big pic

Let me know your thoughts.

<web designer talk>
It uses a ton of CSS3 for gradients and borders, but I’m going to strip that all out for the production site for images instead.
</web designer talk>

Big Image

I’m thinking this is going to be part of the header, and the blue might be too bright, but I’m just trying to show that I’m headed in the right direction.

Ignore any blockiness around the logo, I just put that in for testing.

(aka it may never happen, but we’ll see)

Also, AndrewAnimation.com redirects to this site now too.

Point is, this is the new site design. Just like last time, I have another version of this theme ready for the main site, with a few modifications so that it will fit the content. Although this time I built the WP theme from the ground up, instead of just copy-pasting stuff into Kubrick.

Now I have stuff organized by “Game News” and “Tutorials”, since I’ll be using this site for both of them. I’m having some trouble migrating all the posts over to the new way I’m organizing stuff, but I’ll get everything working eventually. I’ve already had to delete and restore a backup twice, hopefully no more screw-ups. Let me know what you think of the new theme, and I’ll finish up and upload the home site sometime next week.

My new site is a lot like Inkman, you’ve heard a lot about it but nothing ever got published to the web so you probably began to question their reality, in your mind anyway. Inkman is still in the works, but I finally put the finishing touches on it and uploaded it. It’s a lot like this site (which I’ve also updated, with a few new plugins and layout features), but some things are obviously different (ex. no sidebar). You can also see the original homepage I had for AndrewAnimation.biz (yeah it’s pretty bad, but it was my first shot at designing a webpage). You can see how far I’ve come from there.

It’s somewhat advanced compared to older versions: The new pages are XHTML Complaint (I hated doing that but it makes your site look better to have valid source code). There isn’t any Flash content on the site. I think it’s more optimized for search engines, maybe. And it looks pretty good too. If you find any problems with AndrewAnimation.biz, please let me know either by comment on this post or using the “Report a Bug” page at the footer.

PS. History Manager, my WP plugin, is now available on the Plugins page at Wordpress.com. It’s the thing that says “Post History” on the sidebar.

Okay, so for starters, I’ve made a bunch of changes/fixes on the site. The most noticeable feature is the tabs at the top of pages. You can’t see it here, but go to any of the pages through the Flash header and you’ll see them in action. It looks a bit strange where there are no subpages (specifically on the contact page), but I can’t really do anything about that. The only other noticeable thing I changed was my history manager sidebar plugin (it just says ‘Post History’ here, but I coded it myself. It doesn’t look all that great when there is no post history, but once I actually post news here more often, it should look better. I’ve actually been trying to get that into the Wordpress plugin list, but the process for doing that is really complicated.

Now for the news. My latest project has been creating a new engine. My reasons for doing this were:

1. In Engine 5, I had code scattered all over the place (timeline, character, individual MCs), and hundreds of comments mashed in there (mostly old code that I wasn’t sure if I would ever need). There wasn’t even any particular pattern for what code came where, which made debugging or changing something a real nightmare.
2. Engine 5 was a project I started last August when I barely knew anything about Actionscript (and had to use AS1). All these archaic methods I was using were probably not very efficient, and so that needed to be changed.
3. Engine 5 rain painfully slow on a regular computer. I’m talking 10-15 FPS kind of painful. It’s fine on mine, but I have 4GB of RAM and very fast processor. Since I don’t think this is going to be my target audience, I decided I needed to fix that. Unfortunately, I had no idea for what to do about the lag, other that disabling codes at random and seeing if the CPU usage went down.

So, Engine 6 is a lot more organized, uses better methods (WHILE loops instead of FOR loops), and runs fine on my old computer (which was actually fast when I first got it 5 years ago). I don’t think I’m going to put it online, since it plays a lot like the original engine (with some minor enhancements), and I think I’ll wait until I make the Inkman demo. Which I first mentioned back in December.

Oh, and one more thing. For those sites linking to me, could you please change the RSS to http://andrewanimation.biz/games/feed or just this site, as I won’t be using the old one anymore.

So I guess the first piece of news I have to post is the updates for this site and the main andrewanimation.biz. If you register here, please leave comments about your thoughts on the site and the regular one. Note that this area is still in progress a bit, but if you see anything that looks odd or find something that shouldn’t be, please let me know.

I’ve installed a few plugins to get this site looking the way I want it. I’m not 100% satisfied with them (and never will be), but if there are any other things that you think the site should be able to, leave a comment and I’ll see if I can find something to do that.