Civ 3 Demogame Website

[FionnMcCumhall]

there is a way and id have to talk to thunderfall about it. It doesnt involved a security risk at all after all ive seen things like that before.

Also before you start taking over the main information page of the website you should know ive already got an idea in mind how to lay this out. We do not want to inudate potential players with too much information, we should keep it simple down to a paragraph or a couple of lines with a click for more link.

 

[deshelbr]

Yeah, all the ideas I'm thinking about were really for the underlying pages, not the homepage.

On the homepage I think the only information you would want to have automatically update out of the database would be the President's last turnchat summary.

I would think the rest of the homepage would really just be user-friendly starting point for navigation and an advertisement for the game.

 

[deshelbr]

Is this like what we want for the Main Page map?

The idea being each province is linked to a map of the province which then has links to the Governor and Mayors threads. That map would look something like this.

Do I need to add titles? Little dots for cities? Wonders? Other nations? Houston? Should I be putting this in it's own thread so everyone will comment on it?

 

[Donovan Zoi]

@Fionn - please let us in on that idea so we can figure out how to lay out that page. I envision having our clickable map(is that what you are going for, deshelbr?) at the top, followed by an introduction by myself --- if no one objects. As I have said before, this intro would include all pertinent links to get the new user started and shouldn't run too long.

Please let me know what your proposal is, Fionn. Also, if anyone else has any ideas for our intro, please post them here.

 

[Donovan Zoi]

@deshelbr - I like the concept alot. Is it possible to do the same thing, only with our cities on the map? Either that or you can manually place dots on the map with slightly larger dots for our two capitals. I think that doing so will give viewers a better perpective of our nation and will lure them to click on....

 

[Peri]

Good map. Sorry to be a pedant but the borders for Capitoline are wrong.

 

[deshelbr]

@DZ - Yes we could do that. I realize that we don't want this map taking up the whole screen, so it might get even smaller. I can put the cities in the full map, but then we are going to have a lot of really small things in there. I think dots will look nicer than the actual screenshot cities, but I can try it both ways.

@Peri - I was trying to figure it out correctly, please elaborate on what is wrong with Capitoline's border.

 

[Peri]

Sorry I did not post these links last time.

Aventine's eastern and southern border

Quirinal's border

Capitoline's eastern border

Capitoline's western border

Hope this helps.

 

[deshelbr]

OK, I can see where I'm way off on that western border. Looking at Aventine and Quirnial again brings up an interesting question. Should I be including the areas we don't control in these borders?

 

[FionnMcCumhall]

the main home page will have the mini-map that we see on the left side of the civ3 screen, that will then link to the bigger clickable map, thats not good design if we put a large map on there

 

[Donovan Zoi]

Originally posted by deshelbr
OK, I can see where I'm way off on that western border. Looking at Aventine and Quirnial again brings up an interesting question. Should I be including the areas we don't control in these borders?

Originally posted by FionnMcCumhall
the main home page will have the mini-map that we see on the left side of the civ3 screen, that will then link to the bigger clickable map, thats not good design if we put a large map on there

Maybe there is a way of combining both of your ideas.

Why dont we use Fionn's mini-map idea(but slightly enlarged to fill the screen) as our main page link. We can then split up the provinces on this map and have each province link to their more detailed individual maps, cities and all.

 

[deshelbr]

OK, usually I think that shinking big pictures looks better than blowing up little ones. So here is both of them:

Little mini-map blown up:

HUGE map shrunken down (keep in mind I can add dots for cities):

Which one of these do you think says, "Click me, punk!"?

EDIT: I have removed the original images from the ftp server.

 

[Donovan Zoi]

I would be happy with either one. The mini-map blown up would be slightly less work for you, but it does look a bit fuzzy.

While I mull over the pros and cons of each, does anyone else have an opinion?

 

[ravensfire]

Wow - I quite like the second image, the big map shrunk. It gives much more inforamation about us! The heck with the world, this website is about OUR nation!

-- Ravensfire

 

[Falcon02]

I'd go with the second as well, though would be nice if Civ III let you zoom out more to make it easier.... ~sigh~

 

[FionnMcCumhall]

second one my man

On another note: TF granted us a sub-domain for the demogames
so the new address is: http://demogame.civfanatics.net
Things have been moved. We have PHP MySQL content available so anybody who can write databases please come forward, Ive asked CT for some help as well. We havent gotten training on DB's yet at school and its a bit tough to teach myself. Assuming we go complex, i dont want to get too complex Just some simple things like a DB for current turn and such

 

[deshelbr]

I actually work for a software company that makes CRM's that run off of Sybase, Oracle, and IBM DB2 databases. I know quite a bit about querying databases, can we get a copy of the CFC DB schema from TF??

 

[ravensfire]

Fionn,

Are we going to be querying information from CFC's database, creating our own database to store information, or both?

If we're looking at creating our own database, we'll need to know what kind of information will be stored, and where it comes from. That should give us a good start on creating a schema for DG3.

As for the complexity of designing the DB - if we do it fairly openly, it would be a great learning experience for many people. Just please, PLEASE no 5th normal form, okay? <shudder in memory>

-- Ravensfire

 

[FionnMcCumhall]

%th normal form? do i wanna know , no we have our own domain basically so we will be working on creating our own databases. We just need something simple, to show current turn and such, i assume a db does such a thing so all we have to do is show the year and such of the turnchat with summeries and the saves? like i said this is a new foray into this. CT has more info on what we need via databases

 

[ravensfire]

So what you're thinking of is several types of information than.

For each turn:
-- Summary of events
-- Instructions
-- Link to save
-- Chat log

For each term:
-- Elected officials
-- Summary of events for that office
-- Summary of progress made during that turn

Trust me, you don't want to know what 5NF is. When you get into that in class, throw things at the instructor. Many things. Heavy things. Sharp things. Explain reality to him. For a simple database, the design is very straightforward process. You'll learn a fair amount watching the process and from just using the design.

The actual queries to get the information will be the interesting part.

-- Ravensfire