Good morning~! The time has come, we have a couple big things in store for everyone! We've been working on a big update to the community website for a while and it is finally finished. This is an extension of the one we published early last year, Rowdy has been working on more here and there since.
We're all very excited for this, as we feel as though this helps bring new potential into SCG. There's so much I want to share, but I'll do it in pieces, today I'll start with two big things.
But not just any Wiki, not even MediaWiki, this one is ours. Rowdy made it himself from scratch, fully integrated into the SCG website. And it has all of the proper features, custom syntax support, editing tools, categorization, special robot pages, search tools, etc. It's not a work in progress, it's done, and it works.
However, what it lacks is content mostly, I've written over 100 articles (well, most of them are unfinished and some are just category pages). but that's where the next part comes in...
But first, so what is the Wiki for? Wikis are just generally useful overall, I plan to make it a super centralized database of all of whatever important information we have. Server commands, plugin info, community tools, etc. I also want to assemble a list of credits for...everything possible. I'll...talk about that one soon. But also like, SCG history, that'll be there too!
Okay so what about the help we need...?
No more using Google forms, we have one of our own now. It works the same exact way, I can build all sorts of neato forms and questionnaires. Do you know that feedback poll we kept talking about? You can actually go and vote for tomorrow! I know we said today, but we just want oneeee day to let this information flow around first!
To help keep the voting process good and stuff, this particular poll will require that you've played on SCG before, all you gotta do is login and it'll work. And if it doesn't...? Uh...maybe come talk to us! ^//^;; But like, that's one of the options we can do now with our own polling tool! Also, anything you submit, will be anonymous, like, nothing is associated with anything. We use hashes to make sure people don't double dip, but otherwise it's all anonymous!
Oh...so like...
You know what doesn't require any sort of special access? An open questionnaire asking if you'd like to be apart of the Wiki team! I'm assembling a team...on Discord~! A collaborative team to work together to help fill out the Wiki with the stuff we need! If you're interested in helping out, toss us your Discord ID here: https://www.scg.wtf/poll/21
These are some big things, Rowdy worked really hard! But there's still more to come! But I'll stop bugging you for now, before I go, Rowdy told me to include this, just a super condensed list of what all was done the last few months. X3
Yes, the formatting below is incorrect, it will be fixed when I push a website update over the weekend, I'd fix it now but I'm very sleepy, plz understand thank
I'd like to first give you an apology for how quiet things have been, it's been really busy around the observatory!
During the last few...oh I don't even want to think about it, there has been substantial work done to the behind the scenes of how SCG works, while our messages haven't been frequent, I can assure you, we've been having fun like always! You're going to be hearing a lot about the recent additions to our servers soon, as well as some new games and events along the horizon!
I originally wanted to announce something big today, but between all of the craziness in the world right now, as well as the imminent release of Elden Ring, I figure it is best to wait until Monday perhaps. PLUS, this will also help me test to see if the new news system works, so that's cool I guess!
Do me a favor will ya? If you read this post, mind giving it a thumbs up? If you do, Rowdy will be really happy, and if you didn't know, Rowdy isa ferret now. Happy ferrets are really cute, and you'll get to picture them in your head, isn't that worth it? :3
Little things is a major SCG update designed around the idea of quality of life fixes. The inspiration came from an idea I had a few months ago while playing on our MVM server. A player had accidentally used their canteen before the round had even started, and I felt so bad for them in particular that I had spent that evening coming up with a plugin that could prevent accidental canteen usage.
When I described it to others, it was praised as a quality of life thing. Normally when I work on things, it's usually some big feature or a bug fix or something. I never really thought about little things, so that was the goal this time around.
There's two parts to this, the SCG website, and our TF2 servers.
###Starting to support alternative fonts
The Jewelbox is now starting to support alternative fonts! Presently, I have enabled the option to switch your font to the Open Dyslexic font which has been designed to be easier to read for some folk. You can learn more about that here
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###Team Fortress 2 settings
Let's get this out of the way!
I have introduced a new settings page that allows you to adjust settings for the TF2 servers!
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This page works even if you haven't been on the servers yet, as long as you have your Steam ID associated with your profile. If you are a donator, you should also be able to adjust your donator settings here as well!
###Personal stats
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There is now a page for your personal stats, though right now the only thing that we track is your personal victories in MVM. It is used as a checklist to determine what missions you have and have not yet completed!
###Home page
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When you log in to the Jewelbox, you are now taken to your home page. It acts as a small portal to some of the features of the website, as well as a list of suggestions to help get you started!
###Achievements
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The website also offers new achievements! This is a new feature, and there aren't a lot of them yet. The long term goal is to provide some goals for people to work on while being apart of SCG.
###So what's the plan from here?
These features above were designed with the goal of providing more for the community as it is, but also built in a way to scale to any and all future plans. They may not seem super exciting, but at the very least, this is all personal practice for me in my own skills as a designer so...there's that!
###Other updates
The following are a list of fixes and otherwise for the SCG site itself.
-The Member directory now has a proper search function
-Assorted graphic changes to the Jewelbox
-You can now @ people in posting pages
-New notifications system, however at the time isn't completely implemented
-Profile activity feed is now up and working
-Auto saving for discussions are now totally implemented!
##Team Fortress 2
###All talk for spies
All talk has always been a small problem for spies, a spy talking while cloaked still leaves a speech bubble...until now. Thanks to a plugin developed by Fraeven and myself, spies no longer retain their speech bubbles when they cloak and talk.
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###Typing bubble for all
From the same plugin, we've also implemented a bubble for those who are typing. This bubble first appears after your first chat message, and lingers around for a moment until it leaves on its own or you start to move around. We've also implemented a feature where you can open up chat, press space and enter, and have your bubble appear without having to send the first initial message.
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###Donator menu rework
The donator menu now allows you to access and adjust everything all at once. You can set your kill effects, toggle your rainbow text, and more all from one menu.
###Clientprefs rework
Clientprefs are like cookies for you on the servers. They store things like your kill effect setting, your usage of ghosts in rainbow, so on and so forth. These settings have always been on a per server basis, but now they use one central database you can adjust anywhere. Saving a setting for one server carries it over to every other. You can also adjust some of them using the TF2 settings page listed above!
##So what's next?
This was a fun series of projects to work on! But there's always more to do! Aside from the help I get occasionally from Fraeven, this is mostly a solo project! I do a lot of maintenance and upkeep, and because of this, I'm often a little confused or overwhelmed on what I have done, need to do, or have yet to plan out.
My organization is a little questionable, but I am learning more every day! My next few projects won't be so exciting, there's a lot of code cleanup I want to do which isn't the most fun thing to talk about. But the next bigger project will be work on our Saxton Hale server, so stay tuned!
If you'd like to help support me and SCG, please consider checking out our contributions page! and feel free to help report any problems, bugs and suggestions here or anywhere else! Oh, and the full patchnotes for the TF2 update are here below!
Late last year, I made a pin on our Discord regarding political talk for the oncoming election; saying we are not looking for election / political talk in the group.
Today I would like to state that we explicitly will not allow election / political talk on the group going forward.
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Whether a message/conversation is "election / political discussion" and not allowed is at the sole discretion of staff.
I hope everyone understands, there are much better places in the internet better equipped to handle election / political talk, but SCG is not one of them.