Log In
Name:
Pass:
Online Members (0)
No members are currently online.
Current Interguild Time:
Fri Mar 29 2024 3:29 am
Member Chat Box  [click here to enlarge]
Recent Posts and Comments
« Forum Index < The Interguild Board
«Previous | 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 | Next»

Sefro
[?] Karma: 0 | Quote - Link
Thursday, April 16 2015, 6:26 pm EST

Karma: 313
Posts: 1136
Gender: Male
Location: Canada
pm | email
'Yaya' said:
IMO by now we're past simple complacency and have just moved into straight up denial about having a reason to gather here. Out of habit, and forum games. That's about it. Of course we enjoy each other's company, but gathering here solely to do so seems unnecessary.

The remaining memberbase is basically split between several teenagers and several young (or not young) adults; I feel bad because I know when I was in my 13-17ish years, I had plenty time and energy to do stuff on the Interguild, I don't know if members currently of that age have a similar disposition, but IG's current environment in no way promotes or stimulates such.

You know, I was thinking it might be helpful if we had like an election or something and let the younger members take the reigns of the site for a while, but I don't have a good sense of how active they are or if it would make any difference at this point.

We never really managed to slip past the main existential problem of the Interguild which was the decline of HatPC. I don't play Minecraft either, which seems like the site's other staple, so I really don't feel like I have a stake in anything here but the community now. But even if I don't really participate in it as much as I used to, I'd have a hard time saying enough is enough and shutting the site down because I don't mind too much at this point that all those shenanigans of ours have wheedled down to just occasionally checking in with each other now and again. I'd rather have some contact with you guys than none at all (Steam doesn't really count).

I was probably not as active even when the site was in its prime, though, so I'm already used to my experience with the site being a bit disparate. If everyone's like that it doesn't leave much to come back to and as you said it doesn't really inspire or stimulate much content.  However, I sort of think having an era of inactivity and time to grow apart might not be so bad. I was starting to feel a bit out of place here before I became so inactive, like I associated the site with a side of myself I was having a hard time relating to, and coming back I feel a bit more cogent. I think if we stick it out and just remain open to checking in here and posting every once in a while, there are still cool things to be made and shared and cool conversations to be had.
jebby
[?] Karma: 0 | Quote - Link
Thursday, April 16 2015, 6:35 pm EST
Interguild Founder

Age: 32
Karma: 233
Posts: 968
Gender: Male
Location: United Kingdom
pm | email
I've been using Fiddler for the first time to play HATPC levels over the last hour and damn, Thomas was smart to figure out that solution. And no Neopets credentials required either! The more I examine it, the more I think I can automate most or all of that process. The only stumbling block will be simulating mouse and key inputs to the SWF element. I can think of a hack for mouse inputs, but it seems that the keyboard input to enter a username and (after clicking Submit) fire off the HTTP request may be impossible. I'd be interested to see how the SWF reacted to an HTTP response to a HTTP request that we faked. It's a very interesting problem. The SWF (I have little to no understanding of ActionScript or Flash, so this thing is mysterious to me) seems to be an impenetrable black box. But I want to poke it and see what it does.

The bottom line is: I think I could make the cavemaking and cavetesting process significantly easier with CaveGen. To the point that the inconvenience/difficulty of the process would be on par with the original uploading process, possibly easier. So this is a possibliity for stirring up a crumb of extra activity. But I'm not too concerned about that - I'm just excited about tackling this problem.
soccerboy13542
[?] Karma: 0 | Quote - Link
Thursday, April 16 2015, 6:44 pm EST
~*~Soccer~*~

Karma: 450
Posts: 4466
Gender: Male
Location: 1945
pm | email
Jebby, the only problem i forsee in that is if it's broken by TNT due to cutting down on space or something. If they were to remove HatPC, would we be able to recover from that? Would anything still be playable?

As for the rest of the site, I don't really see much reason to give reign to younger users. It's hard to just "make" activity come about, and that would only be possible if people have free time and are actually willing to use their free time to come on here. Personally, I'm on here a lot, probably more than the average user.

One thing I've been trying to do regarding the MC server is to get my brother on and his friend on, but his friend is not whitelisted and livio has not been online in like a month. Even though they would just come on on weekends for the most part, i figure any activity is good. They're both older so you know....life. Still, they would add to survival.


'Livio' said:
You know, I was thinking of getting an internship at Microsoft, but I'm not sure I want their lameness to rub off on me.
jebby
[?] Karma: 0 | Quote - Link
Thursday, April 16 2015, 6:55 pm EST
Interguild Founder

Age: 32
Karma: 233
Posts: 968
Gender: Male
Location: United Kingdom
pm | email
I just made a local copy of the HATPC DCR file. Can't get it to load in a browser though. Looking for solutions...
Sefro
[?] Karma: 0 | Quote - Link
Thursday, April 16 2015, 6:59 pm EST

Karma: 313
Posts: 1136
Gender: Male
Location: Canada
pm | email
I think you press Shift-O-K on the 'not intended location' screen and it should load.
jebby
[?] Karma: 0 | Quote - Link
Thursday, April 16 2015, 7:08 pm EST
Interguild Founder

Age: 32
Karma: 233
Posts: 968
Gender: Male
Location: United Kingdom
pm | email
For me, the Shockwave Player loads the file right up to 100% and then stops. Not sure what screen you're talking about. Are you saying that you or someone else has made a local copy of HATPC and been able to run it offline?
Sefro
[?] Karma: 0 | Quote - Link
Thursday, April 16 2015, 7:33 pm EST

Karma: 313
Posts: 1136
Gender: Male
Location: Canada
pm | email
Yeah, that's what that mysterious David guy was talking about. I personally can only run the offline DCR on IE.
Yimmy
[?] Karma: 0 | Quote - Link
Sunday, April 19 2015, 9:24 pm EST
Resident Goody two-shoes

Karma: 72
Posts: 1625
Location: Climbing In Your Windows
pm | email
Quote:
The remaining memberbase is basically split between several teenagers and several young (or not young) adults

Sorry, incorrect, not a teen yet.
Anyway, nobody here is interested in anything that we do except a little bit of MC.
People aren't going to join an inactive site.
'Sefro' said:
So, what if we could make the lack of direction the purpose of the site? One of the things I like most about the Interguild is the sense of free creativity. There’s always been a focus on level design, but you can also post comics, art, music, choose-your-own adventure stories, blogs, programs, that funky puzzle Xyteran made – and no matter what you create, the community will be receptive to it. From the “community as a service” point of view, I think that’s our site’s best quality. There are no limitations: you can create whatever you want, with whichever tools you want, and if it’s good and interesting then you’ll find an audience.

For that reason, I suggest we lose the gaming focus. It would exist anyway, because that’s what we’re all interested in, but it doesn’t need to be the basis of the site. The Interguild could come to mean an international guild of creators: artists, programmers, writers, game designers. A place to collaborate, give and receive feedback, and find a place in the community doing whatever you like to do. We’d be able to carry on doing everything we already do, but the site would have much more marketability, versatility, and potential for growth. We could make site-wide collaborations a regular thing, projects that encourage us all to contribute our skills and work together to create something cool (like Aeon, but less ambitious).

So I guess what I'm suggesting is that the Interguild become a creativity hub, one that focuses on freedom, collaboration, and experimentation. We'd still be a gaming community in many ways, but that wouldn't be our purpose (though in a way we would be much more open to gaming than we are now; we'd abandon the idea of "supported" games and open our doors to everything).

We even know of members who would surely be interested in some of these, and it would probably get Silver, Cedric, and CKJR some incentive to actually come back.
Seriously, I say either let it die, or (much more prefered) do something, ANYTHING, to get some activity, and get out there.
Of course, I'm still not even a teen, and therefore iz uh idot


Spoiler:

Interguild discord!! People use it!!
jellsprout
[?] Karma: 0 | Quote - Link
Monday, April 20 2015, 7:10 am EST
Lord of Sprout Tower

Karma: -2147482799
Posts: 6445
Gender: Male
pm | email
An idea I've had is to introduce proper "guilds". One guild for various categories, such as level design, sprite art, music, coding. All the separate parts needed to make a Flash game.

The idea behind guilds is to stimulate collaborating and tutoring. Instead of just doing competitions and guides, we can combine them into workshops. Do tutorials on the basics of sprite making which people can follow to make their own. A large part of this should be that people can submit the creations they made with the help of this tutorial and get feedback. The level system we have now is already good for this, except the purpose shouldn't be for people to rate them but to give feedback on how to improve them.

A second system would be inspired by the apprentice/master structure. People can do a basic design for something and then submit it for other people to polish up. Like in woodcrafting guilds, you would have an apprentice making the basic chair and the master finishing up the decorations for it.
This makes it easier and less intensive for people to provide contributions to the site and should even improve the quality.


Spoiler:
Yaya
[?] Karma: 0 | Quote - Link
Monday, April 20 2015, 8:29 am EST

Age: 28
Karma: 747
Posts: 5367
Location: Ohio (US)
pm | email
'Yimmy' said:
Sorry, incorrect, not a teen yet.
Anyway, nobody here is interested in anything that we do except a little bit of MC.
People aren't going to join an inactive site.
Because saying "The remaining memberbase is basically split between several teenagers and several young (or not young) adults, and Yimmy" would've totally improved the quality of the post. Look Yimmy, you're the outlier prepare to get lumped in.



COMING SOON: A giant meteor. Please.
Give me +karma. Give me +karma.
canadianstickdeath
[?] Karma: 0 | Quote - Link
Wednesday, April 22 2015, 4:15 pm EST

Age: 35
Karma: 350
Posts: 2990
Gender: Male
pm | email
Thomas didn't figure out the Fiddler thing. He might have said something that resulted in me doing some Googling, but that's about it.
jazz
[?] Karma: 0 | Quote - Link
Thursday, June 25 2015, 4:08 am EST

Karma: 108
Posts: 3050
pm | email
Amazing how all of this is still relevant over two years later.
A user-made level database *is* rather specific, but I guess a problem a general gaming site is that it'd be easily lost among the multitude of similar sites. What makes this one unique compared to the others? What'd attract them to us?
Plus, the general gaming community nowadays is pretty censor, and I feel that the way the site was originally based on Neopets helped attract a non-toxic userbase. Part of what attracted me to here was the general active and friendly close-knit atmosphere, and, well, as we age, it slowly disappears, as said before, which, personally, I find to be very disappointing, and could i possibly add any more commas to that sentence, which make it super difficult to read?.
I spent a lot of my formative years on here, so I really don't want this place to die out. But since the HATPC playerbase is pretty much dead, and most other games already have dedicated forums, there isn't too much I can think of right now to help it go back to its former glory. What brought me here in the first place was the stuff discovered about HATPC and the creative ways of exploiting it. When you compared the main game of HATPC to levels like CSD's The Cascades and Sefro's/Cheeky Dando's stuff, you notice how the game mechanics are used more fully in the user-made levels, and there's that wow factor from that. But I guess there just aren't that many games we could exploit in that manner anymore. Ah well.
Also holy censor I remember the jokes about CSD being old, but now that you're almost 30, you're practically ancient to me.
/nostalgia
aych bee
[?] Karma: 0 | Quote - Link
Wednesday, July 1 2015, 4:38 am EST
when i am king

Age: 104
Karma: 147
Posts: 1002
Gender: Female
Location: you will be first against the wall
pm | email
The Interguild is a half-corpse hooked up to a ventilator with festering sores all over his body. He doesn't know who he is and can't change his own bedpan but we visit him anyway because he's our grandfather.


Spoiler:

« Forum Index < The Interguild Board
«Previous | 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 | Next»

In order to post in the forums, you must be logged into your account.
Click here to login.

© 2024 The Interguild | About & Links | Contact: livio@interguild.org
All games copyrighted to their respective owners.