AGS Games Section Updates

[edmundito]

I got bored one night, and since I have a few months of web experience, I redesigned the games details page. I figured that I should contribute my knowledge to the AGS community. Here is how it looks like, kinda:

http://images.cellosoft.com/netmonkey/ags/gamesdetails.gif *

Feel free to compare with: http://adventuregamestudio.co.uk/games.php?action=detail&id=706

There are several things I changed, but I think the most important two are:

1) Eliminating a lot of the blue. Right, the bluecup is blue, but it doesn't mean that you have to use it everywhere. It kind of takes away a lot of the contrast from the page, and there is plently of blue from the banner that says adventure game studio and the links and other little hints. Also, white is easier to read to most people's eyes.

2) The screenshot is actual size for 320x200/240. The reason why is because most of AGS games are made in that resolution, so it would take advantage of that. Only the minority of games that are made in bigger resolutions would suffer, but at least is a lot less than the current screenshot size which is tiny!

However, because the screenshot is now bigger this page was designed for people with a minimum resolution of 1024x768. Since the AGS website doesn't really gather browser statistics yet, I'm wondering if anyone is seriously still on 800x600. So, if anyone is, please complain. And also, feel free to comment on the screenshot.

* Right right, case 5 has not won any awards yet. Those are for case 4, but I needed some awards to play with.

[HillBilly]

This new design is prettier to look at, but not matching 800x600 could be a problem. Since everything else seems to be all-resolution friendly, it would be silly to suddenly change it on the games page.

Other than that, I like it.

[juncmodule]

Exceeding 800x600 for a website width is generally considered to be unfriendly to the visually impaired (if you were following 508e guidelines I believe it is considered a violation). I recall only a few years ago a lot of complaints about AGS being a little demanding on some peoples machines. Some of those people indicated that they were running 500MHZ machines still. Basically, to run 1024x768 you need to have a 17" monitor. I'm just not sure if everyone in the AGS community is going to have a top of the line machine. If gaming isn't your thing and you play games from the 90's then upgrading just isn't a priority.

Why not redesign it for 800x600? Or perhaps the screenshot could be enlarged on mouseover via some fancy CSS and layers.

I agree that the design is more appealing. I just don't think we should overlook any of our users just because of an assumption about their resolution.

later,
-junc

[InCreator]

compatibility 800x600 IS required.

Believe it or not, there nothing to do with 1024x768 if you're sitting infront of 14-15" CRT monitor, and this monitor is not that rare, especially among people who occassionally play low-res games.

Text is simply too small to read in hi-res on a small monitor and eyes die fast.
Also, I'm still cursing myself for buying 19" LCD - 320x240 looks downright AWFUL on it.

EDIT: Forgot to mention that your idea rocks. It surely looks better!

[Dr. Scary]

With a quick edit in Photoshop I found out that with a slightly smaller screenshot it was easy to make your design fit withing the 800px limit.
Nice improvement!

[Haddas]

I fail to see what all this is about.

http://imagesocket.com/images/whatyoumeanc58.png

[edmundito]

Maximize in windows does fail at higher resolutions. at work I had gotten used to not maximizing because it was just awful. But most people do it because it's a bad habit...

As far as I know, 508 does not have any mention of screen resolutions. it's all in the scripting: http://www.access-board.gov/sec508/guide/1194.22.htm. And I think the AGS website does not pass the accessibilty test, unfortunately.

Again, we are all asuming that somewhere out there, visitors of the AGS website are using 800x600. It would be nice to really know what percentage of those people actually is downloading.

I would be happy to redesign it for 800 but I'd still like to keep the big screenshot, which looks really nice. But that would mean changing the nav to the left into a top navigation, and that would be more work than I expected!

[juncmodule]

I just ran the site through the W3C validation service.

Wow.

27 errors on "http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/ac.shtml"

Is there any reason the site is like this?

Anyway, I think that kind of says that it doesn't matter about the resolution. Since no one has complained about the current state of the site I doubt it is an issue.

As far as I know, 508 does not have any mention of screen resolutions

Yeah, I couldn't find any actual guidelines that said yay or nay to resolution. I work for OSU as a web developer and we have all of these funky guidelines set up by the Humanities department and we are supposed to adhere to 508 guidelines. However, all of that crap is so vague and tangled up in legal mumbo jumbo that I never really know what is part of which one. I just use W3C for everything.

Something of note. I guess people in the UK are getting sued for not complying with the new accessability laws. Since AGS is a UK based thing, Chris could run into some issues down the road if AGS gets super big and someone decides to be a jerk. Although I think this is mostly government and public services that are getting in trouble.

Perhaps we can get Chris to put a poll up requesting a AGS user system spec survey, kind of like the one that Valve puts out for Steam users:

http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html

later,
-junc

[scotch]

It's mostly missing alt text for images and some unescaped special characters, nothing major...
I think a user survey on the download page could be useful for CJ, as well as us game developers.

Edmundo, maximise fails at high res in windows? Not sure what you mean by that, I run most things full screen at 1856x1392, including my web browser, just fine.

[edmundito]

I didn't mean that the pages themselves break or anything, but I meant that because the "liquid" websites like the AGS forums are so stretched out, when you read a post on the forum your eyes have to move a lot, maybe even your head, and at least for most people it makes the eyes tired of moving so much. This is why magazines and newspapers don't write text all the way accross the page, and it's not just to make it look prettier. In addition, a lot of sites are not necessarily liquid, so you have a site like eg www.espn.com with a ton of whitespace to the right. There is really no need to stretch out the whole window.

[scotch]

Oh, yes, most sites are very poorly designed for high res... you get used to it.

[Kweepa]

Hmm, I hate those websites that keep the text in a little column and force the user to scroll up and down. I maximize my web browser for a reason. If I wanted the text in a little column, I'd shape my window that way.

[Esseb]

Edmundo: You could of course simply create a user stylesheet with max-width defined on the body. Opera supports user stylesheets by default, and I assume Firefox supports it also in some way, either by default or through an extension.

This rule seems to do the trick: body { max-width: 1280px !important; }

Will probably screw up some sites. Nothing's perfect. Replace 1280px with your preferred value.