A.D.A. Amiga Demoscene Archive

Hi ada visitors :)

It seems that there might be some (limited) room/time for ada www development in the (near) future. So i'd like to use this thread as a feedback topic from visitors. Is there anything you want to see changed? New features? Bugs that need to be fixed,...? It can all go here. I can't promise that all will be executed but they will certainly be taken into consideration.

I'll start with the controversial bit: i actually plan to slim down the website and focus on the bare essentials in the future. We all know the imdb of the demoscene is coming, containing every bit of info you can imagine and more. Also, Pouet is still going strong with a lot of demos and info and a very active community.

To be honest, ada was never intended to be anything more than a collection of solid, good demos with lovely screenshots (i hope) and the most essential info: credits, general demo info (party,...), amiga download link all wrapped in an easy to navigate and simple site/design. Since time is limited and since there is no use in replicating Demozoo or Pouet (i wouldn't even know where to start), i think i'll concentrate on this in the future.

That means i'd like to scrap some stuff in the database:
- demogroup url: demosceners usually don't care that much for their websites, i have the impression. Lots of them are left unattended, vanish, change url,... It's something that is hard to maintain and i'm wondering if it's worth the effort. Personally, i very rarely visit demoscene group websites.
- link to demoscene soundtracks: on noname's suggestion, i once started this feature since i think it's a nice idea. However, it's rather hard to maintain and quite a bit of work.
- link to videos: this was interesting back in the day when videos were difficult to find. Nowadays, everyone uses Youtube (i suppose?) and there are usually a lot of videos for one demo (varying in quality). Since it's very easy to go on Youtube and search, i'm sort of wondering if there is a point to keep this.

In essence, i want to go back to credits/info (chipset, party release/...)/screenshots/working amiga download and keep this as up to date and as correct as possible for each demo. I'd rather have less info/links to external sites that is all correct and working instead of huge amounts of info/links of which a lot are not working/hard to maintain, if that makes sense. I also plan to change all amiga download links to scene.org in the future (since it's the most reliable external source for demoscene stuff).

Ultimately, i'd like to go to a website that can be moderated by multiple persons with a www interface so hopefully that's something that will be done in the future.

It'll be interesting to see what you think of this and of any other opinion is appreciated.

z5, I think the future of ADA lies in the fact that it has become the very hub for the creative core of the Amiga Scene; with strong focus on the coding and general production outlining aspect -- at least that is my perception.

Good to hear!

I wish the screenshots were full resolution.
I also think it would be a good idea to host the demos on ADA.

Good news! ADA becomes the center of creative part of the Amiga scene. And that's the fact.

With some improvements it can activate the amiscene community even more.

My ideas:

- news section (!): amiga related news with the possibility of addings comments (even ADA related news
should be here, like list of new productions added).

- the ability of adding news / site administration by more people

- one user database (there are 2 now).

- maybe some year filters in charts section

z5, good focus choices! also.. as I can't seem to figure out how to do it, maybe an easy option for jumping to the latest post in the forum in the list at bottom?

I rather enjoy the current size of the screenshots and the mosaic layout - it gives a great overview of the demo. and the shots are indeed lovely :D

I think it's time to add something in the system requirements info pane. it's been a while since a generic "OCS" or "AGA" pretty much says NOTHING about a demo (we have plenty of 68060+32MB only prods f.i.)
So, my 2 cents: Chipset, CPU class/frequency, minimum amount of FastRAM.
And maybe a "UAE" chipset category for, let's say, Elude stuff! ;P

Slimming down on features is fine. I could live without logos, although they are kind of nice as a collection.

Forum, screenshots, discussions, and linked credits are key ingredients of ada to me.

A welcome quick fix could be to jump to the end of a discussion rather than page 1. And maybe youtube links instead of videos.

More fundamentally, I would like to suggest considering opening up the ada data by complying to the 5 star data plan that berners-lee sketched out for the web. And have us users help maintain the data. That could be awesome.

I have to say that ADA is perfect for me right now :-) I'll give some ideas but for me it's perfect as it's now:

ADA:
-Filtering prods optionally by cpu may be handy for those who have slower machines like 030.
-Storing files locally could be nice although links to mirrors may be nice too (and having both party and final versions available). Maybe a link to www.scene.org file could be enough?
-Youtube links to HQ versions could be useful too (although real men watch demos on real hardware) ;-)

Forum:
There's a lot of interesting programming information, so a box with search option that calls google for example using something like
site:ada.untergrund.net word_to_look_for
could be nice.


All in all: Thanks for your efforts! BTW, we want more intros from you :-)

I'll get back to all of your points but i'll divide them in smaller chunks.

Starting with the forum, i have the impression that these things are needed most:

- ADA homepage: when you click on a topic => go straight to last reply in that topic (bsttr, noname)
- one unified user database for the ada website and the forum (slayer and a lot of people who mail me to ask why they can't log in to the forum with their ada user info)
- one unified login system for the ada website and the forum. If we could use the ada login system, then the ADA demo quiz would probably also solve the problem of the forum spambots, since they aren't usually that good in amiga demo quiz :)

As Charlie pointed out, there is a way to let miniBB use an external user database so in theory it should be possible. However, there is a bit of problem since we should have done this in the beginning. Not sure if there is a way to implement this system at this point without losing to much forum posts,...

Great news!!

Here's some random thoughts of mine.. :D


No offence, which it isn't, as it is praise ;) ...but no site out there has such a clean and nice presentation as ADA. Pouet and potentially Demozoon are much more complete as databases, but I'd prefer ADA anytime if the production is there. With that in mind, the sole reason for scrapping features would be if they're to hard to maintain.


Argh!!! And I registered finally managed to register powerline this week! :D Maybe I'm blind, or it's gone already, as I can't find any such links. Anyway, since "the core" hang around here on ADA, imho having links to groups would be good. I'd imagine it can be time consuming to maintain, so a rough idea would be to only add one when a group requests it. That would perhaps at least solve half the problem. The other one - 404 - well that could require some effort from the community to help out. Some kind of mechanism to "report" obsolete stuff perhaps?


Keep it!!! It's just sad seeing your own or others' productions being shown in (for example) 30 FPS when it was designed to run all effects in 50, recorded on unknown hardware or even on virtual one etc.. That's not Amiga! In these days when we more and more watch demo as video it's even more important for the makers of those to be able to encode them in a way they feel is true to the real thing. Being able to download such via a link on ADA is worth a lot imho!

Some other ideas others might already have mentioned:

-Would be great to have compact but essential info on system requirements: Chipset, CPU, (FPU?), Memory, and (for demos) size on disk. Would be even better to have the compo machine/rules somewhere too. Again, I refer to my first paragraph here: You can find all this at other places if you search, but having it on ADA's neatly presented pages would be the right place!

-Minor wish: More screen shots! Would be nice if a button click would expand the screen shot area and showed more screen shots. I feel some demos can't be done justice without many of them, yet it's a good thing to keep the number down as default. This also has parallels with resolution. As is now, 160x128 shown no difference between 2x2 and 1x1 stuff. Yet I like the current compact presentation so something like the above might be an idea? :)

-Finally - my top wish: Be able to send PMs to each other!!! Don't know how many times I wanted to contact someone here or offer help, but didn't as I wouldn't want to post contact info on a forum open to the whole world.

tremendous thing you created, z5, it's still alive so big up =D

for some reason I had an interview with you done by some "DH" in a textfile.. think it dates back to 2004 and you get to say some about your background and motivation for ADA back then, and even thoughts about future revisions.. and it was interesting to read that you already were thinking of a demo-fx-o-pedia, which I saw was proposed here somewhere, in the not so distant past.

Anyways, if ADA were to be "innovative" again, perhaps a sort of "stumbleupon"-service would be a benefit for the community, that could be a good alternativ to the other alternatives out there =)

Someone mentioned something in the directdion of having an editorial staff. I think that sounded intriguing because sometimes I get the kicks and just want to know something about something stupid. Since I sorta started scening again I haven't seen one diskmag.. tell me diskmags didn't die!... =P

If a part of the site was to be news and shit, then an editorial staff could for example shine a light on Photon's great youtube-tutorials.. which perhaps wouldn't have happened without Vikke, and like that you have some sort of article where certain things in the videos could be further emphasized or discussed or whatever - for the ambitious new/late bloomer programmer... Would things like that help the set of up&coming programmers, and perhaps keep some veterans interested as a side effect?

One thing I read (in the datastorm2013-thread) is Angry RB who said something like "again, again they pissed on us" referring to democompos (amiga having little releases or sumthing.....).

I'm simply thinking that one way to change that is to make it exciting to be an amigascener.. or?

I think there would have to be some limit on who could update what. If the database becomes too freely updateable it will probably be abused by spammers at some point :(
Also, the addition of an "undo" option may be required so that if bad data gets entered, then it can be reverted back to what it was within a set time period (e.g 2 months).