Shadow of the Eternals and Precursor Forums

DaiAku

Active member
Hi Everyone,

I anticipated this post so much and was so excited to be finally be able to post here - and wanted to do so this morning. However, all of these great plans were side-tracked by issues we didn't anticipate. Before going into all this good stuff let me start out with a proper introduction.

We make video games and have been working towards launching a crowd sourcing campaign and forums for quite some time. I am completely new at forum administration and it is fun, exciting and terrifying to actually be running this thing. Our company is called Precursor Games and today we announced Shadow of the Eternals. Here is a few videos of what we do:

Our Teaser Video

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Our Campaign Video

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When I first started looking at forum software, I was almost certain Vb would be what we would use as this seemed to be the status quo. However, we were determined to make intelligent choices so I investigated several forum options.

Inspired by you!

When I checked out Xenforo, I dug into the lawsuit and read the merits of the case and made up my mind pretty quickly that the case did not seem to have much merit. However, I unfortunately have an understanding of the negative effects of a litigation and the possible downsides so I ran it by the team who also understands these things. In the end when my opinion was asked what we should do, I conveyed the following message. “I think this software is the best choice of all the others out there, however, what I find special about Xenforo is the strength and support of the community. The community is supporting the software because they believe in it so much and this support is very strong. The site is literally running by itself right now despite the litigation. The community made me a believer so lets be honey badgers and use Xenforo”. The team agreed and several months ago in 2012, we purchased Xenforo did our first Xenforo install.

The Inspiration Does Not Stop Here

Crowdsourcing is new and not many people really have a solid understanding of it. We certainly do not claim to have this understanding. However, what has become clear is that keeping in touch with the community is key to success and we felt forum software was key to this. I was inspired by the quality and additions the Xenforo Community provided here and felt we should do something similar with our game. So we started working toward have our community have ways to contribute to the development of the game. Not just opinions, or votes, but real content - like the resources here. There were other inspirations of course - creativity is very ephemeral but this community made an impact. The Order of the Unseen was born so contributors can work together with Precursor to “Make games that they want to play”.

Side-Tracked by SPAM

Our campaign started as expected - with an extremely high number of hits. Over 1k users on at once with a ton of site hits. It all held up! This was great but what surprised us was that the email confirmation for forum registration volume was so high it was flagged as SPAM by Amazon (AWS) they stopped sending the email confirmations. This was later fixed and but we were also flagged as by SPAM by hotmail. We ended turning off email confirmation for registration after 6 hours of the server going live.

The Forums

So on to the tradition part of the post. Here are some quick screens of the forum: we decided to go with 3 styles (not common I know) but we wanted each part to look different.

Precursor.webp

SotEForum.webp

Order.webp

Let me know what you think! Here is a shot of our FAQ with a list of all the add-ons/resources currently employed. Please let me know if we missed anyone and I will try to fix it. It will be crazy the next few weeks but I will pop to check out everyone thoughts.

Forum Credits.webp

Thank you for all the help during the last few months to help make this happen - especially Chris Deeming for keeping me sane when I thought I burned the forums to the ground. It has been a great learning experience and it is fun to be part of this community.

The forums are working great so far but I am sure I have done some things incorrectly. If you see anything please let me know!

Hope you like.

(edit: addition) Just realized I forgot to mention. I am Denis can be seen in the 2nd video.

Wish us luck!
 
Nice looking theme and congratulations. Hope your funding goes as planned and you meet that goal.

Just a minor grievance however when you hover over the tabs on the forums and the menu opens. The tab next to it (tab which is opened) jumps as you move off. Nothing major but something you may want to look at at some time.

Good luck. :)
 
What. The. #@^&.

This is... this is... this is... um Dennis Dyack.. the infamous C.E.O. that founded.... Silicon Knights!? :eek:
 
A quick update. Our forums are over 1000 strong and people really like the Notification Add-on and Post Rating Add-on. Everyone at Precursor Games is very happy with Xenforo!

What. The. #@^&.

This is... this is... this is... um Dennis Dyack.. the infamous C.E.O. that founded.... Silicon Knights!? :eek:

I am sorry that you feel this way Carlos. Here is a video that may address some of your concerns.

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Detailed reference and notes if anyone is interested:

http://www.precursorgames.com/forum...-vlog-plus-notes-references-posts-email.1465/

On the forum side - we have now grown to 1500 members in 2 weeks and the Order is doing amazing things. If you are interested in check out a game project that is working with the community to create content - check us out.
 
@DaiAku and others have been working very hard to get the community going once again. We have some interesting new things coming soon as outlined in our Road Map for the Future thread. Stay tuned for some new things coming soon, and leave any suggestions below. Sure I can pass them on.
 
Only game of y'alls I played was Star Fox Adventures and I'm still mad y'all didn't create more flying levels but I know that ain't y'alls fault. I know it was originally called Dinosaur Planet or something like that and Nintendo lazily asked y'all to turn it into a Star Fox spin-off. They should've let you do Dinosaur Planet and gave Star Fox back to Argonaut to develop or something...
 
The site and game both look great. There are a couple of small issues for me such as the post rating bar doesn't seem to fit in with the theme and the font color for the Facebook text at the footer is legible but perhaps not an ideal color:
.22.webp

Additionally, when I click on the second video it says it's private for me.
 
Thanks for the comments!

The site and game both look great. There are a couple of small issues for me such as the post rating bar doesn't seem to fit in with the theme and the font color for the Facebook text at the footer is legible but perhaps not an ideal color:
View attachment 67887

Thanks. Yes, the post ratings thing is a compatibility issue with Better Blogs and Post Ratings - if I turn off the show 'B' - it goes away. I will post the creators. We are testing and about to launch these features.

Additionally, when I click on the second video it says it's private for me.

Yah, we took that video down sometime ago. I can't edit the post any longer, otherwise I would remove it.

Most beautiful dark theme I've seen in awhile btw.

New Style Chooser.webp

Thank you! We spent some time getting styles that our community would like that looks good (chooser pict - thanks @Shelley !!!) and give some good variety of styles. These are all derived from Space by XenCrea.

Ironically we are about to redo the styles - I was going to post a big update in 2 weeks. We like these but they are not the best for mobile. We will be moving to UI.X and working with @Audentio to make them look awesome.

Can't wait for this! Will post with an update soon!
 
The site and game both look great. There are a couple of small issues for me such as the post rating bar doesn't seem to fit in with the theme and the font color for the Facebook text at the footer is legible but perhaps not an ideal color:
View attachment 67887

Additionally, when I click on the second video it says it's private for me.
The facebook thing is unavoidable unless some admin replaces the code with a light version (I meant white on black bg). I would just leave it alone - unless you want to go back in there after each upgrade. Leave it alone.

But that "bar" thing is a simple color change in one of the options, I forget which, but it's easily done.
 
The facebook thing is unavoidable unless some admin replaces the code with a light version (I meant white on black bg). I would just leave it alone - unless you want to go back in there after each upgrade. Leave it alone.

But that "bar" thing is a simple color change in one of the options, I forget which, but it's easily done.

Thanks Carlos - I will look into getting the fixed :).
 
Going to keep this extremely simple. I am sure @DaiAku will explain everything in more detail!

We got a big update, named Quantum Entanglement stage 1. With the help from @Audentio we have a bunch of amazing theme's based on UI.X. Check us out and leave comments below.
 
Our mission at Precursor Games is to create unique games with community driven design and in our quest to design the best platform for aiding this goal, we went through several different visual style redesigns since we first launched nearly a year ago.

Whilst we were happy with some of the look and feel of our previous styles, there were always more things that we wanted to be able to do that we simply couldn’t do ourselves. For us to be able to provide the best community involvement with our games design, we’re continually updating things and always looking for new and unique ways to improve the user experience and make community involvement in our games design more meaningful. Xenforo as a platform has given us many of the tools to do just that but there was more we wanted to do.

After using several styles - many of them very good but each with their problems we reached out to @Audentio for a combination of great looking styles and great user interface. Mike at @Audentio was excellent and created a customized look for our site quickly and efficiently - using the UI.X framework as a base design/interface and customizing it to fit our unique needs.

Here’s a few shots of the styles and video going over how our site works:

New Style Image 1.webp

New Style Image 2.webp

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Many Styles Ordinem.webp


Our members truly love our latest style updates as well as the new functionality that UI.X brings and we wholeheartedly recommend Audentio to anyone wanting to take their Xenforo site to the next level. The work was professional, accommodating, seamless and worthwhile. We couldn’t be happier with the work done by them. Audentio comes with our highest recommendation and we’re looking forward to working with them again in the future.

Our hat’s off to @Audentio - Great work!

For a complete rundown of the changes on our site you can see this thread with many videos and screenshots.

I understand that you are only supposed to have one thread per forum but I could not update the original post. So hopefully the mods can just lock/delete the old one.

Thanks!

Hope everyone likes!
 
It looks very very nice, you've done an excellent job on this! So are you in search of moderators or anything!? (Shameless plug)

In all seriousness, everything so far has been great though I'm not sure if you meant for guests to be unable to see any of the Media. I also have a small pet peeve with the FAQ, all of the text is aligned directly against the UI.X edges which is an issue I actually had. To fix that simply insert the following line into your EXTRA.CSS template:

Code:
.faqItem {padding-left: 10px}
 
It looks very very nice, you've done an excellent job on this! So are you in search of moderators or anything!? (Shameless plug)

In all seriousness, everything so far has been great though I'm not sure if you meant for guests to be unable to see any of the Media. I also have a small pet peeve with the FAQ, all of the text is aligned directly against the UI.X edges which is an issue I actually had. To fix that simply insert the following line into your EXTRA.CSS template:

Code:
.faqItem {padding-left: 10px}

Glad you like thanks! Yes they are supposed to be to see the media. I will look into that - permissions :( - the bane for us. :) Thanks for the tip on the FAQ as well!
 
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