R.I.D BASE OF OPERATIONS

Apreciate the acceptance. /deepbow

Things have been really looking up between our two guilds. The future boads well for us.

I'd like to ask a favor. I've been spending the last 4 months working on a new skin for MEK's web site. But it seems to be too intense for people trying to forum whore from work or school. It works great on gaming PC's, but on anything else runs slow. Mind visiting it right quick and answering the poll on the main page?

www.mekclan.net/swg

Apreciate it, I am getting really fustrated. I made a really sweet space animation that featured a star destoryer, med frigate, the title transport, and a tyderium shuttle landing in the stations hanger with all sorts of fighter sorties. But I've had to cut out everything but the title ship. And now its looking like that too may have to be sidelined.

If it was me, I'd strip out all the graphics on just the forums portal pages and leave rest of the pages alone. Forum whores just want to read, scroll and type... not look at an animated graphics rich page. Looks like you're using the Nuke + phpBB package? If you separate out phpBB from the Nuke shell, you should be able to just have a plain jane forum portal that is work computer friendly. Then you can put your original graphics back in and see how they work for people.

Your hard work may look really cool, but if its unviewable, its not worth having... all trial and error finding a balance between a cool website and how well it works for the average viewer. Even the smallest GIF animation costs CPU cycles on the viewing machine. For some reason, Flash animations are hell these days on some machines. I have problems with some Flash ads that are really graphic intensive, there was a Spiderman 2 for PS2 ad that used to all but crash IE for me, but your animations seem ok for me.

edit: As an added note, its not that the page takes a while to load for me, 6-8 mbps cable, but its the page scrolling that seems a little choppy in the upper areas of the page, where it has to load the Flash anis as well as the ani GIFs and marquee boxes. Seems like too much animation in one viewable area of the page, plus the page looks to be set for a 1280 screen, not 1024.

ya, the welcome animation I plan on reducing in size by 50%. going back to just BB is not an option as our site features chat, our city layout plans, our 3d medals, ect ect. All MEK guilds have the same features and such. The EQ2 page works fine on any PC, it is graphic intensive in that everything is textured, but its got very few animations. I am trying to find a balance between the two for SWG. I've yet to compress all the graphic components, which should reduce the total page size by 30%, the background texture itself is enourmous.

the flash animation is 2.5 megs, and I beleive the welcome animation is about the same. i set out to design the page for gamers, and then relized after it went live it sucked using it from school, the over all design will be the same, I've yet to finish customizing the text coloring and revamping the forums graphics which still use the old charcoal2 theme. I may have to do a 2d flash animation

Sorry, I meant rather than using that forum module for phpNuke, just use phpBB as a standalone forum system and just link to it. I assume that phpNuke is what you are using for the site, but the usual phpNuke branding stamp at the bottom of the site was removed and replaced with other text.

Why I recommend that, is because you mentioned that the primary complaint is folks can't use forums from work/school, so if you pare down the Forum area and make it basic, you can then maintain all the features of the rest of the site. That way all they have to do is bookmark the forum URL and they won't have to worry about being forced to download all the fluff on a slower machine.

Thats what I did for my guild's old site, just disabled the forum module and installed phpBB as standalone forums, altho my reasons were for security patch rather than performance.

hmm, I am able to remove the left side blocks, but don't know of a way to have the banner not show for the forums. I'll see what our programers say, thanx for the tip.

Thats an awesome site

It does take 10 minutes to load though, I think its because of the animations....the size of those must be massive, considering that some of my most simple cinema 4d creations took minutes to warm up and play through. Try compressing your animation into a .swf or .avi format, that might help a bit.

Took less than 30 seconds to open on my pc. FYI I'm on a 7Mps cable connection and my pc is an Athlon XP 1500+ (1.32Ghz), 512 RAM. Not exactly a "work computer" and not exactly a "gaming" machine either.

Great looking site. I would suggest changing some font colors as some text is difficult (or nearly impossible) to read. A lighter color would well.

thanx for all the great advice. I'll be making some tweaks on sunday, will let ya know how it goes.