Also Known As: banshee_revora (Steam) Joined: 15 Aug 2002 Location: Brazil
Posted: Thu Jan 02, 2014 12:54 am Post subject:
Happy 2014!
Subject description: One vision, one purpose: one better 2014!
Hello everyone and happy new year! As usual, we wish the best for everyone, not only in this date.. but every single day. I hope you guys have enjoyed the new year's gift. A hell of a gift, to be quite humble.
Anyway, 2013 was an excellent year for PPM in many ways:
-> We've been more active than in the previous years, specially by the end of the year.
-> The technology behind PPM has advanced considerably. We have a much better News Tracker, tracking the latest news in our projects and forums at the top of our site. Our menus now have subsections, which allowed us to cover multiples games (non C&C ones) in our sites. We are also able to host huge download files without having our bandwidth obliterated by bots, allowing us to save important files for modders from extinction and distribute freeware games. The forums are also more stable (the recent error 503s are not related to PPM), better, with more features for the users and for the admin as well. There was only one downgrade in our technology where we were forced to drop support for comparison of files from different revisions in our SVN.
-> Ares has expanded the options of Yuri's Revenge mods tremendously and some of them can be attractive to Tiberian Sun modders as well, with many features related to Tiberium being supported in the latest 0.5 version. The future for it is unclear, but I'd say that the Bounty logic seems to be a strong candidate for the next version.
And there were several contests, file submissions, tutorials and much more.
Anyway, while the recapitulation of the year in the paragraphs above looks interesting, let's look back to our plans for 2013 and see what was really done:
-> Expand the site to cover non-C&C games: That objective has really advanced a lot in this year, although the approach was different. My original idea was the use of subportals. Maybe they will happen, but for now, we have just reorganized our menus.
-> Progress with VXLSE III's 3D model export feature: Unfortunately, we didn't have any practical advances with that in 2013. Most things lies in theories at the moment and the texture atlas extraction did not obtain the expected results yet. It should change in 2014.
-> News coverage on Tiberian Twilight, Generals 2 and Tiberium Alliances: Tiberian Twilight did not receive any news at all, although we now mirror a Mod SDK for it in our left menu. Tiberian Alliances was totally ignored and that will hardly change for 2014. Generals 2 is past, unfortunatelly, but we did a good coverage of it. If a new Command & Conquer game gets announced in 2014 or Generals 2 returns, we will be covering it here.
-> Motivate modders to play C&C games older than Tiberian Twilight: Once again, mission accomplished. Any doubts?
And, so, what about 2014?
-> 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 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 2014, such as using hashtags.
-> 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 2014.
-> 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. I hope you enjoy PPM in this year and help it to become a better place. Stay tuned here and you'll certainly have a lot of fun.
Posted: Thu Jan 02, 2014 2:26 am Post subject:
Re: Happy 2014!
Banshee wrote:
-> Motivate modders to play C&C games older than Tiberian Twilight: Once again, mission accomplished. Any doubts?
[Incoming VERY Vulgar Rant]
I have to say, What the ztype? Really? That was a goal? That's a default! I would be surprised if the opposite! Who here actually play CnC4?!? What the flying ztype? I bet I could not get anyone here to play CnC4 is I payed them per Hour!
Are you that dumb of a ztype to not know your own site? What the ztype? I mean Most 99.99999998 ztyping percent of CnC fan cites would have 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 ztyping members playing CnC4 and everyone playing at least ANYTHING earlier, with a ztyping majority playing something from ztyping westwood!
Mission A-ztyping-complished, Really?
[rant over]
I accept my ban now. _________________ I am Zengar Zombolt, The Sword That Cleaves Evil! There is Nothing I can not Cut! QUICK_EDIT
Posted: Thu Jan 02, 2014 2:59 am Post subject:
Re: Happy 2014!
Banshee wrote:
-> Ares has expanded the options of Yuri's Revenge mods tremendously and it is starting to become attractive to Tiberian Sun modders as well, with many features related to Tiberium being supported in the latest 0.5 version.
Banshee, And who exactly got attracted?
Its good to see that TS modders are planing to move to Ares. _________________
Also Known As: banshee_revora (Steam) Joined: 15 Aug 2002 Location: Brazil
Posted: Thu Jan 02, 2014 3:24 am Post subject:
I didn't mean to say someone has actually got attractive to it. I meant to say that it had features that could be attractive to TS modders. I'll rewrite that sentence.
Also Known As: banshee_revora (Steam) Joined: 15 Aug 2002 Location: Brazil
Posted: Thu Jan 02, 2014 7:02 pm Post subject:
The forum is a fork of a fork of phpBB... at this situation, the version doesn't tell much, specially when one of the forks received far too many features. QUICK_EDIT
Can't you run a diff against the appropriate base phpBB-Version and reimplement your changes as phpBB 3.x plugins? _________________ #renproj:renegadeprojects.com via Matrix - direct link QUICK_EDIT
Also Known As: banshee_revora (Steam) Joined: 15 Aug 2002 Location: Brazil
Posted: Fri Jan 03, 2014 5:20 pm Post subject:
It includes subforums (phpBB2 doesn't support it by default, although phpBB3 does), topic descriptions, forum attachments (also phpBB2 doesn't support it by default, but phpBB3 does), its own captcha system, revamped forum permissions, system groups, a completely new forum caching system, and much more that doesn't come to my mind right now. QUICK_EDIT
Pardon me saying this, but 90% of that does not belong in a category hierarchy mod. No wonder this shit is difficult to port. _________________ #renproj:renegadeprojects.com via Matrix - direct link QUICK_EDIT
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