Also Known As: banshee_revora (Steam) Joined: 15 Aug 2002 Location: Brazil
Posted: Fri Jan 02, 2015 4:56 am Post subject:
Happy new year, from Project Perfect Mod!
Subject description: Our tiberium vision for 2015 has not changed at all. Peace through power, brothers!
Hello ladies and gentlemen: happy new year! Of course, we wish you the best, not just for this year, but for your whole life.
Last year, the following has happened here:
- Project Perfect Mod's frontpage has been fully recoded and it loads better on desktop and mobile browsers. We've also started to use a different and less cryptical CAPTCHA system in our forums, although a couple of bots have showed up here since then (and wiped/banned with no mercy). We have also created a news cloning vats that easily duplicates interesting posts in the forum as news posts. We've also released our advertisement plans.
- HyperPatch 0.3 was released and it has 'fixed' the famous air transport problem from Tiberian Sun, although there were few issues with that solution that were found later. It still better than using CarryAll=yes. In the meanwhile, Ares has advanced to the version 0.8, bringing several features along the year such as customizable score screen and graphics, cyborg reaper weapon recreation, toggle power, advanced ruble, academy buildings, forest fires, lots of code recoded, bugs fixes and improvements on several game mechanics.
- OS SHP Builder 3.37 was released reliably saving SHP (TD) files and with an internal installer, auto-updater, improved resize method and mirror and flip features. Voxel Section Editor III's Modelizer system was partially recoded and the program has gained support for OpenCL. There were several failed attempts to generate texture coordinates for models. To edit the voxel models, there were improvements in the user interface as well as bug fixes. The surprise of the year was the C&C Executable Modifier from Lin Kuei Ominae that allowed any monkey to hack the executable files from old C&C games with known solutions to several problems. Near the end of the year, Nyerguds has released the C&C1 Fading Table (Mrf) Generator, which allows you to modify the palettes that deal with shadows, map shroud edges, stealth effects, etc.
However, if we take into account our last year plans as reference, the results above are not satisfactory. In fact, these things never work out very well, but I keep doing it for the sake of fun.
-> Expand the site to become more popular with games beyond Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 scope.
-> Progress with VXLSE III's 3D model export feature.
-> Attract more high quality mods.
-> Improve methods to organize our content.
-> Improve news coverage from other games and communites.
-> A new PPM Network Bar.
These plans look beautiful when the site works correctly, but we've spent the whole year haunted by messages saying 'error 503'. The good news is that the source of the problem was identified and it has been greatly attenuated. The bad news is that, due to my thesis proposal pressure, I won't be able to dedicate enough time to fix it completely in a low term, although the site is pretty much browsable in 99% of the time right now.
So, these problems (error 503 + my thesis) have postponed the execution of most of these objectives, although my thesis will accelerate the execution of automatic generation of texture coordinates for VXLSE III's 3D model export feature or maybe another program (it is being coded separately from VXLSE III at the moment).
The only high quality mod that we have attracted last year was Global Crisis and we've only promoted it here at the very ending of the year. The hashtag feature to organize the content and the new network bar are future plans. I'm keeping it again for this year, but don't be surprised if they get postponed to again to 2016, 2017, etc...
Regarding the news posts about other games, the news post cloning vats released in the last year was part of that plan. Also, we are slowly improving our coverage to non-C&C games. Since I'm a fan of RTS, I'm certainly covering more RTS games. If we want to move to other games as well, I'll need help. You can contribute with news by posting them at the Community News forum.
And now.... here are our plans for 2015 and upcoming years, forgive my copy and paste:
-> Improve the site stability to 100%: We need to make PPM be more stable by splitting our internal services (news reporter, mobile site, etc) into different accounts. That action should wipe any sign of error 503 service unavailable messages by making our main account use a lower amount of processes.
-> Expand the site to become more popular with games beyond Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 scope: We are slowly adding content for other games here, but we are not getting many modders interested to discuss them in our community yet. We'll try to change this situation by adding more content and trying to approach communities from other games.
-> Progress with VXLSE III's 3D model export feature: This is our ultimate goal to become a significant community that modifies or develops 3D games. We have many voxel assets that would be very useful in newer games if we are able to convert them.
-> Attract more high quality mods: We need fresh blood and attractive content in this place. PPM is still an attractive place to have forums to advertise your projects and it still holds a community with skilled modders and artists to improve the quality of your project in the long term.
-> Improve news coverage from other games and communites: Nowadays, we are covering news related to RTS Command & Conquer games and OpenRA, while we want this place to become a modding reference for every game. Although we have channels where everyone may post a news, such as our Community News Forum, we shouldn't have to rely only on our community. We need to be more pro-active. Our plan to do that is to improve our techniques to import RSS feeds to our forums without simply posting a clone of the news from other sites. I don't know if we'll get that ready in 2015.
-> Improve methods to organize our content: The News Tracker is a nice way to organize the news that happens in this place, but there are other ways to organize the content that we may explore in 2015 or later, such as using hashtags.
-> A new PPM Network Bar: We may eventually drop Revora's network bar and build our own, focusing on what do we have to offer here.
And that's it. Happy new year and I hope you enjoy PPM in the future.
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