Website Down

What happened?

The Hamster whos wheel powers the server fell off.

well he has been working for months!

I guess he deserved a little break, the poor little thing..

down again...

Should use guinea pigs, they go for longer.

I thought it was a gerbil?

The hamster was in reality a Siberian Rat, which had to leave the building for hygiene reasons! So, there's your downtime.

I think its time they changed hosts to something reliable

They dont need to only change hosts, they need to hire a web site designer and give this place a complete 100% overhaul.

My son hands in better designs than this for his school projects.

That hamster has been pumping out 14 gigawatts a day on 12&1/2 gallons of pure caffine a day...

...it finally died




















they have since replaced it with a chinchilla and a brazillian super-baby, an assured combined 94 tera-watts per day, for at least 13 millenia

however maitenance is cleaning up the poopies (AKA CRAP)

Wonder if it wasn't a denial of service attack? There's some sad types out there.

Well you're entitled to your opinion, but you're wrong.

How is anyone going to take Max, lets face it the Flagship of the company seriously when they come to the website and find this bedroom coded style.

Now I really don't mean any offence, its a sad fact that appearance and first impressions can be devastating to any business/company/website. if people don't initially jell with a site/company.... they will and are put off.

For Example.

While taking part in my Degree Year in Games Development, the University and I think all in the UK currently teaching these courses, Almost all of them Start with Dark Basic Pro. we all know that its an inferior product, When I took a petition, of over 100 Signatures, to the Lead IT Co-ordinators to have DB Replaced with Blitz3D at the time, I was initially met with good intentions, Sadly this instantly fell away when they actually checked the website.

Even tho I clearly showed them the difference in quality from the community made projects, and even tho they could see that Blitz was at the time producing far better code structure and far better games, even with its dated GFX core, they still went with DBPro.

When I finally got hold of the man in charge, to find out why, his reply was that in a nutshell, he didnt like the site, and it seemed very poor on support and backing.

This was a good few years ago, and nothing has changed, Blitz Max is now out and should be blowing DBPro out of the water, its far closer to the style of coding done in the industry with its OOP style, and makes for a far better stepping stone that Dark Flipping Basic. so when Max was released, and even tho My Degree was done, I contacted them again and asked that they look into Max as a replacement for DBPro. and no surprise the response I got was that nothing had changed, the site still looks the same, they didnt even bother looking deeper to see what massive changes Max offers over DB and B3D.

I am sorry if this looks like a rant, I guess its pissed me off for so long this just seemed like a perfect opportunity to get it off my chest.

The Site needs work, the purists of you have to see that having a better more well designed and more commercial looking website is better not only for BRL as a company, but also for us as a community as it will increase sales all round and activity.

I think anyone who wants things to stay as they are now are insane. Evolve or die.

I think the site is nice, usable and pretty well organized. With that said, the default theme IS terrible! Actually, none of the theme have a nice modern web look...

maybe someone with great skills can donate a new theme? I know long ago there were directions on how to create a theme for this site...

(of course, don't compare anything to my site.... I'm no web designer or graphics artist! :)

Yavin: Just curious... In your opinion, is the website in your signature well-designed?

So I suppose the IT coordinators where much like Jen:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKTwKLA_cyQ

Could be worse....look at the cobra website...*shudder*

But I do agree, Blitz website can really do with a re-design, something like http://www.nevercenter.com would be very flash.

The game creators site is pretty spot on, its pretty much 14 year old eye candy from the moment you enter the url, which is what gets them the sales, not the quality of the product.

Unfortunaly the admin staff on this site don't really listen to anything we suggest, so why even debate it. I mean how important is the apperence of thier website...its not like thier main source of sales and marketing is it </sarcasm>

First impressions can lose you customers no matter how good the product is. The first time i came here, years back i thought this site was plain and it didn't really grab me but i was interested in seeing blitz3d. Tried the product and haven't looked back, it's great, site is not bad but just..boring..looking.

And Yavin, Although I agree on the site redesign, I can pretty much 90% garentee you that the choice not to switch over to b3d was the fact that they already owned DP and didn't have to pay anything to continue using that. But would have to pay quite a bit to rebuy b3d licences....

You and I are about the same age, if I remember correctly, and I think you would have realised about the same time I did that Uni's don't really care about education any more (maybe a few good lectureres still do), but Uni's care more about putting as many people in the door and back out after 3 years with a useless degree and thier own pockets lined.

I remember that some years ago a not working brl site meant that they were about to release a new version of BlitzMax. Nowadays that's not the case anymore. Not even a worklog update afterwards...

By the way any estimations if we'll see Max3D this xmas? :O)

@Torrente : The Design is generic, nothing flash about it its nothing more than an out of the can CMS with a theme, I don't see what that's got to do with anything really.

@boomboom : Nah m8, their licence was ending and they were about to renew or buy something else. so money didnt have anything to do with it, unless of course they contacted BRL and the price they gave them wasn't good enough for the UNI I cant comment on that.

I have to agree as well, the DBP Site is better than ours, but even that could use some work. the thing I think our site, and DBP's to a lesser degree miss out on is the showcase that B-Coder had, I mean lets face it, this is a 100% community driven site and business, I think there should be a main focal part on the main page above the fold that shows off the communities work. and not just 3 thumbnails that we have now with no descriptions.

I would like to see BRL, taking the gallery, the worklog's and melding them together into a single work showcase, that can be listed by category, and then have the newest and most popular displayed on the front page along with the usual news and other stuff.

I also think that BRL should at least think about helping the community a bit by setting up a BRL Shop built into the site, where people can sell their apps and games through BRL, I know clearly its more work and they would probably need to hire more people, but hay that's why they call it work, and a business.

That showcase, and shop alone would drasticly change the community, with people actually buying stuff from the site, those new customers would see the games, buy em, like em, and then realise they could actually code something as well. and that then means more sales of the language.

I'm ranting again, like I said before .. this is a topic thats kinda pissed me off for ages. I wont moan about it any more, Yav the moany git signing out...

Yavin, personally I have never bought any DB product because I hate their website, it is so slow and bloated and pretty ugly imho. I would hate to try and get help on their forums mainly because it is so slow on my pc even though I have a decent broadband connection.
On the other hand I have always liked the Blitz website design, in fact the only theme I like is the default one. Also it is nice and fast. So I doubt redesigning the Blitz site would make much difference to Blitz sales.

Why do you care?

Things you make up are not facts. Nobodies first impression of any Blitz product is going to be the website. The chance of someone randomly typing the correct URL into their browser to see what happens is pretty close to zero. Almost everyone here is using a BRL product because a friend recommended it - and that's their first impression, the product itself, something made with said product, or the recommendation of a friend. Nobody is going to visit the site by accident.

That's nice. Too bad the argueably most successful sites on the Internet present empirical evidence to the contrary. I mean compared to ebay, the BRL website kicks ass.

I'm sorry. But I don't see how it's BRL's fault your professors are incompetent. Back when I was in Uni doing the game design thing, the tool of the trade was gamemaker. It was free and (in theory) did enough to allow people to prototype games easilly.

Tell that to Google. Of course they won't be able to hear you over the sound of all the money rushing in, but if you feel so strongly about it, I suggest you write them, telling them how they need to be more like Yahoo or die. The facts of the matter (and this is a real fact, not a make believe fact) is for all you know Mark could be rolling in dough. He's certainly making enough money that he's in no real rush to release Max3D - and as for getting more users, that's not likely to have a positive impact on the community. It certainly hasn't so far. Personally I miss the times when Mark had the time to carefully respond to every post on the mailinglist, like he used to, before all you people came along and scared everyone off.

I'm sorry, but as far as I can tell, the design of the website is identical to the BRL one. The main difference is a matter of content. BRL has news, Silo has a pointless graphic.

For the record, this is the website of the worlds leading authority on website design and usability: http://www.useit.com/

My estimation is no. I'll take 500:1 odds.

Me neither. I bought my copy of DarkBasic on James Boyds recommendation (for lack of a better word), and the promises of the developers.

You could definately re-design the site to appeal more to the kind of weak willed morons who buy this kind of junk. Personally I'd like to veto that decision.

Personally I like the site its MUCH easier on the eyes than other sites, I just think they need to change hosts thats all as this one keeps going down.

Flameduck you make me laugh so hard m8, thanks :)

Oh, and just because you dont agree with me, and reply to every line in a quote does not make it fact ;) Everything is based on perception. yours differs from mine, I think that in itself makes my point.

I was just wondering what you considered to be a nice looking site.

I've never minded the look of blitzbasic.com at all.

I think a good looking site is one that's not all one flat colour. hmm trying to think of an example that I could link.

But its not just about what the site looks like, a good website needs to meet the requirements of its users, and give them something that they will not get better some where else.

I think this site has some good functions, like the gallery, the code base, and the worklog, all those things should be meshed into one, Each user could then create a profile for each of their projects or games, for example, say you create a new profile for an RPG game, that profile then goes into the database, under RPG's, with its title showing up on the list, the profile has its own gallery, and worklog, as well as what a code base, this would be amazing for some of the community open source stuff that gets flung about. think about it, instead of seeing x thread number 500, its all inside one neat profile.

It makes perfect sense to me I guess, just feels alien having all those things split away from each other..

Thats just what I think, you can agree or not its your call.

flameduck: I'll take you up on that... your $500 to my $1...

From a UI perspective I like the site, its pretty easy to navigate and get what you need. The code, and actual design could use some work. Torque's site is really nice looking, and does draw in customers because of it.

I found Blitz years back when I was working mid shift helpdesk and was bored. No idea exactly how I found it but glad I did. Anyways not cutting down the products the site sells but the site could use some modernization.

And yeah the site in my sig sucks. Its one of my older ones. Some of my newer ones are shown here http://www.loktar.com/portfolio most of them are my USAF ones, and most of them are tableless using only CSS layouts.

I came across Blitz after searching the web for game creation languages & to be honest I had never heard of it until google came up with the search results.

I then bought BlitzPlus after trying the demo and seeing how easy it was to compile and create a stand alone executable.

That said, since using Blitz I have recommended it to many of my friends, some of whom have purchased it & others who haven't.

Those who didn't like it thought it was too simplistic and didn't take it seriously.

Don't think the website had much to do with any of the above, but each to their own.

DBPro is used in a lot of educational places - from the small booklet that was given out at the convention, its quite impressive. Dont forget that quite a few people, when they reach a higher seat of learner, still dont have enough knowledge to write software, so they need something easy to use, but still pretty near the cutting edge of technology.

There is also a related thing thats going to happen to the GSDK, but cant say much due to a NDA..

Is there going to be a DLL version for any compiler (PowerBasic, Purebasic etc) instead of tying it to C++? I tried to write a custom DLL to export the functions of GSDK but it just didn't work.

No, but theoretically you could use LoadLibrary and the GetProcAddress to get to the functions. The only problem would then be how to initialise it.