A Makeover
It was by necessity more than anything, but our website has just underwent a makeover! The new theme builder has been much easier to use, and in addition to that, I think it looks better too! What do you think about it?
Long story short, last week our previous website builder went kaput on us. This is also a rather critical time as we are preparing something for you. If you read through the blog posts, you will know that at the beginning of this month I had promised something.
However, it looks time we have to delay it by about a week to ensure everything is stable first. I really apologize for this… But anyway! For now let’s go through the new things.
Our Logo
It’s finally here! A BIG thanks to Maymiyuriae for the help in making this one. The next videos will feature this logo instead of the generic GeoSans Light font text.
Website Makeover
What you see now is made possible by a new theme builder. I do like web designing, but learning to code it is a whole different for me. More accurately speaking, I am interested but I probably don’t have time to learn CSS, HTML and stuff.
Arguably, by having a website you might say that we have already put in a lot of effort already. But either way, I still like to have the website at least looking pretty. It’s a good thing we don’t have too much pages yet, or else the website makeover may take a longer time…
A major UX improvement that became possible now includes tabs, playlists and toggles! The Press Kit and Commission Guidelines have been updated so that they are easier to read. Go out there to these pages and have another look! But aside from these two, actually all of the pages have been updated too. Just that these two are the biggest ones to write about.
And also, if you compare this dev blog with the previous ones – surely… hopefully… this one looks better.
But there’s something we still have to figure out…
Stuff such as above (title showing up twice) feels little wonky to me, but it’s something I’m sure we can fix in due time.
What's Next?
We will be working on the story implementation NOW! I’d have liked to focus on infrastructural stuff first, but circumstances have changed and we have to get it ready as soon as possible. I will tell you what’s going on in due time, and it won’t be too long to wait for that.
In more optimization news – with my Samsung A7 tablet as the guinea pig, we managed to have the song animation reach a constant 60 FPS! The start, when everything is spawned is a little lower than that, but it’s fine when everything gets going! What we did to achieve this was by packing our sprites. Again, small sample size alert but by logic, it definitely should be something that improves performance.
If you notice, the full image size for this is 4096×4096. This is something achievable in Android devices using Open GL 3.0. From Google’s own data, the devices that are still in previous versions of OpenGL are only about 6-7% of total devices used today (as of this post’s writing)! So, we can ignore this 6-7% to provide a more optimized experience for you all. Meanwhile, iOS should have no problem with this.
In short, OpenGL 2.0 allows images of 2048 pixels at most. OpenGL 3.0 allows up to 4096×4096 pixels. Packing multiple images into a single one (like above) helps quite a bit.
Some of the images stretch (like the backgrounds) stretch all the way to 2048 pixels, whether horizontally or vertically. If we are still in OpenGL 2.0, to pack an image of 2048 pixels to a single image with a maximum of 2048 pixels… Well that doesn’t do much isn’t it?
There is still a hiccup that happens to a minor subset of images. So, there’s still work to do. But most of the song artworks are already packable in this manner.
Closing Words
Well, I think that’s it. We will be quite busy in September and October, but thankfully a lot of content stuff has been done already. However, implementing them is another part of the work.
Next week, hopefully we will be able to give you that thing I promised.
Stay cool guys and let’s kill Chaos chill.