Considering you have less than 1% of SEN's membership, that's no surprise.

You're taking it too seriously.



Now, to be honest I see nothing wrong with sen instead of people whinning a lot more recently. In all honestly the posters I keep seeing for these kind of topics are the ones that don't map (or at least I am not informed that they have contributed to sen that way).
Don't come to me that we don't have a nice wiki or that maplantis wiki was better or that the DB was better. THEY WORK. And that's all it should matter.

IP's not gonna throw away his coding, I agree with ex on this one. A discussion like this has already been made when maplantis merging discussions were made public
http://www.staredit.net/maplantis/index.php?sid=b699ec5f01;topic=3027
And there's another merger topic I can't seem to find....

And now I'll quote yoshi:

Is it really worth upsetting the applecart over a change to a new forum system?

The way I see it is that v5 has problems and is unfinished. I've always preferred some elements of v4 but that is by the by. Latove is indeed a more streamlined forum system and from what I've been told of its modular structure it would be easy to work with. However, I foresee a switch to another forum system (requiring re-registration) killing off the community.

My rationale is that the community has been weakened in past years not just by the declining popularity of Starcraft and the maturation of the userbase, but by drama and upheaval. With the Icy Hell debacle, Synd][cate hack and various DDOS issues we lost members; through the long and difficulty-ridden switch to v5 we lost members; because of the SEN/Maplantis split we lost members. Perhaps I am overstating things a little too much but these events - migration and an effective civil cold war - weakened the community in terms of userbase and sapped its spirit. I won't go into any more detail about Maplantis but I will say that I think the entire issue was a disaster for the community.

The point I am trying to make is that major change causes weakening of the membership. In times of success the damage would not be great and the site's momentum would carry it forward. This is a time of inertia however, and I fear that a large change requiring re-registration would have serious consequences for us.
I think at the moment, at least until SC2, we should try (though this is not ideal) to work with what we have and maintain the community on life support.

I see us, SEN's older members, as sentinels of a dormant civilisation. Our job is to keep the community alive for the next generation of eager young mappers, not yet jaded or occupied by the trials of life. Sure, this new generation of young blood will probably not arrive until SC2, but I guess we'll just have to wait. When SC2 comes out it will be our responsibility to get our name out there and attract the next generation so that this dormant civilisation can prosper once again. Although our time as mappers is probably past, we don't have to sit around wringing our hands and waiting for the inevitable. Even if the social side of the site is kept alive then that is something. The rest can wait until SC2 which, I am aware, is not guaranteed to be a magic wand which will cure the site's problems. No, it is simply an opportunity and one which we should take advantage of.

My advice is not to make any kind of switch. We are in a state of hibernation at the moment and the last thing we should do is move to a new site. The site and its layout/coding are not the largest problems.

i like sen v5 atm, it'll get finished sometime in the future, till then just chill.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Oct 6 2009, 9:43 pm by Merrell. Reason: abusing bbcode

I agree with this 100%. One more thing that I hate and think hurts our community a lot, is all the retards that fight about "mappers > modders" or vise-versa. Also the fact that almost noone in this thread (or even other parts of the site) has even mentioned that SEN even has modding sections. Its all "SEN mappers this" and "blah mapping that", we should all be working together as a community, not having a constant "civil war"...

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Oct 5 2009, 4:00 pm by poiuy_qwert.

I particularly like the sentinels of a dormant civilisation bit, whether I count or not. The thing is, I don't believe that switching to Latova to form SENv6 will kill off SEN in any way. The community has rebounded somewhat from the split to Maplantis, and, again, if people are too lazy to register, we don't need them. Here's what I see happening in the event of a successful transfer: The vast majority of the active members make the switch properly and aren't negatively affected. A few people flake off, but these aren't by any means required. I consider transfer to Latova, or the expansion and optimization of SEN, to be required in order to make SEN, the website, the best it can be right now. While we guard the civilisation now, we should also try to make sure that when it stops being dormant (SCII comes out) and the activity starts up, that SEN, not any other website, is considered the best mapmaking help website. We can do that using the current community, so it is, of course, important. One of the flakes that could be making a tutorial that draws in several members and helps many more might be lost during the transfer. Apart from community, the website infrastructure is the one thing that we can optimize.

Very few people on SEN now would leave if we transferred most of us have done it before. Once we get an influx of new people, not tied down, a transfer and forced reregistration can be far more damaging, so it won't be so much of an option. If we optimize the website infrastructure NOW, without forcing newbies to feel the changes, we can minimize community damage while making SEN competitive against our would-be competitors. We control the Starcraft mapmaking community, but the larger and more active part of the SCII mapmaking community will probably be derived from WCIII communities, and if the same people convert the websites to handle SCII as well, we're in for a bit of competition. We should make SEN as good as it can be now.

Of course, IP may still say no.

True, because SEN is already dead in any form that switching code cores can affect.

Essentially.

Long live v4!

Oh, do you remember dial up? Stop complaining about loading times ;o

Oh wow.

SENv6 will be fucking hawt (pending getting good graphic designers for it).

Of course it won't be on Latova, it has nothing to do with who codes it. If I were to choose any forum system to base a site on, it would be invision. Latova wouldn't even be considered because a) it's not fully developed and b) i don't need a b, a is good enough.


Yes I'm addicted to HoN. But my game phases do end. It'll get to the point where I'm like "what the fuck, why am I wasted my time...".
If you want to help sen, then here's a project for anyone to complete: Get a wiki, figure out what lines of code I have to change to:
1) Change the name system to use SEN's name system
2) Change the login system to simply use SEN's sessions
3) Disable registration / login
4) Change the groups to be SEN's permissions
5) Change the wiki to use an external header (SEN's minimalistic skin)
6) Make a wiki skin to match SEN default skin

Or you can make a php class to handle maps using farty's program. One function to get proper screenshots, one to get map data, an optimized way to get both at the same time (without loading the chk twice).
Last I remember, the 2 tileset data files caused illogical problems.

Just run it once? ;o Unserialize or store the output and then store the output filename in one run? If you need multiple screenshots, use -p 0 to only generate the screenshot and not collect/print data.
Having both data files is a bit redundant. If you use the #define LargeMap at all, just keep only the LargeData.dat and the one build. It has the same information as the other .dat file + more. I don't even know why I didn't just make it always use the #define LargeMap.

If anyone does what IP asked, talk to me for specs and arguments on the program (unless IP modified it at all). xD

IP: http://www.staredit.net/topic/8699/

Most people wouldn't help SEN in the way you're describing.

Also, can you elaborate? Are you planning a v6 already, and are looking for graphic artists? How long do your phases usually last? Why are you looking for a new Wiki instead of slightly changing the one we already have?

Want to play Phantom?

Trust me, If I got bored and quit HoN, he will soon too ;o

I should kill you, then.

I doubt an epic battle will spark the rise and coming of SENv6, but we can try ;o

v6 is just a thought in my head on the coding successes / failures of v5. After you build certain core codes, it would be too much of a hassle to change / optimize core functions and such.

Somebody just pointed me towards this thread and I thought I'd give my two cents...

What you get with latova is not really a fully featured forum system, DLDB, wiki, and whatever, you more get my own personal coding style of doing things. I lay out my objectives before doing a project, and emphasize the fundamentals. Which is why, it may not be the prettiest way of doing it, but it works, well. One of my objectives for maplantis was to work on very simplistic features. Minimal user input and clutter, but maximum information output. The idea is that I was making a mapping site where you'd find what you were after as quickly as possible, and avoid all the community mombo jumbo if you wanted to avoid it.

It worked for me, but it may not necessarily work for IP, or SENers for that matter.

Latova isn't finished, I still have major plans. Hell I'm planning a major kernel revision out of a few things I picked up by examining some php frameworks that I've had to investigate as a part of my full time job. At this point I just need to manage my time a little better to get the ball rolling again.

IP is a coder, and he's similar to the kind of coder I am. We like to do things ourselves. It's half the fun in coding in the first place, and we learn in the process.

If you want to help SEN I suggest you tell him how you'd like things to be while he's developing it. "Use latova/maplantis" won't really cut it, so take your favorite parts about it and lay it out.

If you're after a maplantis remake or something, it's been tried already and didn't go anywhere, mostly because I really don't want to spend the time to set it up for somebody, they need to figure it out on their own. I got other stuff to do now.

Well I like to think we aren't enemies, we've just had a couple of disagreements and I tend to be a total asshole to deal with I've had more than my share of screw ups. I tend not to proof read posts I make so sometimes I say something wrong, especially when it's something sensitive, and along the road with SEN and Maplantis, I've taken big risks, made some mistakes, had some successes, but that's just kindof how I roll.

Admittedly his tolerance is pretty high. I mean, I did make maplantis under a different alias (which could be viewed as under-minding SEN, but I just wanted to code a new mapping site that I've always wanted SEN to be running under latova and encourage some mappers to leave their maps open instead of that huge map protection controversy that was going around).

Generally though, most of our disagreements were at a developer to developer level, not really personal. That's at least how I think it is. Although we rarely talk to each other about coding problems we both have developing our respective projects so who knows.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Oct 8 2009, 4:58 pm by Yoshi.

Most of us, I think, want something that works, as opposed to a half-completed piece of software that randomly has parts that say "sorry, not done yet"

If I'm going to personally oversee that it all works, I might as well just run the site myself.

The man strikes a hard bargain. ;o