CGEmpire.com

[Nikolas]

Introduction

The older members will know about www.cgempire.com, but many new members might not be aware. CGEmpire is a community for those who wish to make computer games. Resident experts there have experience in all sectors, like code, art, audio, writting, etc. It is a very friendly community and has been alive for something more than a year.

Furthermore...

There is another thread about it, I know, but things have changed radically in the past year, and wish to inform you of the new CGEmpire.

On the community front, there have been efforts and each member has his or her own blog, where they can have their images, music, etc. At the moment we are not offering webspace, but it's the very next step, which should arrive very shortly.

The front page features news centering on the computer games industry but also on all things orbiting around it, as well as news from coding, art, audio and writting as well. Central events from the forums, like the winning of a competition, or a member made crossword, are featured as well on the front page. In all the front page has had a huge overhaul!

The forums have also been updated, the layout changed, and some nifty stuff have been added, for example the dynamic imagezooming, which allows you to zoom on an image on the forums, without any code, by simply ctrl+clicking it.

Some links...

I have been very fortunate to have music competitons that have attracted quite some attention now, both in terms of sponsors and entrants. Most entries are very high quality and sponsors have been very kind to offer various prizes every month, some of which are worth 600$.

Click to listen to the entries of the current (11th) CGempire Music Competition with theme "sadness"

Art is going also very well and some there have been some very interesting pieces posted in the gallery, while Andy is having fun with some pixel art as well as AGS's own mashpotato

And I did forget, but edited the post: Registering, posting, using the forums, drawing, presenting your works, taking part in competitions, learning, and helping others is totally free of course!

Thank you,

Nikolas

[Chicky]

You should have written in bold. I would have payed more attention.

[Nikolas]

LOL

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

I wonder if I'm still a moderator there.  Wasn't much going on at that forum -- wasn't much for me to do there, anyway!

[MashPotato]

Yes, it's fairly quiet in the pixel forum at the moment (although busier of late), but do you know what would make things more lively, ProgZ?  Being active   ...That, and new members!

CGE is really a lovely community, and you should all check it out

[zabnat]

Sounds interesting but looks messy, mosty on the forum side. Maybe I'll still lurk around a bit

[Nikolas]

Hem...

Could you be more specific about the "messy"? Because we, very recently, tidied up! Or you mean my description here?

Imagine that the forums hold pretty much everything (and just got a huge coding tutorial from Nickstien), so you get a forum with music tracks, links, code questions, mapping and level editing, art, 3-d, 2-d, sfx, about dialogues, and pretty much everything to do with computer games. In the end it's quite a lot...

Could you be more specific on the messy part? here or there, to see what we can do to fix it, of course.

[zabnat]

With messy I mean the layout on the forums.

First I was confused about the subforums, but since you have such a variety of stuff in there I think that is ok.

But the main thing is when viewing a thread: everything is stacked. First you have user information, then the post and then the sig. Usually the post is the smallest of these three and in user information (and maybe in some sigs) there are images so it is hard to quickly browse through the thread and find the posted images or even quickly see the comments. Also the colors seem a bit tiring to the eye.

As you can see in my profile I'm not a fan of signatures or avatars I think avatars are okay though (when they are small enough in size), but signatures should in my opinion be no more than one line of text and preferrably with smaller font and/or less noticeable than the text in the post. Someone at cgempire had white text on the signature and some empty lines, this takes the space and focus from the real content, the posts. (well, mostly signatures are in control, no big images...)

To clear things up, I would suggest having user information on the left, like in here and for example in cgsociety (who seem to use the same forum software) and maybe think about the other things I brought up.

[Nikolas]

About the signature I can understand and actually agree with you. Never mind the current signature here... (which promotes The Tale Of Two Kingdoms, which I worked on and is a great game, blah blah ), but if you check in CGEmpire, I only have 1 link (my own website on).

Problem with the profiles is that CGEmpire is filled with professionals, or freelancers, etc, so this needs to be seen in the profile. The pencils and stuff, should probably be removed, as well as some high scores from some games (although it's great fun actually). You can get used to it pretty quickly, but yes some things can and should be removed...

And indeed I think that we should set some limits on signatures, but I don't recall thayt problematic ones. The two members I saw, in the tutorials by Nick, were just a few words and a guy listening to some beers or mellons or something!

I am aware of CGTalk of course We will look into it, pretty soon (maybe even today I hope, although I'm not the one dealing with Vbulletin stuff really. I know very very little of that).

Thanks for getting back to me

[Akatosh]

...could it be possible that I already saw that weird bird in the critics lounge?

[MashPotato]

Yep, I posted that here a few months ago... you're not crazy (assuming you're talking about the pixelled lady/bird, and I'm not crazy )

Also a note that the clutter in the sigs and User info has been cleaned up