A.D.A. Amiga Demoscene Archive

Any opinions about A.D.A version 3 are really welcome. What did you think about it? An improvement over the previous version? The biggest changes in version 3 were:
- completely new design
- layout changed on many pages
- ability to add comments and votes on the same page as the demo (it is possible to comment on a demo while viewing the screenshots. And idea from Loaderror)
- the scener database (on which i still have some questions to ask)
- the news being database driven, meaning that it will be possible to see older news.
- the party list, where you can now see all the years and go straight to one year, or still see an overview of all years
- demos with multiple downloads (for example more than one disk) are now all listed in downloads, instead of only the first disk being in download and the others in "extra info". An idea from Patrik Axelsson
- the comments are not all on the same page anymore, resulting in shorter pages. You can navigate through all the pages with the navigation buttons. (that was obvious, wasn't it)

and some other little thingies here and there.

all it good, but forum is little buggy. cannot login by my login and edit my posts. Login string in bootom of all messages is little annoing.

kas1e:
strange... i can login. Anybody else who can't login?

i use old account , and it works .. plz, delete kas1e from your base. thnx.
btw, new style of ada3 really nice.

Registration works here...
Ok, fantastic new look and features! Congratulations and thanks for your work, z5!
Being able to look at screenshots while writing a comment is the most important improvement for me.
Time for bitching around, though: I still think that using jpeg's for the screenshots is the wrong choice, gif should be only way to go... some shots look better, some look worse (but since they are all scaled down anyway, this might not be that important). that's too late now to change, I guess.
And there are still links broken, I`m afraid.
Well, well, sorry for these ungratefull sentences ;)
Glad A.D.A. is back and better than ever before!
Cheers

@z5

You know you r00l! ;)

The new design works really well and looks great. Like the scener database so that you can check all the productions from a specific scener. Great work z5, the only thing missing now I guess is to get the same layot in the forum as on the main site.

And yeah, great to see the forum back online.

thanks :)

Yep, the downloads... we sort of recovered from making A.D.A 3 so i should start correcting some links soon. Most that don't work are from amigascne.org because the directory structure was changed.

As for integrating the forum into the A.D.A design. It's not that easy because it's a premade forum and i want to be able to upgrade the forum to future versions without much hassle. Still, i'll see what i can do :)

Keep in mind, A.D.A is teamwork. Most of the credits for A.D.A 3 should go to vanquish for the layout/design/...

Time for bitching around, though: I still think that using jpeg's for the screenshots is the wrong choice, gif should be only way to go... some shots look better, some look worse (but since they are all scaled down anyway, this might not be that important). that's too late now to change, I guess.
Hi un0,

You are correct in saying that it is not important for scaled or manipulated images. Maybe a little explanation would interest everyone...

Where a demo/image has a predetermined palette, i.e, there is a specific RGB colour for each colour entry in the palette (this is the usual Amiga palette range; 16, 32, 64HB or 256 colours) then this is regarded as an 'Indexed File'.

If you need to apply any image processing effects or scaling/size manipulation then the file needs to be RGB. The reason is that to accurately manipulate an image you need to change it and also be able to change the palette - something you cannot do with an Indexed File.

Example:
Tile.LBM is has 2 colour palette of black and white and consists of a 2-by-2 pixel image with each pixel alternating in colour - just like a chess board.

To make this image half the size (1-by-1 pixels) you would need to average out the colours in the image to find a colour that represents all the colours in the image - in this case, the pixel would need to be grey. And here lies the problem with an Indexed File... there is no grey in the palette. Therefore, if you were to scale this file you would have to decide which of the 2 colours (black or white) the pixel should be. The result is an image that does not really represent the original image.

Now, this is an extreme example but explains the issue.

The same applies to the pixels themselves...

If you half the size of a Indexed image you would literally lose every other pixel in both X & Y. This causes real problems if the image is dithered in a checker board manner because you just end up with a solid block of colour (instead of a dither) AND it can make the image look really blocky because any anti-aliasing in the image (as drawn by the artist) could lie on the X & Y pixels that have been removed. The opposite is true if you scale the image bigger by 50%...every other pixel in the X & Y would have to be double width. 100% bigger would require doubling the size of every pixel. The resulting image just looks terrible.

Still following me? ;)

So, the beauty of an RGB file is that you can look at the pixels and colour information, work out the scaling/manipulation and calculate exactly what the new pixels should look like, in both colour and size. This is called interpolation or filtering (bilinear or trilinear).

The bottom line is that if you need to scale the original image, you get better results switching the palette mode from Indexed to RGB. And because all the pixels and colour information would have been changed by this process, there are are no original pixels to save - therefore it does not matter what file format you save it as.

If the images are original (ie, not scaled or manipulated in any way) then retaining the original file format (or saving as an Indexed file format such as LBM, IFF, PNG or GIF) gives you a more accurate representation of the original file (as the author intended).

BUT, in my experience, saving images as 100% JPG does not recalculate or destroy the original pixels - all you lose is the indexed palette file (you'll get a full 24bit RGB palette instead).

Hope this makes sense!

Oh, and I'm glad that you all like the new design! :o)

I

rload
you were saying? :)

Huh? where did my message go?

I was saying:
+ Design rules! (cool colour scheme)
+ Comment box on screenshots rules

- browsing demos, spotting one to comment, logging in and being thrown back to main page and then having to browse to the demo again is annoying, but I don't really mind much :)

rload
ok, good points. I'll see what i can do. If you have more, please report them. Seeing the non-commented and non-voted demos should be quite easy to do on the user page.

The main site's design is the ultimate...very cool job indeed! Stands out as one of the nicest looking scene sites out there.

But as I feared would happen, this forum has not been updated with the new gfx. :o) Is MiniBBS based on CCS/templates? It would be so much nicer if it had the same design as the main site...

Didn't really see the previous versions, but the current one looks really fine and even loads very fast (*cough* pouet *cough*) ... and as a bonus, the logo-gallery is absolutely gorgeus :)

as a bonus, the logo-gallery is absolutely gorgeus :)

Talking about the logo gallery, this is something i should update more often in the future. There are so many great logos out there. Well, today i added 14 new logos.

But as I feared would happen, this forum has not been updated with the new gfx. :o) Is MiniBBS based on CCS/templates? It would be so much nicer if it had the same design as the main site...

As said, i will see what i can do. The forum is indeed CSS/templates but i want to be able to upgrade to newer version easily so customising will be kept to a minimum.

Looks excellent :) Ive missed this site alot!

z5, the only thing I can really miss is auto-login by a persistent cookie alá pouet.net... I mean anyways local security is already implemented at the OS level with multiple users and most people set the passwords to autofill I think...

z5, please fix this logo, I recall this is opening screen for rom #2 (sorry can't check right now for sure)

Also this logo by facet is from rink a dink by lemon

winden
i'll fix the logos with the next update.