Zephyr Net

The VNFAWING.com website will be offline until I have it fully completed. I am receiving way to many compliants from people about dead links, because I do not have time to work on the site right now.

I am going to time its reactivation with the next release of FA Futures (which will have dramatic changes and improvements over the current version)...

That way the site will be fully active and the library will also be available from the site instead of the temporary site.

I am doing this, because the way the site is right now people do not know whether there will be available content or not on the site and it is leading to frustrated users...

I will keep you up to date on when the site will be fully active again...

CAG out...

One request: please install a site map.

And take your time on it Cag, want it to look all shiney dont ya

_________________
"Smile, AMRAAMs love you!"
"May the PATRIOTS down the FROGS!"
1Lt. Centurian57_76/369th

For all your FA needs and Game Remod 6 visit

Cent can you send me some suggestions?

How about a popup flow chart with active links on every level to those associated pages?

My suggestion is a fixed navigation menu not a pop-out one...They always cause less problems...

_________________
"Smile, AMRAAMs love you!"
"May the PATRIOTS down the FROGS!"
1Lt. Centurian57_76/369th

For all your FA needs and Game Remod 6 visit

Cant do that... It makes the page to slow if you use graphicals, plus makes the page boring. Atleast with the pop out menus you have a feeling of interactive use on the site. And it feels more modern then just old fashioned text or graphical only buttons...

Its nothing special that way.

Me just looking out for our 56k friends. Personally I had to wait a few minutes myself for it to load and I am on a wireless bandwith that even when it sucks loads rather quickly but at the time I had a good signal. One of the things I mostly focus on when building a site is how quickly it loads and how well it does and how it acts with users and what not. Complicated stuff often goes fooey especially when you have people on without much knowledge of how to use a computer, let alone click a mouse and man we have too many of them in the world, lots in the computer science program LOL!!!! Shows you what the world has to look forward to.

_________________
"Smile, AMRAAMs love you!"
"May the PATRIOTS down the FROGS!"
1Lt. Centurian57_76/369th

For all your FA needs and Game Remod 6 visit

Hate to say this, but the popups take no time to load as they are simple scripts that are only active when the mouse over occurs... What takes so long is the graphical layout of the site, which is why I do not want to add to the with additional buttons, etc...

THe site takes a few minutes to laod out due to this problem and I am hopeful I will have that solved before it goes back active online.

Unfortunately I must use the graphical advertisement displays to qualify for the assistance on those ads when clicked. Cant get around that.

ALso I might decrease the number of pics in the slide show as I feel that is the majority of the problem for the speed of the loading as it has to load all the images into resident memory before it finishes writing the page out...

Just a little rookie computer graphics tip if you have JASC Paint Shop Pro to all reading this, if you don't know this CAG I highly recommend it to silence any critics who have a problem with load time at the site whether it is with the main layout or anything else like galleries. With most graphics anyway you can get away with this so here we go...

Use GIFs not JPEGs or BITMAPs
• In Paint Shop Pro load your image you wish to decrease in size
• On the top menu, click "Colors" and from this drop down menu
• Click (only have to highlight with mouse to open)"Decrease Color Depth >"
• Click "256 Colors (8 bit)..."

Now here are the only things you want checked off in this menu's 3 main categories...
Palette: Optimized Octree
Reduction Method: Error Diffusion
Options: nothing seleted

After you click Okay your image will be decreased in color and therefore size.

Note this method will not work with all images as some will show the dithering moreso if the colours are really crazy and advanced, but this happens rarely. Basically a prime example of how effective this method is would be in navigation buttons where you can take a button that is close to 100kb or more and take it down into single/very low double digits. By the way CAG I've yet to recieve any information regarding the VNFAWING and if there is anything I can do like look for ways to speed up the site give me a link to an existing page like www.vnfawing.com/thescreenshots page then I should still be able to access it, just not through the main addy.


Jimbo

Jimbo,

I have put forward your request to join the dev group, but have not heard back from everyone yet, so I saw no need to send you anything as of yet.

I am uncertain right now of the final layouts, but reducing the size fo the screenshots(the thumbs are already quite small single digits, but he full sized images are high. Once I finish up those new pages I will forward you the links so that you can attempt to diminish the size of the images.

As to using jpgs or bitmaps. I try to stay away from those two whenever possible. bmps are to large and jpgs usually suffer from detail loss.

However I have been looking at the new png formats as they ten to have the clarity of the bmp and the size of a gif with no color loss...

The new crash log buttons on the main page are png format and quite nice...

however the site is mainly suffering(speed wise) from the screenshot show. Decreasing that will speed the site up tremendously...

Once I Have the site fully ready I will let you run through it and se what you can improve.

I appreciate the help!

CAG out...