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| Re: Hey Louis | |
| Posted By: Louis Wu <halo@bungie.org> | Date: 7/17/03 5:15 p.m. |
In Response To: Hey Louis (dalecooper) : Any chance of the tricks section ever seeing another update? I've been away
Pretty unlikely in the near future. :( (Pretty unlikely in the far future, at the rate we're going, for that matter.) Here's the problem. The Tricks section is by far the most complicated section here. Tricks that come in have a combination of pictures, movies, and text descriptions, of varying quantities - there's no easy way to template them. For a while, I semi-templated them; I had a few generic templates, and I'd use one each time a trick came in. Almost all of them required some sort of customization, unfortunately... so the templates didn't save much time. So I decided they had to be databased. There's really no other way. However: building the interface for this particular section is non-trivial - and while I might only need, say, 10 or 15 hours in a stretch, you can triple, quadruple, or septuple that number if I have to split my time between it and other things; keeping all the pieces in my head is quite difficult (much more so than other sections, I've discovered). This is definitely MY limitation - so all the posters in the world saying 'but it's really not any harder than, say, the movies section' isn't going to change the fact that I KNOW it's harder, for ME. Okay, so I need several days of uninterrupted time to do this... or a couple of weeks of interrupted time. Why not just do it? Well, because as this site has gotten more popular, the quantity of submissions has gone up - and there simply ISN'T that much free time. When Fan Fiction submissions (which once were 1 or 2 a week) climbed to 3-4/day, I couldn't keep up - so I imposed limits. They didn't help, so I created a submission form, and forced people to use it. Now, instead of formatting stories from whatever form they come in as and posting them by hand, I just have to make sure they're correctly submitted, and approve them. Except... 1) submissions have climbed to 10+/day - even if they're perfect, and I just scan them to make sure there aren't problems, it's STILL 15-30 minutes. 2) There are ALWAYS problems. It ASTOUNDS me, ESPECIALLY in the fan fiction section (where people are WRITING, for god's sake, which would imply they enjoy reading, as well) how MANY people can't follow simple directions. So tack on an extra 15-30 minutes/day to fix the crap. Artwork submissions range from ~10-50 pieces/week. They all need to be thumbnailed (I have yet to find a tool that will automatically thumbnail an image nicely, 100% of the time; most of the thumbs need manual cropping before being made, almost all need sharpening, etc), databased, and posted. Movie submissions are up to over 1/day, and almost every one of them needs post-processing; the tools to make clean, web-friendly movies are simply not cheap, and the vast majority of Halo moviemakers don't have access to them. Dialogue snippets now come in at a rate of 10-50/day, and almost all of them need post-processing (either cropping, to get rid of extraneous noise, or maybe just renaming to get rid of web-unfriendly characters like spaces and apostrophes) - and then need to be added to the database, with a bunch of information. Takes a boatload of time. Oh, did I mention I have a wife, 3 kids, and a full-time job? (A job which would eat 15 hours/day if I weren't working on HBO?) Many people have offered to help with HBO over the years... but rarely do any of them show that they're willing to live up to the attention to detail we've tried to maintain. (Some do - and we hire 'em. Witness Finn and mnemesis, for example.) The backend HBO uses (MGI, by PagePlanet Software) is relatively obscure - even though it's pretty powerful and easy to learn. We can't just snag off-the-shelf solutions in, say, PHP, because HBO runs on a Mac (in OS9), and PHP doesn't run in that environment. (Yes, you can FORCE it to run in that environment... but it ain't pretty, and it's certainly not fast enough to keep up with a website getting between 500,000 and 1,000,000 raw hits/day.) So if we're gonna get coding help, the volunteers are gonna have to learn MGI. It's quite doable - witness the Tips section. We didn't have one, and Cybrfrk said 'you need one.' I said, 'yeah, I know - but i don't have time to make it. You wanna make one, go for it.' So he did. I guess what I'm trying to say is that just keeping my head above water here takes many hours a day and a lot of help from the other HBO maintainers - but I can't do much more on my own. And the Tricks section, unfortunately, is where the camel's back got broke. So here's the deal. If anyone wants to step up to the plate and learn MGI (all the reference material you need is right here), and build a new interface for the Tricks database that allows easy submission of tricks (in a flexible manner, given the types of media that come in for them), I'd be happy to accept the help. I am NOT interested in holding someone's hand through the process, however - if you wanna do this, just do it, and come to me with a finished product. (Well, functional product - we can talk about finishing it once a goodly chunk of the work is out of the way.) If nobody is willing to step up to the plate, it's simply gonna have to wait until I can breathe again (which may be never, unfortunately; In a month or two, Halo PC will be out, with a whole new set of demands on my time... and then six months or so after that, Halo 2 will be out...). I have limits, unfortunately... and I'm finding more of them every day. :( | |
|
| Replies: |
| Hey Louis | dalecooper | 7/17/03 4:23 p.m. |
| Re: Hey Louis | Louis Wu | 7/17/03 5:15 p.m. |
| ...wow... | goatrope | 7/17/03 5:25 p.m. |
| This is gonna sound ....err.... | guy who doesn't post....too often | 7/17/03 5:40 p.m. |
| Re: This is gonna sound ....err.... | Louis Wu | 7/17/03 5:46 p.m. |
| Re: This is gonna sound ....err.... | guy who doesn't post....too often | 7/17/03 6:23 p.m. |
| Mr Wu U R greatly appreciated, and I would donate$ *NM* | decibel | 7/17/03 7:23 p.m. |
| The Wu is too old fasioned... | Shishka | 7/17/03 7:27 p.m. |
| I try to be nice and I get insulted Thanks Shishka *NM* | decibel | 7/17/03 7:32 p.m. |
| Humor 101 | Shishka | 7/17/03 7:39 p.m. |
| Re: Humor 101 | BOLL | 7/17/03 8:03 p.m. |
| Re: Humor 101 | Shishka | 7/17/03 8:05 p.m. |
| Re: Humor 101 | BOLL | 7/17/03 8:46 p.m. |
| Re: Humor 101 | bikeman704 | 7/17/03 11:27 p.m. |
| I guess I wouldn't turn down money, especially.... | decibel | 7/18/03 2:27 p.m. |
| Re: I guess I wouldn't turn down money, especially | Louis Wu | 7/18/03 3:24 p.m. |
| Re: This is gonna sound ....err.... | AJ Mendoza | 7/17/03 10:08 p.m. |
| Re: ...wow... | dizzy | 7/17/03 5:47 p.m. |
| Re: Hey Louis | deanero | 7/17/03 5:47 p.m. |
| Re: Hey Louis :) | Wado SG | 7/17/03 5:59 p.m. |
| Re: Hey Louis | dalecooper | 7/17/03 6:29 p.m. |
| Re: Hey Louis | Louis Wu | 7/17/03 9:33 p.m. |
| Louis... | Ross Mills | 7/17/03 6:30 p.m. |
| Re: Louis... | dizzy | 7/17/03 6:43 p.m. |
| A HA ! now i found him :) | vshields ash | 7/17/03 8:37 p.m. |
| Re: A HA ! now i found him :) | Louis Wu | 7/17/03 9:30 p.m. |
| Re: A HA ! now i found him :) | dizzy | 7/17/03 9:56 p.m. |
| Holy crap... | Konrad9 | 7/17/03 10:06 p.m. |
| Re: Hey Louis | Elfster | 7/21/03 5:37 p.m. |
| Re: Hey Louis | Louis Wu | 7/27/03 7:37 p.m. |
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