The Dark Unknown: Website Makeover
Goldenflame Dragon posted a short note to The Dark Unknown’s Facebook page today:
Post by The Dark Unknown.
And indeed, The Dark Unknown’s website does have a new look about it, that borrows some design influences from the title screen of Ultima 7: The Black Gate:
The little box just above the menu actually plays out what I assume are pre-scripted scenes using the game engine. It isn’t just a single animation; right-clicking it and choosing to open the image in a new tab (this in Chrome) brought up a single tile, rather than…say…an animated GIF of some sort.
And I must say, but Lucifuge Dragon does have a way with the logos, doesn’t he?
It’s a pre-scripted scene, but doesn’t use the actual engine- I just have a bunch of javascript that moves tiles around. 🙂
Love the web site update; nice work. The demo just sort of sits there in my browser, however. What are its requirements? I’m using Kubuntu 13.10 and the latest stable Chrome build. I can do some Linux QA for you if you’re interested. I also just tried it in Firefox, so I’m thinking it’s a Java issue at this point. Will try some stuff and report back.
No, that’s all me. I borked it during some of the shuffling around and forgot to finish fixing it before I announced that the redesign was done. Will fix today.
Yeah, it was busted because when I revamped the site I brought it up to date with my working SVN repository, which had a missing curly brace. 🙂 Derp. It’s remarkably slow to load right now but should work in theory. Unfortunately, since my previous work desktop died I switched over to a windows machine at work, so I no longer have a linux machine to test on, so you may still see some issues, but hopefully not, since I am trying to stay within the browser standards. 🙂
It works now but is definitely slow. Once it’s loaded does it run locally or still exchange information with the server? I have some torrents raging in the background that may be affecting it.
How do you move on the main overworld map? Arrow keys work in the [W]/Equipment menu. Actually, I think it just doesn’t update/refresh the view, but does move your player. It says blocked eventually in the right pane.
Moving on the overland map should be arrow keys or, just for the nostalgia, [;’/ work like the keys in those positions did back on the Commodore.
As for talking to the server, the game never does so per se (not in any AJAX kind of way), but any new images that haven’t been previously seen (or are no longer in the cache) will be fetched from the server. All the JS should get grabbed on the initial game load. I think part of why the game load is so slow now is it pre-loads all the music even though the game starts with music turned off. I wonder if I can make a “loading” screen or something. 🙂
Anyway, if the arrow keys aren’t working on the main map (though make sure the game’s window has focus), let me know, it’ll be something I’ll want to look into.