Check Out Our New Look!

[x4000]

I was about to report that the site is broken on Safari on an iPhone, but then I tried it again and it is working now. Looks like I was beaten to it.

Yeah, I noticed it on mine, too.  Should have tested before I put it out with my iPhone.

[Colonel J]

New site looks very slick guys, nice work.

Another Safari snag.... Game screenshots don't open properly in Safari 5.0.3 on my Mac. I was idlely clicking on the LoS screenies as I haven't looked at the new ship designs yet.  I assume screenshots should open in a pop-up window. They don't but I get half of the image way down below the main page and there's no horizontal scrollbar. Rght-clicking 'open image in new window' gives a blank window labelled 'sigpro.transparent.gif 1x1 pixels'. Not tried it in a different browser.

[x4000]

Hmmm, that's odd -- I'll have to check that out on my mac.  Thanks!

[x4000]

Well, I changed around the front page to no longer include the full feed descriptions from the news blog.  That was a bit overwhelming, anyway, and tended to result in a huge amount of extra download requirements (over a meg, actually, in images).  The formatting of that also just wasn't ideal, as some folks noted.

Plus, it's bothered me for a long time that as soon as one news article goes up, the ones before it get REALLY pushed off the screen.  Just showing an index there on the news page of the last 30 entries really helps with that.  And then of course folks can click on whichever ones are actually of interest to them.  And there's 1MB less of data to be downloaded for people first visiting the site, and there's not this scary-huge page sitting there.

At any rate, by doing that as well as shrinking the images in the header scroll down to JPEGs, the total download size went down from 3MB to about 480KB.  And it's GZip compressed now, too.

Doing a lot better on this: http://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.arcengames.com/YLIm3i0C

There's still more that could be done, but it's no longer so dire as it had been.  And frankly, this ought to be smaller downloads than the old site now, thanks to not including all the blog content on there.

[x4000]

Okay, there's now a forum for AVWW-related questions and topics: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/board,92.0.html

If there are any more questions/comments, probably best to start putting them in there, though bear in mind there's still a lot of stuff we're not ready to discuss yet.  All will be revealed in due time!

[Burnstreet]

Ah, the home page is much better now.

I would recommend showing a teaser of the text for at least the newest article, though.

[x4000]

I don't think I can, without a ton of fiddling with various third party components, or possibly paying for one that's commercial, unfortunately.  The theme itself is a commercial one, but a lot of the feed components aren't worth paying for for my purposes, I don't feel like.

[TechSY730]

We're hoping that the game will be massively more popular than AI War

Considering how popular AI War already is, that is saying something. 

[x4000]

AI War is very niche.  It's super popular in it's niche, but completely and utterly known outside it's niche. AVWW is more mainstream, along the lines of most any other RPG or adventure game -- those are way larger genres than strategy in terms of audience.  I don't expect that AVWW is necessarily going to be as popular in its genre as AI War was in is, but even if it isn't it could still have way more players than AI War just by nature of the genre.

We thought that with Tidalis, too, but we really miscalculated on the casual folks.  That's another story, though.

[TechSY730]

We thought that with Tidalis, too, but we really miscalculated on the casual folks.  That's another story, though.

Maybe the puzzle genre was a good choice to attract new customers. Its just that the puzzle game genre is so over-populated, the average number of people to see any one new puzzle game may be less, even if there are more people interested in puzzle games.

But again, another story for another day.

Not that one person's purchase means much, but I sure will buy AVWW as soon as it is available for pre-ordering.

[Nalgas]

At any rate, by doing that as well as shrinking the images in the header scroll down to JPEGs, the total download size went down from 3MB to about 480KB.  And it's GZip compressed now, too.

It loads massively faster for me now, so that seems to have pretty much fixed it.  Probably still makes the three people out there still on dialup sad, but the load/display time is negligible now on my (also fairly sad) 1.5 Mbps DSL.

[x4000]

We thought that with Tidalis, too, but we really miscalculated on the casual folks.  That's another story, though.

Maybe the puzzle genre was a good choice to attract new customers. Its just that the puzzle game genre is so over-populated, the average number of people to see any one new puzzle game may be less, even if there are more people interested in puzzle games.

But again, another story for another day.

Well... without going into too much of a tangent, the problem is that "casual gamer" doesn't refer to a specific group of people.  As in, there isn't a "Casual Gamer Magazine" with broad readership amongst casual players, etc.  Instead, "casual gamers" as a whole are defined as not a coherent group, and are simply people who happen to enjoy one or another non-hardcore games periodically.  Put another way: we can't get ourselves in front of them by getting coverage or reviews on certain sites, or by having players in your typical forums getting excited about the game.  The bulk of the casual players do not read or visit those places.  Instead, you have to get where they are, which is... all over the place, with massive visibility.  Bejeweled is great at this.  We are not.  Oops.

At any rate, by doing that as well as shrinking the images in the header scroll down to JPEGs, the total download size went down from 3MB to about 480KB.  And it's GZip compressed now, too.

It loads massively faster for me now, so that seems to have pretty much fixed it.  Probably still makes the three people out there still on dialup sad, but the load/display time is negligible now on my (also fairly sad) 1.5 Mbps DSL.

Sweet!  Yeah, I figure that folks who have trouble on our site (via being on DSL) are likely having trouble on most every game-related site out there these days, honestly.

[Tim James]

Can you make the links stay in the same window instead of opening a new one? I could be wrong but I thought it was bad form to open a new window for something like that.

[x4000]

Can you make the links stay in the same window instead of opening a new one? I could be wrong but I thought it was bad form to open a new window for something like that.

Unfortunately, doesn't look like the current feed component I'm using allows that -- odd.  I have three or four installed but disabled that I was trying out, though, so I'll be sure to experiment with them soon.  Surely one of them will work better.  This was the best at displaying the description text inline, but since I'm no longer doing that, one of the others might turn out to be preferable after all.

Thanks for bringing it up, somehow I hadn't noticed that!

[Nalgas]

At any rate, by doing that as well as shrinking the images in the header scroll down to JPEGs, the total download size went down from 3MB to about 480KB.  And it's GZip compressed now, too.

It loads massively faster for me now, so that seems to have pretty much fixed it.  Probably still makes the three people out there still on dialup sad, but the load/display time is negligible now on my (also fairly sad) 1.5 Mbps DSL.

Sweet!  Yeah, I figure that folks who have trouble on our site (via being on DSL) are likely having trouble on most every game-related site out there these days, honestly.

For general use, it's actually not bad at all, even for game-related stuff (with the exception of some of the really crappy sites that are done entirely as a single 15 MB Flash file).  The two things that really kill it are video, which will make everything screech to a halt if it's any higher res than 360p, and large downloads, obviously.  Installing The Force Unleashed after I picked it up on sale on Steam was an adventure in patience, because some genius decided to include separate copies of every single pre-rendered 720p cutscene for each of the ~8 languages the game supported, bloating it to nearly 30 GB.  Hilarity ensued.  Ok, maybe not.  More like an entire week of leaving it downloading overnight.  Heh.

One of these days I'm getting FIOS, though, which should be enough of an improvement to be worth putting up with redoing my entire home network yet again...