Umbrella Online | Resident Evil and survival horror gaming

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Oblivion Knight

Oblivion Knight

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Umbrella Online is primarily a Resident Evil and survival horror gaming fan community. The project initially ran from 2002-2003 on vBulletin 2, and after a long hiatus have decided to revive it following the recent remakes of Resident Evil 2 and 3, as well as the upcoming releases of Resident Evil Village and a Netflix series.

Honestly there's been very little development time (probably about 6 hours), but was excited to share what I have so far. Hopefully any issues are minor.. Add-on wise, I'm going for a completely opposite approach to Nerdface and am trying to keep these to a minimum (currently just 4).

A shout-out goes to @Stylesfactory for the style (Rain), his permission for me to edit and customise it, and his awesome support in resolving a couple of issues that were identified with the base style since going live.

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Quick development is the best unless you're going all in on one forum (this, I believe, isn't your first).

Get a taste for how it performs and allow the community to somewhat take part in building it (nodes, etc.). This will make them feel more involved and the retention will be higher.

It looks good as it is, but, I've found key in the retention by allowing others to help design forums. :)
 
Looks good to me, but if I can be honest, after using it for little while I don't care too much for the menu bar and node list hover effect.

I'd like to echo that it is good to see you back in forumland and with a niche that I can help you to support. I love Resident Evil ;)
 
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Great to see you back Nerdface! The forum is looking great too. Loving the hover effects and node bg images. The theme fits well with your niche, hopefully this time it will succeed and you the project will go on longer. Great job thus far!
 
Thank you all for the kind words and returning welcomes.

Lee said:
but if I can be honest, after using it for little while I don't care too much for the menu bar and node list hover effect.
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Lee said:
with a niche that I can help you to support. I love Resident Evil ;)
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Honesty is good, especially in a critiques forum! The design was never going to please everyone, but I quite liked the effect to link back to the Umbrella name and logo as well as breaking up the darker colours slightly.

Your support is much appreciated, and can only apologise I haven't been able to do the same with your latest project yet.
 
It's pretty difficult trying to come up with a "light" style for a survival horror themed site.. but after much grumbling and procrastinating, I think I'm getting somewhere.. The style is now selectable, but is considered a beta. It is once again based on a @Stylesfactory theme (Snow).

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In other news, the project recently moved host to @MattW as he came strongly recommended throughout XF and I'm sick to death of having server issues. Unfortunately (in terms of maintenance), keeping the add-ons to a minimum lasted for all of about 2 weeks.. :X3:

The Wiki was scrapped and is being re-developed using XF2 [8WR] XenCarta 2 (Wiki) PRO by @Jaxel - it's not live yet though.

My username here at XF has also reverted back to the original, Oblivion Knight.. 😎
 
Most likely the last update for 2020 from me.. The return of the Wiki - currently for members only! The previous iteration was just too basic and the xF Glossary script that was used didn't appear to be receiving updates any time soon, so was scrapped. This time it's being powered by XenCarta 2 PRO by @Jaxel as it ticked many of the boxes that I wanted to see developed with xF Glossary. That's not to say it was a perfect fit, hence it has been quite heavily customised.. Allow me to take you on a guided tour!

If you like what you see, please do join the community and help to support it. Thanks.


Wiki Index
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"Choose your destiny!"
Game selection page - note the Contents has been moved to the top of the page


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Navigation has proved to be a bit of a bugbear with XenCarta, as neither the XF breadcrumb nor the built-in Navigation block felt appropriate, particularly the further down you got in to the Wiki. By the third level, you were hitting "many-to-many" relationships (many characters belong to many games) which don't appear to be catered for without a lot of repetition.

I tried a couple of different solutions, but settled on a custom multi-level dropdown menu inspired by the modified navigation bar ([OzzModz] Dropdown Tab Into Multi-Drop Down by @Ozzy47). It seems to achieve the desired result pretty well..


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Not all of the pages and sections are finished yet.. Far from it, writing a Wiki is a monumental task. Rather than not show the games at all, I've opted for a "Coming soon..." overlay when unavailable games are hovered over.


Game page
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Not too much different to see here than has already been covered. Notice the "sections" of game information on the right can be collapsed, though at present these preferences are not stored.. I may look into a solution that stores them as a cookie further down the line.


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Further down the game page, some custom wiki bbcode templates displaying other elements of these games.


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Forgive me for sidetracking to a different game for a moment, but notice the "Soundtrack" and "Discussion" links just above the Contents. XenCarta has the option to have a "wiki discussion forum", but I've instead linked this directly to an already existing thread. The soundtrack links to the Media entry.


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This is the discussion thread linked from above. It uses Game Thread Starter by @Snog and @Ozzy47 which is unfortunately no longer available for public sale, but thankfully I have a license from a previous project.. The information contained within is different to the Wiki, but that's fine - I can edit it if I really want to.


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I opted for an easy solution to link back to the Wiki and the Soundtrack from the discussion thread.. Posting a reply as a bot with links to these pages. Not everything has to be over complicated! :)


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...and this is the Soundtrack linked from both the Wiki and the discussion thread, although this doesn't link back yet (it may do in future). XFMG is using [cXF] Sidebar for Media by @BassMan as to me, it just felt more "uniformed" to the rest of XF.


Character/Creature page
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Designed much like the game page with a slightly different information block, which again are collapsible though currently not stored.


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Finally, a bit of custom BBcode based on XF prefixes, displaying the character's appearances to try and make it feel less wordy. On hover of each prefix, the full game title is shown.
 
If I'm an unregistered user, aren't all posts 'new posts'? I find the many new posts icons over unnecessary but excellent job!
 
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