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guffaw
INTRODUCTION

I am now able to demonstrate one direction in which SDA could be taken in the future -- a dynamically-generated, database-driven front-end to the site's data and content. It is entirely my work, although inevitably it was inspired to some degree by Radix's original SDA architecture. Apparently lacking inspiration, I named it "sda2p". It incorporates some of the interface improvements that people have requested and suggested over the years, and a few improvements that people have not. While I am not sure to what degree this code will end up being used, I am demonstrating it here in the hope that productive things of some sort will happen.

A NOTE ABOUT THE DATA'S AGE

The data on which this demonstration is built is old. My records indicate that the cutoff date for the data was 18th February 2008. As a result, there will be many games and runs missing, and there will be many new runs not currently available via this system. Please do not post just to mention that an obsolete run is present, or a new run is missing. Since I performed some of my own edits on various pieces of text, and since there have obviously been edits to the main site since the sda2p data cutoff, there will also be some other differences between this and the main site. At this stage, I consider the somewhat out-of-date nature of this prototype's data to be unimportant, even advantageous: We do not want people using this as a substitute for the main site, since we need the google advertising revenue from the main site to keep SDA going. The data in the database at this point is more than sufficient for development purposes.

OTHER THINGS THAT DO NOT MATTER

Don't bother complaining about lack of original SDA colour scheme or fonts, or that the HTML doesn't validate against W3C standards. The top banner is something I threw together in 15 minutes in Inkscape when I got tired of writing code. Yes, the game pages lack pictures, and placeholders are used instead. None of these things matter at this stage.

PROJECT GOALS

There were a number of goals identified when nate and I spent some time in 2007 and 2008 thrashing out loose specifications for this software:

i) to improve the site's user interface;
ii) to automate and streamline the update process as much as possible;
iii) to remove the requirement for technically skilled staff to conduct day-to-day site operations;
iv) to incorporate mechanisms to deal with unusual conditions not currently handled well by SDA's systems.

There were also some other, secondary capabilities that were kept in mind during the design, but which have so far not been fully thought out:

v) to allow runners some degree of direct control over their own content;
vi) to keep track of obsolete runs and other old content, hopefully with the ability to roll back to this content should a current run be taken down for whatever reason.

NO UPDATE INTERFACE EXISTS YET

Although I was able to get 400 games' worth of data into the database, this was all achieved using extremely hacky tools that were written, used once, and then figuratively thrown away. Although I was able to automate some of this process, tasks such as category insertion had to be performed manually. There is, sadly, no web interface by which sda2p can currently be updated, and so its data is likely to remain largely unchanged for the time being. Writing such an interface would clearly be the next big challenge for this project; only at that stage could we consider replacing SDA with sda2p. However, the underlying database schema was very much designed to allow such an interface to be written -- it just needs to be done.

PLEASE HELP

I would welcome comments, discussion, and suggestions for improvement, particularly regarding general structure and layout. If you encounter any glaring errors not related to the age of the data (like a run missing some files), let's hear about those, too. As I mentioned, cosmetic flaws are not a concern at this stage. Most links should work, but some (particularly archive) may be broken. Please use your head when deciding what to report and what not to report.

GAME LIST

The logical place to start is the game list, although since this provides essentially the same functionality as exists now, it isn't terribly interesting. You will notice immediately that there are now two new ways of listing SDA's content, though -- the runner list, a full implementation of this popular feature request (yes, this one handles individual-level runs correctly); and the system list.

RUNNER LIST

The runner list displays and sorts runners surname first, which seemed to make sense. There are a few runners (listed at the end) who are identified in SDA's database purely by their handles. Since the decision seems to have been taken to allow runs in future from runners providing no real name, this may need to change if we start to get a lot of content from anonymous runners. While I'm on the subject of the runner list: I know that I have the two Wouter Jansens listed in the database as a single person. If someone could clarify which runs were done by which Wouter, I will get this fixed.

The runs-per-runner listing would also be capable of displaying a bio for runners that wished to write one, but while a field for this text does appear in the database, this feature is not currently implemented.

SYSTEM LIST

It is possible to filter games by released system via the game list, but this new implementation also knows on which systems runs were actually played, something of which I had always wished SDA would keep track. Even though there was nowhere at SDA to record it, I dutifully nagged Mike for this information for each and every run I posted, and recorded it at archive.org. This is how I happen to have this information for all runs from my tenure and older. Having said that, if you spot any glaring mistakes, please point them out.

There are a variety of ways in which runners, games and systems could be sorted, filtered and listed, so I would welcome discussion about which ways of manipulating these lists might be the most useful, both for experienced site users and for newcomers.

CATEGORIES AND METACATEGORIES

Trying to get the correct design for the category system was a difficult challenge. Run categories in sda2p are now distinct objects. Nearly all categories belong to one particular game, but there are a handful (100% and single-segment spring to mind) which are global and can be applied to any game. In addition, all categories have a "metacategory", which might also be referred to as a "supercategory" or a "category group". In essence, metacategories are "categories of categories". At present, the following metacategories are defined:

| Completion percentage
| Segmentation
| Game version
| Death abuse & Save Warping
| Game mode
| Path taken
| Result
| Character used
| Difficulty setting
| Glitches
| Scripts

So, "100%" and "low%" would be "Completion percentage" categories, as would "no items" in Contra; "Richter" or "Jill Valentine" would be "Character used" categories; "Good ending" and "Bad ending" would be "Result" categories. Some of these metacategories have overlap: "Path taken" and "Result" being the biggest offenders, so perhaps this list requires something of a rethink.

The rationale for grouping categories into metacategories may not immediately be obvious, but this design elegantly solves a number of problems:

i) We could add a feature to list runs by category; however, 374 categories are currently defined in sda2p's database, and presenting the user with a long list of terse, unhelpful category names like "Browny" would make very little sense out of context. Instead, users could search for runs by metacategory. There are a sensible number of metacategories, with sensible names. (This feature is not currently implemented, but that is beside the point.)

ii) Metacategories each have a priority code associated with them; that is, some metacategories are "stronger" than others. This means that sda2p can now automatically generate long multicategory filename strings like "eu_hard_100p_SS" in the correct order by itself. (Given the number of times we've screwed this up, it is a more useful feature than you might imagine.)

iii) Metacategories have a description associated with them. If there is no tooltip descriptive text provided for a category, then sda2p will fall back to displaying the description from the metacategory. Since virtually no categories in sda2p currently have a category description (I think "single-segment" is the only one that does), the category tooltips everywhere on the site currently display the description from the metacategory instead. (Of course, this default text can be replaced with a category-specific description for any category on the site). Needless to say, this is transparent to the end user.

iv) In addition to correctly assembling run filenames, the metacategory priority code also allows sda2p to automatically perform complicated game page layouts. Consider the legion of categories provided by Metroid Prime. The page layout engine is clever enough to know that the strongest category here is the game version, so it creates top-level game version bullet points for the two lists. The other categories, having lower priority, appear as part of the run description instead. Again, the metacategory priority is used to determine the order in which these categories appear on each line; it is also used to determine the order in which runs are listed on the page. Metacategory priorities are also key in determining how individual-level tables are formatted, but I'll come back to this.

GAME PAGES

I think that clicking on a time at the top of an SDA game page to take a visitor to the run comments, followed by another click on an apparently identical time to get to the run itself is confusing -- I will admit that in the very early days when I occasionally used to follow SDA, I would tend to get the runs from archive.org directly since this behaviour puzzled me so much. Clickable times are gone in sda2p, being replaced with the more cheesy but probably somewhat clearer "(go ->)" links. I'd appreciate people's thoughts on this, particularly if they can think of something better.

Another way in which sda2p's game pages have been made less confusing than SDA's is that run comments have now been moved to the run pages themselves. The game pages are now far more streamlined. They are also improved by having working links to runner and system pages.

Run completion times are all stored internally in milliseconds. They are formatted into human-readable times according to a time formatting code (i.e. a number) which may be different for each run; hence, run times are currently displayed in the old "whatever fits best" Radix fashion, but this could be changed site-wide with a few simple SQL queries to update the formatting codes.

Run dates are now displayed in textual format to avoid confusion between the various date formats used internationally, but again, this is easily changed. Via cookies, it should be possible to allow the user to pick his or her own date format.

Sda2p features full support for multiple runners working on a single run. Hexen II and Doom II demonstrate this. You can also see one form of auto-formatted IL table on the Doom II page, with the Wolfenstein secret exit category slotting itself intelligently into the table in the correct place.

Each game can have notes attached to it, which appear in a dedicated box under the game pictures; random example.

RUN PAGES

The flash player, the download links and the runner comments have now all been integrated onto a single page, which seemed to make the most sense. Now, as per nate's suggestion, you can watch a flash video and scroll through the runner comments (which appear in a scrollable div for flash-enabled runs) at the same time. The flash player allows mirror selection for the first time, and you can pick from either the primary or the secondary archive.org mirror. The flash player has its playlist mode enabled, and this allows you quickly to pick any segment of the run without leaving the page. I am not sure whether we could have this and the 2x/4x zoom currently offered by SDA at the same time, though.

The different video flavours now provide more information about themselves in those ubiquitous tooltips. Also displayed in the expandable download lists are the run length of each part, and the exact filesize in bytes. The download lists also display the segment descriptions for the few runs that have this data, such as Sparky's Metroid Prime 2: Echoes 100%. If there were any flash-enabled runs that had populated segment descriptions, these descriptions would appear in the flash player's part list too, but I don't think any such runs currently exist in sda2p's database. For some files, md5 of the file (allowing users to verify their downloads) are also displayed. This feature will probably not be used very much, but I have included it because I think it would be a good idea to record this information for all video files. It may also prove useful in diagnosing problems that visitors may have viewing downloaded runs. One note about md5: you may think that it would be trivial to fetch md5 for all SDA content by using archive.org's auto-generated md5 checksums. Unfortunately, though, I discovered a bug in archive such that if a file is replaced by a new file with the same filename, archive will fail to recompute the md5 of that file. Since we had to replace files on archive every time there was a video encoding screwup (certainly under my stewardship), archive.org's md5 cannot be relied upon, and no md5 is probably better than a possibly incorrect md5. So, only runs on which I had the opportunity to compute the md5 myself have this data at the current time.

Another useful innovation is that files that are not actually part of the run can now be attached to speed runs as "supplementary" parts. Examples of such files include ZIPs and RARs of save games and demo files; bloopers and credits segments; and image files of various types. LLCoolDave's Jedi Academy run demonstrates this feature admirably, having both a supplementary video part (bloopers/credits), and a supplementary ZIP file (game saves). Finally, these auxiliary files have an official resting place, rather than being stuffed awkwardly into the game page HTML. "Main parts" and "supplementary parts" may be somewhat goofy labels ... perhaps you can think of better ones. Also, I added all the auxiliary files I knew about, but if there are any such files missing from any runs, let me know.

BBCODE

Runner comments, like most blocks of text in sda2p (including the tooltips and game page introductions) are now stored internally not using HTML, but a BBcode variant which is converted into HTML by my own (hopefully quite fast) BBcode-parsing engine. This solves a few problems compared to the current static SDA situation. Firstly, it eliminates the site-wide issues we have at the moment with inconsistent and often W3C-invalid HTML markup. (No, sda2p's BBcode parser does not always produce W3C-valid HTML either, but that is a bug.) Secondly, it allows the look of the site to be standardised around a specific set of layout tags. Thirdly, by modifying or extending the parser, we can reformat SDA's content in various ways -- as XML or XHTML, as HTML, or as plain text. This would also be useful for creating a better-quality RSS feed. Fourthly, it eliminates the requirement for runners to send formatted content as HTML; most netizens these days must be familiar with BBcode, and a simple page can be provided to allow runners to preview their formatted comments before sending them in.

Not currently implemented, but definitely possible, is the ability to add tags to this parser that would allow simple linking to SDA objects like games, runs, categories, segments, video files, runners, and so on. If this were done intelligently, it would have various benefits such as simplifying writing news updates, providing a further means of dealing with unexpected future crises, and allowing graceful failure in the case of broken links to obsolete content.

OTHER COOL STUFF

marshmallow's 100% 6:31 Chrono Trigger run is missing its first 29 parts on SDA, since it branches off a now-obsolete previous any% run. There are various mechanisms to override the auto-generated URLs of sda2p runs, though, so my software handles this exception seamlessly.

The individual-level auto-formatting code is something of which I am quite proud. For example, sda2p's layout code is intelligent enough to lay out the IL table for Doom with the category that applies to all levels ("Ultra-violence") listed outside of the IL table, but it also realises that the "Secret exit" levels should be inlined into the table. This is made possible by some clever logic, although this logic is currently defeated by Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne, where both categories should be outside the table (rather than NYM being inside). This can be fixed, although not trivially.

OTHER KNOWN ISSUES

To protect email addresses present in runner comments, the parser has been temporarily hacked to replace the '@' character with the '|' character.

There is no BitTorrent support yet. Opinions seem to differ at the moment on how this should be implemented -- as usual, individual-level runs and their categorisation are the problem.

The flash player does not provide a playlist for individual-level runs, displaying instead only the single level that was chosen by the visitor from the IL table. The reason for this is that it is not immediately obvious what to put in the playlist. Should it be all the IL levels for a particular game? What if some of them are in different categories? If the playlist is to contain multiple categories (i.e. duplicated levels), how should the categories and levels be ordered? Also, the run page for an IL level displays the IL comments from the runner who submitted that particular level, but the next level displayed by the flash player might be played by a different runner, and the wrong comments would then be displayed. It is not obvious to me how these problems should be solved, so any input would be helpful.

Some games with individual-level tables also require a ZIP file to be attached to an entire IL level set, specifically the SSBM Break the Targets ILs and Counter-Strike: Condition Zero. Again, I am not sure how this should be done. Files could be attached to IL categories, or to games, or a [vidfile=X] tag could be added to the parser as I suggested earlier (in which case a link could be placed into the game notes). Currently it is not possible to create files within sda2p that are not attached to a specific run, but that behaviour could be altered.

The system's speed could be improved quite a bit -- in particular, large (>10K) runner comments should have the BBcode-derived HTML cached in the database for future display.

TRIVIA

While early development was done on a PC, and later development on my MacBook, the last few weeks of work were hosted on a hacked Wii running Linux. The machine's modest CPU and even more modest RAM provided a good simulation of high load conditions on a web server, and in fact much of the database code was rewritten for better performance following this switch. Tongue

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

When not writing code, I may often be found knitting my own socks.
Thread title:  
My feelings on The Demon Rush
I don't know what I love more, DJGrenola's dedication to SDA, or his socks.

Seriously though, I'm glad you came through with this project Grenola. SDA will be a lot better off now.

Oh yeah, I just thought of something, will there be a way to sort out runs with audio commentary?
Edit history:
Enhasa: 2009-10-17 09:01:25 pm
everybody wanna tell you the meaning of music
I haven't read this at all yet, but I guess it would be good to get in an early reply. Edit: Now that I have read this and understand that it won't replace the main site but supplement it, that solves any concerns I had and I'm 100% behind this now. Looks cool. Smiley


I want to apologize to everyone for procrastinating on this. I wanted to take care of it in the summer but instead I was AWOL. Anyway this matters because what you see here is entirely Grenola's work. This means that anything I talked about will not be in this prototype. So please do not ask why such and such isn't there. My idea was more of a total reworking from the ground up, and AFAIK Grenola's goal was to convert the existing format into a database.

After Grenola left, eventually he got the urge to work on this some more, and there was no collaboration. This is my fault as I assumed he had just rode off into the sunset and that I would be doing everything myself.

I would love nothing more than to incorporate everything I was going to do into this sda2p. I'm really hoping it can be done, since duplicating work is terrible for everyone. I'm wary though, because on a fundamental level, our approaches to how we were going to tackle this are completely different. An example, although this doesn't directly affect the implementation, is that it seems like Grenola approaches SDA content like a black box, whereas I would reorganize all the content to fit a redesigned system.

The problem with the current SDA is that everything is stored as inconsistently-formatted html, meaning there are no semantics. The game page says a time is 0:13:37, but that's just text -- no system knows that the time is 0:13:37. Instead of using a running database (which I think is overkill for SDA), I would have a xml -- this means verifiable against schema -- flat file database that would be converted into the html the end user sees via xslt. This would be run as a script whenever necessary, such as updating, just like the currently used scripts for site administration. So the advantages would be that the user sees a bunch of html (just as it is now), that everything would be done in commonly-used modern web formats -- meaning that everything would be forwards-compatible, and this means that this could gracefully replace the main site (since to the user, it wouldn't be any different from before, only with new backend features).

I don't want to write a tedious, overly long post that really only matters to me, so here is a good place to stop.


Quote from mikwuyma:
Oh yeah, I just thought of something, will there be a way to sort out runs with audio commentary?

That's easy if you just include metadata of which runs have commentary. It's not in sda2p currently because this design is from like 2007-2008, before we implemented audio commentary.
Edit history:
Manocheese: 2009-10-17 10:52:01 pm
Yes, a cucco riding the ground.
Excellent job on this. It's great to finally see some of the ideas that have been discussed over the years in action. That said, anything new is bound to have problems, so I hope you won't think I'm focusing on the negatives if I share a few thoughts:

  • I disagree with limiting the number of games shown at once on the game and runner lists. It makes it a hassle to get to things that aren't on the first page.
  • The ability to sort the runner list by nickname would be convenient.
  • Filtering results by system appears to be broken: link
  • The new date format is an improvement, although personally I'd rather see "month day year". An option to change the display would be a good idea, as you said.
  • Displaying run times differently when they are less than one hour is a step backwards. Why go back to this system after making the opposite change?
  • I agree that clicking on a run's time twice is confusing. It certainly took me a while to figure it out at first. The "go -->" links solve this problem perfectly.
  • Game titles on run pages should link to the appropriate game pages.
  • Comments are given too little space on run pages with Flash. They currently occupy only a quarter of the screen. Instead, they should be as they are on pages without Flash, which IMO makes them easier to read than when they're confined to a small space.
  • A small note: "Runner commentary" might be confused with audio commentary, so perhaps it should say "Runner comments".
  • The box displayed when you expand "Download files for this run" and hover over the top "details" text on this run page is cut off by the Flash video. The border of the box associated with the bottom "details" text is cut off by the bottom of the screen, and I imagine the actual text might be cut off for other tooltips.
  • The "typical x" notes in the tooltips are confusing. For example, "typical resolution" has two resolutions listed with no indication of which one is the actual resolution of the video. "Typical framerate" is even more confusing.
  • A more specific note: the any% and 100% Ocarina of Time runs were both done on the GameCube version.
  • The names "main parts" and "supplementary parts" are indeed somewhat unwieldy. Maybe just "run" and "supplement(s)" would be better.
  • The mp4 files should be listed before the avi files, IMO. People will download the first things on the list
  • I found it inconvenient that embedded Flash was above download links and comments. However, I imagine a lot of new users might like this, being accustomed to YouTube. I rarely use it, so I would prefer if it were at the bottom of the page and collapsed by default, but a lot of people would probably not find it if that were the case. With the current system, however, a lot of users might not notice the download links, or at least they would spend some time watching the embedded videos before doing so. I think a good compromise would be to have "runner comments", "watch embedded video", and then "download run", with the former initially expanded and the latter two initially collapsed. For runs where some of those categories don't apply, some other initial settings would be in order; if an individual-level run has no embedding and no comments, there's no reason to have the download links collapsed initially. I'd like to hear what others have to say about this as well.
  • "Back to runner list" on runner pages makes me think that a generic "back" would be better, since there are several ways to get to a runner page and the runner list would probably be less common than others.
  • IMO, it would make more sense for the lists for individual systems (e.g. this page) to list games rather than runs. Listing runs makes the user scroll a lot more to find what they want, and it also makes them less likely to see the information on the game pages. I'm not sure how listing games instead of runs would work with identifying the systems on which runs were done, though; I guess it depends on how the database is set up, and I'm no expert on that sort of thing.
  • Nice socks.


Quote from Enhasa:
I haven't read this at all yet, but I guess it would be good to get in an early reply. Edit: Now that I have read this and understand that it won't replace the main site but supplement it, that solves any concerns I had and I'm 100% behind this now.


When you say that this won't replace the main site, do you mean that the current game pages and game list will coexist with sda2p or that everything else will stay, but sda2p will replace those? I'm just making sure, because the former would be pointless.

EDIT: As far as the Wouter Jansens go, I think all the ones in the database are from the same one.
Fucking Weeaboo
Quote:
I disagree with limiting the number of games shown at once on the game and runner lists. It makes it a hassle to get to things that aren't on the first page.


I agree with this point.  If you're going to do this, at least include an option to display the full list.  I know that loading large chunks of text can be taxing on dial-up, but a lot of us are on good broadband connections.

Quote:
The ability to sort the runner list by nickname would be convenient.


Also seconding this.  I think a lot of us know the runners more by nickname then real name.  That also can get around the issue of a runner choosing not to use their real name for submissions.


Another thing I noted is that when viewing the video, I get a video box, as expected, but then I see another box with "video" over it but it's just a gray blob.  What's it there for?


Overall though, I'm loving where this is going.  Great job.  I appreciate what you're doing for this site. Smiley
gamelogs.org
loving the scrollable comments so you can watch the run at the same time. when i read your description of it, i thought the flash player would be fixed on the right, so you could scroll the rest of the page beside it, seeing more of the comments at once. i think that still might be a good idea, and i'm also having these crazy ideas about making the flash player draggable.

also really like the "go →" links, but they might look better and be easier to click if they came first on the line. perhaps a small "go" icon or something similar in place of the bullets?

i might have missed you mentioning it, but are there any plans to implement a search for runners, games, runs, etc.? seems like that would be great to include, as sda is only going to get larger.

expanding on what manocheese said: on system pages like this this i think only games should be shown by default, each of them being expandable to show runs for that game. if there are only a few games for a system though, this would be unwieldy, so i think it would be awesome to see a smart system page lister that starts hiding runs after x runs or games.

Quote from Manocheese:
I disagree with limiting the number of games shown at once on the game and runner lists. It makes it a hassle to get to things that aren't on the first page.

like lord_vg, i think this should be an option, with paging shown by default.
Fucking Weeaboo
Quote from Arkarian:
like lord_vg, i think this should be an option, with paging shown by default.


I say we take this one step further.  Not only do the above, but allow for a cookie to be created to keep your preferences.  Or if it's tied into the forum, a forum option.
Exoray
Like everyone else, the first thing that struck me was the annoying paging Smiley
If paging should exist at all it should at least contain alphanumeric page links. Right now, you don't know how many 'next page' you need to click to arrive at games starting with G. The number of next's is also dynamic as it will change when new games are added.

+1 for the remembering of the requested "display all games on one page" option.

I also agree on the system list looking cluttered with all the runs listed. My suggestion is to list only the games, like the game page, but unfold the related runs when you click a link instead of moving to the game page. (Basically it's just the way it is now, but the run listings are all folded by default instead).

Really like the idea with comments and the flash on the same page. I always had to swap between two windows if I wanted to do that with current SDA.

btw, this example site exposes LeCoureur's SM64 70-star run once again. Just thought I should mention it.
Edit history:
Manocheese: 2009-10-18 09:46:37 am
Yes, a cucco riding the ground.
Quote from moooh:
I also agree on the system list looking cluttered with all the runs listed. My suggestion is to list only the games, like the game page, but unfold the related runs when you click a link instead of moving to the game page. (Basically it's just the way it is now, but the run listings are all folded by default instead).


One potential problem with this is that people might never see the game pages, which often contain important information about categories and do a better job of formatting ILs than the system pages. Being able to get to run pages directly from system pages is convenient (although personally I never use the system lists), but the only way I can think of to enable people to do that while still drawing attention to the game pages is the way it is currently, which has its own problems that've been mentioned. I don't know what kind of functionality most people would want from the system pages, but personally I see them as smaller versions of the big game list, so I think they should behave the same way (i.e. simply linking to game pages).

An unrelated problem I noticed with system pages is that Zelda games are alphabetized incorrectly. They always seem to be at the top of the lists (but only on the system pages, not the big game list). Maybe sda2p would be a good opportunity to start alphabetizing Zelda games by L, which would probably be the first thing most users think of.

EDIT: I just realized you could mouse over all the red text. Roll Eyes I think save warping and death abuse could use separate descriptions. Also, the page navigation for game and runner lists should be at both the top and bottom of the page.
Exoray
Quote from Manocheese:
One potential problem with this is that people might never see the game pages, which often contain important information about categories and do a better job of formatting ILs than the system pages.


I was under the impression that the important game specific category information would show up if you hovered over the marked categories right next to the run. This would cover for the need to actually visit the game page as you'd be able to view all the category specifics on that page as well.

Impression based on:
Quote:
Metacategories have a description associated with them. If there is no tooltip descriptive text provided for a category, then sda2p will fall back to displaying the description from the metacategory. Since virtually no categories in sda2p currently have a category description (I think "single-segment" is the only one that does), the category tooltips everywhere on the site currently display the description from the metacategory instead. (Of course, this default text can be replaced with a category-specific description for any category on the site). Needless to say, this is transparent to the end user.


This only solves category information though. I agree on what you say in the part about IL formatting. That would require the game page.
contraddicted
@ DJGrenola

I haven't read your post really detailed, but what you've done sounds solid on the structural part Smiley

There's just two things that popped to my mind:
1. Why does the D-Pad in the logo have 12 directions, instead of 8? Is it intended to resemble a clock?
2. Knitting? Cool, I do sew.
Exoray
Quote from EvilJogga:
1. Why does the D-Pad in the logo have 12 directions, instead of 8? Is it intended to resemble a clock?


It's a clock, which symbolises speed.
It's a gamepad, which symbolises, well you guessed it, gaming.
Please reformat some of the lists a bit as when there's a huge IL table it's difficult to get an overview, example: http://speeddemosarchive.com/sda2p/system.php?sid=19, e.g. by initially collapsing those lists (with Javascript to expand them again, similar to the spoiler tag), putting them to the bottom, adding a game list to the top or whatever.

While generally a good idea those tooltip popups make the site feel a bit hectic because they unexpectedly appear and disappear when just moving the mouse pointer from one place to another. I recommend adding css the attribute cursor:help; to them and a delay of e.g. 0.5 seconds for the tooltip box to appear.

A different issue is the assignment of games to systems. It appears to me that on current SDA games are assigned to all systems for which they were released while in your prototype only actual runs are assigned to the systems they were run on. Both methods are legitimate but what are your plans here?
guffaw
(I'm not ignoring this topic, it's just taking me a while to address everything that's been said.)
Edit history:
NMS: 2009-10-19 04:32:46 pm
Wow. Great work! Other people (especially Manocheese) already made most of the suggestions I was going to make, but here are a couple more:

On run pages with embedded flash, the scrollable comments are really nice while watching the flash, but not as good if you just want to read them (if you downloaded the video or just need information from them). I suggest hiding the flash player and having the scrollable comments box appear under or beside it when you reveal it. Ideally, everything would fit on screen when the other items are minimized, to cut down on accidentally scrolling the page instead of the comments box or vice versa. The comments under the download links could expand normally, for when you want them to fill more of the screen.

For pages with supplements, I would call the bullet items "Run video(s)" and "Supplementary file(s)". (Maybe it could choose singular or plural based on how many items there are in the category?) Under the supplement bullet, the items should be sorted by what they are, rather than video quality or file type. For instance, on the JK2 page, you see this:

• supplementary parts:
    ▸ Normal quality DivX AVI (details)
    ▸ High quality DivX AVI (details)
    ▸ ZIP archive (details)

You have no idea what they are until you expand them and the tooltips don't help. Instead, the videos should be under the Bloopers bullet and the ZIP archive under the Game Saves bullet:
   
• supplementary files:
    º Bloopers (0:01:30)
          ▸ Normal quality DivX AVI (details)
          ▸ High quality DivX AVI (details)
    º Game Saves
          ▸ ZIP archive (details)
guffaw
Sorry for the slow response. I've been working fairly hard on this project since the beginning of July or so, and I wanted the weekend away from it.

Quote from mikwuyma:
Oh yeah, I just thought of something, will there be a way to sort out runs with audio commentary?


Yes, as Enhasa pointed out: When I drew up the database specification, there were no or very few runs on SDA with commentary, so it's a feature I neglected to include at the start. There are two ways to tackle this problem; it could either be done at the flavours level (so run X has audio commentary in its MQ and HQ but not its LQ, say), or alternatively at the vidfiles level (parts 1-6 of the MQ have audio commentary, but 7-12 do not). It would be quite irregular for a run to have half the files containing commentary and half not, so the first solution seems like the way to go. However, odd things happen at SDA sometimes, so it would be nice to have the extra granularity of the second approach. The best way would be to do both, so that audio commentary applies by default to the whole video flavour (all parts of the run), but can be switched off on a per-file basis should some files randomly not contain audio commentary.

Quote from Enhasa:
I haven't read this at all yet, but I guess it would be good to get in an early reply. Edit: Now that I have read this and understand that it won't replace the main site but supplement it, that solves any concerns I had and I'm 100% behind this now. Looks cool. Smiley


Well, I did always intend it to replace the main site, but it obviously isn't ready for that duty yet and will not be for some time. Whether mine is the right approach is of course up for debate -- although I am taking the opportunity to show off my shiny demo, I think thrashing out what to do about SDA is the real reason we are here. But no, I wasn't for a moment suggesting we should replace SDA now with something containing data that is fast approaching two years out of date.

Quote from Enhasa:
I want to apologize to everyone for procrastinating on this. I wanted to take care of it in the summer but instead I was AWOL. Anyway this matters because what you see here is entirely Grenola's work. This means that anything I talked about will not be in this prototype. So please do not ask why such and such isn't there. My idea was more of a total reworking from the ground up, and AFAIK Grenola's goal was to convert the existing format into a database.


Well, my goals are stated explicitly somewhere near the top of my original post -- my design does borrow a lot from Radix, but only because I think Radix got many things right.

Quote from Enhasa:
After Grenola left, eventually he got the urge to work on this some more, and there was no collaboration. This is my fault as I assumed he had just rode off into the sunset and that I would be doing everything myself.


Yes, this mess is something of an embarrassment to me as well. I think four things happened more-or-less at once earlier in the year which motivated me to go back to work on sda2p. Firstly, I finally got round to finishing the encode of my 17% Echoes run, at which point I started spending more time at SDA because I wanted to see it posted. Secondly, I learned that you had disappeared, and since nobody seemed to know where you had gone, my naturally pessimistic nature coupled with having experienced total SDA burnout myself led me to believe that you might well just not be coming back. I have unfortunately invested too much time and effort in this site to be happy about the idea that it might have to go back to drifting aimlessly in a sea of submissions with nobody at the helm, so a solution to facilitate updating by technically unskilled staff suddenly became high priority for me. Thirdly, in the absence of all the other admins this summer, I gave an interview to gamersglobal.de about SDA, and had to suffer the ignominy of being asked why it was so awkward to find things on the site, and when it was going to be given a new lick of paint. Fourthly, I chanced upon dex and arkarian fiddling around trying to build their own runners list, effectively duplicating work I had already done; this was the final nail in the coffin. Since I had come closer than anyone else to producing a replacement SDA, I felt embarrassed and guilty about these things, and that it was my fault that nothing had been done.

One of the reasons I quit working on this originally (other than extreme emotional turmoil) was because of several changes that occurred more-or-less all at once to SDA's modus operandi. Specifically, flv was replaced with mp4 immediately after I had finished my flv implementation, and the files on FDC (dl) were moved into the canonical directory structure that is now used for BitTorrent immediately after I had finished my download links implementation. Life was not treating me kindly at that point in time, either, so I completely lost interest in sda2p.

I had resolved to clean the code up and deliver it to SDA's administration in case someone could find some value in either code or data; perhaps someone else would continue the project. Indeed, I emailed off a very early version to nate in mid-July, asking him to forward it to anyone interested in continuing work on it (I understand you didn't receive this tarball for some reason, which is a shame). However, since the code had been left in a completely broken state and a lot of things were in flux, I had to do quite a bit of work just to get it functioning properly. So, in the end it seemed like producing a fully-featured demo was not much more work than I was already going to have to do anyway, and here we are.

Then you returned, of course, and I was left in the rather embarrassing situation of looking like I was attempting a technological coup. But I had promised myself and others that I would ship this, and so I felt I had to. We had been talking for years about this theoretical, nebulous SDA 2.0 and the community had been shown nothing. Plus, assuming that others would do the work so far hadn't got me very far, so I wanted to put my money where my mouth was, so to speak.

Quote from Enhasa:
I would love nothing more than to incorporate everything I was going to do into this sda2p. I'm really hoping it can be done, since duplicating work is terrible for everyone. I'm wary though, because on a fundamental level, our approaches to how we were going to tackle this are completely different. An example, although this doesn't directly affect the implementation, is that it seems like Grenola approaches SDA content like a black box, whereas I would reorganize all the content to fit a redesigned system.


I think much of the difference in our respective approaches stems from the experiences we have had as updaters. Radix seemed quite suspicious at first that new recruits would respect his property, and I tried to follow his way of doing things to the letter. I also had to steer the ship during the dark days of dreamhost and lunarpages (to the latter of which we only had FTP access and the ability to upload PHP files). There was also that memorable occasion when the Chinese movie piracy bots listed a Resident Evil 3 run as a leaked release of one of the Resident Evil films, and brewster at archive commanded that the files on archive be renamed in a format incompatible with our demo.pl. Events like these always made me think having flexibility in the system at all levels was probably a good idea.

Quote from Enhasa:
The problem with the current SDA is that everything is stored as inconsistently-formatted html, meaning there are no semantics. The game page says a time is 0:13:37, but that's just text -- no system knows that the time is 0:13:37. Instead of using a running database (which I think is overkill for SDA), I would have a xml -- this means verifiable against schema -- flat file database that would be converted into the html the end user sees via xslt. This would be run as a script whenever necessary, such as updating, just like the currently used scripts for site administration. So the advantages would be that the user sees a bunch of html (just as it is now), that everything would be done in commonly-used modern web formats -- meaning that everything would be forwards-compatible, and this means that this could gracefully replace the main site (since to the user, it wouldn't be any different from before, only with new backend features).


I did consider XML for sda2p's internal text storage format, but the requirement to escape every instance of ' and " seemed to go against the goal of making the update process simpler and more accessible to the unskilled, so I rolled my own tagged format instead. I think my only experience with XSLT was some years ago trying to write something to convert my winamp 3 playlist into HTML that I could then upload to the web ... I don't remember much other than getting irritated with it, lol. I understand the principle of what you suggest, and the approach does have some merits, but I'd probably need more detail to form an opinion on it. If you have any killer features planned that I haven't thought of, I would be interested to hear about them.

Oh, and while I think it is nice in principle to have a list of systems that each game is available for, I agree that in practice it is probably an often unused feature which is a total pain to maintain, so I wouldn't object to removing that. I have always felt that the system the run was played on was much more important than the systems it was sold on.

Quote from Manocheese:
I disagree with limiting the number of games shown at once on the game and runner lists. It makes it a hassle to get to things that aren't on the first page.


I agree, but pagination is something of a necessary evil in order to make the system scalable. Right now it probably isn't necessary, but one day there might be thousands of games on the game list. This would be a problem for visitors as VG suggested, but furthermore it would be a problem for the web server itself, since it has to provide the game list to a lot of people a lot of times every second. The system list should also be paged, since selecting e.g. 'PC' on the system list brings back an awful lot of content that all needs to be built dynamically at request time. I didn't bother adding system list pagination because system.php was written last and it's not simple to do (you need to ensure the page doesn't break half way through the list of runs for one game), but it's something that needs to be added. I do agree that finding what the user wants can be quite tedious with a paged system, and more/better mechanisms to assist locating things need to be added. I didn't want to spend too much time on the initial version. As others suggested, there could be an option to display the full list (disabled by default). For the moment, though, yes, I could just turn pagination off.

Quote from Manocheese:
The ability to sort the runner list by nickname would be convenient.


Since the "real names required" rule for SDA submission has been relaxed, I think this may be unavoidable (we can't sort by a last name that isn't there). Of course some people have real names but not handles, which gives the opposite problem, so some thought is probably going to be required on how to do this.

Quote from Manocheese:
Filtering results by system appears to be broken:


Drat, how embarrassing. I changed some stuff and then forgot to test it. Thanks.

Quote from Manocheese:
The new date format is an improvement, although personally I'd rather see "month day year". An option to change the display would be a good idea, as you said.


Ideally, we would have much of the site text available in multiple languages, and the date format would magically adjust itself based on the user's locale settings. That is some way off, though. I don't think there is a way to write a date in an internationally recognisable format, since even the way it is done on sda2p now uses English month names. Stupid dates. I'll look into making these more configurable, anyway.

Quote from Manocheese:
Displaying run times differently when they are less than one hour is a step backwards. Why go back to this system after making the opposite change?


I liked the idea of making something that could preserve all the site's little inconsistencies, but I think I agree and it's very simple to change this.

Quote from Manocheese:
Game titles on run pages should link to the appropriate game pages.


Yes, I think I agree with that.

Quote from Manocheese:
Comments are given too little space on run pages with Flash. They currently occupy only a quarter of the screen. Instead, they should be as they are on pages without Flash, which IMO makes them easier to read than when they're confined to a small space.


Quote from Manocheese:
I found it inconvenient that embedded Flash was above download links and comments. However, I imagine a lot of new users might like this, being accustomed to YouTube. I rarely use it, so I would prefer if it were at the bottom of the page and collapsed by default, but a lot of people would probably not find it if that were the case. With the current system, however, a lot of users might not notice the download links, or at least they would spend some time watching the embedded videos before doing so. I think a good compromise would be to have "runner comments", "watch embedded video", and then "download run", with the former initially expanded and the latter two initially collapsed. For runs where some of those categories don't apply, some other initial settings would be in order; if an individual-level run has no embedding and no comments, there's no reason to have the download links collapsed initially. I'd like to hear what others have to say about this as well.


Yes, it's a shame the scrollbox had to be so small. I wanted it to be possible to scroll through the comments without having to push the flash player off the top of the screen. Obviously this won't be possible in all cases, since we all have differently sized displays, but I wanted it to work on my laptop at least. Are you suggesting doing away with the scrollable comments altogether, and just having them displayed conventionally under the flash player?

One problem I should mention with the flash player is that on some browsers it really hates having dynamic content placed above it; that is, it does not expect suddenly to be moved from one place to another on the page, and funny things happen when you try it. I forget the browsers I had this trouble with, but in general it seems that having collapsible/expandable (variable height) content above the flash player is not a good idea. This kind of means the flash player has to go above the download links and author's comments, which is irritating but seemingly unavoidable (maybe once the HTML <video> tag gets widely established, this problem will go away, but I don't know). We could go back to having the flash player on a separate page altogether, but this really seems like a step backward. Perhaps the ultimate solution to this would be to have a user-configurable setting that disables inclusion of the flash player altogether for those power users that just want to get straight to the downloads. (Personally, I used to hate the flash player, but now FLV has been replaced with the distinctly superior MP4 I find myself using it to watch runs much more frequently purely for convenience's sake.)

I think arkarian mentioned having the scrollable comments to the side of the flash player; in today's world of widescreen monitors this might make more sense than having them at the bottom, but I don't know, since I've so far gone for quite a slim (~700px wide) design (I think this makes reading long lines of text quite a bit easier). I like having the playlist where it is, although I will admit that it's entirely superfluous for SDA's many single-segment runs, and the space could be usefully used by something else in these cases. The flash player does have a mode for displaying the playlist underneath the player, but then the author's comments would definitely have to go somewhere else if it were still to be possible to see the run and the comments at the same time. I do like having a displayed playlist within the flash player itself, though; it would be even more valuable if the IL playlist situation were sorted out.

So yes, the layout of the various components on this page is a bit of a compromise, in that I want all of them to have enough space when that space isn't really available.

Quote from Manocheese:
A small note: "Runner commentary" might be confused with audio commentary, so perhaps it should say "Runner comments".


OK.

Quote from Manocheese:
The box displayed when you expand "Download files for this run" and hover over the top "details" text on this run page is cut off by the Flash video. The border of the box associated with the bottom "details" text is cut off by the bottom of the screen, and I imagine the actual text might be cut off for other tooltips.


Good spot ... this is the sort of thing I was talking about when I said that the flash player and dynamic content have trouble peacefully coexisting. The tooltips do have a tendency to screw up the layout, but I like the context-sensitivity a great deal; we could replace them all with separate links to separate pages that contain the information, but that is, in my view, another lame step backward. Alternatives to making the tooltips less intrusive would involve forcing the user to click on them rather than just hovering over them to pop up the relevant information, or providing a separate, dedicated area of the page where the mouseover information is displayed. I think I prefer the former to the latter.

The bottom-of-screen cutoff problem I intended to fix lamely by adding a load of padding at the end of the page ... I forgot to do that.

Quote from Manocheese:
The "typical x" notes in the tooltips are confusing. For example, "typical resolution" has two resolutions listed with no indication of which one is the actual resolution of the video. "Typical framerate" is even more confusing.


All right, I agree. If we want to keep some sort of context-sensitive video flavour information, we have two choices: a) as nate suggested, we could try to recover the exact video information for all video files on SDA (a difficult but not impossible task) and store it all in the database, in which case all this text would be 100% correct for all videos; or b) water the descriptions down so that they contain more general information rather than specific numbers and so on. As an aside, I would like to be able to add a link to VLC in these tooltips, but it is sometimes not possible for the user to get his or her mouse cursor into the tooltip to reach the link without the tooltip disappearing. Maybe this can be fixed, though.

In short, I think context-sensitive help for categories and video flavours is a good idea and definitely worth pursuing to improve the site's transparency to the layman, but I'm not sure what the best way to do it would be; again, I didn't want to polish it up too much since it was likely to need changing later anyway.

Quote from Manocheese:
A more specific note: the any% and 100% Ocarina of Time runs were both done on the GameCube version.


Thanks, I'll fix that.

Quote from Manocheese:
The mp4 files should be listed before the avi files, IMO. People will download the first things on the list.


Yes, I think I agree -- I'll fix that, too.

Quote from Manocheese:
"Back to runner list" on runner pages makes me think that a generic "back" would be better, since there are several ways to get to a runner page and the runner list would probably be less common than others.


Yeah, again, I knew this was lame and couldn't be bothered doing anything about it -- noted.

Quote from Manocheese:
IMO, it would make more sense for the lists for individual systems (e.g. this page) to list games rather than runs. Listing runs makes the user scroll a lot more to find what they want, and it also makes them less likely to see the information on the game pages. I'm not sure how listing games instead of runs would work with identifying the systems on which runs were done, though; I guess it depends on how the database is set up, and I'm no expert on that sort of thing.


It is certainly easy enough to make it not list the individual runs, and in fact it is advantageous to do that from the point of view of not making the server melt down every time someone asks it for the list of PC runs (see the earlier comment about pagination).

Quote from Lord_VG:
Another thing I noted is that when viewing the video, I get a video box, as expected, but then I see another box with "video" over it but it's just a gray blob.  What's it there for?


I think you're just seeing the playlist (which would be filled with different video parts for multisegment runs). I agree, it's confusing and pointless for that box to appear if you're just watching something with a single part or segment, so that should probably change.

Quote from Arkarian:
loving the scrollable comments so you can watch the run at the same time. when i read your description of it, i thought the flash player would be fixed on the right, so you could scroll the rest of the page beside it, seeing more of the comments at once. i think that still might be a good idea, and i'm also having these crazy ideas about making the flash player draggable.


Fixing the flash player on the right? Perhaps that could be done, but I'm not sure where the playlist would go. Are you talking about using absolute CSS positioning? Draggable flash player might not work so well because of the issues with complex DHTML/CSS and Flash, but you're welcome to mock some HTML up and we'll see how well it works.

Quote from Arkarian:
also really like the "go →" links, but they might look better and be easier to click if they came first on the line. perhaps a small "go" icon or something similar in place of the bullets?


Anyone else for the link first on the line? I had intended to make a little icon for the "go ->" thing -- something like Wikipedia's "offsite link" arrow, but I'd rather use Unicode glyphs if it is at all possible to do so. Replacing the bullets with an icon might work; I hadn't considered that.

Quote from Arkarian:
i might have missed you mentioning it, but are there any plans to implement a search for runners, games, runs, etc.? seems like that would be great to include, as sda is only going to get larger.


Yes, probably, although I'm putting it off for now since search functionality often seems to end up being harder to implement than you expect it to be, so I preferred to put the work in elsewhere. I don't think it's too hard to find what you need via game list or runner list or system list, unless it's one of those cases where you remember a sentence in someone's run comments and want to find the run that way. Although it would be great to have an in-bounds search engine, there is always google, which makes this somewhat lower priority than it would otherwise be (although sda2p's current deployment should forbid google from indexing the pages, since we don't want that to happen yet). If you could come up with some probable scenarios where search functionality would be particularly valuable, that would probably help your case. But yes, it can be done, I just don't think it's vital, and it would complicate development to introduce it at this stage.

Quote from Arkarian:
expanding on what manocheese said: on system pages like this this i think only games should be shown by default, each of them being expandable to show runs for that game. if there are only a few games for a system though, this would be unwieldy, so i think it would be awesome to see a smart system page lister that starts hiding runs after x runs or games.


I did think about collapsed runs, but system.php was rushed as I mentioned, so I didn't bother to implement it. Manocheese's later point that it might draw people's attention away from the game pages is possibly valid, though. There could be an arrow to unfold the run list and then a separate link to take the user to the game page, but that might confuse people. Another option might be to fold up just the IL, or merely provide the number of IL runs rather than listing them all.

I think the game page does serve a useful purpose even though system.php almost makes it obsolete. Firstly, the game pictures and summary blurb appear on that page, and while they are hardly essential for the process of locating runs, I think they are a great thing to add a bit of atmosphere to the user experience -- the site would be very dry without them. Secondly, some games have notes which would become homeless if all games were just located via person.php or system.php. I do wonder whether those two pages should just offer summaries of the runs on the game pages with no links to the runs, forcing the user via the game page, but then the idea of not providing links to something that we could easily provide links to seems so stupid. Any further thoughts welcome.

Quote from moooh:
Like everyone else, the first thing that struck me was the annoying paging Smiley
If paging should exist at all it should at least contain alphanumeric page links. Right now, you don't know how many 'next page' you need to click to arrive at games starting with G. The number of next's is also dynamic as it will change when new games are added.


Yeah, I agree entirely with that, and paging-by-letter would likely have appeared in the prototype if I had worked on it for longer. The only danger is if we get into a situation where for example someone's name is only provided in non-Latin symbols, but even then it might be possible to find a way of making it fail gracefully. The development strategy for sda2p was to try to make the implementation comprehensive without bothering to provide anything more than basic minimum functionality, since one can never predict exactly what enhanced functionality users will want. I am aware that the paging is a pain to use but I would expect the capability to become an essential one some years down the line. It just didn't seem worth the effort to improve it yet.

Quote from moooh:
btw, this example site exposes LeCoureur's SM64 70-star run once again. Just thought I should mention it.


Thanks.

Quote from Manocheese:
An unrelated problem I noticed with system pages is that Zelda games are alphabetized incorrectly. They always seem to be at the top of the lists (but only on the system pages, not the big game list). Maybe sda2p would be a good opportunity to start alphabetizing Zelda games by L, which would probably be the first thing most users think of.


If it happens on system.php but not gamelist.php then I suspect this may be a bug and will investigate.

Quote from Manocheese:
I think save warping and death abuse could use separate descriptions. Also, the page navigation for game and runner lists should be at both the top and bottom of the page.


Yeah, both save warping and death abuse are currently inheriting their descriptions from their metacategory. In an ideal situation we would find people to write tooltips for each and every category on each and every game, so every piece of text would be correctly tailored to the situation. In multiple languages. Tongue

Quote from Kabuto:
Please reformat some of the lists a bit as when there's a huge IL table it's difficult to get an overview, example: http://speeddemosarchive.com/sda2p/system.php?sid=19, e.g. by initially collapsing those lists (with Javascript to expand them again, similar to the spoiler tag), putting them to the bottom, adding a game list to the top or whatever.


Yeah, that's another of those things I was waiting for someone to ask me to do. Thanks.

Quote from Kabuto:
While generally a good idea those tooltip popups make the site feel a bit hectic because they unexpectedly appear and disappear when just moving the mouse pointer from one place to another. I recommend adding css the attribute cursor:help; to them and a delay of e.g. 0.5 seconds for the tooltip box to appear.


I agree that the popups are a little bit in-your-face, so that's a great idea. My CSS knowledge is fairly rudimentary so I didn't know about that attribute -- I'll see how it works out.

Quote from Kabuto:
A different issue is the assignment of games to systems. It appears to me that on current SDA games are assigned to all systems for which they were released while in your prototype only actual runs are assigned to the systems they were run on. Both methods are legitimate but what are your plans here?


Well, sda2p actually does both things -- the game list lists all the systems that the game has been released on, whereas the system list refers to the system that the run was actually played on. I know Enhasa plans to do away with listing multiple release systems per game, and I've never been a massive fan of it either (it's a nightmare for the staff, since with constant remakes and so forth being released it changes all the damn time). So the game list system listing will probably be removed, and the system that the run was played on will most likely remain. Again, if you spot any errors in that data, let me know.

NMS: I agree that the way the supplementary parts are displayed is a bit goofy. I'm not even sure it's necessary to fold them up at all, since there are never more than just a handful of them.

The socks were made from 2.2 skeins of Noro Kureyon (Japanese, worsted weight wool; hand-dyed, hand-spun), colourway 206, and knitted in the round on 3.75mm double-pointed needles. I know you all want the pattern but I'm afraid you can't have it since I designed them myself, so there isn't one. Har.
we have lift off
Quote from DJGrenola:

Quote:
The ability to sort the runner list by nickname would be convenient.


Since the "real names required" rule for SDA submission has been relaxed, I think this may be unavoidable (we can't sort by a last name that isn't there). Of course some people have real names but not handles, which gives the opposite problem, so some thought is probably going to be required on how to do this.


If runners do not have handles (or at least, don't provide them) then as I see it you should simply just use their real name for both lists. I think having a nickname list is more crucial than a real name list as surely it is the nickname list that most people are going to be using. I for one certainly only note people by their nickname really.

Also stop saying how embarrassed you are Tongue . You have done an amazing job getting this preliminary version out.
I love YaBB 1G - SP1!
How many lines of code does this have? I dont feel many, but maybe I'm wrong, if you post the database design maybe people can add whatever you are missing, unless that's not your goal. I think I skimmed over something about not using images for external links like wikipedia, maybe you can use one of these, and maybe utf-8 has even better glyphs available:
U+2934 ⤴ e2 a4 b4 ARROW POINTING RIGHTWARDS THEN CURVING UPWARDS
U+00BB » c2 bb RIGHT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK
U+261B ☛ e2 98 9b BLACK RIGHT POINTING INDEX
U+261E ☞ e2 98 9e WHITE RIGHT POINTING INDEX
U+2750 ❐ e2 9d 90 UPPER RIGHT DROP-SHADOWED WHITE SQUARE
U+2752 ❒ e2 9d 92 UPPER RIGHT SHADOWED WHITE SQUARE
U+279A ➚ e2 9e 9a HEAVY NORTH EAST ARROW
U+279C ➜ e2 9e 9c HEAVY ROUND-TIPPED RIGHTWARDS ARROW
U+279D ➝ e2 9e 9d TRIANGLE-HEADED RIGHTWARDS ARROW
U+279F ➟ e2 9e 9f DASHED TRIANGLE-HEADED RIGHTWARDS ARROW
U+2924 ⤤ e2 a4 a4 NORTH EAST ARROW WITH HOOK

or these if you can display them inverted/mirrored with css
U+25E9 ◩ e2 97 a9 SQUARE WITH UPPER LEFT DIAGONAL HALF BLACK
U+2607 ☇ e2 98 87 LIGHTNING
gamelogs.org
Quote from DJGrenola:
Fixing the flash player on the right? Perhaps that could be done, but I'm not sure where the playlist would go. Are you talking about using absolute CSS positioning? Draggable flash player might not work so well because of the issues with complex DHTML/CSS and Flash, but you're welcome to mock some HTML up and we'll see how well it works.


yeah, i'm not sure about this either. i'll play around some and get back to you.


Quote from DJGrenola:
Since the "real names required" rule for SDA submission has been relaxed, I think this may be unavoidable (we can't sort by a last name that isn't there). Of course some people have real names but not handles, which gives the opposite problem, so some thought is probably going to be required on how to do this.


i think the best way would just be to allow sorting by both. not sure what the best way to implement it would be; one idea is a dropdown with "last name" and "nickname" as options, where selecting an option either reloads the page or switches the list via ajax.


Quote from DJGrenola:
Although it would be great to have an in-bounds search engine, there is always google, which makes this somewhat lower priority than it would otherwise be (although sda2p's current deployment should forbid google from indexing the pages, since we don't want that to happen yet). If you could come up with some probable scenarios where search functionality would be particularly valuable, that would probably help your case. But yes, it can be done, I just don't think it's vital, and it would complicate development to introduce it at this stage.


you're right— i can't really think of any standout need for it as sda is still relatively small, and if enough people want it later, google would do the job just fine.


Quote from DJGrenola:
I think the game page does serve a useful purpose even though system.php almost makes it obsolete. Firstly, the game pictures and summary blurb appear on that page, and while they are hardly essential for the process of locating runs, I think they are a great thing to add a bit of atmosphere to the user experience -- the site would be very dry without them. Secondly, some games have notes which would become homeless if all games were just located via person.php or system.php. I do wonder whether those two pages should just offer summaries of the runs on the game pages with no links to the runs, forcing the user via the game page, but then the idea of not providing links to something that we could easily provide links to seems so stupid. Any further thoughts welcome.


i agree with all of this; the game pages are my favorite part about the site. i might be in the minority here, but i think not listing the actual runs on system.php would be a good idea. just listing the games and renaming eg the nintendo 64 page from "runs on nintendo 64" to "nintendo 64 games with runs" (or something similar) would force people to go to the game pages but wouldn't seem unwieldy due to the page title change.
think of it like this: when you click systems, you see a list of systems; when you click a system, you see a list of games for that system; and when you click a game, you see a list of runs for that game. that seems both logical and natural to me.

of course, some people might see that as hindering quick navigation, which might be true.
gamelogs.org
rough idea for how drag and drop on run pages could be implemented.

that could also easily be done with toggle buttons (eg "click to put video on right"), but the drag and drop could be expanded to the runner commentary, etc so the user could position things however they'd like.

i also played around with letting you drag the vid anywhere without having set drop zones but thought that might feel sort of ghetto to the user.


so yeah, just some ideas; any thoughts?
Yes, a cucco riding the ground.
Quote from DJGrenola:
I agree, but pagination is something of a necessary evil in order to make the system scalable. Right now it probably isn't necessary, but one day there might be thousands of games on the game list. This would be a problem for visitors as VG suggested, but furthermore it would be a problem for the web server itself, since it has to provide the game list to a lot of people a lot of times every second. The system list should also be paged, since selecting e.g. 'PC' on the system list brings back an awful lot of content that all needs to be built dynamically at request time. I didn't bother adding system list pagination because system.php was written last and it's not simple to do (you need to ensure the page doesn't break half way through the list of runs for one game), but it's something that needs to be added. I do agree that finding what the user wants can be quite tedious with a paged system, and more/better mechanisms to assist locating things need to be added. I didn't want to spend too much time on the initial version. As others suggested, there could be an option to display the full list (disabled by default). For the moment, though, yes, I could just turn pagination off.


Would it be possible to generate certain frequently used pages in advance? What I mean is that pages like the main game list and the runner list will be used fairly frequently, so instead of generating them each time a user asks for them, just generate them every time the site is updated. Then, when people request those pages, give them the pre-generated pages.

Quote from DJGrenola:
Since the "real names required" rule for SDA submission has been relaxed, I think this may be unavoidable (we can't sort by a last name that isn't there). Of course some people have real names but not handles, which gives the opposite problem, so some thought is probably going to be required on how to do this.


Perhaps the nickname list could just sort people without nicknames by their last names. It could look something like this:

"GameMaster" (John Doe)
Gray, Henry
"HardcoreGamer" (Jane Doe)

Quote from DJGrenola:
Yes, it's a shame the scrollbox had to be so small. I wanted it to be possible to scroll through the comments without having to push the flash player off the top of the screen. Obviously this won't be possible in all cases, since we all have differently sized displays, but I wanted it to work on my laptop at least. Are you suggesting doing away with the scrollable comments altogether, and just having them displayed conventionally under the flash player?


Yes, that's what I was thinking. It seems that a lot of people want to be able to simultaneously see the video and the comments, though, and they wouldn't be able to with conventional comments. I think your idea of being able to disable the Flash player is the best option.
sda loyalist
Quote from Manocheese:
Would it be possible to generate certain frequently used pages in advance?


Uh, yes. This is a fairly simple thing to do, and I'm fairly sure he already indicated he would do it.
Yes, a cucco riding the ground.
Quote from lag:
Quote from Manocheese:
Would it be possible to generate certain frequently used pages in advance?
Uh, yes. This is a fairly simple thing to do, and I'm fairly sure he already indicated he would do it.


I must have missed it, because he said this about pagination:

Quote from DJGrenola:
The system list should also be paged, since selecting e.g. 'PC' on the system list brings back an awful lot of content that all needs to be built dynamically at request time.
sda loyalist
Well, yes, but the then-generated page could be stored in a cache table and then used instead of generation for future views.
Yes, a cucco riding the ground.
Yes, that's exactly what I said.