(Even though the following rant might be too off-topic for this thread, I could not resist)varmint wrote:I can't tell you how many times I've had people turn away from irrlicht because of the website, and the few that make it to the screen shot page are turn off from there. It's 99% of the feed back I get from people when talking to them about irrlicht. Their general impression of from its' web site "irrlicht looks old and out dated." And then irrlicht looses out.For example google summer of code.
I tried for over a year to get our screenshots to be put in the irrlicht gallery, it wasn't until we moved on to another engine that I was finally asked for some screenshots. Mainly because no one wants to deal with the current site. Thats a good indication change is needed.
That's a funny quote from one of the engine devs, who can have write access to the website and the screenshots section on request. I even did not see any massive mailing by you on the dev mailing list, not even a request for anything. Even if you have no time for making it on your own, what about discussing this with the one's in charge?
IIRC, you were already out (without telling anyone...) when it came to GSoC, but we simply did not get the project because the task descriptions were too vague. The project itself got good marks.
Question is how I, personally, should judge your "cover". Now that you had all abilities to change stuff, and failed.
We're currently building up the screenshots section in the gallery. So all images do exist with automatically created thumbnails etc. So it's just a matter of integrating this stuff into the website. Projects and plugins won't go to our website unless they have their own properly set up website. Simply because we won't give support for them, but people tend to think so. Some stuff is hosted under irrExt, and that would deserve a place on the website. But honestly, irrExt would need some more polishing before it will become really usable by everyone from the community. And it would need a stable maintenance. After all we have the Wiki, which is not that thoroughly maintained an updated, and we don't get request to put projects up on the news site or anything. It's not that we actively prohibit the dissemination of news.Somethings the new site should have:
- Random screenshots on the first page
- List of projects berried deep in the forums (most people don't look here) Like XEffects should be listed right off the front page.
- Any interesting plugins should have a section
- Show Case of projects and or games (this is key)
- New Topics and New Posts maybe so people at a glance can see whats going on in teh community today. (helps for community building)
It's time to grow up boys, Change is good
However, I'm all for changes, as long as they are well-thought and give some benefit.
hopefully we will see many entries.
