New Theme!

Tessil · Posted: Fri Feb 11, 2005 10:15 pm Post subject: New Theme!

I've added a new custom theme to the site: PH2. (I've also removed the incompatible CPG-News theme.) You can try the theme out using the Preview Theme block in the lower left-hand corner.

If you like the theme, you can set it for your profile by going to "My Account | Preferences" and selecting it as your theme.

Enjoy!

Tessil · Posted: Wed Feb 23, 2005 3:39 pm Post subject: Re: New Theme!

More new themes!

CPG-News
Fi SubSilver Shadow
Mountain Rush
PH2 Blue

Tessil · Posted: Sun Mar 06, 2005 4:56 pm Post subject: Re: New Theme!

After much effort (and cussin' and swearin'...) I preset the newly-reengineered PH2 themes! I implemented a fancy cross-browser JavaScript slideshow into the header which rotates through a selection of EverQuest II's characters.

I've also made PH2_Blue the default theme for the board. You may select your own preferred theme in My Account > > Preferences.

PH2
PH2 Blue

Oxonia · A Skeletal Trooper Joined: Jul 18, 2004 Posts: 89

Really like the new PH2 theme Tess. You did a great job, and it doesnt kill my machine to use it.

Thanks for all your hard work on the website.

Tessil · Posted: Mon Mar 07, 2005 4:01 am Post subject: Re: New Theme!

Febreeza wrote:

Really like the new PH2 theme Tess. You did a great job, and it doesnt kill my machine to use it.

Thanks for all your hard work on the website.

Glad you like it! I put a lot of effort into getting the PH2 themes working, especially that JavaScript fade, more than I should have had to. Getting the fade to work properly required a lot of trial-and-error.

Finding character renders turned out to be a lot harder than I would have expected. Sony doesn't have them up on their site, and doesn't include them in the Fan Site Kit. Ended up finding them on some obscure game review site. Except, they were character renders against a black background. Creating the transparency around each character was... fun. Though it wasn't too bad... I shelled out for Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0, which isn't too terribly expensive (compared to Photoshop CS), and has a lot of the power of the full version of Photoshop. All the plug-ins for Photoshop work in Elements, for example. The only thing it doesn't have that I really miss are the full suite of Text editing and placement tools in Photoshop. But for something like 1/7th of the price of Photoshop, you just can't beat it. So, a few parameter tweaks to the Magic Lasso, some pixel editing with the Heal tool and Eraser, and Save for Web made me a stack of slides ready to display over the static header background.

I started with a really nice slideshow, but it required a filter effect that was completely IE-dependent. The cross-browser effect looked terrible (it would ramp the picture in from white, instead of transparent, and there was no fade-out effect). Plus, it wasn't completely cross-browser - it worked in IE and Mozilla (and not well in Moz), and that was it.

So, I hacked together some other code to do Alpha channel (transparency effect) detection with the slideshow code, dropped the IE-specific effect filter, and got that working. Now the fade-in looked great and worked in both IE and Firefox, but there was no fade-out ramp. Whoops!

The slideshow had function hooks for running pre- and post-slide changes, but it left the master timer loop running, so as soon as I called the fade-out, it would swap the slide, and both of the fades would run at about the same time, which wasn't so pretty. I had to struggle with reverse-engineering the code flow to find out where I could stop the loop before it set a new timer, run the loop for the fade-out, and then reenter the slideshow loop code. That took a really long time, not because it was a particularly difficult problem, but it took me a long time to remember how timers work in JavaScript, and to realize the fundamental mistake I was making.

I had it all working at one point too. I was cleaning the code up, misplaced a bracket, and had to start over because I couldn't find my mistake. Embarassed

Finally got it back together, optimized some of the code and stripped out the slideshow functions I wasn't using to make the code smaller, and got it all up. Took most of Sunday, which is why I wasn't on.

There's still a few tweaks I could make here and there, I think I can get the header to look better with smaller file sizes if I covert them from JPEG to another format (GIF or PNG), and I might play with adding a vignette effect to the bottom edge of the characters, to ease the discontinuity at the top of the navigation buttons (it really isn't possible to put the buttons on top of the slideshow image, so the spaces between them end up showing the hard edge of the bottom of the picture). All in all, I'm pretty pleased with myself though.

Janey · Posted: Mon Mar 07, 2005 7:42 pm Post subject: Re: New Theme!

It rocks Tessy,

Not as much as I rock, but it still rocks. I also have to add you didnt have to spend nearly as much time tweaking me...haha