Castle Paradox

[Inferior Minion]

In an attempt to keep myself on track I've decided to try and maintain bi-weekly progress reports on the Castle Paradox rewrite. While the primary motivation behind these updates is to ensure I consistently devote time to CP development, previewing and demoing the pages as I develop them allows you, the end user, to play around with my designs and tell me what works, what doesn't, and what needs changing. Tell me what you like and, more importantly, what I've done wrong. I also hope your exposure triggers more feature ideas. Please, feel free to respond to these posts or contact Cube and myself with your ideas. We'd love to hear them.

So, a little background before I get into what has happened over the past two weeks. Back in May, Cube and I began toying around with yet another site redesign. The phpBB 3 release candidates had just come out and was looking very promising. However, making a switch to phpBB 3 was no simple task.

For those of you who don't know, Castle Paradox proper ties into the phpBB database and utilizes phpBB's Database abstraction and Templated display functionality. As a result of phpBB 3's changes, most of CP's pages break if we upgrade.

At that time, I started migrating pages to conform with phpBB's new APIs and database structure. What started out as simple renames of function calls turned into a painful process due to the current state of the code. At the same time, School and Work were taking all of my free time and the project went on halt.

Around October, Cube and I began discussing the rebuild again. We had new features we wanted to implement and really started nailing down project goals. I ambitiously set an end of the year goal to go public with something. As you all know, come New Year's Day, all I ended up going public with were our ideas. During those few months, I picked up where I left off on the phpBB 3 migration while doing research on various Project Management tools. There are quite a few features I really want to implement in my quest to transform CP into a Project Management Suite. However, it became very clear that CP's current codebase would severely hinder its growth and my goals.

I ended up throwing away the current code. It's functional, and that's really its only redeeming quality. I went back to the drawing board and even redesigned the database. I wrote migration scripts to ensure no current data is lost and toyed with various 3rd party tools, looking for ways to avoid reinventing the wheel.

While 3rd party integration would be wonderful, I decided the primary focus should for this first sprint should be data migration. I need to take the current gamelist, review list, and song list on CP and present it within the new framework I've designed. While new features will be added, they have far less priority over replicating current functionality in some way.

Over the past two weeks, my target has been the Game pages. We have made it a point to utilize CSS in creating the page layout in hopes of allowing more adventurous users to create custom layouts for their pages.
While most of the data has been a direct port from the current CP, I have been playing with the Vikings of Midgard project data to showcase some of the features. You can explore the current test page here: http://castleparadox.com/testproject.php?id=768

In the URL, if you replace id=768 with id=<another game number here>, you can view other games from the current gamelist. For instance, if the game can currently be viewed at http://castleparadox.com/gamelist-display.php?game=668, you can now test it at http://castleparadox.com/testproject.php?id=668. Please note, displaying the games requires data to be migrated into newly created database tables. This means additions and modifications of games in the current gamelist will not be reflected in this test page.

The current layout uses images from the current Ring (red) theme. It is in no way final. We do plan on launching multiple themes as this overhaul progresses. Veld has thrown together the following mock-up which I plan on incorporating once more focus is on the layout and not backend changes: http://castleparadox.com/cp_comp1.png

In terms of functionality, you'll notice Vikings of Midgard showcases the multiple screenshot feature with custom captions. It also sports multiple authors. While not yet populated with data, the Project Timeline will eventually work something like this: http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/. Game downloads work, but do not yet show any download specific information (size, date, download count, etc.). I am currently working on the feedback aspects of the page. I hope to have reviews, polls, and surveys working by the next update. Currently, the poll, survey, and game rating are hardcoded elements which do not function and do not reflect actual game data. Reviews will be listed below the Screenshots section in a format similar to the current gamelist. Journal entries will also be incorporated within the page, although the journals are lowest on my list of priorities, as they will involve the most migration work. I'm dreading that rewrite.

Again, please let us know what you think. Your feedback is invaluable.

Thanks,

~IM
_________________

[Bob the Hamster]

[TMC]

Hmm, bi-weekly updates, I like the sound of that

I wasn't aware that you were throwing everything away.

The screenshot captions are great, except shifting the page layout every time you mouseover is a bit nauseating. How about leaving enough space below the screenshot for the largest screenshot caption, is that possible? It would potentially mean a bit of blank space, but I think it would be more usable.

Out of interest, how many pages are you going to give each game (ie, how will you spread game related things out)? The current gamelist has one page per game, one page per review, a journal, plus the summary table on the games listing. What I mean is: what's going to happen to the download graphs, for example? Will there be a separate page for details on releases and downloads, or will it be put somewhere far down the main page. The first sounds better.

Wondering, what do you mean by '3rd party tool integration'?
_________________
"It is so great it is insanely great."