Half-Life Improvement Team

This is great news, I was kinda saddened how the flow of news had shrunk down to a small trickle, but atleast now I can know that's a small trickle of hope. :P

OH SNAP!

And yeah it's HL1's Bday.

The site looks great, and this news is very, very welcome.

:D

Its rather amazing what you can do with Javascript these days :)

Looking forward to see what you guys cook up.

Well shit, I've been waiting for this day for 10 years and when it comes I completely forget about it.

stupid sexy flanders

We have a winner. Yeah, we weren't waiting for it, exactly. But then the site was just about ready a while before this date, so we figured it was the best possible time to launch.

It wouldn't be anything without modern browsers supporting it. And anyone still using an ancient browser won't get the pretty stuff. It's not just JavaScript, but CSS that has to work as well, they go hand in hand. Not to mention web standards, best practices (including progressive enhancement), and whatever buzzwords I can fill this post up with. Those are more important than being able to do snazzy things with JavaScript. What can I say, I love web development, along with sprucing up Half-Life. :)

What a way to start the day. And what a perfect day to go public as well. I'll be keeping my good eye on this one, as I have in the past.

So could we start sabering the champagne and finally warring our T-Shirt "I Knew HIT wasn't dead, bitches" ?

Not mentioning what you can do with stuff such as jps or asp.net

Edit: I just played with the new website, it's really nice, even if links are redirecting to nowhere, bring me back so old memories, thanks

What next, a DNF release?!

I like what you've done to the website, but the links all bring up blank pages :-\

What will the Blue Shift: Unlocked Update hold in store for us? Minuit just got permission from Matt to use the BS:U code for a new mod of mine.

The pages were working before. Not sure what has changed now

Not the code, just the tool to convert the maps to standard HL bsp files

This is the best thing this week.

Hell, it might just be the best thing this month!
I love the new layout, and good luck on your projects!

I take it was a new theme, not an update for the previous ones? Cuz I'm using HECU + I don't see anything different, other than the updated news box. :P

Completely new site. Not just a theme

Link

OH.

I don't go to the main site anymore, just directly to the forums.

That is one of the reasons why we implemented the news system with the forums. I thought most people would tend to visit just the forums.

Hopefully eventually we will get a matching forum theme. Depends if Ambient.Impact feels like doing it :P

Damn, for a crowbar, that's pretty damn tight.Good to see things are still going :)

Blasphemy! Who is this mortal?! Good to see you here. :)

Those are backend languages, and they all output the same thing: HTML. Best practices are much more important than any scripting/programming language, backend or frontend. Remember that. The quality of the HTML you output is more important than what language you choose to generate it.

Thanks. Was going for the ol' WON-style, pre-Steam. Yeah, there was a technical hiccup. Those pages are there, but with a "Coming Soon" message plastered where the content should be. I'm still trying to figure out why they're not displaying. Probably a PHP error. At any rate, it'll be fixed soon...I hope.

That's the plan.

:O QUICK EVERYONE FLAME HIM, anyways the design really fits well loads quickly and works in Opera quite nicely

Huh, me too. Site is simple yet cool.

D:

I haven't gone to the main site (other than today) since I was looking for BS:U, which was.... D:

Months ago.

Agreed, tho.

It looks great, reminds me of HL alot.

Now if Shooter Sucessfully releases his month this week, it is going to be the best week ever!

That's because I'm a responsible web developer. Along with sticking with web standards and all that other good stuff I mentioned, I test in all major browsers. By the way, Opera 9.5 and up run the title animation and everything else so silky smooth it's ridiculous. Only Chrome and Mozilla 1.9 browsers (Firefox 3, etc.) come close to its performance level.

That's the idea. Glad you like it. :)

Yes indeed ok I will unflame you

Damn! That's a nice update. Good to hear from you again! I love the new design of the main page. Good work!

This is prrrobably out of the question, but perhaps, making a theme for both BS + OpFor, coloring some of the grey to green to match the OpFor/BS WON backgrounds, to go with forum OpFor/BS themes?

Just a suggestion.

yey.

So fantastic!

Well this is pretty cool, I was looking at the HL:E section and was beginning to wonder a lot about it, then this came up and now I'm like, "Woah! Awesome time to become a little more interested into HL:E now!"

The new front page is quite awesome. :)

It's something I'd like to do. It won't be anytime soon, but I might get around to it at some point.

The HIT default theme is a little bit strange right now.
I'm not sure if it's supposed to look lke this but having boxes around the links seems like some sort of glitch.

Yep, that's intentional. Mind you, in browsers that support rounded corners (via CSS, not the image method I use in the Half-Life theme, which is different - Firefox, Safari, and Chrome support this), they look slightly better, with the corners slightly smoothed. I gave links that background because the traditional link colour didn't contrast enough with the background, kind of hit the ol' eyes funny a bit. I'm still not really happy with it, but at least it's readable.

A.I., how about concentrating on mods that's going on here? I mean now the site is almost useless. Or no? I really can't see its purpose.

It serves a simple presentation and gathering spot for simply accessible information concerning their current projects, and even if publicity is not the main point, it still stands as helpfull.

hmm the link button path has changed as it was http://www.hl-improvement.com/images/links/hitbutton.gif

Anton is right: Having information in a public, easy-to-reach place is quite important. You might be used to interacting with the forum, but not everyone is interested in doing that, or they don't have the time, or a number of other reasons. When you go to a website, you go there looking for something. In our case, it's usually new content for Half-Life. You have to look at this from the point of view of the average user, not just from your own. I'm sorry that you don't see the website as a worthwhile project, but it's quite important to us, if we're to grow.

Nice to see a familiar face around here and good to hear that the projects will be contined :)
BTW: A nice site you built up there. Brings back the good ol' WON feeling.

Yeah I also like the WON themed new style of the homepage!
And it's nice to see you are still around A.I, and great to hear that HIT is still working on HL:E! ;)

Thanks guys. Yep, things are moving forward (even if pretty slowly), which is better than nothing.

I'm glad you guys like the classic WON style. I always felt that Valve shouldn't have dropped that launcher when they moved to Steam. It had way more character, and was much more interesting than the boring thing they have now. That's the only thing about Steam Half-Life I don't like.

Me too, the WON menu was much better than the STEAM one!
I really love the AVI logo, the buttons, the heads and the splash background.
The splash background has a big plus: It's one BMP file
But it also have a minus: BMP format isn't that good, and it has to be 640x480 pixel

The WON menu was much better to customize for Mods!
All you can customize on the STEAM menu is the Background and the Logo in the left lower corner. :-\

You can also customise the menu on the splash screen. Infact, it is more customisable than the WON menu

Oh no it's not. I can redraw EVERY single thing in WON menu, every single thing. All the buttons (including arrows and crosses), all the text, all the colors.

Great, I appear to have started some sort of argument over which menu is/was better.

You're mostly right, Besli. The WON menu's graphics were much more customizable, but the behaviour, order, and commands weren't. Those weren't flexible. At most, all you could do was disable a couple of them, such as the console or multiplayer. Also, you appear to have your resolution digits backwards, it was 640 by 480. :)

Slow down there. What Matt was trying to say was that the actual menu items are much more flexible in the Steam version. Not only can you change what they say, but you can also change what they do, and what order they're in. In fact, you can even set up menu items to execute an engine command, like load a map, or set a CVAR. He didn't mean that it was more graphically more customizable than the WON menu.

Now then, can we keep this on topic?

Why do you, A.I. and Besli keep talking like this about WON and Steam menus :P

anyway, nice too see that you are still making stuff, the cbar looks pretty rad.

Because of the new Homepage Design! :P

Now that the Homepage is redone the syling of the Forum doesn't fit anymore! ::)

NICE! I like the desing of the website, VERY GROOVY :) can't wait to see your web updated.