I umm... like it? Heh, gotta give more exposure to the boards, I guess :)

I umm... didn't notice it? :)

Seriously I didn't...

I just made it a bit bigger and dropped the "About Us" to the bottom of the sidebar. That, and I changed "Email us" to "Got news or comments? Email us."

Tom, what resolution to you set your browser at? Does it seem really large?

Hey Mark, I like the new sidebar. One thing that would be nice is if you could bring back the dropdown box for previous news pages that was sorted by date. Even better would be an index of the more interesting news bits and posted links. An index of things you and Tom have written would be cool too, but I know you're probably too busy to do a whole lot of stuff like that.

Oh yeah, you need to keep reminding us (or maybe just me lol) when a new GameSpin gets posted.

Just some thoughts.

We really need to get a news archive going. That drop-down list I had got out of date and I was also concerned about how I would handle it after 4 or 5 months -- would I have 150 entries on it?

I have two goals as far as HTML stuff goes with the site. I want to come up with an archive scheme for the news and I want to institute some kind of search feature. So if anyone has any suggestions, let me know -- and no, I don't want to convert the site to a database-driven site.

As far as GameSpin, it should go up every Wednesday on GameSpy. I submit it on Tuesday and they get it up the next day.

Oh, one more thing. I don't really want to institute a search feature that requires us to put meta tags on every page. That's a real drag.

Mark, the link isn't overly large - sticks out just enough :)

I'd switch over to News Publisher for the news posts - it's what I use on most of my sites. The archiving feature is pretty easy to implement.

As for search engines... I'm not sure, but I think there are some that you can get that just search certain directories on the site. I really have no idea though, as I've never really been too into cgi and such - I have other people do it for me. It's kind of cool ;)

I also think you guys could use another writer (me). heh. Not like I'm going to have anything better to do once the fine University year ends.

I also use News Publisher, which is at GW Scripts.

It might be tricky to adapt it to the Tabbed format on the news page here. I've gone with monthly archives at my Ring of Red site and at my now mothballed Shadow's Darkstone Tomb site.

Once you figure out the Perl/CGI configuration nightmares it's otherwise quite easy to use, and you can set up multiple posters, adjust the byline styles, etc.

"Once you figure out the Perl/CGI configuration nightmares"

To Tom and me that's like saying, "Once you pass advanced calculus...."

Actually, for all I know Tom is a mathematical genius. I just remember sweating trig in high school and then taking easiest math classes I could in college.

I may just set aside a few hours and just do simple HTML pages to archive the news. Click on news archive to get a list of years and months within each year, then after selecting the month you want just go to a page with 20 or so links by date.

If we had a site search function set up, that would alleviate some of the need anyway. I doubt anyone is ever going to want to find the news for December 20th, 2000, for example. Most people are going to be looking for something they remembered reading or just hoping to find something we may have covered.

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Quote:

If we had a site search function set up, that would alleviate some of the need anyway. I doubt anyone is ever going to want to find the news for December 20th, 2000, for example. Most people are going to be looking for something they remembered reading or just hoping to find something we may have covered

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Well, Mark, if you need any help archiving stuff, let me know - I've got 2 days of classes left before exams (basically two days of classes before I get to start looking into a new Major heh), so I've got a fair bit of time on my hands.

"Actually, for all I know Tom is a mathematical genius."

Ha ha ha ha. Haa haa har haw har. Hee hee ho. Ha ha ha. Ohh. Ha.

-Tom

Well, I try not to assume people know either more or less than I do about HTML and setting up Perl scripts. If the Web space that hosts Quartertothree has a cgi-bin, then you can use News Publisher and I'm sure I and Tom Ohle (my fellow NP fan here) could help decipher NP's instructions. If it doesn't give you a cgi-bin, then yeah it's a moot point. :)

You don't need to be a math whiz or a programmer (I'm certainly not), it's just a matter of knowing what folder to FTP the script to, what folder to have it put news archives in, then learning biogenetical crosspolymorph engineering.

I'm kidding! You don't have to know folders! :)

The automatic archiving would be nice, but I like to have a fresh page of news each day. I like the 3am at the bottom of the page and not just mixed in with all the news because it hasn't been automatically archived yet. I don't like articles just falling off the table into the archives.

Nice Darkstone site, Geo. Is Delphine going to do a sequel? I thought Darkstone was a nice game, though I didn't care for the way the characters aged. I also never played it online. I tried with MPlayer and none of us could figure out how to start a game.

Okay, not the point of the string, I know, but...I downloaded a demo of Darkstone, thinking it looked really cool, and from the demo it felt awfully Diablo-ish, with just a tad more character development. I'm not a big Diablo fan, so I didn't invest in that one. Am I wrong about it?

Back on topic - I like the new message board link. I spent too much time on this site before discovering that there was a message board. (And this was back when every story said "Comments? Post them in our forum!") I guess I'm a little slow sometime...But it was the first thing I noticed coming here tonight.

Michael, Darkstone is definitely a Diablo clone, so if you don't like Diablo you most likely won't like Darkstone.

If you stay with manually archiving news (I did so with my Incubation site, and Gone Gold's Webmaster did that for a long time before a friend set up a script for him), and want it searchable you might try Atomz free Express site search engine or Free Find.

Neither requires you to mess with scripting, neither requires banner ads or buttons (although when you conduct a site search the results page usually has some kind of ad on it). Other than the ad on the results page you can customize results pages to look pretty much identical to your site.

I use Free Find for my sites, and 2 years later it still automatically spiders the pages I assigned to it, and emails me to let me know it did that and that it updated its search results. :)

The unofficial please don't quote me on Darkstone (not that anyone reall cares) is there's no sequel planned and Delphine's presumably doing something different for its next game. I honestly have little respect for Gather of Developers anymore (and I'm not referring to their catholic school girl clad babes or Mike Wilson's apparent plan to make the whole world think all computer gamers are horny 14-year olds, no, I'm not refering to that.) ;-)

At one point their own marketing guy said G.O.D. was pleased with Darkstone's U.S. sales and felt it would be a good "franchise." Somehow that didn't end up happening, cause G.O.D. was busy with its Catholic school girls and publishing a lot of terrible games.

It seems like one of Darkstone's artists (Frederic Michel, a mainstay on keeping in touch with fans for a long time) is in his own time working on another free add-on/sequel of sorts (basically just another quest set with the quest editor) but who knows if it'll happen.

Gosh, who was that guy? He sounds bitter. :D

Anyway, yes, Darkstone was a 3-D Diablo clone right to the nearly identical sword whacking and gold picking up sounds.

It did have going for it:
* Controlling two heroes. Now it sometimes caused more trouble than it was worth, but I liked playing as a mage and having a sturdy warrior always there to scrape off melee fighters. Unlike D2 mercs, you know your second character was one you had customized and equipped and was always up to the challenge.
* A random set of randomizing quests. You could play it through 3 times and only experience a few overlapping quests. I love Diablo 2, but doing the same quests over and over again loses its charm after a while. Then again, Darkstone suffers some of that Shadow Watch "overly generic" feeling in its cookie cutter quests.
* A blazing fire sword or axe in Darkstone simply looks 10 times more impressive than any weapon you can wield in Diablo. :)
* Many menu shortcuts and click-reduction features that Diablo 2 sorely needed
- options for auto-clicking (click once on a beast and then the remaining clicks to kill it didn't require you to keep exercising your finger) or not (you could kill faster if you clicked as fast as you could in this mode)
- simple menu for clicking once and walking directly to any specific merchant in the town (rather than, again, making you wear out your mouse finger and button)
- simple menu for walking directly to the entrance or exit in any dungeon level (once you had found the exit). This only came problematic when they introduced respawning of monsters in response to customer feedback.
* Goblins riding giant horse-like bats. You usually only saw these on tougher skill late in the game, but it was just so hysterical.
* Great support from Delphine. All in response to player feedback, Delphine:
- introduced support for custom skins for all your heroes.
- introduced a free quests editor
- rather than marketing an add-on they posted for free download a full new 7-quest pack which also upped the level limit for characters (to 120) and added another skill level.
- at times, simply tried too hard to please everyone. The final version of the game (1.05) is so different from the initial release, it's like a .... well, different game. :)

For reasons that never made sense to me the miserable Heat.net got a long exclusive on Darkstone (I don't recall it ever supporting Mplayer, which I did push for). Kali and now Gamespy Arcade support Darkstone but it's a good 2 years too late to do the game any good.

Well, sorry to rail off topic. Darkstone finally came out on PSX recently but it's by most accounts terrible, washed out and a sad end of the line to a good game.

Mark,
You can set news publisher to archive every day. Having the 3am at the bottom of the page isn't really a problem, either - you'd just have to post it before anything else :)

"- simple menu for walking directly to the entrance or exit in any dungeon level (once you had found the exit)."

This was the coolest. Given how bad pathfinding normally is in computer games, I was quite impressed at how well this worked.

The PSX version may be bad (haven't played it), but it's got an MSRP of only $10.

It was HEAT and not MPlayer I tried to play on. My bad. If the game had had good multiplayer support on GOD's own servers right out of the box, I bet it would have sold twice as many copies.

It's really too bad there's no sequel in the works. If they would up the resolution to 1024x768 and add good multiplayer support out of the box, I bet it would be a decent selling game.

Tom, about News Publisher -- I want to be able to publish an entire page of news at once. Keep the old page up while I work on the new one, and then just upload the new one to replace the old one, so the transition happens all at once instead of every 15 minutes as I add a news article.

Geo, thanks for the tips on the search utilities. I'll look into them.

Hmmm... well, you could just write the whole day's news in one post. Basically, it would involve all the work you do now, but it would archive the news on a daily basis.

Geo, if anything, you have convinced me to give the game a try. I've got a copy of Darkstone (still in the shrinkwrap) that I received as the "free game" in a Compuexpert order recently. I've been craving some D2 action, but have been resisting reinstalling D2 in anticipation of the expansion pack. I think I'll install Darkstone tonight.

I think I must be one of the only people on the planet who absolutely despises Diablo 2.

I love Diablo 2, but I hate it. Love it, hate it. Hate it, love it. I'm weird that way with repetitive games. :)

I've read the PSX Darkstone is so bad you should be paid $10 to play it. :D

PC Darkstone is, by all means, worth giving a try. You may even want to play it sans patching and then patch it up to 1.05 and feel the difference. :) Respawning seemed like a good idea initially but I eventually joined the chorus who didn't like it. I didn't like backtracking to get something I missed and then getting ambushed.

BTW, the Wicked3D RivaTNT (I think that was it) card had special proprietary drivers that could successfully force Darkstone to play in 800X600 and 1024X768 resolutions, and reports were it looked and played fine at that rez.

Funny thing about Darkstone is I only developed my site to give me something to do while waiting for D2. Running the site and the EZ Board I set up became totally overwhelming for a time (I like helping people but when you get a dozen emails a week about tech support problems and you don't know jack, it's tough), but it was very gratifying.
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On the news archiving, I think you can set the script (very easily via drop down menus and filling in a couple boxes) to archive each day, every X# of days or every X# of posts; you could also set it to display only up to X# or X# days worth of posts.

My Darkstone Tomb site archived monthly, but it did so on a "running" basis, i.e. the news posts displaying on my main page also were in that month's archive as well.

"I think I must be one of the only people on the planet who absolutely despises Diablo 2."

Rogue and Hack are old, old favorites of mine, and Diablo 1/2 are just those games with better graphics. I don't know if this is the case for you, Tom, but I often find that people who hate Diablo expected an RPG and not a Rogue clone. Sometimes, I am just in the mood to do a Cuisinart imitation, and Diablo fills that bill just fine.

No no no. I LOVED Diablo. I hate Diablo 2. At no point during the original did I get as irritated as I did in the early part of Act 3 from Diablo 2. The original was a game where you could just sit back after a long day, and hack shit up. There was no thinking involved, you didn't have to run around completely empty areas for extended periods of time, and everything was laid out in an extremely linear fashion. Diablo was everything Diablo 2 isn't.

Act 3 is what caused me to stop playing Diablo 2. I got really tired of "exploring" that damned place (bad pun intended). I did like playing as a necromancer, which I chose as my first character because my usual playing style would incline me to pick the barbarian or paladin. I wanted to try something different and got it. Still, running around Act 3 got boring really fast. I picked it up again as an Amazon a few weeks ago, but haven't even finished Act I with her. Got bored with it again really fast. I keep my save files backed up, and I'll probably pick it up again and play for a few weeks. I figure at this rate, I'll beat it by 2004. The ending cinematic better be worth it. LOL.

What was this thread about again? (Scrolls up) Oh yeah, like the new look... :)

I also found Act 3 a bit frustating, though the temple was neat. I didn't really care for the jungle stuff though.

D2 probably would have been better if the same gameplay length was split over 5 acts instead of 4.

...and if they had completely omitted act 3 :)
Act 2 was also moderately boring, but I found act 1 to be rather enjoyable.

I thought Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption was a far superior game.

(Straining to take this back "on topic")So, is it just my imagination, or did the big link to message boards go away this morning?

"So, is it just my imagination, or did the big link to message boards go away this morning?"

You mean completely vanish? I didn't do anything to it. It will scale according to your browser settings, but it shouldn't just vanish.

Maybe that's it -- I'm using a different browser here at work than I was the other night at home. It looks smaller than it did, but that's probably why.

New Look Menu, New Look Menu

Okay, back on topic! :)

I don't mind exploring in Diablo 2. It's funny that the Diablo complaints were It's too linear, not enough variety, not enough places to explore; and then those are the complaints about the sequel. :)

I do think the game is simply too long and too big. I would've been happier with a 2-3 "world" game that had 800X600 resolution and more useful mercs. Well I guess the add-on's delivering some of that but for $30. :) Just a touch of Darksone's quest randomizing - maybe even just randomizing the rewards here and there - with the more minor quests would've made replaying less repetitive too.