South African Game Development - Forums

Hey Everyone,

As from tomorrow we'll be kicking off the development of a brand new front-end system, SAGD V, internally also known as SAGD 2010. The technical approach for this new system is radically different when compared to the current system. The design will leverage .NET much more and the core technologies is currently undergoing heavy revision as well as optimizations. One of the most important points is that it will become simplified, and not over-complicated when it comes to using the system. The first phase of the development is taking the best of the current features and build them into the new system and get things tweaked and sleaked-up. SAGD 2010 is all going to be about simpilcity and to-the-point usage. I think its safe to assume we have a good thing going with the new forum implementation... we are going to attempt as close as possible seamless functionality between the two systems.

Everyone that wants to make a difference or add their opinions on how the new system could be built can send me a PM. I'll add you onto the development mailing list, which will be where the development will be discussed. Using this topic to highlight some ideas for SAGD and current problems areas and the likes can be publicly listed here, although discussions on those will be done via our mailing list. One of the items on the TODO list which is a very open subject is the layout of SAGD 2010 including fonting and widescreen or fixed width etc. What will be interesting to see is maybe a break from the "traditional" SAGD layout styling. Personally I don't have any specific ideas around layout, so it will be great to hear from the community what layouts are you envisioning. That speaks true to coloring and such as well. We'll take all ideas into consideration, pick the best ones and maybe even merge a few ideas to get hopefully the best results.

Once phase1 of the development is concluded and launched, we will immediately start phase2 which will begin to add more winning (read: useful/commonly-used) features to the system. At the moment we are still working on core processing functions and the rendering framework, these include the image processing, string processing, smtp services, out-of-process services as well as being able to process phpBB users (logins, MD5 hashing etc).

Anyhow... the floor is open.

Wouldn't it be best to discuss everything freely here on the forum, which is what it's here for .

Discussing it through a mailing list adds an unnecessary layer, in my mind. If you're worried about people stealing your/our ideas, you really shouldn't be. If we all decide on an implementation that we think is best and will work to fit our needs in the most streamlined way possible, that's good for us.

If someone decides to steal those ideas, it's no skin off our noses. Our implementation still works best for us. This isn't a competition, it's an effort to make us feel more at home.

The mailing list is primarily meant for info I don't want published on the forums for anyone (like bots etc.) to see. A great example of this is how the security might work... hehe, I don't want to Google and find info on how SAGD's front-end login security works. What we have in mind for SAGD is to simplify the system significantl... not only to make it easier to use, but also to make it easier for me to develop the system. Simplification is very high on the development agenda. As for features, phase1 will only look at what the current version of SAGD got and re-write those. The security of the system will be discussed via the mailing list only. I have a few thoughts on how phpBB's security and that of the front-end could be integrated.

For the front-end, the main features that will definitely be migrated (re-written) to SAGD 2010 is the Developer Journals (blogs), Latest Forum Threads, Image Gallery, Links. Once these are rebuilt, the system will be expanded from there with extra features that is useful to have. Everyone of the above features should be discussed in details. One of the things I'll be looking at is significantly improving the way the Developer Journals work, I will be looking at typical blogging sites as well as Word Press and Live Journal and see what will work for SAGD. The Developer Journals' comments will be developed to work like a typical blog site's commenting. All of the features that will be migrated will retain their current data.

One of the things we are going to look at is feature highlighting and importancy. In the new system Journals and Forum Threads will become much more significant, and news will play a much smaller role, so yes, that means Journals and Forums will get much more real estate on the new front-end.

I'm also planning to do a bit of research on AJAX... so there a slight chance of some AJAX functionality.

Korax wrote:I'm also planning to do a bit of research on AJAX... so there a slight chance of some AJAX functionality.

Looks like hell has totally frozen over.

I'm still working on the system CORE at the moment, but things are coming together fairly good. I've been looking at the notes I made a while back regarding issues with the way SAGD manages images, and I've spent quite some time re-working the image processor. Infact, its being re-written from scratch; Its pretty much like comparing Quake1's code with Quake2's regarding cleanliness. Things are much more defined and put together much more intelligently. I'm currently working on a "conditional" function that will validate an uploaded image against a few rules that applies where its being uploaded to, and only if the rules being checked against doesn't pass it will execute image manipulation technology.

The current system can only accept BMP files as valid input. The new system will accept image input from BMP, JPG, PNG and GIF... Basically this means if you use a JPG and you are within the rules (eg: image dimensions or bits per pixel) that apply in the selected site area, the image gets saved intact, otherwise the image will be manipulated. The most important point is that your input are accepted if its of the above formats. The way images gets uploaded will also be simplified significantly. The new image processor also manages non-standard ratios and sizes of uploaded images better. This means ratios 0.75 (letterbox) and 0.5625 (widescreen) images are now possible and thumbnail images and originals gets re-scaled properly. It means even a non-standard screenshot taken from an iPhone will be uploaded and rescaled properly... small full sized images will be cropped/canvassed upwards and re-scaling takes the current image ratio into consideration.

The image processor is well under way, the last few days I've been investigating how to get MIME types from streams. In certain cases data will be presented in one way or the other as only a stream of bytes without knowing from a filename what type of file it is. Doing this is not a very easy task. Its easy enough to load from a stream into an "Image" class and be able to save that out as any type of format, but the idea is to be able to load an image from a stream, do rule validation on it and if it passes, the stream needs to be saved as-is without changing bytes and write it out to disk in its original form.

I should have all the new CORE classes for the new SAGD done within the next two weeks at most, then its onto building the interface. The development of the new SAGD will be done in a few small phases to ensure its development doesn't interfere with our UDK game project.

OK, so I take it from your previous posts here that you're talking about making the front page of SAGD handle all content (forum posts, developer journals, gallery entries, articles/features, news etc.) in a similar way to one another, as has been discussed before (only in private conversations).

What I think would be pretty cool would be to have all entries to the above-mentioned categories show up on the front page in the same way that 'News' currently does (but not necessarily the same, layout-wise), all in one stream and intelligently handled as far as length, links, commenting, tags, images etc. are concerned.

Additionally, if one would like to add a new entry to any of these categories, that entry could/should be entered in one single environment, with an intelligent tag system that places that entry in the correct category (journal, news, article, etc.) for more specialised browsing purposes.

I don't know if such a system could be shoehorned into the current forum topic creation environment, or if forum entries would have to be the only category that would be a different environment to the journal, news, article etc. environment, only able to shown in the front page in the same way.

As far as layout is concerned, I think all pertinent and permanent links should be moved and consolidated to the top bar of the front page, and the 'Features' and 'Community' boxes removed to make space/clean up.

The gallery box could be shifted to the very top right of the page, and maybe even enlarged by 50%, with the current logo and top bar shifting across to the left. I love the SAGD knuckle-duster/ring, but I don't know if it's really *necessary* anymore... ;(

I don't have a clear vision for exact layout either... maybe the artists amongst us can give us a proper bead on things, taking into consideration a nice change-up for the Forum and Developer Journal boxes.

Add home link to SAGD logo image.

Oh, and while I'm here, is it possible to add some kind of visible link back to SAGD.com proper from the forums? If there is already a link, forgive me, but I can't see one... ;(

Edit: Adding ReTweet (through Twitter, using a commonly used retweeter) ability for front page content, like Gamasutra?

Yes, thats what I have in mind, using the WWW site to glue information together and only add features manually (re-writing) that doesn't fit into a generic system. I'm also looking at some other 3rd party tools to lessen the amount of code I need to write (I don't want to spend too much time updating SAGD and not progressing with UDK), rather than having things too centralized and re-written custom. Having to write everything one-self is good for centralization, but it waters down the actual functionalities. One of the things I'm thinking of is making use of specialized tools for specilized/generic functionality.

One of the PROs is, the system as a whole becomes more detailed and useful, the CONs is it has the potential of fragmenting the SAGD system as a whole regarding logins. By fragmentation I mean centralizing the login creation/update process and storage. It depends on the frame-of-mind though... meaning, some might use one part of the system more than others, which makes the fragmentation issue less of a big deal. Obviously I'll do anything in my power to see to what extent can I do some type of syncro process between the fragmented technologies.

One thing Id like to steer clear of is doing extreme modifications (if any) to the chosen 3rd party tools.

I'll definitely follow your advice on layouts, as I'm thinking that it'll be refreshing to change from the traditional SAGD layout that got migrated from earlier SAGD systems. I've also checked out the link-back issue regarding the forums, it seems like I have to end up having to make a change to the forum system to allow that... I'm not too keen on it, as it makes keeping the software up to date a little bit more difficult and it could happen that things get lost by the wayside with successive updates.

Plans for the SAGD upgrade has changed a bit the past few months. Between researching different engines for Excentrax Games (we decided on Unreal Engine), I've also been busy researching different technologies for SAGD. I think the move from our custom SAGDF forum system to phpBB3 was a good one. There are more changes in store and the secondary upgrade phase for SAGD starts tomorrow if all goes according to plan. The frontend (www) has already been tweaked to handle the changes that will be implemented tomorrow. All changes done for the frontend is pretty much under-the-hood and is a temporary measure until we get to phase four in the upgrade process.

We are moving the SAGD database (SAGD V) from MSSQL to MySQL tomorrow, which is a huge move for me... being an Microsoft groupie and all.
The move to MySQL is to acomodate a few things I've got planned going forwards.
I've been hard at work researching what needs to be done to best upgrade SAGD with some good technologies instead of rushing it.

The SAGD forums are now running live using MySQL 5.1.46!
I had to make a few changes for the SAGD frontend to acomodate the change. The SAGD frontend now connects to both MSSQL as well as MySQL to render using the MySQL .NET Connector. This was needed to still be able to render the latest forum jobs & topics. This is only a temporary transitional measure.

The real interesting changes will be starting now that the forums are seemingly successfully migrated!
If anyone come across any problems, issues or integrity errors, don't hestitate to let me know... its still possible to switch the connection back to the original MSSQL database.
I'm hoping that the move to the Vodacom Datacentre as well as migrating the forums from MSSQL to MySQL will result in far better response times.

Before the migration to MySQL and using a direct connection to MySQL, the SAGD forums have been making use of an ODBC DSN connection to indirectly communicate with MSSQL.
Another interesting fact is this: If you are using the Vodacom network or have a Telkom ADSL, you should have the shorest & quickest route.