Journal #4849

TWHL3 Development Diary Thingie #2

Hello again, and welcome to the second instalment of the TWHL3 development diary! This time, I will be discussing future upgrades to TWHL after the release of TWHL3, but first, a small correction to last post:

I said that PM's are now like mini-forums, but I had to change it back. The practicality of it died. Who deletes the thread? If it's deleted, that forces every user to lose it. What if they want to keep it, reply, archive it? It messes with the system, so I scratched it. PM's are the same as they are now.

Now, on to future upgrades:

The first major upgrade is, as I've already discussed, a wiki system for entity guides and the glossary. The wiki system works like this:

The user must be logged in to edit. Once an edit is made, the entry is then locked off to any further edits until a moderator approves it/rejects it. I'll give wiki users a little "approval rating" that is a ratio of approvals to rejections. users with a low approval rate may have to plead their case to not have their wiki edit privileges removed.

History of all edits to the wiki are retained and can be reverted by an admin or moderator at any time. Moderators are alerted to any edits that need checking, so edits will be processed quickly. There may be new positions available for wiki moderators if need be.

Using the same wiki system, an error guide will be added. Most of the information will have been......borrowed from other sources such as tommy14. There is also a HL2/CS:S/DOD:S entity guide in the works.

Moving on to the next upgrade, which is something new and exciting. Projects! A project is a mod, a program, a map if you want, a drawing, anything you want! But, projects are generally limited to mods and programs such as my Twister or muzz's Compilator.

Each Project gets its own private forum for team members, their own news reel, and maybe even their own shoutbox (replaces current one), or a public forum. But I want to keep public forums out if I possibly can. Projects will get limited (if any) storage space to upload screenshots (probably will just link to imageshack).

There will be a 'Project quick news' news update on the right of the main page, and a bigger version on the main project page. This is much like the news feed thingie on sites such as Facebook ("Twister has uploaded 3 screenshots","Half-Life: Hostage Situation has posted 1 news update","6D has provided 2 new downloads", etc).

For the moment I can't get very detailed with Projects for the moment as no planning has gone into it yet.

The next new thing to hit TWHL will be reviews. A user can review a map, mod, film, game, book, anything. They write their review, give it a rating out of 10(? 100?), and then they can list pros and cons, and a (possibly humorous) "better than" and "worse than" scenario. Reviews will also be included in an update module ("Penguinboy has reviewed Far Cry","Ant has reviewed Batman Begins",etc) and so on.

Both Projects and Reviews will be included in the user profile.

Well, those are a few things that are planned for TWHL in the future. If you have any other suggestions (not a texture vault, please) don't hesitate to PM me with your suggestions. Just to note: the order of release for these is: Source Entity Guide, Wiki, Error Guide, Projects, Reviews.

Oh, and I almost forgot, TWHL3 passed 95% yesterday, and is currently sitting at 95.1%. PM's are complete. Next time, since I'm running out of things to talk about, I will run though the upgrades to design and graphics.