A quiet few days on here means I’ve been very busy… or lazy but with the current pressure of 6 forum skins, daily server watching and actually sleeping on the odd occasion I highly doubt the latter.
One thing that we lost during the upgrade to vBulletin 4.0 was a range of plugins and products for vB that were very useful to playstuff. We don’t tend to install things willy nilly just because we feel like it, only those that provide a specific purpose or suit our ethos which meant losing one, meant losing a significant proportion of our site’s functionality.
The biggest casualty being our game server status page, which displayed the current map, players, online/offline and other intricacies which made it clear what we were about. Take this post in the feedback sectionI like the look of your site playstuff.
I read many interesting posts.
I would however comment that it is ironic how hard it is to actually play stuff there – i couldn’t even find out if you had servers….
So this raised an important point, the previous addon we used was a phgstats/ vBulletin bridge: http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=118347 but this is for 3.5 and so we were very fortunate it survived right up to the very end, vB 3.8.4.
Being the pragmatic chap I am, I took it upon myself to take a crash course in vBulletin plugin making and ended up with a successful merge of GAMEQ and vBulletin which gives exactly the same functions as the old one.
When it’s in a usable state it will of course be freely released, here, maybe at vbulletin.org but the big boys there scare me somewhat. For now, here are some screenshots:
Admin view of Playstuff servers from an early build.
Here is a normal view:
Pretty view of playstuff servers page. What the end user will see
And you can see it live here:
http://playstuff.net/servers.php
There’s a lot still to do, but while it works and looks good as it does now – I’m fine to leave it as is until I can catch up on the rest of the work I need to do… like schoolwork.
