Messages

Rharpe: If you want to be sure that all buttons are clickable at all times, you'll have to  select images that are no higher than 115px.

SSH: Maybe it would be better if the delay after the last frame (so before starting the animation again) is set to something like 3000 (3 seconds) or so.
What you are suggesting is possible, but it requires loading 2 images instead of one (one static image and one animation). Not that these static gifs are of conciderable filesize. But adjusting the frame delay seems like a more elegant solution. Javascript is often best used sparingly and without direct control over visual content.

The anims didn't so much as bother me, but the larger ones that floated over one or two of the navig buttons prevented them from being clickable. I had to refresh the page to make a smaller animation come up to be able to go back to the home page or the 2dg page.

I didn't mention them because someone else already did.

[home page:]

I'm using Firefox 1.5something and i suggest you download it to, cause then you'll have access to this great toolbar for webdevelopers:
http://chrispederick.com/work/webdeveloper/
You can use it to resize the firefox window to represent other screen resolutions. And it has a LOT of other great features.

Some general suggestions:
- The page is too wide and horizontal scrollbars appear. This is almost a deadly sin in website design, unless it is an integral part of the layout. The scrollbars are caused by 2DGamersTitle.gif, which is absolutely placed at 194px from the left border. With its width of 846px the right edge of the picture is at 1040px. This is about 30 pixels too wide for the current standard resolution 1024x768 (i'm counting in the vert. scrollbars here).
- There are no alt attributes in your navigation buttons. These are important for a lot of things. ie: search engines, visually handicapped, textual info when image load fails (or is disable). So i suggest you put these in anyway.
- Learn CSS. Cascading stylesheets aren't difficult, in fact you use some of it already in yuor pages. But try to seperate the HTML from CSS by placing the CSS in a seperate file. As a rule of thumb, you should strive to have your HTML tags as pure as possible (without height, width and align tags in every table cell  ).
- Pick a font and stick by it.  Using CSS will help you manage this much more easily aswell AND as an added bonus, cut down on your page loading times and bandwidth. (just noticed you're using frontpage as editor. Not sure how they handle CSS, but it's absolutely worth checking.)
- Please lose the iframes. They're not new, they're not stylish and they're just plain ugly. You can get the same functionality by using PHP's include command. Things will still be seperated between header/footer and content but it will be much better  in terms of visual effect and search engine scores.

And if that wasn't bad enough, here's a page by page breakdown of crits and suggestions  :

home page: Screaming news. There is a big problem with the font sizes here. The news title fonts are smaller in size than the news itself. Attention of anyone scanning the headlines for thing of their interest will be drawn towards the news content rather than the news title. Please change this around. Also, the idea of making one bullet bold and the other normal doesn't really work. If you want the reader to be able to seperate them more easily, try fiddling with padding and margin settings of the <LI> element in CSS to create some space between bullets.
Another one you may like to look at is line-height.

2DG Font-o-rama! I can see at least 3 different fonts on this page, not counting the ones in graphics or in the textarea. One font would be enough. Again, CSS is your friend here. Set your font of choice in the body tag and all other child elements will automatically inherit them so you don't have to set them again.

Try using a same width content area for all pages. The content area of this page is wider than the home page, and the 'pix' page is even wider! Having evenly wide content areas all over will help in a much calmer surfing experience, without layout elements 'jumping' to their new sizes when a different page loads.

Email What does this button do?  While i like the fact that you tried to have an original way of offering visitors a way of contacting you, i absolutely abhor javascript prompt messages. Even though you ask for confirmation before a last step, it just isn't as fancy looking as a simple form. And, since you have PHP on your server, you might want to check up on the mail() function. Chances are high you can use PHP to send your mail instead of having to start up the users email client.

Pix Mouseover gallery. I like! Although the images take some time to load, it's worth the wait. However, the images seem to be there placed at random. Maybe some form of categorisation would be nice. ie: characters, backgrounds, from sketch to sprite, misc ...

files / links Breaking styles.  This seems to be an obvious remnant of a previous website version, copied and pasted in a new website. If you use the same colors as in the home and 2dg pages, it will all look a lot more uniform.

notes A guestbook with a puzzling name. When i clicked notes, i didn't expect to get a guestbook page. The comment for the files page applies here too. Keep things in style. And to top it off, why have a guestbook if you've got a forum that people can use?

forum Nice! Forums are great for creating a community. Without the iframe, it wouldn't look so cramped. And while i know the next crit is a HUGE pain and prolly already planned: Try to match the styles of the forum to that of the website. It will do a whole lot for you if you want to create a cummunity. A recognisable and identifyable colorscheme is one of the most underrated methods of communicating your websites identity.


Well then.. Seems like you've got work till xmass! please don't get bummed by my long reply. The effort i took to review your site is only proof of how much i like its concept and current design. And i'm only trying to help in making it better.

Good luck!

I went to pick up some groceries the other day and the total came to 4.44 euros.. Because the smallest unit of currency used in supermarkets is 0.05 euro, it got rounded up to 4.45 euro.
I paid with a 10 euro bill, and received 5.55 in change..  I guess 666 would have been a natural next step, but it never happened.


Also, as the bible quotes (or, i memory-quoted it from an Iron Maiden song )

'Let men who have understanding reckon the number of the beast, for it is a human number. It's number is 666'

Now, in the olden days, people were often indicated with numbers to protect their identities from the church. it is believed that 666 is such a number indicating the one who is the antichrist, not an indication of when this will happen.

hahaha, right on! Congrats to Lordi and the Fins for finally winning one..
I laughed my arse off when i found that Lordi made it to the finals and Holland didn't.

Then i laughed even harder when i flicked through the channels and saw them performing their song after winning.
About five seconds after that i almost died as i envisioned orthodox chrisitians around Europe trembling in fear and expecting the apocalypse when they saw these servants of satan winning such a prestigious (WHAHAHA) contest.

But in all honesty, i wasn't really that impressed with the song itself. It reminded me of late 70's early 80's Dio and Black Sabbath music. With costumes like that i had expected some gruesome death metal band who's music even i couldn't stomach.

Still, a nice turn of events when finally a non-conformist act goes home with all the glory.

All of the above points are good in my opinion. And i'd like to add one.. A very important one if i may add.

The boobs dude!

They start of way too high, right below the throat..
It would be more realistic if they started halfway down het shoulders (like in ProgZmax's paintover) or even lower, depending on how saggy or perky you want them to be..

Good luck!

I think the idea is good and the angle is well chosen.

It's just that the tree itself isn't that convincing.
The first thing i asked myself when i looked at the picture (only the big one) and then started reading your post was: "Which way is down?"

I couldn't make out which way i was looking..  Even without the guy hanging from the parachute it should be obvious what i'm looking at.

In my opinion, there should a central stem running upwards. And the idividual main branches should be more directly connected to the stem. Right now the branches go down for maybe 100's of feet before meeting at the stem, which isn't clearly visible and only suggested by the meetingpoint of the branches.

Different trees have different branch systems, but i haven't seen one that has branches this long. Check out some examples of real branch systems.

After having assured this wasn't some psychadelic pot-smoker game, i really liked your style and choice of colors, so good luck in making this a killer background!

Replace your previous code with this.  This code uses include as suggested above and added a check for the actual existence of $_GET['page']. Depending on the server settings, an error or warning may be printed if you make a call to a nonexistent array-item.

Code: ags

if(isSet($_GET['page']) {
  if (file_exists("pagedata/" . $_GET['page'] . ".txt")) {
    $file = "pagedata/" . $_GET['page'] . ".txt";
    include($file);
  }
  else {
    echo "This section is temporarily blank.";
  }
}
else echo "No page specified.";

Good luck.

Maybe next time you'll take the time to inform us of what it is exactly that you are looking for. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of 3d engines out there. And the only qualifications you gave us were "free" and "good".

What'd you expect?

Actually, any of the pages you see that need scrolling are probably the ones not finished. At 1024X768 or 800X600 there is no horizontal scrollbar...

It was the menu that needed sidescrolling for me, because of the many submenu items.

Javascript really makes no vital content at all, it just loads a page that was accessed directly into the correct frameset, nothing more.

Using Javascript to generate a frameset seems like pretty vital content to me.

And belive me if you saw all my submenus you'd know they are actually organized. Each header button at the top has a subfolder, with each link bar item with it's own folder... and so on and so forth...

I have seen your menus and yes they are organised, but not organised in such a way that you'd be able to find what you're looking for fast. Especially the menus for the MUD and D&D pages are so full of submenus that it's easy to lose track of what submenu you're scrolling through.

I'll look into the php, but frankly I didn't really want to look into learning another language. But most likely I'll find the code snippet I need with a google search. I really just didn't want to do a full site redesign... AGAIN.

haha, if the arguments in my first post weren't desicive for you, then i don't think it'll be worth the trouble. If this is your only website, or if building websites isn't really your thing or hobby then it would probably be a little overkill, even if you were to only learn up on the things you needed and not the entire language.

Anyway, good luck with the page whatever you decide to do with it.

In an effort to get this topic back to the actual topic:

hotscripts is your friend:
http://www.hotscripts.com/PHP/Scripts_and_Programs/Polls_and_Voting/index.html

You'll most definately need to learn some php coding to customize things, but the basics are there won't make you invent the wheel all over again.

One of your assumptions, that your graphical banner is loaded on every page request, is false. Browsers use cache memory to temporarily store images and scripts and stuff (and search bots don't load images). Whenever a subsequent request to a webserver is made where the same image/script/whatever is used, the browser gets is from the disk cache instead of downloading it again. So no worries there.

Second, the use of frames is pretty much out of date and i really think you should reconsider if the searchengine results are that important to you. The use of javascript to create vital page-content is a very dangerous one. I don't really know if search engine bots support it, but i'm sure not all do, in wich case you're severly screwed.
Also, i don't know what resolution you designed the page for, but on 1024 x 768 the lefthand menu needed horizontal scrolling, which is a big no-no in almost every case.

What i suggest is this:
Organise your menus with the help of submenus. Here are some links that can help you figure out how to organise those enormous amounts of menu items:
http://www.opencube.com/
http://www.twinhelix.com/dhtml/fsmenu/
http://www.twinhelix.com/dhtml/popupmenu/
http://www.smartmenus.org/

Drop the javascript, and try to use PHP instead. PHP allows you to do your sorting much more elegantly than Javascript AND it isn't browser dependant. If your webhoster supports it (wich is almost standard nowadays) it'll work regardless of what browser (or search-bot) makes the page-request.

PHP also allows for seperation of content, just like you're doing with frames now. You can include the header and menu files with one line of code.

<? include('header.html');include('menu.html'); ?>

Combined with one of the menusystems above, you'll be able to get the all the benefits you get by using frames AND no more hassle with search engines.

Good luck!

2 years straight eh?
Try looking in the confinement zone of your spyware program. It probably identified it as malwear 

I suggest writing your congressman about it.. Maybe he can fix this glitch you're talking about

That domain isn't registered yet, but it will be registered in the past.

Pudding of the Future will use his time traveling device to go back in history and register http://www.privateerpuddingrocks.com, and hence will create an alternate reality.  Future Haddas has obviously been tampering with the laws of time, seeing as he knows of the future events that take place in the past.

If you're confused, read Mr Colossal's book

See now, if pudding were to be able to travel back in time in his lifetime, he would have. And undoubtedly he would also register the domainname.
However, since it isn't registered yet, it is safe to assume that he never will be able to go back in time or else the domain would have been registered already..
Once he had back his little trip to history, we (from our perception) wouldn't have known better than that privateerpudding.com was registered.  So since it still isn't, we now he failed..

And besides, where the hell are we gonna get 21.1 gigawatts from?

Vacuum cleaner is the word you're looking for, Voh.
Or hoover for the brits.

The only filter i'd use in a game bg is the clouds filter for quick n easy clouds.

If you don't succeed the first time it probably wasn't worth trying in the first place.

I think the logo is very powerfull and wouldn't reccomend changing too much. It has a very nice retro feel.

I made a slight adjustment bij just removing the 'X' and moving both words inwards.
Don't know if it's an improvement, but it makes both words of equal length and incorporates the logo x into the name..





edit: On second thought, it isn't obvious at first sight that the name is 'malvax' instead of 'malva'..  So never mind..

Helm.. You plan on wearing anything other than maybe briefs when partying with 50 swedish girls?

How odd.

Wow! that has the be the most convincing and self confident off-topic reambling i've ever heard.. well done Tuomas!

on-topic: Congrats on the award Fluke.  Being away for over a months and people still voting for ya says a lot on the huge impression you made.