):

 

Candle Flicker 1

 

Candle Flicker 2

 

It was fun to mess around with the idea for a short time anyways. If anything were to be done to the website for the release, I'm thinking it would be funner to do more than a candle flicker. But it really does take time away from creating the mod toolset to do stuff like this.

[Noisycricket]

That looked freakin awesome!

[greebo]

Can you produce an animated gif out of that?

[Mortem Desino]

An animated gif is likely not the best solution because

1. It'd take up several hundred KB and 2. 256 color palette (even an optimized pallete) will look very ugly.

 

The second one can be solved by an animated png, but few browers can view the animation, just the first frame.

 

The best solution would probably be a shockwave flash animation, though I'll quickly mock up an animated gif just to see it it's acceptable quality.

[Noisycricket]

What happened to Oddity, does he come here anymore?

[Mortem Desino]

'bout a half-hour's work from scratch. And not a bad filesize, either: 192 KB for 10 frames. Maybe we won't need a flash animation.

 

I still like candle flicker 2 above a whole lot more. With time I could make a similar "dancing" flame.

[greebo]

Yes, I somehow dislike using flash for simple things like that. Flash is ok for browser games or playing videos, but for site graphics it feels a bit wrong to me (but that's just my personal view).

 

What happened to Oddity, does he come here anymore?

Haven't seen him since last year. The last thing he gave to us was the Saint Lucia statue (which was awesome as usual), but then he seems to have disappeared.

[SneaksieDave]

What happened to Oddity, does he come here anymore?

Presumably putting talents to work for cash at this point.

 

http://www.pixelwerks.be/

 

He did mention he'd contribute some stuff now and then, but as greebo said, he hasn't been around for a long time.

[Darkness_Falls]

The flame in Candle Flicker 2 is an actual candle flame. I filmed one on my desk at home and put it in there, and the flame had some nice dancing to it you can't really see in that compressed video.

 

At the time, I had also tried to make an animated GIF of it, but as stated above, it looked really bad.

 

With more time, I might've been able to make something for a web page... but just kinda gave up on things when I couldn't get After Effects to cooperate very well with file sizes and video compressions, etc. It probably wasn't the most ideal application to use.

[Mortem Desino]

If you've got tempgenc or some other utility, email me or PM me lossless screenshots of each frame of the movie (in a ZIP is fine). I'll make an animation; I'll just adjust the gif's 256-color palette by hand so it looks a lot better.

 

The only issue would be trying to turn that dancing flame into a seamless loop without obvious repeats.

[Tels]

Could we use a similiar technique (by using ROQ directly) to embed moving parts into our (main) menu?

[Mortem Desino]

Yes you could, but ROQs don't have an alpha channel. That's why we often just use gui commands to rotate, translate, dilate, etc.

[Crispy]

Might help if you kept a static image for most of the logo (omitting the flicker on "The Dark Mod" which I'm not a huge fan of personally) and just used a GIF for the flame part. You can then use CSS positioning to put the flame over the top of the base image. That gives you much smaller file sizes and more freedom with the palette.

[Springheel]

Is there really a pressing need to add more eye candy to the forum title?

[Darkness_Falls]

Crispy - And on the flip side, seeing only the candle flame move wouldn't do much for me, personally. If something like this were ever done, I would think you'd also want some light bouncing off the table underneath the candle or the chair on the right. Candle Flicker 2 has just what you say (static Dark Mod logo), but with the chair bouncing light from the candle. It should probably be softer and more subtle than what I have, though.

 

SH - I'm not sure if Noisycricket was looking to modify the forum's banner, or was just wanting a more atmospheric home page (thedarkmod.com) upon or nearing the release. I thought it was moreso the latter.

 

I feel the banners used on the sites could use some subtle life somehow someday, but I would agree it's probably not a pressing need by any means, considering the toolset is still under construction. And no matter what the site looks like, people will download The Dark Mod. I think it would accentuate the final product by having a more atmospheric site or sites in the end. (And no, I'm not saying a candle flicker would be the only way.)

[Noisycricket]

Yeah, the flickering torch/candle idea I imagined to be part of larger effort (in a perfect world ), but it certainly could look nice alone of course. I guess the thing i think would be most helpful is something that sort of visually shows what the mod is trying to offer, something atmospheric. I think its likely the dev's here are more passionate about the Thief universe than the Thief 4 dev's and i hope people know that and how much effort has been put into this.

 

But I wasn't sure if there was a person or group dedicated singularly to the homepage design or not, I just noticed it changes every so often. I was really just sort of talking out loud as i usually do, It certainly wasn't a request.

[Fidcal]

Yes, and more important is to discuss the download page for Dark Mod Release 1. Looking at the home page @ http://www.thedarkmod.com/ you wouldn't quickly know there are two demo FMs to download already. I'd hate to think Release 1 just goes in as a news item and gradually gets pushed down out of sight. I would at least add as the first link at top left 'Downloads' plus add 'get it here' in the descriptive summary at top centre.

 

The download page can be the same style and should at least include:

• A link to the Release 1 download.
  
• A link to the FMs downloads.
  
• A link to the existing demos downloads.
  

Each link to at least include a short summary with full info on the download page. Do we plan to have manage and maintain a continuing FMs download page or will it be run by other websites such as Komag's? Think carefully. That can be quite a task over the years and FM makers will want to be able to finish their FMs and offer it up to a website and have it available within a day or so, ideally the same day. Who would be available to manage that?

 

Re-releasing the two demos has been discussed before but it now occurs to me that they are fine to remain forever as demos. Any newcomer to Dark Mod might not want to download 1.5GB unseen. I would rather those demo wiki pages be moved to and re-styled along with the main Dark Mod pages and leave the wiki as an info website. We can stress that they are very early demos and Dark Mod has progressed enormously since then.

[Tels]

Is there really a pressing need to add more eye candy to the forum title?

 

No, but people like to do things that interest them and that they find "cool" If humans cared only for "what they need", they would eat, sleep and have sex in the trees all day long like bonobos...

[Springheel]

Each link to at least include a short summary with full info on the download page. Do we plan to have manage and maintain a continuing FMs download page or will it be run by other websites such as Komag's? Think carefully. That can be quite a task over the years

 

Yes, I've considered that. I think I actually started a post asking for input a few weeks ago, but didn't get any.

 

edit: My only concern with relying on third-party websites is that we lose control over what FMs are hosted (in other words, FMs that infringe on copyright could be mixed in with official TDM missions).