Hi Angel Welcome to the forum, and thank you for this great intro, its always interesting to hear peoples stories.
Ooph, I know the feeling, HTML took me years to get into.. I think these days I'm of the opinion whatever you are able to use and enjoy using is perfect, wix, carrd or html; although html does give a A LOT of freedom.
Fashion has always been a secret interest of mine, I think indie sites and games are a lot like it; they are not really practical, but practicality is not the point, its the spectacle and play between ideas that's important!
I just wanted to do a quick review of this book because some of you might enjoy it! My uncle got it for me for Christmas and firstly its a BIG impressive book, but looking online right now its like 17 euro, so that's a reeeaalllyyy good deal!
Basically its a loose outline of the early history of video games, it has descriptions of some famous games and some interviews with their creators. Both are fine, its interesting that this was made before the retro games scene realy kicked off so all the interviews are like "Wow I'm surprised anyone cares about this", but I think the real benefit is the context it gives some games; it explains them in relation to what was happening at the time which is super useful as someone who did not exist then!
I think more than anything I LOVE the visual style and print format, whoever did the layout really pulled a lot from 80s design catalogues, right down to the way the ink feels on the page is perfect. I pictured it next to a real 80s catalog below for comparison. Its apparently from 2001 and maybe what I like so much is the 2001 vibe mixed with the 80s vibe? Its this super cool mashup of moods and it just exudes cool. (Discamer, I'm not sure if they have the same print quality on newer editions)
Complaints! My big complaint is that its entirely retrospective, its looking backwards without connecting that past much into the future. It is a history book though so I suppose that is to be expected! Again its also from a time before the retro scene, and I would argue being from 2001 its from a time before games got boring? (Although that's a whole other debate!)
Anyway, if you have or get this book, or other books like it Id love to hear your thoughts! Do you find books like this interesting/useful?
Ah that's a fair question! So yes there is a degree of grey area; all the images here are from asset archives found on archive.org or other online sources, so they already exist out in the wild.
These are from asset/stock collections though, the original idea was that you would get a CD with textures on it, and you could freely use those textures in your projects; so they were intended to be used and included in projects.
Many of the CDs were handed out for free, some were included with software and others were sold; but of the ones that were sold, none are still available for sale and most of the companies that made them are gone, ADDITIONALLY most of these assets are too low res or low quality for modern games; I cant imagine a large AAA company using textures like this.
Long story short, these textures are really quite obsolete, but I think they are super cool. So this site is more like a personal project honoring them. Iv also resized and compressed most images, so if you want full res originals you'll have to go and get the original CDs, but for indie and web projects these lower res versions are perfect!
Hi Paint! Welcome to the forum, hopefully you enjoy your stay ~~~
A van huh? Iv often considered going the tiny home rout, but Id really have to learn to drive first.. these self driving cars were supposed to be here by now! ANYWAY I suppose websites are always a good way to waste hours, its surly better to waste them on cool indie sites instead of facebook though
Id like to share my new website for sharing textures with everyone! Its an archive of MANY old 90s textures and patterns, it also has 3d sampler animations and a demo room you can test your textures in. Hopefully you find it useful!
Oh no, I have lots, possibly more than I should admit
A big one is sites that depend 100% on Javascript to load content (unless they are actually a JavaScript game or world). Also inline styling <body background="red"> etc unless there is a veryyyy good reason for it!
Iv also been on Neocities for a long while, so there are some things Iv seen too many times. For example joke 90s sites kinda annoy me now, even though my site started like that too. People are at different stages in their web dev journey so I try to give people a lot of leeway in my mind for a lot of things.
Also welcome to Angel, Slugger, Danny, Drazkise, Memoru and Ryuichi and Mortimer; if and when they visit the forum
Excellent artwork on your site, I'm always super impressed when people can do complex pixel art like that, if you ever wanna submit some graphics to the forum you'd be more than welcome! Maybe we should host an exhibition
Hi, so a few people have asked me why DN was discontinued on the 12/3 and Ill try to explain here, there are a few points!
So Im basing this info off some tests I made; I logged what words people searched for, the date they were searched, and what results that search returned. These logs were temporary, anonymous and have been deleted.
The results:
Basically, I made a fundamental mistake about how people use the old web. I assumed they would know what they wanted and therefor search for it, but in reality people don't think like that. Instead, when someone is on the old web they want to just click and explore; so when I presented them with a search bar they had no idea what to search for, so all anyone did was search themselves! That's not very interesting, so they would do it once then leave
Sadly its also a little less wholesome than that, DN was getting hit with a lot of searches for illegal content, thankfully none was being found, but it made me unhappy. Im not sure where that traffic was coming from, but I did not want to associate my site or other peoples sites with that kinda traffic. As someone creating a directory/search service, I think its somewhat my responsibility not to expose the sites I promote to abuse if I can help it
Besides all that, the site traffic was quite low, and the work in keeping it online was quite high. Although this version of DN is MUCH more stable that the first version in 2017, it was still work!
So I concluded that it was best to close the site.. I have to admit I'm feeling way less stressed since them Although Im sad to have lost this thing I made and loved, and some of you perhaps liked too.
The Future!
Im not done yet! I have loose PLANS in the works! Possibly to create some sort of directory service site (I know everyone's doing it these days!) based on the DN style. Annd maybe merging that with something like MelonTown, or a 3D explorer.
In the meantime though, for those of you curious, I have open sourced the DN code here: https://github.com/Melonking906/Daniels-Network-Search its all there and if you have the skills it should not be hard to start up your own node.
Site note, but something that always struck me about Pokemon is that it has no roads or mass transport. Almost all travels seems to happen on lil country roads, even between big cities. Its kinda like the 1800s, where there is a very different lifestyle depending on where you live, and areas in the wild are excellently lawless.
I think what appealed to me as a kid was the feeling of freedom in Pokemon, you could just walk out into the world and it was all like a big wild garden with cities and towns. I guess Id still like to grow up to be Ash, but when I look at my real life I guess Im more like professor oak
I keep looking at this and meaning to reply, sorry for the delay
This very much has a mood, I get Silent Hill vibes from it, but its also sorta cozy?? Iv never heard of Blend4Web though, is it new or old? It seems super handy that you can export directly from blender to site. ALTHOUGH, you could try exporting as x3d too, that might be less of a hassle? Im not sure, gotta explore blender more!
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Welcome to the forum, and thank you for this great intro, its always interesting to hear peoples stories.
Although Im sad to have lost this thing I made and loved, and some of you perhaps liked too.
