Almost time to party! And to revisit the bladerunner 'project' Dave.
The New Giant Bomb Goes Live February 12
I hope they are changing the video player as well, GB has THE worst video player on the internet right now.
Excited for this! Though, the one thing that keeps souring my impressions of the new site is the subscriber medals. They have shifted from directly below a user image to slightly over them, and that just takes away from user images and over-emphasizes the medal. Something more akin to what we have now only slightly covers over the bottom edges of a user image, which are usually unnecessary anyway, but when you start cutting into 1/5 of an image with a medal, it actually makes user images look better for non-subscribers than subscribers.
Regardless, I'll be glad when this finally gets done and the real process of adjustment can begin.
@snide Brilliant news! You guys are awesome. I have just one question. I (and by proxy my family!) watch everything Giant Bomb produces on our XBMC media center. Will the Giant Bomb plugin be affected by any of this?
P.S As a side note, since the plugin redesign last year, the ability to list more than 100 videos in any particular section has disappeared. Basically, it makes it impossible to go back and watch stuff from even a few months ago, unless you know exactly what to search for! Major bummer :(
@villainy said:
@Ravelle: As I understand it's not that the APIs are wonky, it's that they don't exist. Achievement tracking currently is the programmatic equivalent of hitting view source in your browser and picking out the relevant text. Scraping pages like that is the worst possible way of collecting data. The most innocuous looking change on the source site can completely break scraping scripts.
With a complete site rewrite I'm sure the engineering time is better spent squashing real bugs instead of maintaining achievement tracking. Hopefully the manufacturers will make actual achievement APIs to go along with their new consoles but I'm not holding my breath.
Sony, Microsoft, Valve, Apple and anyone else possibly reading this:
I play many games, mostly on 360. Giant Bomb's cross platform Achievement tracking system got me to play more games on other platforms because I suddenly had a way (that I cared out) that surfaced those achievements. I'm sure I'm not alone. Provide an API and you will have more of my money.
Membership goes up for renewal tomorrow, woo! I was going to ask what happens to those whose memberships come up on the 10th/11th, although it sounds like they'd just get processed the next day.
@snide When the new podcast RSS feed goes up on the new site, will it continue to link to all Bombcasts released thus far (including the old Arrow Pointing Downs)?
Also, is there any chance you can increase the episode count in each of the subscriber-only feeds? They're currently locked at fifteen episodes. Any way to bump that up to thirty episodes, or are they hard-locked specifically to fifteen for a reason?
Any assistance or thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
I could be wrong, but I thought one of the basic differences between progressive and streaming video transfer was that, while progressive can't skip ahead like streaming can, progressive will allow the whole media file to load up front, whereas streaming will stop at the end of a limited buffer, and only begin downloading again once you move forward through the video.Kind of surprised they're taking it live this soon. Streaming videos don't work, looks like they just straight up removed the option (kind of a big deal on site where video content is the point and their progressive player doesn't allow skipping), and as of last Unprofessional Friday, the live chat still crashed if you breathed on it the wrong way.
I like the new site though, only thing I don't like design-wise is that reviews are now constrained to a fixed width column like news posts and can no longer resize take up the full width of the screen. IMO they're not as nice to read as a result.
Which I guess would be useful for someone with less bandwidth that still wants to watch HD video :)
Excited for this in terms of responsiveness, functionality, content structure and the accessibility of that content. In terms of visual design, not looking forward to it that much. The new design has a lot of superfluous, overly-tweaked elements which work against the readability (for example "dig deeper" photos have a 1px border, a light border, darker outer border, then a drop shadow). Then there are some unnessesarily-skeuomorphed elements like the podcast controller which ruin the consistency. Why doesn't the video player look like a tv? Not that I'm complaining. As a designer and lover of restraint, this bums me out a bit. Just my two pennies – I'm not trying to derail or be negative for negativity's sake. I wish you guys the best of luck with the launch and I'm looking forward to its evolution.
Haven't had a chance to look too much, but I just want to say thanks for keeping pagination! So many sites are using never-ending scroll these days....its the absolute worst.
@morrelloman said:
What does this mean for the mobile site?
The mobile site as it exists now is a thing of the past. The site now uses responsive design. The same pages are served to desktop and mobile users, and which layout you see depends on the size of your display.
You can try it out right now, even if you're not using a mobile browser. Go to the beta and resize your browser window. When it gets small enough, the "mobile" version of the page will appear.
Along with everything else, we are changing our video hosting provider. This should fix a lot of the slowness people have witnessed with our videos in the past six months. We'll be testing this on the beta site in a couple days.
HOLY SHIT YES! There are so many old videos I can't watch right now, so my random QL button is kinda broken.
I guess I'm the only one around here (at least on the top of the comments) that isn't crazy about the new site layout. Reminds me too much of every other gaming news/review site.
@fleshribbon said:
I guess I'm the only one around here (at least on the top of the comments) that isn't crazy about the new site layout. Reminds me too much of every other gaming news/review site.
Yeah, I don't really like it either...
Is there an option to turn off comments on the new site? Or could somebody maybe make an extension for Chrome like the wonderful YouTube Options one (seriously the best extension next to AdBlock).
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