Preserved Topic: The new OZONE front page is nearly ready!

http://www.ozones.com/ourWalls/

I haven't finished the lnks section, and I'll of course have to re-write all of the content bits (this will appear in the little floating window that you could imagine in the left side! Not written yet, heh.) I'm *totally* happy with the minimal CPU burn on this one, many thinks to Slime for continuing to give me crap about the eval(...) statements I was once so fond of. I've tested this in MSIE5.5, 6.x, Mozilla 9.2 and NN4.72, if anyone finds any obvious errors, you let me know, cool? I was awfully tempted to just tack links in there and replace my front page, but Malin convinced me to truly finish it first and *then* spring it on the public! Still, I wanted to share this with you folks first. The entire page with images and code weighs in at just under 82k, not too bad for all that's happening here, I figger. I'll be tweaking at this all this week, and as soon as I think it at least appears complete, I'm gonna launch it.

So! Any feedbacks for me? I'm raring to go with this, and my patience is wearing thin. I'm going to be moving fast to finish this ASAP, but it's very flexible code, I can change nearly anything given a good enough reason to do so! Humm, I am *very* happy, this will be my first big finished project for just *me* in at least a year and a half, woo-hoo!

<note>Yah, sure, this belongs in the "Site Review" section, but there's a pretty good argument for it belonging here, too! :-></note>

Your pal, -doc-

Looks great doc! My first impression when that popped open was WOW.

Looks really good but all that motion is a bit disorienting after a while of staring at the page. Maybe set a timeout so that the motion slows down after a while?

Course, maybe thats just me in my hungover state.

Pretty freakin sweet, Doc.

~Bout time you took some *me* time.~



Why, yes. I was raised by Apes. How did you know ?

Looks good in IE 6.0, but Mozilla 0.9.5 has some problems:
There is a HSB and the animations are very slow...


And i like that animation when I resize my browser .

hmmmm I love the look Doc

being browser retarded this side of the pond, in my NN4.72 it didnt load up correctly. Got teh bg image and the two upper and lower bars but that was all b4 it stopped loading. IN my IE4 it loaded great and as far as I can tell all is working. (no linked pages yet I am guessing?)

The imagery is beautiful ~Vp~

That's pretty amazing visually Doc. I love it

Much more appealing than the earlier version you unveiled (although I liked that plenty). The richness of the colors is stunning, and the movement is pretty damn cool.

The *only* thing I didn't like - the last stages of the 'alignment' of the items on loading, or on resizing, is very slow and staggered (at least on my machine). It'd be nicer to see the movement of the objects quicker and smoother. As is, it takes several seconds to get into place...which just seems a bit too much.

Can't wait to see it implemented

WOW Doc... schweeeeeeet !

Awesome work...as always

~"Art" happens in the head, the rest is just tricks and techniques that can be learned-DocOzone~

DIZZY!!!!!

I love it! you feel like if you have just taken a pill!!

Real and pure 'Doc's Style'

whoa...look at all the movement *grins insanely*

Nice work Doc. Can't wait to see the finished page.

*goes back to look at the moving colors, and resizes the browser continuously*

damn that is so unbelievably slick I lack the vocabulary to even start to tell you how good it is.

I find myself refreshing over and over, that's real smooth (ie5).

Can't wait to see the linked up stuff too.

prettyprettypretty

Jason

It's just gorgeous in every possible way A new Ozone front page was a long time coming but well worth the wait!

OOOoooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhh........

:: Max ::

Doc,

I just noticed a slight wierdness. I visited your site several times and twice this happened on the bottom sparkle thingy...



It only happens sometimes. I'm seeing this in IE5.5 Win98



[This message has been edited by Bugimus (edited 10-14-2001).]

Beautiful!
I see the same thing as Bugimus, it's hard to see when it's moving, but if you knoww, it's there.
-{D}-

Bugs, did you try to minimize and maximize your browser window?
I had the same problem with some websites before. I noticed that when I resize my browser and resize it back, site looks good.

Try it.

:: Max ::

Ducati, yeah that fixes it but Doc will want to prevent it from ever happening because he's the Doc

Wow, this is really cool. Impressive.

it looks horribly wrong in opera (5.12).

though i almost thought it was better in opera because it didnt have all that movement.

------
this rose has a thorn...

the WOW-effect is coming when you have the site in an IE window and scale the windowsize! all content applies to it smoothly!
WOW!

Amazing! I can't wait until you put it up. A few suggestions:

1. I can also see the thing bugimus mentioned.
2. The movement of the little "ruler" things are sort of nauseating. The problem is that if they move one pixel, the whole image has this flashing effect, since every pixel changes. That isn't a real big problem, 'cause it's not that noticeable, but the real problem is that the repetition of the image is only about once every 10 pixels, so if it starts moving faster than 4 pixels per frame, it gets hard to see where and how fast it's moving. If I were you, I'd make the repeating image longer, and - you know how every 10 pixels or so, the line sticks out farther than the other ones? Make so that every 100 pixels or so, it sticks out even farther, or something. I dunno. I just suggest that you work on that a bit.
3. Make sure the word "Ozone" links to an older front door! That's tradition. =)
4. I noticed that as the animation slows down near the end, it becomes more jumpy. I suggest that as you slow down the movement of things, you increase the framerate simultaneously. Then again, test to make sure that will work on slower computers. You may just want to double the original frame rate, if slow computers can handle it.
5. Consider some very simple, slow movement on the left when there's no window there. Like, birds flying around the huge sphere in the background, or something.
6. A "replay intro" link might prevent people from refreshing hundreds of times, and thereby reduce your bandwidth. =)

I hope you find a good way to make that window appear large on big resolutions and still fit in small resolutions. This is really neat, can't wait. =)

PS: I miss my slow connection. I can no longer see how pages behave while they're still loading. Sigh.

*blink, blink*

Wow...had a hard time tearing me eyes off it! Where do you get this stuff?
You keep giving us inspiration to come back for more!

Just one thing I noticed is that when I grabbed the HS and zipped to the right, to see what was there, the whole page loaded again where I stopped moving the cursor. Don't know if you intended that.

Oh, whoops, I think the slow frame rate I mentioned is due to how big my window is, IE is just having trouble refreshing the screen. It's not a problem when I make my window smaller. Nothing you can really do anytihng about.

Two things I'm interested in knowing: Why did you call it "ourWalls?" And how does the shineyness on the horizontal orange things relate to the mouse movement? 'Cause they seem to react to me moving my mouse in and out of the main area, but I can't quite figure out how...

Edit: Wow, is that partial transparency I see on the horizontal orange thing, letting the "Ozone" graphic show through? Oh, no, I see, you faked it, but that's very well done...

[This message has been edited by Slime (edited 10-15-2001).]

I actually exclaimed "holy crap!" in the control room when it popped up on my screen. (Good thing we weren't broadcasting.) I wish you'd stop doing such great stuff, Doc, 'cause I realize I suck a little more each time.

Incidentally, I also see what Bug pointed out except the flashy bit is a pixel too far UP. However, after about 4 or 5 seconds, all the elements shift themselves spontaneously a couple pixels in various directions and everything lines up OK.

The movement is disorienting...

I like the movement, however when I am in the active area it distracts me away from the links.

I love the window resizing functions as well...

Let me tell you that that Resize stuff is amazing!!!!!!!!

WOW!!! thats just ****!

dddaaaaaaayyyaaaaammmmnnnnn.....

looks absolutely fabulous in IE ...

that thing bugs et al are going on about...it settles after a bit, doesn't it?

and you've got this strange fascination with the color orange, don't you?

SUN
//you could promote orange pop //

wow!!! really great work, doc!

OMG Doc! When it first came up I was like when did he learn flash5!? Then I right-clicked the thing to hell and well.........all I can say is Whoa! and Wahoo! Great job Doc!
Looks wonderful IE6.

The poster has demanded we remove all his contributions, less he takes legal action.
We have done so.
Now Tyberius Prime expects him to start complaining that we removed his 'free speech' since this message will replace all of his posts, past and future.
Don't follow his example - seek real life help first.

bloody hell.. fantastic..

sorry.. I thought this was the new lobby initially.. obviously didn't read your post right Doc.

1 thing.. your side to side animation is very cool.. but too fast.. if it slowly slid from side to side (like the light on the front of "Kit" the car in good 'ol "Nightrider" with bad 'ol David Hasselhof) it'd be MUCH nicer...

BTW everyone.. click the OZONE logo to restart opening animation.. much quicker than F5..

Oh, and Doc.. you wait to see how you hit-count rises once people see that page and start refreshing!

fantastic.

OK, comments on comments. The jerkiness of the animation as it slows down, I need to add a 'snap' function at the end; all the pieces on the page approach their 'goal' at 1/12th of the distance each loop, which is fine until they get really close to the goal! I don't have the math in my head, but I should be able to make that 1/x distance be an inverse of the distance it's got to move? (Make sense? It will. ;-) Mozilla is way super-slow, I've been playing with different values for the animation on that one, maybe I did it backwards, it's slower than I remembered it, hrmph. (Tweaky-tweaky, I'll get it right! IE first I guess, then the others. Should be fixed before official launch, I hope.)

This thing is called "ourWalls" since the seed of it was a sketch I did for the walls in our computer room, which were supposed to be beige with these neat-o grey lines scribed on it. It looked cool, so I put an OZONE logo on it. Then I was playing with glass bars, but the beige was boring, so I added a blend, and then the rulers. The lines were kind of static, and when I added the web/grid image I lost them too. The colors, so light, not me! So it got brown and orange, and I added the Bryce render of "Asylum Island", heh. For the record, our walls do not look like that, and probably wont, bummer. :/

The OZONE logo will link to the next older page, but for now, it just re-loads the page, I could sit and reload it dozens of time myself! I'll add a little reload button down in the corner and change that link when it goes live.

The two major animation "things" are the pulses (which are dormant until you're in the "active" area in the middle) and the rulers. The pulses were the first thing I added to the page, and they made me kind of nauseous at first, that's why I made them go 'off' when you were outside the active area, maybe I should reverse that? Maybe I should lose them altogether? Maybe just pulse 4-5 times then hide? Comments on this one would be great.

The rulers movemement is disconcerting, I know - Slime, I remember you had the same comments about the ozonicLabs page which behaved the same, but I thought it was kind of cool when they move so fast they appear to go backwards, I'd appreciate comments about this also. (We'll have to see how they look after I add the 'snap' function, maybe it'll get better?)

The content 'window' which I'll add soon should scale just like everything else, filling a space from 32px on the left to (somewhere close to) the OZONE logo, hopefully with transparent background (I think there's a way to do this with gecko browsers too, didn't I hear?) If not, I may have to cheat with this, as Slime did on one of the earlier aqua pages. (2 images, with clipping on the hidden one.)

Ah, what can I say about Opera? The most amazing thing right now is that it works at all, I didn't expect that. I'll need some help finding out how to track mouse movement in that browser, seems to me I had figured that out (once), but now all I get is "Attempted to call non-function: has undefined value: 'addEventListener'", hrmph. CSS compliant my ass, I hate this browser!

I've included one link for "set preferences", here I'll expect to add flags and adjusters for the function of the page, rulers on/off, pulse on/off, speed and such like. Mostly I wanted it for a flag for a "launch links in new window?" switch, and any other things I can think of. If I can ever figure out the 'Zcookies' bit, I'll write this info as a cookie for future visits.

Well, I'm back to work on this thing now, thanks for all the help you folks have offered over these last months, I've adopted many of the idea that have been brought up here in this forum, "liquid" design being the major thing, I love this stuff! With any luck I'll be able to launch this thing sometime this week, woo-hoo!

Your pal, -doc-

whoa! long post and to the point, may be comment on that comment? heh

I like to do that, helps me keep all the feedbacks in my head when I'm working on it! An old trick I learned about taking comments on things I just said; "What I hear you saying is (re-phrase what was just said to you, with enhancements)." Now I have a mental checklist to work with as I change the codes!

Your pal, -doc-

The poster has demanded we remove all his contributions, less he takes legal action.
We have done so.
Now Tyberius Prime expects him to start complaining that we removed his 'free speech' since this message will replace all of his posts, past and future.
Don't follow his example - seek real life help first.

The poster has demanded we remove all his contributions, less he takes legal action.
We have done so.
Now Tyberius Prime expects him to start complaining that we removed his 'free speech' since this message will replace all of his posts, past and future.
Don't follow his example - seek real life help first.

Oh my god - i am speechless. You really are the best, Doc!

That is amazing! What a guru....

I can't wait to see the final ver.

ps
it works fine in IE 6

Doctor Ozone, always one step closer to perfection.

Nothing more to say.

Edit: or, well, I have. Those rulers are going to be the next over-hyped thing after scanlines. I guess.



[This message has been edited by mahjqa (edited 10-15-2001).]

very nice work!

I love the wee reload icon you've added doc (it says a lot for your design when someone goes back to see it again, just for *fun*!)

an idea though - how about placing the reload icon in the middle of the "O" of "OZONE"? - you could still make the ozone logo link elsewhere, but make the reload icon reload... I think that would be soooo cool.. (though a wee bit tricky perhaps)

With a design like this, I think that reloading should be a key feature - esp. considering the amount of webdesigners/graphics-heads/DHTMLers that must visit your site.

Coo.. that is breathtaking and you leave the vast majority of us green with envy. Some of the things I noticed:

1. Keyword and description metatags are missing.

2. You code has a some upper caps thrown into the majority of lower caps code and there are some missing inverted commas - a good example of both is:

<LINK REL=stylesheet HREF="/ourWalls/css/Zskin3.css" TYPE="text/css">

Its not a problem now but would make a move to XHTML trickier in the future (its probably best to pick up such inconsitencies now).

3. The lack of scrollbars means it is pretty easy (esp. in 80x600 and below) to resize the window so that all the naviagtion is lost.

4. You do love the moving rulers but it is a little distracting and although I don't suffer from motion sickness it still makes me feel a little odd - I do like them though.

5. Have you removed the flashing light? I saw it last night but I can't see it today.

Its so good - I've really got to stop resizing the browser window and go and get something done.

Emps


You're my wife now Dave

Yeah reloading is a blast! It looks pretty smooth in IE5 too. Sliders are gone? They didn't make me nauseous! I thought they were cool. However, at first I was trying to use them as links, like the current slider-bars, until I figured out they weren't lol.

I wonder if the glow around the active menu buttons was planned or just a bonus of contrasty light bouncin off the inside of my monitor...it's neat how the background seems to light up softly...

The slider is really smooth now, I see the Doc has slowed it down a bit and it works much better right now. Also the reloading is very smooth, its just great!

I really like the circular grid behind the logo, and the colours! Oh, it's amazing!

The rulers make me dizzy and I keep loosing my bearing no exactly where the mouse pointer is because of them but I kinda like that. It adds to the ozone feel. Lots of wacky movement! Very sweet!

Set preferences? What's that?

Tutorial Sites. <- 's' There something else you not telling us there Doc? Heh.

There is a couple of things I want to pick at though....
The text. It's all so small and bunched up. Makes things kinda hard to read, espically the tiny orange links.
The background image also has visible compression errors. It may just be that my gamma setting it exposing them more than an average monitor.

I can't wait to see it finished!

Well, the text (at least on the bottom 'blah blah' credit links) is only 9px Helvetica, but I plan to use 10px Verdana for the main body type, should be readable. The pulse is retired for right now, at least until I figure a good way to let it do its thing. I guess I'll make that an 'option' for the set preferences link? The <meta> tags are coming, I've got an include I can use for those, I'll add that before it goes live. Hmm, BIG tags, small tags, whatta pain! I just cut&paste usually, so that's probably allover my site, heh. I'll fix.

Hmm, I think I'll leave the log alone, it's always bad "branding" to muck around with your logo, wouldn't want to give anyone bad ideas! Ooh! Emps, you have to try this in 800x600, I got a bit cute there, as you start to crop those bottom links, it snugs up higher (to the glass bar), and if you crowd it more it'll sacrifice the top rulers too! You'll need to be maximized, but it's actually optimized for 800x600, these little details matter.

Well, I'm working on the floating window graphics right now, check back later!

Your pal, -doc-

Oh, put the pulses back! I loved those. Don't get rid of them.

The replay intro animation (animated gif?) needs some fixing, it looks like it only has four frames... it's not smooth. Most of your animations are smooth, with motion blur. You should add some more frames to that. =)

And don't forget your window.status explanations for JS links!

[This message has been edited by Slime (edited 10-15-2001).]

I love how it resizes with the browser size... mmmmm... At home on my phat computer it is smooth as can be, but here at skool it is kinda jumpy.

Dang it Doc, Between you and Wead, I am getting way over loaded with all i want to know... ahhhhhhhh



::::izzay

The poster has demanded we remove all his contributions, less he takes legal action.
We have done so.
Now Tyberius Prime expects him to start complaining that we removed his 'free speech' since this message will replace all of his posts, past and future.
Don't follow his example - seek real life help first.

Doc this is just amazing. It makes me want to learn how to do things like that. My girlfriend loves it.

One suggestion, the 'spokes' or 'rays' coming from the 'O' in Ozone would, IMHO, look AMAZING if they rolled along the rulers at the top when it begins to move. I'm not sure how much that would increase the site size, but I think it's something worth trying. You could even set it up so that when it's clicked, it scrolls in a circle for a few seconds.

Just some thoughts

Amazing Doc, just amazing.

--------------
cheers.jay

Site is looking great Doc, keep it up

I've noticed recent improvements, Doc, it's looking good. I like how you put the pulses in there if I mouseover the logo, good solution to that problem. I hope you're aware that things stop moving if one resizes the window too small?

I see you have added the windows for the content, they look great, also the sliders are much smoother now...

Oh! I never actually made the window that small - me bad, so sorry! I'm willing to bet that I end up dividing by zero or something stupid like that, I'll see about tracking that down later tonight or tomorrow. I'm thinking about maybe some dynamic "fading away" effect for the windows, but have to add an "opacity" flag to the Zobject script, then I can handle it inside the loop that's going on anyway. I'm *very* very close to truning on the scrolling function (which I'll do from scratch for this piece, probably), and then all I'll need is a nice cross-browser handle for loading the text into that window on an 'as-needed' basis, then the scripting should be (mostly) done! I've already got most of the text written, so I can launch this baby, woo!

Your pal, -doc-

*really* nice Doc. Animation is nice and smooth The content windows look great too.

The poster has demanded we remove all his contributions, less he takes legal action.
We have done so.
Now Tyberius Prime expects him to start complaining that we removed his 'free speech' since this message will replace all of his posts, past and future.
Don't follow his example - seek real life help first.

Ah yes! That is the newest bit of code inserted, makes sense that that'd be it. Hmm, what will I do when people make their windows so tiny that the content just won't fit? I guess I can use that little space under the logo, it'll look kind of neat as it "squeezes" itself down to fit, heh.

(edit: OK, it squeezes wide now, but the table it sits in is fixed at a size of 300px tall, I never considered making it scaleable that direction! I'll re-do it tomorrow, from scratch, and it will get shorter at the same time it gets wider, heh. May make this an option on the menubar, hmm...)

Your pal, -doc-



[This message has been edited by DocOzone (edited 10-19-2001).]

you probably don't care, but it doesn't look right on Konqueror, linux.

Hmm, I could care, but really don't have any good way of checking it on that browser, and have to admit, I don't really know it's capabilities! Does it understand the current DOM, CSS, Javascript? If you get the chance, I'd love to see a screen-cap of just how broken it looks, that'd help.

Your pal, -doc-

Wow, so liquid... so... cool.... Really lovin the yellows! (I never thought I'd say that)

Are you going to put in any kind of alternative content for NN4.x or have you decided to cut the umbilical completly?

I'm still finding it hard to ditch Netscape 4. These's just tooo many fond memories. But I'm getting sick and tired of having to resort to not so pixel perfect frames and lots of dogey table tricks just to get a liquid site!.

Oh, I've got most of the old Netscape hacks in place, even if it's giving me some speed problems right now, (hrmph.) The biggest difference will be in what happens on resize, instead of 'flowing' out to the proper spots, it'll just reset the values and fire a flag to stop doing anything, then reload the page! Cheap, but it works, Netscape users know that resizing a page will make for colorful explosions of code, heh.

Your pal, -doc-

looks pretty good there doc... but if i make the page 2 small i cannot scroll Down. when i do the pages bumps me back up 2 the top really fast. errr... what is that JS Alert there for when it horizontaly resizes the page after i size it way down?

::::izzay


---------------------------------------

(Stealing some space from you, thanks Eyesaer!)

Continued thread lives here: http://www.ozoneasylum.com/Forum1/HTML/002872.html

[This message has been edited by DocOzone (edited 10-25-2001).]