PlasmaJoin Date: 2003-04-26Member: 15855Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue
I've added automatic updates to the tracker!
If you leave the page/tab open during the day, it will check to see if there are new posts every few minutes.
If new posts are available, the page reloads, plays a sound and flashes the page title to grab your attention.
Some fans may recognize the sound that gets played :)
You don't need to do anything to use the feature, but you can give it a test/simulation by visiting <a href="http://play4dead.com/ns2/?updatetest=1" target="_blank">http://play4dead.com/ns2/?updatetest=1</a>
Thanks Plasma, that was quite an awesome feature! Must admit that I got confused by the sound at first though, made me step back in my Youtube video :p
Anyway, I took some time to make a header for the website Plasma. Not sure if it's good enough but it's something. <img src="http://www.andrige.com/ns2/NS2DevStalkerHeader.png" border="0" class="linked-image" />
PlasmaJoin Date: 2003-04-26Member: 15855Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue
Hi guys,
@falc: Yeah, I think you are right - there were some problems, I've done a quick update to try and resolve them.
I still fetch everything in real time when you hit the page (so everything is up to date), I do cache GetSatisfaction for a few minutes though because that site is pretty slow.
Fetching Twitter info is quick, but checking the NS2 site sometimes times out (even for me in Australia) and so the page may timeout / fail to load.
I'm considering just caching everything for 5 minutes or so (and updating in the background) so that every visit to the page is instant, but you may be out of date for 5 minutes -- problem? Hmm!
The language I'm using is PHP, I use cURL to grab NS2/Twitter/GetSatisfaction post data in parallel when you visit the page, and MySQL to store some information like how many posts there have been and to assist with tracking ns2 progress tasks.
I have a long running task that checks the progress page as well to find out when new progress tasks are added or change state.
The actual site (unrelated to ns2, play4dead.com) was written a few years ago now, and I've just leveraged some existing code to put this ns2 site together quickly.
@TravCarp: Twitter is working for me at the moment, perhaps it was an intermittent problem - quite possible.
Unfortunately I can't seem to load your picture, its saying forbidden.
@Triggerman: Yeah, basically it means that you can leave the window/tab open in your browser during the (work :) ) day and it will let you know when there's something else to read, instead of having to F5.
I like the header art you've done! I'll look at putting it into use later today if I find the time.
PlasmaJoin Date: 2003-04-26Member: 15855Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue
Looks like a few people are enjoying the auto updates (according to server logs).
I've noticed myself (and you probably have too) that an update apparently happens but you don't see a new post.
There really *is* a new post, its just probably a few rows down the page.
Right now (because of the way the app tries to work out when a forum post was made) it can only determine it roughly within the last 24 hours instead of being more accurate.
Ill look at fixing that soon so that new forum posts actually appear at the top of the page as intended in chronological order.
Hi there, love your page, but pretty please make the sound notification when an update is posted as an opt-in and/or add Chrome desktop notifications instead. <a href="http://0xfe.blogspot.com/2010/04/desktop-notifications-with-webkit.html" target="_blank">http://0xfe.blogspot.com/2010/04/desktop-n...ith-webkit.html</a>
Once again, thanks for this invaluable resource for NS2 :)
PlasmaJoin Date: 2003-04-26Member: 15855Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue
I've done another update today.
1) I've added an option to turn off the sound, look to the far right 2) The site now rotates through the 10 headers Triggerman has come up with randomly (thanks!)
aeroripperJoin Date: 2005-02-25Member: 42471NS1 Playtester, Forum Moderators, Constellation
Minor (somewhat trivial) things:
1) The "play sound" option seems to be cut off a bit by the dev names. Recommend moving it to the same line as "New posts will appear on this page automatically" or other location.
2) The white background clashes a bit with the black background of the headers. Having an option, or changing the background color to black and adjusting font colors accordingly may improve the look of the page.
Nothing to worry about really, its pretty much fine as is save a cosmetic tweak or two.
<!--quoteo(post=1857450:date=Jun 30 2011, 08:56 PM:name=aeroripper)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (aeroripper @ Jun 30 2011, 08:56 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1857450"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->2) The white background clashes a bit with the black background of the headers. Having an option, or changing the background color to black and adjusting font colors accordingly may improve the look of the page.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Yeah, I suggest going for the NS2 forums theme of gray, looks quite good, and the hex-values can be easily copied with the FireBug plugin or with Chrome's built in inspector.
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->2) The site now rotates through the 10 headers Triggerman has come up with randomly (thanks!)<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--> No problem :)
Can you make the tracker show updates to the design decision log? <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/139ySUrBsO0m0Z4ilq0YsDEHJLQhBa6RrIjJIsckL2kE/edit?hl=en&authkey=CLCo8Z0J" target="_blank">https://docs.google.com/document/d/139ySUrB...uthkey=CLCo8Z0J</a>
<!--quoteo(post=1857504:date=Jul 1 2011, 04:43 AM:name=peregrinus)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (peregrinus @ Jul 1 2011, 04:43 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1857504"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Can you make the tracker show updates to the design decision log? <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/139ySUrBsO0m0Z4ilq0YsDEHJLQhBa6RrIjJIsckL2kE/edit?hl=en&authkey=CLCo8Z0J" target="_blank">https://docs.google.com/document/d/139ySUrB...uthkey=CLCo8Z0J</a><!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I did some research (because that's pretty damn interesting as I use GDocs a lot) and it seems like Google have withdrawn their RSS feature for published documents, so it's not that easy to do I think. Kinda sucks. But then again, I'm not a web-magician like Plasma.
endarJoin Date: 2010-07-27Member: 73256Members, Squad Five Blue
I have a suggestion which might make it easier for people in these times of "black screening servers" or similar. Can you display the uptime/time since last restart which is exposed by the overmind query responder?
It would help if someone knows that a server was blackscreening, if its been restarted or not without actually joining the server to find out.
any idea why our server "Heidies Ziegenfarm ([HBZ]HQ)" doesn't appear in your server list? I think its still queriing the servers in it, but updating the list of servers seems broken.
PlasmaJoin Date: 2003-04-26Member: 15855Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue
Hey,
I looked into this for you - your server appears to report the name "My NS2-server" when queried directly, but "Heidis Ziegenfarm (HBZ-HQ)" when listed on the master.
It sounds like you have a modified server and there is a bug that's breaking the query response or something like that? Or your running a second server that's interfering with query responses?
You will see your server's address (95.156.230.60:27016) is actually listed on the page.
no second server. We have a root server and only the NS2 server running on the machine. Only mod is Overmind, maybe something is misconfigured. Or maybe there is a yet unknown bug in overminds query responder (reading the name from the config file even if name specified in command line or something like that?)
Comments
If you leave the page/tab open during the day, it will check to see if there are new posts every few minutes.
If new posts are available, the page reloads, plays a sound and flashes the page title to grab your attention.
Some fans may recognize the sound that gets played :)
You don't need to do anything to use the feature, but you can give it a test/simulation by visiting <a href="http://play4dead.com/ns2/?updatetest=1" target="_blank">http://play4dead.com/ns2/?updatetest=1</a>
Besides that, i'm curious what language and system you are using in the background? ;)
Anyway, I took some time to make a header for the website Plasma. Not sure if it's good enough but it's something.
<img src="http://www.andrige.com/ns2/NS2DevStalkerHeader.png" border="0" class="linked-image" />
@falc: Yeah, I think you are right - there were some problems, I've done a quick update to try and resolve them.
I still fetch everything in real time when you hit the page (so everything is up to date), I do cache GetSatisfaction for a few minutes though because that site is pretty slow.
Fetching Twitter info is quick, but checking the NS2 site sometimes times out (even for me in Australia) and so the page may timeout / fail to load.
I'm considering just caching everything for 5 minutes or so (and updating in the background) so that every visit to the page is instant, but you may be out of date for 5 minutes -- problem? Hmm!
The language I'm using is PHP, I use cURL to grab NS2/Twitter/GetSatisfaction post data in parallel when you visit the page, and MySQL to store some information like how many posts there have been and to assist with tracking ns2 progress tasks.
I have a long running task that checks the progress page as well to find out when new progress tasks are added or change state.
The actual site (unrelated to ns2, play4dead.com) was written a few years ago now, and I've just leveraged some existing code to put this ns2 site together quickly.
@TravCarp: Twitter is working for me at the moment, perhaps it was an intermittent problem - quite possible.
Unfortunately I can't seem to load your picture, its saying forbidden.
@Triggerman: Yeah, basically it means that you can leave the window/tab open in your browser during the (work :) ) day and it will let you know when there's something else to read, instead of having to F5.
I like the header art you've done! I'll look at putting it into use later today if I find the time.
Simple, clean, straight to the point. I dig it.
@Trav: Please let us see what you came up with, maybe I could rotate headers or something every so often :)
I've noticed myself (and you probably have too) that an update apparently happens but you don't see a new post.
There really *is* a new post, its just probably a few rows down the page.
Right now (because of the way the app tries to work out when a forum post was made) it can only determine it roughly within the last 24 hours instead of being more accurate.
Ill look at fixing that soon so that new forum posts actually appear at the top of the page as intended in chronological order.
Bump for usefulness
Had me scratching my head for days, I even uninstalled skype.
<img src="http://www.andrige.com/ns2/NS2DevStalkerHeader_alien-02.png" border="0" class="linked-image" />
<img src="http://www.andrige.com/ns2/NS2DevStalkerHeader_alien-03.png" border="0" class="linked-image" />
<img src="http://www.andrige.com/ns2/NS2DevStalkerHeader_alien-04.png" border="0" class="linked-image" />
<img src="http://www.andrige.com/ns2/NS2DevStalkerHeader_alien-05.png" border="0" class="linked-image" />
<img src="http://www.andrige.com/ns2/NS2DevStalkerHeader_marine-01.png" border="0" class="linked-image" />
<img src="http://www.andrige.com/ns2/NS2DevStalkerHeader_marine-02.png" border="0" class="linked-image" />
<img src="http://www.andrige.com/ns2/NS2DevStalkerHeader_marine-03.png" border="0" class="linked-image" />
<img src="http://www.andrige.com/ns2/NS2DevStalkerHeader_marine-04.png" border="0" class="linked-image" />
<img src="http://www.andrige.com/ns2/NS2DevStalkerHeader_marine-05.png" border="0" class="linked-image" />
Got back home to my .psd-file, had an itch to make a few more of them. I'll make some more later if you want some more in the rotation.
<a href="http://0xfe.blogspot.com/2010/04/desktop-notifications-with-webkit.html" target="_blank">http://0xfe.blogspot.com/2010/04/desktop-n...ith-webkit.html</a>
Once again, thanks for this invaluable resource for NS2 :)
1) I've added an option to turn off the sound, look to the far right
2) The site now rotates through the 10 headers Triggerman has come up with randomly (thanks!)
1) The "play sound" option seems to be cut off a bit by the dev names. Recommend moving it to the same line as "New posts will appear on this page automatically" or other location.
2) The white background clashes a bit with the black background of the headers. Having an option, or changing the background color to black and adjusting font colors accordingly may improve the look of the page.
Nothing to worry about really, its pretty much fine as is save a cosmetic tweak or two.
Yeah, I suggest going for the NS2 forums theme of gray, looks quite good, and the hex-values can be easily copied with the FireBug plugin or with Chrome's built in inspector.
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->2) The site now rotates through the 10 headers Triggerman has come up with randomly (thanks!)<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
No problem :)
I did some research (because that's pretty damn interesting as I use GDocs a lot) and it seems like Google have withdrawn their RSS feature for published documents, so it's not that easy to do I think. Kinda sucks.
But then again, I'm not a web-magician like Plasma.
It would help if someone knows that a server was blackscreening, if its been restarted or not without actually joining the server to find out.
1) Servers now show Uptime info when available
2) Fixed GetSatisfaction 'view more info' link not working correctly (as of late)
I looked into this for you - your server appears to report the name "My NS2-server" when queried directly, but "Heidis Ziegenfarm (HBZ-HQ)" when listed on the master.
It sounds like you have a modified server and there is a bug that's breaking the query response or something like that? Or your running a second server that's interfering with query responses?
You will see your server's address (95.156.230.60:27016) is actually listed on the page.