MegaGlest Website

[-Archmage-]

I hope you guys aren't making this one of those silly websites that is designed for little computers, and phones........ I have a 26" monitor and I hate looking at this tiny little strip all compact with stuff. So please, just make it fit all monitors?

[Cygal]

I'm sorry, but we actually are designing a silly website. If you manage to make this a flexible design, please do so! What is your resolution?

[Omega]

Arch, from a web design point of view, making a good looking custom site that won't break on high resolution monitors is not easy, and with the current style of their site, there's no real way to do that without major changes that will actually look bad in the long run.

For example, if you have a nicely listed column on a site, if you stretch the resolution large enough, it can eventually end up being one line, which would look bad. While web sites can expand well, they have limits, which are best enforced with maximum widths.

[Gabbe]

1680*1200 res for me. WIll it be screwed?

[Cygal]

No. It's designed to be visible with a 1024px width, but the real design "content" goes up to 1300/1400px in width (with the gradients).

[-Archmage-]

1920*1200

This site stretches to fit perfectly.

[olaus]

Concerning the content, if someone comes up with content in something else than HTML, I can always convert it.

i have some content in the pipeline (still lots of work to do):

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http://rupp.de/mg_factions//persian_techtree.html
http://rupp.de/mg_factions/experimental_image_map_diagram.html
http://rupp.de/mg_factions//images/persian/persian_techtree_graph.svg
everything is generated with perl from the techs-directory of glest 3.3.7.2

for everything else a wiki is probably the best because there's not enough manpower otherwise.

[tomreyn]

Very nice! This is going to make a great basis for a manual. I'm not sure how we would integrate this into the webdesign / CMS, though... Maybe it could become a downloadable PDF or go on the wiki. Or we upload it as the static HTML it currently is...

Speaking of the design, the final look is now at

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http://megaglest.org/preview/ - thanks a lot Cygal and TeaR for the many hours you spent on this! I am very happy with the result.

The next step will be to integrate this design into the CMS templates, I'll hopefully get this done during the weekend.

Once that's done, we need to add content (text + screenshots, video), and write some PHP code to convert externally available data to a format which fits the side columns (latest forums posts and currently available game servers) and integrate that, too.

Then we'll be ready to launch.

[Cygal]

Concerning the content, if someone comes up with content in something else than HTML, I can always convert it.

i have some content in the pipeline (still lots of work to do):

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http://rupp.de/mg_factions//persian_techtree.html
http://rupp.de/mg_factions/experimental_image_map_diagram.html
http://rupp.de/mg_factions//images/persian/persian_techtree_graph.svg

Great work! Could you share the code? I have been willing to put the techtree in dot format to be able to play with it, but have never done it.

[titi]

Olaus this is really good work!
Thanks a lot for this! Can we get the script too once is done?

update:
more requests regarding the table like buildings overview, the attack range and power should be included too ( important for beehives )
and the "store"-possibility for food,wood... should be displayed in another way, maybe as its own colomn. ( even in the game so :-), I will try to do this ) .

[olaus]

i included more stuff today. of course You'll get the code when it's done. at the moment it's changing too fast

if You want to import the graph somewhere i can export it to many formats, i use:
http://search.cpan.org/~lbrocard/GraphViz-2.04/lib/GraphViz.pm

update: does anyone have an idea how i can get good pictures for every unit? like creating one jpeg out of the g3d-models?

[Omega]

I could help with filling in the content for the web page, but, not at all in January, as I'll be too busy with assignments, work, final exams, etc etc...

@Olaus: There's no easy way to get an image of the unit. The G3D viewer (c++) has the basic code on how the G3D format is rendered, but setting the proper zoom, then taking the image for that would be trickier.

[will]

Anyone comfortable with python could adapt my g3d_stats.py to skip stats and render team colours and glreadpixels without the zpr window and then PIL to png or jpg.

The code loads and centres the models

Github, under GlestTools

[Cygal]

Indeed, it was really trivial. g3d_stats is great.

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[center][img]http://cygal.info/tmp/slave.png[/img][/center]
I just added those two lines:

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pixels = glReadPixels(0, 0, 640, 480, GL_RGBA, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE)
Image.frombuffer('RGBA', (640, 480), pixels).save('image.png')

I could easily write a script going over all units, and creating an image like this.

olaus, We also have to think about the way your great work is going to fit in the website: the pages are currently too large. Put miniatures for the graphs? Put less information in the "overview"?

[titi]

AMAZING!!!!
This combined with the scripts above is GREAT!
What I want to see is simply red team color in the models, because some of the models look a bit ugly without teamcolor.
By the way, is it possible to choose the background color too then ( transparent maybe :-) )

( next step is the creation of animated GIFs showing the model walking/fighting ....  )

[will]

If you want to fork glesttools on github I can pull your changes and scripts back when you're done happily

A 45o rotation on the xz axis might be pleasing?

If you make n frames as img001.png, img00n.png then you can pipe them through imagemagick's convert to make good optimsed gifs.  Saving as jpg and using ffmpeg to make videos would be even better (but slightly less portable to embed on the web)

Glad my script was a good base

[Cygal]

I'll see what I can do for the gifs, it should indeed be easy to do.

Concerning the colors, I don't know how this works in glest or how it is specified in the .g3d file. will, any idea?
It should be easy to choose a background color. Transparent would be harder, I guess I could use the green screentechnique.

[Cygal]

Working on the animation. It is really slow, no matter what the -delay is. Image Magick gurus would be welcome.

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[center][img]http://cygal.info/tmp/animation.gif[/img][/center]

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convert -delay 1 *.png -loop 0 animation.gif
Putting 1, 2, 10, or even 2x400 does not help for the speed.

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global n
if n < 200:
    pixels = glReadPixels(0, 0, 256, 192, GL_RGBA, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE)
    filename = "%0.3d.png" % n
    Image.frombuffer('RGBA', (256, 192), pixels).save(filename)

Really hacky, I don't know where to stop currently, so stopping after 200 frames. Also need to look at ZPR to set a default rotate.

[John.d.h]

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convert -delay 1 *.png -loop 0 animation.gif
Putting 1, 2, 10, or even 2x400 does not help for the speed.

Some programs don't display animations properly when they have such tiny delays.  Keep in mind that these are only hundredths of a second.  Maybe try it with something more like 50?

http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/anim_basics/
http://www.imagemagick.org/script/command-line-options.php?#delay

[will]

I created a simple script to create thumbnails - g3d_thumb.py in GlestTools

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[img]http://img585.imageshack.us/img585/6461/swordmancharging.gif[/img]
I hope you can adapt and extend this to your needs; please fork the project on github and then when you've committed your changes I can pull them back into GlestTools

The scaling in g3d.py might need to be looked at more closely

You might want to use convert to also optimise the gifs better

Transparency is problematic, because GIF is 256-colour; and at 256 colour, these files are hardly high-fidelity.  I'd say its easiest to live with opaque thumbnails.

Regards team colours, I haven't looked into it, but I bet its a flag in the g3d per-mesh header and it'd be implemented by using glColor before drawing those meshes that are team-coloured.

[Cygal]

As discussed on IRC with will, we wonder if the gifs are adapted for the webserver. Maybe more traditional images would be nicer? Something like those cards.

[ElimiNator]

Wow, this is cool! 

[John.d.h]

Just an example of a well-put-together professional version of what you're working on:

http://classic.battle.net/war3/human/units/
http://classic.battle.net/war3/human/buildings.shtml
http://classic.battle.net/war3/human/unitstats.shtml
http://classic.battle.net/war3/human/units/footman.shtml

Interpret it however you like.

For units with GAE lang tips, perhaps you could extract those and use them as a unit description?  Just a thought.

[Omega]

Agreed, John, those are nicely organized. My biggest beef with the script to generate the techtree map is that it, to be frank, looks dreadful. Of course, we'll never hit the customization of making a custom techtree map, but for a generic map for factions that the developer did not create a map, it should look a bit better, but the script is a start. Reading the XMLs is the first step.

Also, a note that 200 frames for a GIF is far too much. 20 frames is more than plenty.

[olaus]

I could easily write a script going over all units, and creating an image like this.

that would be great! my wishlist would be that i can pass on the command line the x-y-resolution and the directory where the pictures are put. in there it should be built similar to the techs-directory (tech/worker/worker.png)

olaus, We also have to think about the way your great work is going to fit in the website: the pages are currently too large. Put miniatures for the graphs? Put less information in the "overview"?

huh, especially in the overview i would prefer as much information as possible. the design with lots of information on the left and right is more suitable for text to be read serial like news, blogs, ... in the overview i want to compare units in as much aspects as possible (this one has more hit points and armor but this one is cheaper, can target air units and moves faster)

in general this shouldn't become a megaglest-tool but should work for GAE and normal glest. maybe it shouldn't generate any headers and footers, just the plain tables. they could then be integrated in whatever webdesign or CMS someone uses (just not into wiki, wouldn't make sense). of course always in a form that they can be automatically recreated if something in the techtree changes (don't know how often that happens but it should happen because balancing out all the factions isn't easy.)