New website

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Thyrion
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New website

Post by Thyrion »

Thx for the new Frontpage! This wordpress pages are looking good!

First missing point.
Where is the forum link in the top navigation? :)
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Re: New website

Post by Wolfmanfx »

Yes its still wip but I think its better to edit in live mode. So the menus / content will get a brush up too.
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Re: New website

Post by EricB »

It needs a lot of work IMO.

1) It's slow as hell. It takes 94 seconds to load on an average American "high-speed" internet.
2) It uses waaaaay too much java script. I have to disable Ogre3d in no script now if I want to load/use the site on most of my machines.
3) Lots of needless wasted space. The banner takes up 90% of screen height.
4) To much white space causes way too much down scrolling.
5) Color scheme is very boring and bland.


Remember this is a library for programmers, we're not selling face cream to stay at home moms.
(NSFW BLOCKED Humor) http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/


(Of course my opinions will be in the minority...)
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Re: New website

Post by Wolfmanfx »

It can be better http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/enQ49T/ ... gre3d.org/ but its a start maybe we can migrate in the future to typo3.
What I see right now that we need 2.5 MB this can be optimized. The javascripts are ok (not that bad).

But if you want give a helping hand you are welcome :)
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Re: New website

Post by EricB »

No worries, I'm not poo-pooing your efforts. We've needed some improvements to the site for a while. I'm just giving my feedback (shared by a couple on IRC.) Take it with a grain of salt, and keep up with the good work! :P

But if you want give a helping hand you are welcome :)
You don't want me making websites, they look pretty close to the one I linked above! :D
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Re: New website

Post by spookyboo »

New site looks good. I have no performance problems.
Funny to see that there is still a reference to The Yake Engine (which has been abandoned for a long time)
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Re: New website

Post by Oogst »

Sexy new site, I like it! It loads just fine over here. :)

Some small feedback:
-If I click the link beneath a testimonial it goes to the top of the Ogre website instead of to that company's website.
-With the testimonials it might be nice to add the name of their most famous product made with Ogre, if they've made anything famous. Real game names make it sound more impressive.
-I don't think the Torchlight folks are in the testimonials right now, or the devs of Ankh. Might be worthwhile to chase after some of the more famous games for testimonials.
-The showcase only has one product right now.
-The site hardly contains any visuals now. I think to promote a graphics engine it would be good to show some... graphics!
My dev blog
Awesomenauts: platforming MOBA (PC/Mac/Linux/XBox360/X1/PS3/PS4)
Blightbound: coop online dungeon crawler (PC)
Swords & Soldiers: side-scrolling RTS (Switch/PS3/Wii/PC/Mac/Linux/iPhone/iPad/Android)
Proun: abstract racing game (PC)
Cello Fortress: mixing game and live cello performance
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Re: New website

Post by Wolfmanfx »

Yes showcase will be expanded asap. Btw you could add a testimonial :)
thx 4 the feedback
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Re: New website

Post by Oogst »

How do I add a testimonial? Should I post it here or mail it or something like that?
My dev blog
Awesomenauts: platforming MOBA (PC/Mac/Linux/XBox360/X1/PS3/PS4)
Blightbound: coop online dungeon crawler (PC)
Swords & Soldiers: side-scrolling RTS (Switch/PS3/Wii/PC/Mac/Linux/iPhone/iPad/Android)
Proun: abstract racing game (PC)
Cello Fortress: mixing game and live cello performance
The Ageless Gate: cello album
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Re: New website

Post by c6burns »

I would have agreed with "too much javascript" 10 years ago, but not anymore. Site took about 2-3 seconds to load for me. Looks nice.
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Re: New website

Post by Wolfmanfx »

@oogst

Mail me wolfmanfx@gmail.com
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Re: New website

Post by PartyBoat »

As someone new I can say that the website is a huge improvement and it is much more intuitive than the old website. Although I think it would be nice to have link to the forums somewhere in the navigation menu.
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Re: New website

Post by EricB »

c6burns wrote:I would have agreed with "too much javascript" 10 years ago, but not anymore. Site took about 2-3 seconds to load for me. Looks nice.
My opinion is that javascript should only be used where it's needed. Image loading, the main logo resizing as you scroll down, the images above the paragraphs, the up arrow that appears as you scroll down. All of this is unneeded IMO. Other than the up arrow, none of them provide any added benefit over static html loaded images. These things done in javascript make page loading slower and would makes the site hard to use on older/obscure hardware. Case in point, try loading the page on a CI20 mips machine or a Pentium 3...

Likewise if you're like me, you have javascript disabled on most websites, because it's the number 1 attack vector on your computer. The site looks even worse with JS disabled.

In terms of loading. While you may have a 40mb down connection, please remember that the global average is 5mb down. That means about half have slower internet. I personally have 4mb (On a good day), and an un-cached load of the main page takes a while. (With javascript disabled, it's much less.)

PartyBoat wrote:As someone new I can say that the website is a huge improvement and it is much more intuitive than the old website. Although I think it would be nice to have link to the forums somewhere in the navigation menu.
I have this problem with my own game. I never could understand how people see links hidden under menus which you constantly have to mouse over to see what's in them as being more "intuitive" than a visible list of all sections of the site on the left hand side. For me, navigating the new site is a pain in the ass.


Anyhoo, I voiced my opinion. And I'm beating the deadhorse. So I'll refrain from this thread further. :)
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Re: New website

Post by dark_sylinc »

As for the website size, we have GZip disabled. We should check if enabling it chops a sizeable chunk.
We can check with http://checkgzipcompression.com/?url=ht ... e3d.org%2F

I'm personally in favour of pretty but lightweight websites (for reference this site was entirely made by me, old school hand written CSS, minor Javascript & PHP).

However that takes time and money; so buying Divi's plugin is a shorcut. Unfortunately that means a big fat website. Fortunately, no one really spends a lot of time at the front page (where we need to visually impact users, attract them, and tell them: no, we're not dead. No, we're not stuck in 1999) but rather at the forums, wiki, and Bitbucket repo (or the manual, which doesn't run on wordpress). We aren't a news website where our main page is the most visited page (or a blog making one post per day)

So as a fellow hater of fat websites, I understand you, but I doubt that will change.
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Re: New website

Post by moejac »

The new site does not perform very well.

See the performance at GTMetrix: https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.ogre3d.org/n0Gd2ilp

Pagespeed F (40%) and YSlow C (72%).

The good news, though, is that it is relatively easy to remedy.

Gzip is major, and since it is Wordpress, you need optimize the heck out of it.

Page load time is not bad, but the size of that front page is incredible :p

However, much better than the old site.
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Re: New website

Post by c6burns »

Maybe it's just me, but this is wayyyyy too much thought put into a website. It loads in 2 seconds, not 90 seconds. Pagespeed score is bad on that test, but it loaded in 2 seconds. I can show you sites with pagespeed rank A that loaded 2-3x as slow. Having gzip disabled is probably what gives you the F score regardless of actual load speed. Javascript is no longer something you need to minimize (minification doesn't hurt, but minimizing is not necessary). Jquery rules the roost out there nowadays. Scripting is now an integral part of most w3b d3signs (it blocked me from writing those without the 3s) and it's not an issue because browsers have come a long way.

I'd rather people's effort went into the actual code of the rendering engine we all use, instead of optimizing the website most of us don't use. But whatever ... live your life and do what you feel :lol:
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Re: New website

Post by EricB »

c6burns wrote:Maybe it's just me, but this is wayyyyy too much thought put into a website. It loads in 2 seconds, not 90 seconds.
Congratulations! You obviously have very poor reading skills and fast internet. That might explain why glanced over my response for you.

So here is a video of how an average first time visitor would see the page:
(My evening internet speed is http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/5092631421 This is a fresh, no cached Firefox with javascript)
[youtube]sCDGv7IAE4I[/youtube]

It's going a little bit faster this evening. 24seconds. It was literally 90 when I made my post above.
Javascript is no longer something you need to minimize (minification doesn't hurt, but minimizing is not necessary).
Maybe for most people, for me, optimization is a must. The page as you can see in the above video runs like shit. If I were on a different computer, like a Linux or a BSD without hardware accelerated video support it'd be even more noticeable.

Why is that important? Because Ogre's audience(programmers) are far more likely to be running machines that may not handle web 3.0 site as well as your Chrome/Windows10 spybox.

That being said, I don't mind Javascript if it's done properly and doesn't get in the way. As you can see in the video, it gets in the way.... (gzipping may make it less noticeable...)

I'd rather people's effort went into the actual code of the rendering engine we all use, instead of optimizing the website most of us don't use. But whatever ... live your life and do what you feel :lol:
I believe the point of the site redesign is to improve new users impressions. As you can see by my loading speed, which is on a slightly above average internet connection, on a fairly new-ish firefox, it would fail to do that. So if they're going to spend the effort in doing a new site, it is better they actually get it to work otherwise they are wasting their time. :P
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Re: New website

Post by dark_sylinc »

The website could indeed use some optimization, but a couple of notes:
  • I live in Argentina (high latency, I usually have 250ms ping with US servers) with a 3 Mbit connection (320-350 kilobyte/s is my top download speed on practice). A full uncached load took around 21 seconds. A cached load is much faster, obviously
  • I profiled the website, biggest offenders are, in order:
    1. The photo collage. It started downloading in the middle of Divi's CSS download, slowing down the display of overall content.
    2. Divi's CSS.
    3. The green voronoi-like pattern background behind the collage
    4. frontend-builder-scripts.js (don't know what that is, looks like Divi's)
    5. The rest are <100kb elements. The 4 big offenders account for 1.71MB out of 2.4MB
Both Divi and the JS script can be minified and/or compressed for sizeable reductions.

The photo collage and background image however, while we may find a better compression format; don't expect us to lower that. We are a graphics rendering engine. Our business are graphics. We need to display breath taking pictures. Right now the photo collage is not breath taking, but we're looking into displaying ones that will.

Examples:
http://cryengine.com/ 13.8MB. 10MBs of those are the pictures from the slideshow. These pictures start to download after all text content has been downloaded.
https://www.unrealengine.com/what-is-unreal-engine-4 3.6MB. Highly compressed JPGs, but they have lots of it. Loading order looks a little chaotic.
http://unity3d.com/ Has video. 30.7MB and counting. Looks like someone screwed up since the videos are looped. It shouldn't keep downloading forever. Apparently the actual video is around 3MB but is hard to measure precisely. Video starts downloading after most stuff has been downloaded.
https://libgdx.badlogicgames.com/ 2.4MB except for a 381 kb JS script, pictures account for most of it.
https://github.com/bkaradzic/bgfx 3.6MB. Images cover most of it.

Big images are part of what we work for. We can't workaround that. Can we optimize the CSS and the JS files? Yes. Can we force the pictures to download after everything else? Maybe (Wordpress can be a pita sometimes). Can we remove JS? No, it's part of the template that bought us time away from writing a new website.
There's room for improvement. But the size is in megabytes and we're in line with the competition. We just need to switch to eye-candy / mindblowing images.

We're not trying to be Unity/CryEngine/Unreal nor will be. We're a rendering engine component, and those are sandboxed/canned game engines, with monster codebases ever-growing babel towers. But when first timers (and old timers that haven't checked out in a while) open our page, they need to see we can hold our own against those; and that similar professional stuff can be made with Ogre just fine.
I'd rather people's effort went into the actual code of the rendering engine we all use, instead of optimizing the website most of us don't use.
That is indeed what's going on in my mind.
Congratulations! You obviously have very poor reading skills and fast internet. That might explain why glanced over my response for you. (...)
Why is that important? Because Ogre's audience(programmers) are far more likely to be running machines that may not handle web 3.0 site as well as your Chrome/Windows10 spybox.
Please keep it moderate, and don't personally attack other members.
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Re: New website

Post by spookyboo »

What would help is a comparisson matrix of the current versions, their differences and the prerequisites. I see a lot of questions about which versions to use and there is also a 1.10 fork. People get confused and move on.
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Re: New website

Post by dark_sylinc »

spookyboo wrote:What would help is a comparisson matrix of the current versions, their differences and the prerequisites. I see a lot of questions about which versions to use and there is also a 1.10 fork. People get confused and move on.
Yup. I was planning to, but the website got live sooner than expected. Good idea about making a matrix. I was going to go for text.
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Re: New website

Post by spacegaier »

We just did some first optimizations:
1. GZip is now enabled.
2. Minify is now enabled.

=> Page Speed now at 64% and YSlow at 80% (https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.ogre3d.org/Tl8PrCXb). Going in the right direction :) .
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Re: New website

Post by spacegaier »

Did some more toying around with compression and progressive/interlaced images. Seems to also have helped another bit.

Looking forward to some feedback...
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Re: New website

Post by insider »

Site loaded up here in 4 seconds, this is on an 8MBPS connection, sounds fair enough, but can the main image on the site not be compressed?
The original Ogre3D-Gallery_interlaced.png on the site is 1.01MB and here's a compressed version @ 214KB that's almost an 80% reduction in size with little to no quality compromised.

Attached.

Site used https://tinypng.com/ ,I am sure you can find a better one, this was with a 5 second Google search :D
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Compressed Version
Compressed Version
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Re: New website

Post by spacegaier »

TinyPng is converting to PNG-8 which allows only 256 different colours, which is just too few for proper graphics. I had already tried that earlier and it doesn't look good (especially in a direct toggle comparison).

As dark_sylinc outlined earlier, as a graphics engine we need some good visuals and grainy images are not the way to go IMHO. I would instead follow the path of resizing the image to a smaller size and making it a link, so that once clicked upon the actual full size / big version is shown. That would make more sense for me.
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Re: New website

Post by insider »

spacegaier wrote: as a graphics engine we need some good visuals and grainy images are not the way to go IMHO
Sounds good to me. :D
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