Post your ideas/feedback for the Charas overhaul

[ambrose1987]

Late contributions to the thread, I know, but hear me out.

I don't know if you want any assistance, but on my own I decided I wanted to teach myself jquery by creating my own variant of the generator. I have not come very far at it yet but a better Javascript developer than I could probably finish it quite quickly. I started a github repository for it here https://github.com/dkoksal/openchars and you are all more than welcome to use it however you want as I develop it and in perpetuity. It is not my main project, though, my main project is a game in C++.

On that note, my game in C++ incorporates an abstract factory which assembles sprites in one of a few randomized ways, then hands them to the gameobjects which are then rendered. A subset of this abstract factory could be used to create a new Charas.EX. However, a Javascript-Only version of the online generator could serve much the same purpose and be wrapped in a native program. Is the site interested in overhauling Charas.EX?

[DragonBlaze]

Hmm sounds interesting, I'll probably look through your github soon to see what you have thus far.

I like your method for using a factory to randomize sprite creation. I don't think that we would remake Charas.EX though. I would imagine most people have high speed internet by now, plus the most valuable thing about the generators are the resources people put up for them. Actively maintaining Charas.EX to make sure it has the latest resouces seems like a lot of work to solve a problem that only affects a few people. I think a better solution would be to just use a javascript generator that lives on the site, we can have smart caching to make sure resources aren't downloaded/loaded more than once.

And by the way, who are you?

[Archem]

Clearly a top-notch lurker with faith in the site.

[ambrose1987]

Lol yeah I suppose that was quite a bold first post. Spot on though, I've been a lurker for like a decade and have always loved your site, and as a matter of fact it was basically the model for my sprite factory. My name's Dan IRL, and I don't use RM anymore but I use sprites just like the ones used for the Charaset generator for Procedural Content Generation in my C++/SDL game, which has gameplay similar to old-school Gauntlet but with extensive PCG and some other stuff I'm keeping secret for now. I'm not usually big on web programming but I've done it fairly competently before and am starting to grok jquery as I work on this clone.

[Momeka]

You should make a game thread. I want to see more of your game.

[Archem]

Yeah, that would be great. How about an introduction thread so that we can all greet you properly?

[Dr. Ace]

What ever happened to the overhaul idea? Seems like it just died. Seriously, this website needs to be kicked beyond recognition and be revived.

[Archem]

That's on DB, the volunteer.

[Moosetroop11]

: p It does seem to be the right time to do it, since we have quite a few almost active members, if you know what I mean.

[DragonBlaze]

Yeah... So after poking around a bit, I noticed a few things.

1.) The forums can be remade simply enough since it uses Simple Machines. The upside is that this allows for easily creating new themes, but the downside is that I'm not sure how much (if any) actual code they allow, so it may only be a theme swap rather than a revamp. I made a new CSS style for the forums a while back that was pretty awesome, but alas it was not compatible with Simple Machines.

2.) The generators will have to be remade, from scratch. When they were made, it was the standard to have the backend server to do the bulk of the work, and then just pass the client computer what needs to be displayed. Now a days though this approach isn't that good anymore because A) javascript has become more powerful B) Client browsers can handle complex code that servers had to run in the past C) It is pretty difficult to add on to PHP code that is telling the client what to display.
Making the generators from scratch isn't that big of a deal, just very time consuming.

3.) I don't have access to the source code... I imagine that the rest of the site is built with the similar style of having the PHP code sending the client web browser what to display. If this is the case, most of the site will have to be re-written, again, most likely from scratch.

In conclusion, the project is slightly more than I originally thought it would be. The overhaul pretty much entails creating a new site from scratch, and just hooking it up to the charas database so all of our info persists.

I've also have been putting this project off for the moment to focus on creating my 3D web engine which allows 3D content to be rendered directly into a web browser without any plugins. I have the whole 3D displaying, rendering, lighting, cameras, and transforming part down, and now I just need to add the controls and some physics. On the bright side, this engine could allow for some REALLY cool things to be done with the generators (possibly 3D character generators too), plus it'll be very fast as it uses openGL to do all of the image processing.

[jdarling]

Its been a long (really long) time since I have been on Charas, but recently started playing around with an RPG idea with my kids.  Came back across Charas and got the good old warm feeling.

The one thing I've always wanted to see on Charas is an option to download the raw resources.  I never use the composite images as compositing in the engine isn't any more difficult to me, but creating all possible combinations is more pain than its worth to me.

Oh, and if you want to do some type of backend in Node.js or supply a REST over JSON API I'm more than happy to write a wrapper

Oh and for the love of christ, get rid of that captcha or at least give us poor folks with eyesight issues an option that isn't blue on blue.