[mzxgiant]

The "new" archive that I've been marathon coding on weekends for the last few weeks is up in beta. There's still a bit missing from it, and surely there are things that are broken, but I encourage everyone to try it out and report any bugs to the "DigitalMZX" section of the bug tracker.

Thanks!

[RyanThunder]

Hahahaha who the hell uploaded a picture of penguins to Prisons of MegaZeux's page?

[mzxgiant]

Guilty as charged; I wanted to test the screenshot upload system.

[RyanThunder]

Zeux VI: Penguins of Zeux

[asgromo]

Just so we're clear: this is what The New DigitalMZX is going to look like, whenever that happens? Any thought been given to consistent theming and navigation?

[mzxgiant]

Optimally when we do the full move (i.e. when the Vault comes out of beta), the new version of IPB will be skinned consistently with how the archive looks now.

[Pyro1588]

is the game info box supposed to hover on the lower-left corner of the screen? if so, is it supposed to appear underneath penguin pictures and werv's review but over their respective backgrounds?
this is probably just another wonky 800x480 thing. other than that it looks nice!

[mzxgiant]

Urk. Yeah, Wervyn noticed that pretty much 1024x768 and below, the game info box is broken. I'm debating tossing it into the flow with the other sidebar components but then on a larger res screen with games like Taoyarin that stretch a long way vertically, the layout looks off-balance.

[weasel]

Does the image necessarily need to be shown at full size? Perhaps it could be dynamically scaled, similar to how large images are handled on the Digiboards?

[mzxgiant]

Unfortunately, scaling screenshots from megazeux always results in really terrible looking images. I played with this with the last archive... and it really shows on some of the title screens. Take a close look at BtB's title screen, for instance.

[weasel]

Hmm. In that case, is it too costly to have the archive generate screenshot thumbnails upon upload, instead of doing it dynamically?

[mzxgiant]

That's what I mean still -- dynamic or no, scaling down MZX screenshots has historically left them looking god-awful. Unless ajs can think of a good means to do this, I'm at a bit of a loss.

edit: Any particular reason why this is an issue? Screen res? File size? It was the same way in Gambit (though I'll admit I did kind of push it uploading the penguin picture to Prisons of Megazuex)

[weasel]

I'm mainly bringing the issue up for those who are viewing the DigiVault on small screen sizes (netbooks, UMPCs, smartphones). Granted, there's probably nothing stopping from making a separate page for mobile users, but why do that if the Vault can adapt itself based on the screen size/device?

[KKairos]

If this were done, I think (without particularly good reason, except that maybe it would be less likely to bastardize the image) a 50% reduction would suffce

[asgromo]

How costly would it be to imagemagick crop a center portion of the shot on demand

[RoSS]

Going a little further with a sort of a mix of weasel's and asgromo's ideas, perhaps right after you upload a picture, you can select a square of the picture a la facebook picture tagging, and the square can be permanently saved as the thumbnail. The thumbnail would then of course be easy to change if necessary, and at worse you could scale it up instead of scaling it down like you would otherwise.

[Dr Lancer-X]

I still don't understand what's wrong with simple scaling.



Looks alright to me.

[Revvy]

Yeah, I've always found that ZZT games look better from a distance.

[mzxgiant]

So what I'm thinking here then is any resolution < 1024 wide will have to send a separate request to an image handler to scale on the fly. It just means I need to rewrite the way images are requested and served, because right now it's a simple img src=Y and done...

As a side note -- this type of modification would be best served with a rewrite of the CSS to optimize for netbook resolutions with respect to the other containers. Font sizes would need to change, layouts would need to be retooled to a smaller horizontal res, etc etc. Anyone up for helping with that? It's about 400 lines of CSS that would need to be modified down and tweaked, then kept in sync with the mainstream layout changes.

Either way, adding to bug tracker.

[Sai'ke]

You work fast


It looks a bit off that the text in some of the boxes starts immediately on the left side of the box, with no spacing from the border at all. Minor gripe though.

[T-Bone]

Lancer-X, on Mar 3 2010, 12:14 AM, said:

I still don't understand what's wrong with simple scaling.



Looks alright to me.

Not a good example because thats a title screen designed to be visual from a far. If you have 1x1 chars and text at that scale... its hard to see / read.