In other news, the way screen shots are displayed has changed completely for all browsers except for IE.
Why? Those ajax "open pics in an overlay" are a severe pain in the ass. They often take longer to load because the browser has to render fullscreen fade-to-grey. That and the console effect looks like it has 2fps here.
Not to mention the various time I pressed ctrl-w to close the tab with the screenshot and continue browsing the site just to realise that the fricking tab was a "inner-tab layer". Firefox here.
Well, adblock-plus helps... 

I guess you don't like it then :]

Personally, I do like pressing ESC or ~ to close the window, also the fact that the entire page is not re-loaded, only a small amount of code and part of the page is re-drawn - this is in-fact quicker here.

Another thing you may have missed is the code was written by myself for ..::LvL, so instead of it being 1/2 a meg like some other sites, it is a small amount of basic javascript (that means it is quick, not slow to load and run).

As to the 2fps, my guess is you have a low end video card with about 16MB or less (possibly even a 2D card). Of all the systems I tested with, there was only an old laytop with a similar adverse experience. While the screenshot system still works on this old system, I can't help but think that the the old laptop is just that - old and crappy by todays standard.

I'm guessing you don't like change and you have a hard time on many contemporary sites :]

After all that, thank you for your feedback - its the only real feedback I've had yet! 

browsing lvl yesterday, and I was uncomfortable with the change at first because I was thinking, is this going to be like a lot of 'modern' sites where rolling my mouse across the screen will generate about 20 pop-ups (and that's all those telesense things are, a throwback to 90's style popups except with a pretty alphachannel display) on my screen and cause involantary screams to spasm from my mouth. Thankfully, your changes are nothing like the horror story I just described at all. It's pretty useful in fact. 

With all this controversy, I had to have a look and throw in my 2 cents!

I like the new screenshot system, it does seem to load quickly and there's no annoying stuff like having the whole page refresh or jump around. I definitely prefer it to the old method, takes a little getting used to bit it is definitely much "nicer". :)

Having said that I can kinda see where the 2fps comment comes in - specifically, when the black background slides in/out it looks a bit choppy at times. I am not sure how this stuff works so this comment could be completely inappropriate/impossible, but perhaps adding more frames (?) or even just speeding up the transition could alleviate the problem.

The one other problem I noticed is that since the screenshots on the side are semi-transparent, faded-out and dark, they can get lost against the black background and can be very hard to see (in some cases you could almost miss them entirely). The fact that they highlight on mouseover is nice and almost negates the problem, but I thought it might be worth mentioning nevertheless.

By the way, if anyone hates the new screenshot display method, all they have to do is open the screenshot link in a new tab or window... doing so seems to revert to the old behaviour. Whether this is intentional or not, it should allow anyone who has their grumpy pants on to stick to the old method to keep themselves happy (unless Tig stops this from happening of course ;)

p.s. knowing that the ESC key will close the window is useful so perhaps that deserves a mention on LvL as well. 

I like it.

Just got back into Q3 and I'm there downloading my favourites again, works very nicely.

Project idea: Q3 remade in Q1? 

 

Well, I am a weird guy when it comes to websites. ;)
I only care about the information/accessability, not the looks at all.

It really might be bad drivers (Debian Linux with NVIDIA here, and the drivers acted up weirdly recently).

Good thing about this javascript is that it is easily blockable and then nothing fails working.

The main thing I dislike about it is that it breaks with good old web standards. I.e. the site is static, clicking a link takes me to another site, I can go back to the previous site with the back arrow (or similar). Or if I clicked the link to open in a new tab I am back on the parent site.

I think I just dislike all the AJAX stuff. =) eBay's new selling formular is a prime example I deeply hate. There is no way to tell what is happening and why etc. 

 

amd athlon xp 1600+ 1.4ghz
512 ram
gf4 ti4200 64meg video card
firefox 2.0.0.3

The immediate slide down of the black console is fairly smooth, the crossfading in of the pictures is a little choppy, enough to where it just seems bleh.

Switching between pictures within the console happens quickly, however I don't care for the translucency on the thumbnails, I'd prefer they be solid and with a 6 or so pixel space between them and the fullsize.

Closing the console yields a very slow fade out and very choppy scroll up which gets exponentially better as it nears the top.

When the console is down, switching from that tab to another, or back to it has an obvious hesitation compared with normal tab switching. When the console is not down, tab switching is just fine and dandy.

I know my system is very far from top of the line, but this is a bit slow for a website. Idea, don't have a huge console, instead have it draw a frame with a solid background large enough to contain the fullsize and the thumbnails, maintain the Esc or ~ to close it. Right now it seems to drag quite a bit being both moving and translucent, so perhaps being as how this wouldn't be moving, it could still be fluid in fading, even on slow little machines like my own.

Ijed - Q3A is already in Quake, check out Quake1Arena by FrikaC and I think Electro, though it could have been Koolio... Don't have a site, sorry, but it does function with the weapons, items, has bots, and the "Denied" etc etc 

 

http://qarchive.quakedev.com/?dir=./Total%20Conversions

Patch is available. 

Found it on Gamespot but some security shit stopped me joining and then downloading. Will look at it now. 

if your site is too slow to run on "an old laptop" (that isn't a 486), then you might have... weird standards :) 

The fade/scroll animation is kind of slow for me too. This is on a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4, with a Geforce FX 5900. If I can run Quake 3 smoothly, I should be able to browse a Quake 3 review site smoothly.

You seem to genuinely want to get people to the screenshots faster, which I applaud, so my recommendation is to keep the "load on top of existing page" idea but lose the animation. (Full disclosure: I'm against waiting for stuff in general, for example I turned off the fade/scroll on my Start Menu as well, and I try to skip the trailers on DVDs when I can.) 

I only tried it in firefox, and I have noticed that firefox has gotten kind of bloated since 2.0, so you probably don't get all the blame for the animation being slow. :) 

Wow, thanks heaps people. That is a heap of excellent feedback. I'll got a few ideas already to try out to improve the code. Hopefully they will work :] 

Just a quick update. Many small changes have been made and the new code is much faster and smaller! The old laptop even works well now.

So, thanks heaps everyone. 

Much better. :)
I whitelisted lvlworld again. I can live with that. It loads blazing fast! 

we helped Tigger out, and we were also pretty constructive in our efforts.

Now back to being evil. 

Works great for me in IE!! 

It's like greased lightning! 

On my own pc and even on my much worse work pc! Excellent work 

that's really nice now :D