Happy 2020, from Project Perfect Mod!

Banshee · Last edited by Banshee on Fri Jan 03, 2020 2:33 am; edited 3 times in total

Hello everyone again! Happy 2020! It should be 2020 everywhere in the world right now, for those who count the years like us. For those used to the rituals of this site, this is the day of the year where we recap everything that happened in the previous year and share our plans for the future. It is the day we present the directives to make PPM grow larger, even if some of our plans "do not have shoes" to be executed this year, which is something that happens quite often.

We are starting this year of 2020 with some tweaks on the site. Technically, the site (not the forums) uses HTML 5 now. But, it doesn't take any advantage of it yet, since it inherits several limitations from the forums, which will be eventually migrated slowly into a more modern HTML code. Another improvement was a fix at the Hashtag search feature. If you click at the hashtags shown at the bottom of posts, it will show all posts related to that hashtag and not just the ones until the end of 2017. But this bug fix happened in 2020 already.

Now, here are the good things that happened in PPM in 2019:

- PPM website is now responsive and the Mobile site was merged into it. The site now adapts into different screen resolutions, placing the left and right menus into buttons when necessary. The site also follows the European Union General Data Protection Regulation. We've also placed some mechanisms to limit certain features of the site for botnets. Finally, we have fixed the way other domains we own handle this site. We have been testing site donations in BRLs (Brazilian Reais).

- At the PPM forums, we have extended BBCodes with Twitch, Tweeter, Reddit and we have done heavy improvements on other BBCodes. We've improved our forum performance by restricting botnet's activities. And, despite the April fool's joke, we still have a C&C: Rivals Editing Forum here. That is not a joke!

- The following mods were released at PPM: Dawn of the Tiberium Age 1.182j, Frontline Chaos 0.84, Tiberian Sun Client 5.44, Shattered Paradise 20190623 Release and 20191220 Playtest, Twisted Insurrection 0.8.0.6, The Second Tiberium War 2.21 and Tiberium Essence 2.0 Alpha and 1.6 Patch (Unofficial).

- Following our efforts to "attract more high quality mods" to PPM, TS Mini Games has joined our forums.

- Tiberium Essence has scored 9th position on ModDB Mod of the Year 2018 Player's Choice while Mental Omega has received an honorable mention. OpenRA has received an honorable mention on IndieDB Indie of the Year 2019 Player's Choice

- Latest OS SHP Builder no longer saves invalid SHP (TD) files, although its compression quality is lower than many other programs. Voxel Section Editor III's multi-monitor support was improved in the meantime.

- BySc has made Red Alert Online Decrypter, which is a script for QuickBms to extract Red Alert Online files. Lin Kuei Ominae has created SHP Palette Analyzer to count how many times a specific "color" (pixel value, actually) is used by a group of SHP (TS) files in a directory. The user aldrinjohnom has created RA2YR MIX Unprotector Master. The user matt7785 has created AI Join to merge AI files from Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2. Nyerguds has added RA2 fonts support to Westwood Font Editor and some Unicode support as well. E1 Elite has patched Map Tool to allow object rules to have multiple commas separated replacement values. Lin Kuei Ominae has patched Image Shaper with several updates throughout the whole year. Tuc0 and E1 Elite has posted hacks for both Tiberian Sun and Final Alert 2 to be applied with C&C Executable Modifier. Note that most of the Final Alert 2:YR hacks can actually be downloaded at this patch from E1 Elite. Most of G-E's tools, such as MapClean, AICheck, AIClean and SoundCheck have received several updates during the year. E1Elite has done several updates to AI Editor. Nyerguds has patched Engie File Converter, fixed flickering issues with zoom, C&C 64 map reading support and few other fixes and added a feature to convert an image or a set of frames to a specified palette. E1 Elite has patched CnC Maps Renderer several times throughout the year. Starkku has updated BatchTMPConverter to support 24 bits PNG files.

- Ares 2.0p1 was released to fix several bugs from 2.0. The version 3.0 has been receiving a myriad of features, but it wasn't released yet. Tiberian Sun Client 5.44 has improved TS-DDRAW renderer, added CNC-DDRAW renderer and includes several bug fixes. OpenRA Engine has advanced a lot with game spectator UI, save games, overhauled unit behaviors and unit targeting logic, improved map editor and mod SDK, among other things.

With all that said, let's move to how we will make PPM grow larger in 2020. It is always based on the same plans from the previous years since these plans are actually very long term plans. This time, we will expand some of them. So, as usual, it is a copy and paste job with minor changes:

-> Modernize the main website and progress with Project Perfect Game: We plan to reform our menu to support more games without being visually crowded and also allow custom menus for different sites (such as the upcoming Project Perfect Game). We also plan to bring friendly URLs, URLs for specific articles (especially news posts) and the ability to view news as you scroll. We want to improve HTML5 support and refactor our cookies support to allow better navigation and member log in with different domains. The way we do now is limited to two domains. We also want bring more modern web-based technology to the current site design.

-> Modernize the forums: We want to have a similar approach to the responsive site from the main site with the forums, so it will be better to browse it with mobile devices. Also, we want to allow posting, editing, and other common tasks to be faster and as comfortable as a chat in discord. We also plan to bring friendly URLs, HTML5 support, multiples domain support for cookies and etc...

-> Expand the site to become more popular with games beyond Tiberian Sun, Red Alert 2 and OpenRA 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 are already trying to change this situation by adding more content and trying to approach communities from other games. Now we can also re-use our existing content to quickly expand new subjects that can be covered here.

-> 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. Don't expect this to be finished at any time soon since I have a doctorate to finish first and my thesis will be used on this solution (being a small, but significant part of it).

-> 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 communities: Nowadays, we have got a more aggresive approach to cover news related to Command & Conquer games and OpenRA, but this is not enough. We want this place to become a modding reference for every game. We plan an even more aggressive approach to obtain news generated in this community and also from other sources. We plan to use bots to help us to collect news from GitHub, Discord, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter and provide a quicker way to transform this information into news posts. Obviously, these news posts will still be written and revised by humans. We want to use it to increase the activity of this site and the attractiveness for game designers and user content creators that are not restricted to the universe that we cover nowadays. We expect to do that by using the RSS importing feature of this forum, the keywords feature and writing software to interpret the collected data and convert them into readable posts.

-> Improve the organization of our content: The News Tracker and the Key Words features are a nice way to organize the content that we may explore. Now we need to use these resources to expand the potential of this place as a good reference for game design and user content creation, as well as a good place to learn news about it. We will also improve the way we organize our keywords.

And, that's all for now, gentlemen. I hope you have a great 2020.