Quote from: SwapBrain on October 13, 2010, 07:44:29 am

http://8bc.org/

Thanks. Some of the feedback there is pretty good but it's not really as in-depth as I'm imagining. I was thinking more like here — incl. modifications by the creator based on the criticism & then further refinement, maybe even edits (of midi or the native format of the sound program) from other people. Music is sort-of tricky. "Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.", as someone somewhere once said.

I think a music forum in the vein of Pixelation is definitely a possibility. There's no art form that doesn't benefit from critique. I'd recommend http://chipmusic.org/—a forum that has an actual "critique" subforum—but critique is not the focus, and therefore the critique section is nowhere near as active as Pixelation. 8bc is probably your best bet for now. I'd love to see something like Pixelation for music though. Doesn't even have to be chiptune. Maybe I'll start it... one of these days...

BTW, that chipmusic site is great for 8-bit production resources, in the "Hardware & Software" seciton.

I don't care about Samus, who is Samus, even? When I play Super Metroid, *I* am the person going around on the planet, not some Samus.

So my problem isn't that they misrepresent Samus's personality in the newer game, it's that Samus even has a voice and a face. I don't care about that stuff, the meta-plot inf these games is vapid at best. I just want to go around a well-crafted platform game at my own pace, in my solitude. Super Metroid is like a sensory deprivation tank for me, I think about different shit when I go around it, I don't think about Samus's personality. And if I want people around, I'll invite my friends and we'll swap the controller around and talk about the game.

Thank you, I have been trying to figure out what exactly is the "different experience" of Metroid Prime. For some reason it just didn't have any sort of impact on me, unlike Super Metroid which had a major one (and still does whenever I pick it up). You hit the nail on the head here.

Ah, ok, the 2 pixels ARE intentional, it's supposed to protrude. I'll look into it tomorrow, there should be a way around that eventually.

Cool. I'm not a huge fan of the 2 pixel either, but that's definitely a style thing – it's the extra 2 pixels (total 4 pixel shift) in Webkit browsers that's the technical problem (for anyone else reading who is confused).

On the topic of web-design again, I enjoyed skinning the forum, but it's not something I do often. In the past I usually found my way around classic layouting. This here was for web basics class 3 years ago, which illustrates it nicely (not exactly cross-browser compatible, best viewed in firefox):

http://users.fh-salzburg.ac.at/~fhs16724/eightbitfactory/index.html

Nice design! I agree with you about skinning things, it's not always the most fun – you have to work around other people's (sometimes crappy) code, and you can't always just "do something" when you want to. Though I will say that I think there's an in-between: starting from scratch but using the general principles of layout design and user interface design. I think we have the two extremes here: skinning something, in which you are tweaking a very rigid already-created layout – and starting from scratch, coming up with something completely unique (possibly to the point of confusion). I don't mean that your website's design is bad, it looks very good, but it is very difficult to navigate. For example, it's not obvious what to click on on the first page (I first tried the logo, then the door, then the door again, then the dude). I know you said it was a student project, but I'm just using it as an example for the sake of discussion (sorry ).

I'm not familiar with SMF, but I'm curious: have you modified any of the PHP or anything? Or just the CSS? Not asking for any particular reason, just curiosity (and if there's something that you absolutely cannot resolve with CSS modification, I suppose the PHP would be the next step).

@ #36005A:

 I'll look into your color suggestions.

Thanks. Let me know if I need to clarify anything about my suggestions.

Unfortunately I am well aware of the two css issues with Chrome (and other webkit browsers as well I suppose. I don't have access to Safari right now... It would be really nice if you could check on that on your Mac ), I guess I'll have to look into and resort to browser-specific trickery.

Just replicated both of them in Safari, but only the "search button" one in Firefox. The header thing must be Webkit, not sure what's going on with the search button.

The irregular button sizes I am aware of too, but that's beyond my control since the icq and yahoo messenger icons are fetched from an external server, thus inconsistent. About the colors, I used the two recurring saturated colors orange and teal correspondingly to the dominant colors yellow and blue of the AIM and MSN logo respectively in an attempt to assure recognizability without deviating from the skins palette. I think it works.

Interesting. I was actually mostly talking about horizontal size, I understand about ICQ and others. Maybe make all of your buttons follow ICQ in terms of width (and height, accounting for the transparency at the top). Or, at the very least, you could have a set width for the icons you make.

Also, I have to ask, and I don't mean this as a personal attack, but I'm merely curious: If you are not interested at all in graphic design, why did you take on the task of redesigning a website? You seem to have done a pretty great job, so I am surprised to hear you say that. Or did you just mean that "graphical masturbation" is not something you're interested in/inclined to? My apologies if I've misunderstood.

You need to use the URL found under "Direct" when posting your image.




Like this:


[img]http://a.imageshack.us/img829/9443/kite.png[/img]