another silly idea...
I've often thought, especially when I'm tired, it'd be great if the board
showed me which spaces I controlled, which spaces my opponent
controlled.
Could this be possible by shading the squares (eg. blue for under my
control, red for opponents control, purple for both). It might even be
able to indicate which of my peices are vunerable.
I of couse don't think this would be a good idea for experienced
players, but maybe for players below 1250. That way it could be a
learning tool for newbi's.
I know there's probably 1000 resons not to do it, not least the
programming involved, but just thought it was interesting as an idea.
I could put something like this in, it wouldn't actually be that much
programming effort. I think that both players would have to agree
upfront to allow the use of any 'aids' like these though.
I'm about to embark on some reengineering/new feature coding in
RHP within the next month - so I will keep that in mind.
One thing I am going to add is an 'I’m on holiday, please, don’t time
me out' option, which is long overdue.
-Russ
Cool.
Russ, How rude would it be for to ask you to publish your TO DO list?
Not, of course, so we can hound you about when it's going to be done,
but so people can give reasonable feedback on things. Maybe even
have a "To do" page where you list possible future upgrades and
people can vote/rate how important the feature is. Maybe a few
categories like:
1) I would almost always use this feature
2) I would sometimes use this feature
3) I would rarely use this feature
4) I would consider this feature a bad thing.
and maybe room for a comment.
Maybe let each nick only vote/comment once.
This would allow you to um...better serve us. After all, I know your
only goal in life is to find new ways to slave yourself to this site!
:>
To Do list. As I've said elsewhere, I'm going to have a break from
RHPLive for a little while so I can return to it fresh in a couple of
weeks. So between now and then I am going to do a few things:
So my unofficial to do list is as follows:
1, Get some kind of membership scheme up and running, now I am
confident the server offers a level of service that I believe to be more
than satisfactory [unlike our poor old machine which was so
overworked, it could have gone up in smoke at any moment.. 🙂 ]
2, Names for games.
3, Holiday absence option - so people know you going to be away for
a short while.
4, Branding - so we can display the site in different colours/colors and
logo if we need to. A couple of users have expressed concern about
the site name, and are worried about playing in their office (in case
people think they are looking at pornography.) I will offer an
alternative URL with a subtler color scheme for those who wish to play
covertly. This is potentially the largest piece of work to do.
5, Any tools to assist in tournaments. I need your feedback on this.
I could code a few pages which are only to be used by tournament
organisers - but I need to know what you want on this.
6, Any other stuff I might see that could do with improving.
Chris is planning to rewrite the forums - but this may not be so
important to him now the server speed has increased.
I have plenty more RHPLive work to do, and I am quite seriously now
thinking about turning it into a client for making your RHP web moves
too. Of course, I would still want people to visit the site, but there is
no reason why all your moves could not be made from RHPLive.
-Russ
Russ, good luck with your projects.
I know several ideas have been sent in over the months concerning
the change to an annual membership fee, and hope you will give
them some consideration when you start putting that together. I'm
particularly fond of the ones I have sent in (LOL).
And do encourage Chris to work on the forum section of the site. It's
still mostly a mess. With the new server, it's a FASTER mess, but it
still needs some serious rework.
I know others have recommended forum styles they have seen on
other sites. I personally would like to see something similar to the
post layout used in the newsgroup section of OUTLOOK EXPRESS, with
only the main post appearing, and then with a ' + ' icon to indicate
threads attached to the main post. When you click on the icon, that
post opens up to show all threads attached to it. Click it again and it
closes up back to the main post. Also similar to windows explorer, I
guess. I also really like their 'mark all as read' feature.
I do like the current feature in ours, where all new posts and threads
are always pulled up to the top of the page, and posts that are unread
are in bold, then switch to normal after reading.
And lastly, I think I'm speaking for many of us when I say that even
before the server upgrade this site was excellent, and you could have
justifiably switched to an annual membership fee.
regards, Marc
- Joined
- 08 Jul 02
- Moves
- 165421
Russ, Chris,
Could you also consider adding a user message box to the "New
Game" page? It would be nice to send out an open invite with a note,
say, "I'm looking for a fast weekend game Eastern Standard Time.
Anyone out there interested?" or any other such info to establish a
goal for the game or players. Perhaps just a friendly intro differing
from profile information, like, "Hi! Please help me! This game will help
keep me sane in the face of my next AutoCAD project!" Just a thought.
Coyote