Siu Lun

The website launched last wednesday, finally after 6 months of work on it. Well, in reality it’s more like a month or two, since I only work 1 and a 1/2 days a week and I did take a lot of time off during the school holiday season.

You can see it at http://www.icmacentre.rdg.ac.uk/. I was responsible for the underlying system to tie in with the existing databases, the web manager and the marketing manager were the designers in the layout and the presentation. I had to fix quite a lot of html and css errors and incompatibilities they threw at me and still the site is not fully optimized yet.

Strange how the site was working fine on IE6 but not there are reported problems with it, it works perfectly fine on Firefox and IE7. The underlaying system still has a lot of work lined up to do. This content management system is really massive and over the next few months I’ll be adding more and more functionalities for both the users and the editors.

Personally, I would’ve designed the looks differently and if only I had more time before the project started, I also would’ve gone and produced a rails version instead of opting to use php.

As my personal WP layout was never finished, I’ve decided to change the plan and opt for a pre-built one. This theme I have now is based on the huddletogether theme, I feel like kinda stealing his theme but hey, unfortunately that theme is the only theme that I’ve tried that is simple and displays long text well enough. All the rest I’ve tried just doesn’t hack it. So it’s a thumbs up to you my man!

In other news… I’ve starting to look into Ruby-on-rails seriously – I looked at it when it first came out but it just wasn’t mature enough for me, now I feel it has grown sufficiently for me to seriously consider about learning and using it and I’m actually planning to probably develop the next generation site using that. So a bit of a delay in the template and system. Other than that, I’m also currently experiementing with building 3D games using DirectX and C# .NET, unfortunately that is more important than the site – as I need to build a game demo soon so I can try and get accepted to work at a games studio. Hence why I’ve changed the theme for now.

Ok, after 2 days of starting some serious thinking on the game demo. I’ve decided I’ll make a strategic game. In a way, it’s like the Total War and Civ series of games, where you produce armies and try and conquer the land.

I love that kind of game and it seems the more obvious/straight forward thing to make. It’s also something that I’ve always wanted to make for a gundam version or a naruto based version. The only problem is copyright, I don’t really know how it applies, as far as I know Naruto and Gundam aren’t licensed in the UK hence I should be able to do it, but I don’t really wish to find out tbh.

SO~ I’ll make my own names and story etc… and as a matter of interest, I think I’ll go for something that incorporates ninjas instead because I don’t think that kind of game has ever been made – where as mecha are becoming a common thing.

The game is gonna be a 2D overhead view mode, where you have to control aspects of your village to make it prosper in order to have enough funds to wage war. More details later – I haven’t actually put anything down on paper yet.