SURPRISE!
do I even need to say more? ;D
I believe I dont, this was the surprise I've been holding back these days, from here... nothing but GOOD GOOD stuff :)
Enjoy! <3
On a different note!
check out the newsletter to find out what the updates are about and such, if you havent suscribed please do so, these newsletter will be monthly and cover the movement of the team on the previous month, for now we have very few, we continue on working (the site is still under construction) and well... what else? if you want to comment on journal/newsletter and art of the week feel free to do so we will have available any moment soon threads for you to comment on, thnx.
Note: the art of the week may continue on art division
I've been redcued to letters...
OMFG I LOVE IT!!!!!!
Ahh! the flash thing, i didnt know we were updating that!! AAHHH!! LOVE IT!!!!!!!
lol, thankies :D
it wasnt part of the plans (the intro) but im glad it got done as well :)
WOW, EET EES BOOTIFUL :D
Loveitloveitloveit :D
Well i was kinda right cos i said something about updating the forum ;D, and Storm said you probably wouldnt :(, so Storm was wrong :D
I love the new look but...
Why the menu in Flash? I hate Flash for navigation menus... it's slow, doesn't serve any purpose, and screws up my surfing style. Especially since all you're using yours for is simple rollovers... which could easily be done with PNG and a little CSS code. (sigh) So you've effectly locked out anyone who doesn't run Flash for no reason?
(In fact, I usually surf with Flash disabled myself, since it slows down my system because I always have a lot of windows open. Wasn't until I realized there was a slight lack of menus available that I had to turn it back on. I don't suppose you guys have a sitemap I can just surf from?)
Still need to check out the new intro. I usually always skip over splash pages (which I also honestly find to be a waste of time), so I didn't notice it before hearing about it here.
I really like the new look, don't get me wrong. But you don't need the Flash menus. You're just making stuff needlessly complicated.
Peace & Luv, Liz
Hmm...I could do for the column width being bigger on the forum page, now that I think about it. But I do like the new look.
/me already feels the cold breeze blowing :(
lol, what cold breeze?
You say things about it and I reply them to you, this is not a thing done because we felt like it, this is not a thing done overnight, so hence since Im the responsible for my department I guess I should at least clear out the doubts and reply to the comments.
As I said, IMHO I believe its just a matter of time till you all get used to it and stop picking on it :P in the meantime have fun either picking it or loving it :)
I said nothing about it! nor am I going to. Nothing I can say would make any difference anyhow ::)
And I wasn't the one to complain... That was Jeysie with her Flash issues. I don't mind the Flash at all ::)
Oh, no, I'm VERY aware of what I'm conveying here ;D
And you seem to be aware as well... hence the cold breeze ;)
:D I just want to say I'm amazed with everyone who's involved with this, you've all totally shocked me!!!! I love the new intro it's got me all nervous and excited about the game again and also the colour scheme is kinder to my eyes as well. JUST WOW! ;D
Oh and jeysie how is the flash slowing things down? It runs fine on my system, or is dependant on system requirements? Anyhow it just seems a bit odd that anyone would have flash turned off with so many websites now days taking advantage of it.
Quote from: a_c_saunders on February 16, 2004, 09:45:17 AMOh and jeysie how is the flash slowing things down? It runs fine on my system, or is dependant on system requirements? Anyhow it just seems a bit odd that anyone would have flash turned off with so many websites now days taking advantage of it.
If I had *one* page open at a time, it wouldn't make a difference. But as I said, I always have lots of pages open at one time. Lots of pages + flash or java on more than one page = slowdown.
Plus, I'm a heavy right-clicker. With the old menu, I could visit several sections at once by right-click "Open in background page". Now I have to go through the sections one at a time. Yuck. Going through a website one section/page at a time feels like getting somewhere by slogging through mud.
I don't have a problem with Flash. I have a problem with Flash being used when you don't need it. They're currently not doing anything on the menus, at least, with Flash that couldn't be done with PNG and CSS, and the PNG and CSS would be more accessible, less restrictive, and probably smaller in size, too. (I hate to break this to you Say, but I doubt the Flash buttons look better than what an equivalent Alpha Transparency PNG would look like.) Now, when they do stuff on the site with Flash that actually *needs* Flash because it can't be done a more accessible way, I don't have a problem with it.
I'm not against new technology... I'm against new technology being used when the old technology works fine and provides more functionality.
And... strangely enough, I have yet to come across a site that uses all-Flash (or all-Java, or all-javascript) navigation that actually needs to. I have surfed sites with the main structure in HTML + CSS, and content done in Flash that needs to be done in Flash, which is quite different.
I might add that I said I *liked* the new look. I just find the implementation method of the main nav menu to be silly and unnecessary.
Eh, but, whatever. Being a card-carrying member of the "Viewable With Any Browser" campaign is a thankless job anyway. ;) You can do whatever you want with your website... I just fail to see the point of annoying any of your users when you don't have to.
Peace & Luv, Liz
"You can please all of the people some of the time, and you can plesae some of the people all the time. But you can't please all of the people all of the time."
I don't think it was intended to annoy anyone, Jeysie!
And Storm, just come out and say whatever you aren't saying, You know we're not going to hate you, just do us a favor and be constructive in your criticism. Being surrounded by yes-men never did anyone any good, after all! :)
Quote from: KatieHal on February 16, 2004, 11:28:02 AM
"You can please all of the people some of the time, and you can plesae some of the people all the time. But you can't please all of the people all of the time."
Isn't that supposed to be "fool"? ;)
Thanks for all the comments and criticism! 8)
The site has undergone a new design which we feel is more modern and of higher quality than the previous site. As you can see right now, there is and will be a lot of Flash elements with this new site, so it is strongly recommended to have it installed in order to view the site properly. The site is also finally fully CSS and cross-browser compatible.
The menu itself is 48k and is very lightweight, simple and attractive. The different sections of the site are still on different pages, so you can bookmark those pages easily. BTW Jeysie, we will have a Site Map page soon. ;D
Quote from: Yonkey on February 16, 2004, 01:51:35 PMThe menu itself is 48k and is very lightweight, simple and attractive.
Er. I'll agree with simple and attractive. But 48K is not lightweight. :P (The nav buttons on my site are around 15K.) But I forget, you have broadband. ;)
Quote from: Yonkey on February 16, 2004, 01:51:35 PMBTW Jeysie, we will have a Site Map page soon. ;D
OK, that makes me feel moderately better. ;)
Peace & Luv, Liz
Well, I said in a previous post but I'll say it here as it's more relevant. I enjoy the blueness and all, but the white font really hurts my eyes! Is there any way to make the font color choosable for users or something? :o
Well, 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?
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.
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
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 :-\
*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
the journal was an idea from cesar actually, we dedicate that feature specially for him :)
and our directors :) *waves at dean*
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 ;)
(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
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
Yay, Mike actually posted on the board again!!!!
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
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! :)
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
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
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
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.
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.
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!)
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 ;)
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