Showing posts with label Site. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Site. Show all posts

Thursday, 12 January 2012

Labels Changed

I try to tag all the posts I make on this site as appropriately as I can with labels. Hopefully that'll help make things easier to find. But at the same time I don't want too many labels either and instead have a relatively short list.

When I started the blog new labels pretty much came whenever I posted something that didn't fit in the existing labels. I tried to use labels I thought were going to be used a fair bit, but that didn't always happen. Additionally the blog was very much focused on pre-release, trying to find out what kind of game The Old Republic was going to be. With the game now being released that's all far less interesting (as we know what kind of game it is).

With a bunch of labels with very few posts and a bunch of labels that weren't as relevant anymore I decided it was time to try and do a little label cleanup (also because I finally found out how to change and remove labels with Blogger).

Read on after the break to see what changes I made and why and for a list of all current labels and what I mean by them.

Sunday, 17 July 2011

Insider label

A quick update on the site; I've changed the old "fan" label to "insider".

The old "fan" label I added when BioWare started to include a "Developer Corner" in their Fan Friday posts and thus making them interesting enough to report on and give a label. But the Developer Corner has since grown into "Studio Insider" and has become a separate post. In the beginning those Studio Insiders where always next to a Fan Friday, but since then that's not always been the case. And since the interesting thing is the Studio Insider anyway it made more sense to have a label for that.

The new label also covers the Developer Corner so, with two exceptions, all the previous "fan" labeled posts now have the new "insider" label (one exception is where it was a Fan Friday post on its own and another was for last year's special Fan 'Friday' during E3 where I changed the label to just "news").

Wednesday, 8 June 2011

E3 2011 Links updated

Just a quick post, but I updated the E3 2011 Links post with links for yesterday and today (well, added the links for yesterday yesterday).

Wednesday, 11 August 2010

MMO News Feed Added

I've been keeping this blog updated for a while now, keeping a close eye on any Star Wars: The Old Republic news. But The Old Republic isn't the only MMO that I'm keeping an eye on (just the only one for which I maintain a blog). In fact, I try to keep up-to-date with most of the MMO news.

So I've added a gadget to the right (directly below links atm) to a feed with the MMO news that I come across.

It's a bit of an experiment. I just recently figured out how to 'share' news items in Google Reader and how to make basically your own news feeds comprised of items from a variety of other feeds that way. I'm also wandering how useful it really is (as it doesn't show what site the item is from, for example), but I thought I'd add it anyway.

The intention is that when I come across something that I think is interesting (MMO-wise) then I add it to that news feed. And hopefully that'll be useful to some.

You can also go directly to the Google Reader page for the feed which gives a bit more details (like the source site and the opening text) or you can subscribe directly to the  Atom Feed.

Well, there you go. Lets see how this turns out.

Thursday, 25 June 2009

Blogroll Added

Very small bit of site-related news. I added a Blogroll to the right (below the Blog Archive). There's not much in it except for the Overly Positive blog. Don't follow too many blogs myself so the list is likely to remain short.

But if anyone else has a blog that they feel might be interesting to the readers of this one (and me :p) then let me know and we can blogroll each other.

Oh my, now a blogroll and everyone. I'm almost becoming like a real blogger. ;)

Tuesday, 16 December 2008

Changed Text Column Width

You might've noticed already, but I made a small change to the style the blog uses by changing the width of the text column. This used to be 410 pixels wide, but I've changed it to 510 pixels now as I felt the old width was a bit too claustrophobic small.

Hope this makes the blog a bit more readable.

Thursday, 4 December 2008

Why "Moon over Endor"

It’s been a while since there has been any news, so I thought I’d write that post to try and explain why I named the blog “Moon over Endor”.

Let me first get out of the way that it is not because of the Ewoks. If anything, it’s more despite the Ewoks. I used to like them well enough when I was young (which, I guess, was their point), but they have very little to do with my choice for a title.

To explain the title perhaps first a little background is in order. “Endor” is used as a name for several things. “Endor” is the name of a planet, a gas giant (called “Tana” by the Ewoks). Around this planet a number of moons orbit, one of which is a forest moon (the “forest moon of Endor”). Seeing as living on the planet is impossible and living on the moon is (as it is where the Ewoks live) and considering the central role the moon plays in the last Star Wars movie people often refer to the forest moon as “Endor” as well. And together they’re in the Endor System (named after the planet).

So “Endor” is really the name of the planet, but it is often used to refer to the moon. And that gives me some nice duality to play with.

After all, if both can be “Endor” then which is the moon over Endor? Technically speaking the moon is the forest moon, as that’s the only true moon. But one could also say that if you are on Endor then the gas giant would look mightily like a moon (and, indeed, it does).

When you relate this to the development of the game (Star Wars: The Old Republic) one could say that the gas giant is the game (it’s still nebulous, it’s uninhabitable, etc) and the forest moon is where we, the community, live. So we can look at this moon over where we live and make all kinds of speculations about it, perhaps convince ourselves that we know what it is like. Thus “Moon over Endor” is us looking from a distance at an incomplete something that might seem substantial to us, giving us the feeling that we know what it is like.

But at the same time it’s also the other way around. “Moon over Endor” also refers to the forest moon, that place away from the real thing, orbiting the game, the community. And I wouldn’t go so far as to say that we’re all Ewoks, but for the most part we have a similar level of technological sophistication with the universe around us, the world that isn’t completely formed yet. We’re all looking up at the sky and dreaming about what might be.

Of course, I also just like the whole moon symbolism in general and I must say that a large reason for me picking the name is because I simply thought that it sounded nice. But there is at least a little more thought behind it; the forest moon is the community, orbiting a gas giant of a game, still insubstantial even if it looks solid enough from the limited picture we’re getting of it.

Thus “Moon over Endor” refers both to the community surrounding Star Wars: The Old Republic and to the process of us looking into the sky and think we know what the ‘moon’ (or game in this case) is like because the image we see seems clear enough.

And yes, I probably put way too much thought into that and should’ve just said “I like how it sounds”.

Thursday, 30 October 2008

New Title Image

Last night I spent a few hours creating a new title image, as you can see at the top of the page.

Ok, so most of it is just BioWare’s logo for Star Wars: The Old Republic. I managed to find a high-resolution version of the image at VideoGaming247 and used that. Then I downloaded a Star Wars font from TypeNow.net and added the “Moon Over Endor” text.

I spent quite some time trying to get the text right. First in selecting the right characters (you’ll note that the two “R”s are different for example) and then trying to get the spacing right. I added a bevel similar to what the “Star Wars” text at the top has and then used masks and custom-made gradient fills to get the colors (though for the bevel I used an existing gradient in PSP). And finally a similar kind of brown smear behind the text. Though it doesn’t look exactly like the Star Wars text, it’s fairly close and I think it looks nice.

As I added the title image to the blog I also updated the background of the blog by using a starfield image I made a few weeks ago (combination of noise filters and brightness/contrast manipulation for the stars and some cloud filters for the nebula). The image was designed to show behind text, hence the stars aren’t too bright. Even so, I also added a partly transparent background behind the post text to set it apart a bit more.

If the background behind the text looks funky (like pure white I think it is) then you’re using a web browser that doesn’t support transparent png image files (i.e. an older version of Internet Explorer). If so I strongly suggest getting Firefox which is free and in almost every way superior to Internet explorer (IMHO).

Anyway, there you go. New title image. I hope you like it.

Tuesday, 28 October 2008

Welcome

Welcome to Moon Over Endor. This is a blog dedicated to Star Wars: The Old Republic by BioWare and (role)playing in general.

Since BioWare announced this MMO a week ago it's been on my mind a lot. So far I've always greatly enjoyed BioWare's games more than any other and generally enjoy playing MMOs as well, though usually only for a fairly brief time before the game gets tiresome. As such I'm quite excited about BioWare making an MMO, one in the Star Wars universe no less. However, I also do have a number of concerns that I hope to get into later.

The biggest thing to swallow will likely be that this won't be what Star Wars Galaxies was supposed to be, which is a shame. But maybe, just maybe, BioWare will manage to lift their MMO above other MMOs in the same way that they've lifted their single-player games above other single-player games.

And hence why I'm here and why I'm starting this blog.

So I bid you welcome; we're going to be in for a wild ride. :)