Main Menu

NEW LOOK!

Started by Say, February 15, 2004, 10:09:11 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

Cez

Storm, by the way, I'm not mad at you, I'm just always busy, and I tend to leave conversation windows without announcing so.

My computer broke as well, and this weeks are hell for me. With the new site, the recording sessions starting, a whole other new deal that I can't mention, etc, I'm going nuts :)

So feel free to voice out your feelings. There's nothing we can't do unless we know how you guys feel.


Cesar Bittar
CEO
Phoenix Online
cesar.bittar@postudios.com

Jeysie

Quote from: Yonkey on February 16, 2004, 02:39:07 PMWell, relatively lightweight then. :P It's actually a lot smaller than our previous menu's (all the images and rollover gif's).  The bandwidth on this server is extremely fast though, how long does it take you to download 48k on dial-up?

About 10-15 seconds. My max is 5KB/s d/l speed, although it's usually less since I'm usually d/l lots of pages at once. (shrug)

BTW, useless info, according to my Opera "page info" page, this webpage is 11K of HTML, and 216K of inline elements (i.e. images and stuff).

At any rate, if you guys are going to continue to use Flash, could you at least do something more exciting with it than a basic rollover? ;)

Peace & Luv, Liz

Storm

#22
Quote from: César_Bittar on February 16, 2004, 03:28:04 PM
Storm, by the way, I'm not mad at you, I'm just always busy, and I tend to leave conversation windows without announcing so.

My computer broke as well, and this weeks are hell for me. With the new site, the recording sessions starting, a whole other new deal that I can't mention, etc, I'm going nuts :)

So feel free to voice out your feelings. There's nothing we can't do unless we know how you guys feel.

You're not mad at me? Good!! ;D
But I wasn't refering to you. Well, not ONLY to you :P

I'm not just afraid people might get mad at me, it's also that I know you've been working hard and trying to do all that nice stuff for us, it's hard to disappoint you all and say I don't like it  :-\
"Never argue with idiots. They'll drag you down to their level and beat you with experience."

Jeysie

#23
*feels dissed* ;)

BTW, what is the percentage of Internet people that have broadband, anyway? That actually wasn't really one of my gripes.

And I would point out that 2D and 3D don't look and work the same, so that's not quite an accurate analogy. ;)

Truth be told, I pretty much just visit the forums anyway, so I don't really care as much about it as I seem to. ;) Just sort of apathetic, I guess.

Some other thoughts:

The journal's a neat idea.

I like the addition of the artist name to the sketches.

Peace & Luv, Liz

Say

the journal was an idea from cesar actually, we dedicate that feature specially for him :)
and our directors :) *waves at dean*


Say Mistage
Phoenix Online Studios

#IndieSupport <3

Storm

Quote from: Jeysie on February 16, 2004, 05:29:30 PMBTW, what is the percentage of Internet people that have broadband, anyway? That actually wasn't really one of my gripes.

I've got broadband! and I like loading heavy websites. Makes me feel I'm getting my money's worth  ;)
"Never argue with idiots. They'll drag you down to their level and beat you with experience."

Jeysie

(sniff) Broadband is finally available where I am, but it's ridiculously expensive. (And unfortunately DSL is equally ridiculously expensive.) Not to mention that I trust my cable company about as far as I could throw their building.

Peace & Luv, Liz

Jeysie

Yay, Mikey managed to return from the hell of Real Life for a few moments! ;)

And Storm and I are some of your favorite gals, Say? Well, you've got strange tastes in my direction. ;) <3 anyway, though!

Peace & Luv, Liz

KatieHal

Yay, Mike actually posted on the board again!!!!

Katie Hallahan
~Designer, PR Director~

"Change is the constant, the signal for rebirth, the egg of the phoenix." Christina Baldwin

I have a blog!

Storm

Quote from: Say on February 17, 2004, 12:23:30 PMpersonally storm since you decided to speak your mind about it, Ill give you my personal opinion about it, Im a bit sad my fav girls around here are the only ones complaining :P, but as katie said you can't make everyone happy I guess, and no matter how much you b***h I cant hate you :)

I'm a favorite? YAY!!! ;D
Don't worry Say, I'm done complaining for now... I'm actually getting used to the new look ;) and it's a small price to pay for weekly/daily updates :D
"Never argue with idiots. They'll drag you down to their level and beat you with experience."

outofhunk

Well, I am also still getting used to looking at the new colours, but while I liked the old look of the site very much, this one looks great as well!  It certainly gives the impression that the game is headed in a much deeper and darker direction now, which strikes me as accurate based on the bits and pieces I've read in the site and forum.  The new site intro also reenforces that.  It conveys a very mysterious but epic feeling - I am even more excited about the game now, if that's possible!  :)
~ Stefanie

Say

and btw thanks stephie for your kind words too!

A special message for all my forum beloved freaks in here AND SPECIALLY TO MANGO!!!!!!1.... lol :P, be nice to our newcomers, recently we've had an overwhealming suscribing to newsletter as well as to the forum, and as you very well can see we have new posters so no tricking, no liying, no meaniehness, and no spoiling :P

Or I will hunt you down and edit posts with "OMFG I LOVE YOU CESAR" or something :P <3 so behave!

On a even more special beautiful note for all of you... I may have a gorgeous news soon :) for all those kq9 team lovers :P


Say Mistage
Phoenix Online Studios

#IndieSupport <3

KlingonPansy

On the subject of the layout, from a lurker for the past few months who feels obligated to pipe up:
Why?

I'm do about half my computer work on a P-133, the other half on a K6-2\500.  The site is, for all intents and purposes, inaccessible on the former machine.  On the latter, I have to reduce to one window and pause any music playing.  Given that I'm sharing a dial-up connection between three PCs, my download speed is usually no more than 1-2KBPS per page, which puts it at almost thirty seconds to download the navbar usually.

While I won't comment on the asthetic nature of the layout (color scheme, sounds, et cetera), because art is in the eye ofthe beholder, I will say that the layout is not accessible to those of us with older hardware.

Which, if you're designing the game for WinXP, 256 megs of ram, and a 32 meg video card, is perfectly acceptable, so disregard the above post.  Working your design to be nearly 40% flash is a beautiful way to seperate the wheat from the tares.

And back into the shadows,
KP
By the last breath of the not four winds that blow
I'll have revenge upon not Fortunato
Smile in his face I'll say "come let us go
I've a cask of Amontillado"

Jeysie

Quote from: Yonkey on February 21, 2004, 05:25:02 PMWe've only added a Flash-based menu, all other flash ads and promos existed on the old site before this update.  The amount of memory needed for the game will be a lot more than what is required to have the Flash player installed.

The difference is, the old promos were only on one page, and were optional to view, the Flash menu is on *every* page and is necessary to navigate. BIG difference, especially if you like to browse a site more than one page at a time.

Quote from: Yonkey on February 21, 2004, 05:25:02 PMSo in short, the site and the game have completely different requirements.  But if your computer is unable to display a Flash banner, you most likely will not be able to play the game.  :-\

It's not a matter of displaying a Flash banner, it's a matter of displaying lots of Flash banners, so to speak. Plus, when I play a game at least, I shut everything else down so I can devote all my time and (system) resources to it, so it's not a big a deal. Most people I know do more at one time than just browse the web, so when you come across a website sucking up resources, well...

My computer's actually slower than that fellow's... I have a K6-2/350. If I have one or two Flash thingys, and no other webpages with Flash or Java, I'm OK. But more than that, and stuff gets bogged down. And I have a very lean system in TSRs and such... someone with more stuff would have more problems.

As for the download... when you download a big game, well, you're expecting to be in for the long haul. You don't expect that to simply view a webpage. Plus, the old sites may techically have had more images when you factored in the rollovers, but did the bare-minimum-to-navigate images really weigh more? Nobody cares about the rollovers, if you don't have to wait for them to load to click through. Actually, you don't even have to wait for even the plain images to load to click through, you can go by the ALT text. And 50K is a lot on dial-up...

I think we have a slight problem with perspective here. Viewing a website and playing a game are two very different beasts. (shrug)

Peace & Luv, Liz

KlingonPansy

What Liz said for most of the parts.  Just a couple issues to address:
"The amount of memory needed to view this site isn't any different than the old one.  If you had the Flash player installed on your computer at that time then it should be no different now."

And I could disable flash and still navigate back then, couldn't I?

"As for graphics, there are no 3D intensive graphics on this website that require you to have a lot of video memory.  If you can see 16-bit colour then you can see everything as it's meant to be seen."

In this case, I was using graphics as an example of what would be in a faster machine, not as related to the matter at hand as to the game.  I'll be clearer next time.
By the last breath of the not four winds that blow
I'll have revenge upon not Fortunato
Smile in his face I'll say "come let us go
I've a cask of Amontillado"

Say

At some level statements as "I have to shut down my music, and shut down everything else, I cant navigate x sites at the same time" -etc- sounds like personal request, I must sadly admit I've only got 3 right now regarding this and to compared to over 20 other notified replies over this, the answer is pretty much  obvious.

Im sorry, but the flash content is not nearly as much as there is supposed to be, there will be plenty more, and as my co-director previously stated, we actually went a bit more "normal" about the amount of interactive content we were planning to add hence we did set it to a standart and before coding we did research and as far as we realized most of the ppl can support this and more, besides once it's all storaged in cache you dont reload each time, it automatically read what is there so its one time when you must wait for it, but at this rate I asume everyone knows that because It's been told.

About the flash content its on the requirements if you want to shut down flash and you want to shut down pop-ups to enter this site you will not only miss 60% of the news/events/art/whatever we display but also 10% of the current info and upcoming. Every site online has requirements we had our settle very low for the past few years, we cant please everyone but we aim to please around 90% of the internet fans that do frequent this site.

And on the other hand just as Neil said, if your computer is unable to display Flash content, you most likely will not be able to play the game. Even being different "perspectives" this mean our goals are high, so is the quality product and we are not working on a kickass game to have a lousy website.

All the other technical comments on this matter email them at webmaster@kq9.org, we can't buy you a new pc neither we are going back for 3 request but at least you can address your complains the proper way, we've already explained the goals and strategies of the team, they are available to read, those are the minimal requirements of the website and that's all there is to it.

Thanks for all the feedback.


Say Mistage
Phoenix Online Studios

#IndieSupport <3

KatieHal

Quote from: Akril on March 24, 2004, 08:14:32 PM
If someone doesn't at least guess soon, I'm going to start saying what I wish I'd said in that thread on the website's new look before it was locked.


Akril

I don't know what it is (been trying to search a bit to no avail), but I am curious what you have to say about the new look & why you didn't before - or was it cause the thread got locked? (I actually didn't even know it was!)

Katie Hallahan
~Designer, PR Director~

"Change is the constant, the signal for rebirth, the egg of the phoenix." Christina Baldwin

I have a blog!

Storm

Quote from: Akril on March 24, 2004, 08:14:32 PM
If someone doesn't at least guess soon, I'm going to start saying what I wish I'd said in that thread on the website's new look before it was locked.

Racx's guess seems to fit... but I'd still like to hear what you wanted to say  ;)
"Never argue with idiots. They'll drag you down to their level and beat you with experience."

Akril

#38
Darn. I'm sorry, I was typing up a reply when my service provider conked out.

Anyway, racx_00, you are CORRECT! Great job! What mythical creature would you like me to draw for you?

And I don't know why the thread was locked, I guess they just wanted comments from a certain period of time, and I missed the boat.

And this new color scheme, well, it's pretty and all, but it's about as bright and cheery as the inside of a tapeworm, and if I forget to turn my sound down, whenever I visit the page, if I get to close to *WHOOM* one of those *WHOOM* little blue *WHOOM* button things, they make this *WHOOM* loud noise that is a bit much to handle.

And the motif seems to be some sort of fantasy/sci-fi motif, but it doesn't scream KQ to me. I've never seen anything like this in tha games. Something that resembles an ivy-covered wall or some ornately carved inlaid jewels would strike a chord, but instead I've got something that strikes me as very alien...something entirely different than the series I've come to know and love.

But enough smarm already, let's get back to business...


Akril
My Gallery
The Quest Lives... Transit umbra, lux permanet