NeoDex talk:Community portal

Archive 1

New design

I've updated the design of the portal to make it fit in with the current main page and current event pages a bit better. What does everyone think?

Also, I was toying with the idea of renaming it 'Neodex Central' a la Neopia Central - a step too far? --Macbeth 12:37, 7 February 2011 (CST)

We're back!

After 4 long months of slumber we have arisen once more! (Many thanks to Blue who heads up the forum for fixing the necessary files)

....anyone still here? :P CrimsonFox ^talk 16:23, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

Game article images

In the old versions of the Games Room, games had a 150 x 200 resolution click to play button, located on the image server under /games/playbuttons/ and later /games/clicktoplay/ (e.g. here and [1]). It was for images of this size that the game infobox template Template:Infobox Game was designed - that's why it's 150px wide.

In the current version of the Games Room, these play buttons were replaced by large images like this one, 667 x 375. These are very wide and, for now, are probably too wide for use in the games infobox. Slightly smaller versions, 620 x 400, are used when a game is the featured game - these are probably also too big (for now, anyway).

The directory pages of the games room uses icons that are smaller than the original click-to-play images, 162 x 120px including a fair margin of whitespace. These might sound like a good replacement for the old-style click-to-play buttons. However, I still find these unsatisfactory: generally speaking, they are lower-quality versions of the old click-to-play buttons, featuring either resized artwork or re-used art assets. Compare the following to images:

These two images are clearly made from the same art assets, but the old click-to-play image (left) is clearly of higher quality and larger size. I think this is more engaging to the reader and makes for a more appealing article. For this reason, I swapped out the image on the left for the one on the right in the Meerca Chase II article. I intend to continue use the larger, old-style click to play buttons to illustrate game articles where possible. I don't see the need to use poorer quality illustrations in Neodex articles just to use the same ones currently used on the Neopets site.

That's all right for older games, but what about those games produced since the update? I encountered this with the Assignment 53 article. What I chose to do then was to crop the wider, new click-to-play button to a 150 x 200 size image - i.e. imitating the original click to play button style (I also edited out the letters 'A', 'S', and 'S', left over from the game title, which while amusing did distract the eye a bit ;) - I'm not sure I'd have tried to edit out the games title if it had spelt something else).

I am aware it sounds a bit like supporting an old system just because it's what we are used to, which isn't what I want to do, but for the time being, I think this is the best solution. I will be reviewing this approach as time goes on.

As always, I invite your commentary and input. --Macbeth (talk) 20:35, 3 October 2014 (UTC)