Besides now having a much cleaner and smoother design that fits better with FAF, the new newshub comes with a couple more features! Such as no more slowdowns when opening the newshub, flexible image sizing for the news posts, adequate responsiveness and a new modern layout!

Long detailled changes of the new client newshub 2.0

No more slowdowns

The previous newshub was calling the API everytime a user came (as far as I understand the outdated techniques previously used) causing users to wait about 5 seconds for the page to load (both in client and on the website).

The new client newshub caches the newshub in a json file. Meaning users dont have to wait since all the data is already loaded in the website.

Image Sizing

Now all image sizes are supported! No need to make your images 145x97 or other cumbersome sizes. Now images are automatically re-sized.

Images with a 16:9 ratio (2560x1440, 1920x1080, 1280x720 or anything "rectangular") will fit perfectly. Other non-rectangular images will still adjust correctly but might receive a cut-off.

Unlimited Articles

Since now the articles are on a "slider", we dont have a limit with how many articles we can have without sacrificing design. So 5, 7 or 12 articles will all display equally well!

Responsiveness

This design has media queries and responsive unit sizes (such as vw) to always adjust to the users preferences. Therefore, the news will display adequately whether it's on a full screen window or 1/4 of the monitor screen.

More Information Less Clutter

The new design also provides more links for the user. With buttons for joining the discord, twitch and youtube FAF content being one click away, plus new sections for new players, community tools/spaces and development, plus a Support FAF button and a Report a Bug button all in one compact and clean design! Now Users can have an easier time accessing FAF tools and spaces from the client News!

Other

Many of the images inside the images folder have been moved to a logos folder in order to maintain a better order inside the folder (rather than having 40 images on one folder, have them on their own folders).

Small Changes After Feedback

After some feedback, certain changes were done regarding the placement of the social media buttons and the support FAF button (now being merged as one on the top row). Some small color changes were done along with a tweaks here and there to the padding.

A upcoming tournaments/events tab was also added, with space for two events/tournaments which can be changed on the wordpress with ease (through a post called Upcoming Tournaments/Events).

Hello Everyone,

Most of you already know me as Javi/Femboy. I’m the website developer for FAF. I’ve been working in the promo team for almost two years (joined on Feb 2021). However, I haven’t really been doing much regarding promotions lately (thanks to Rowey) and I’ve been more focused on web development. Ergo, as a new promotions lead, I still will be focused mainly on the website development.

Now, as promotions lead, I strive to lead in a decentralized manner. Any contributors interested in helping with the newshub, FAF social media or other promotion ideas can do so with a lot of freedom to apply their own vision. I obviously will have some oversight on these to prevent any big issues but I’ll welcome any active volunteers with open hands.

To the Promo Team

Currently, I'm extremely grateful to contributors @CaptainKlutz and @SpikeyNoob, the former is helping me with the newshub and latter with the YouTube channel. Albeit we are just starting, I feel very happy some have stepped in to help me fill the long shoes Rowey left as promo councillor.

I'm also very grateful to contributors @Fichom, @Giebmasse and @phong for their work as media/graphic designers for the media we use in the YouTube channel, newshub, tournaments and in-game icons. It's added a big touch in professionalism to a lot of our promotions and make us look more official as a community.

To everyone else, I hope we can continue to grow as a community in this classic game we love and hold dear to ourselves.

Best regards,
Javi

Hello everyone!

If you want to get straight to the meat and flashy pictures (https://femboyjavi.github.io/), I would skip my little blog/story about before I started learning coding.

Most of you know me as the graphics guy of FAF (Making the LoTS logo, tons of other banners for tournaments and FAF news, other animations for FAFLive, etc). Nonetheless, when I joined FAF last year, I always disliked how “meh” our website is, always feeling so out of place and difficult to modify without a website maintainer of any sort.

Above you’ll see a screenshot for almost a year ago. At this point, I didn’t even knew what HTML was, all I knew was how to make “nice” pictures on photoshop and a bit of graphic design. I was told by the then promo councilor nine2, that this would be a huge task and it was unrealistic in the short term.

Well, he wasn’t wrong. Learning how to code was a gruesome and painful task. The frustration, hardships and difficulties of doing so by myself almost made me give up. There are plenty of courses and videos but to truly start coding (and not just copy pasting other’s people work) took me quite a lot of effort. Almost a year later, after hundreds hours of self-taught front-end development (and in the last couple of months with the help of Rowey, Giebmasse and others). I have finally started making something worthy of being called a website. I present to you, the current DRAFT of my FAF website mockup.

Now please remember this is a draft and not a finished design. This current draft is mostly my work but both Rowey and Giebmasse have contributed to it (either by teaching me some code etiquette, cleaning my code and the basics of github or some marketing/sales lessons). The website wouldn’t look as cool without them motivating and helping me.

I’m making this post to keep a blog/journal of sorts for this project for myself. But also and more importantly, to get some community feedback. What would you like seeing in the FAF Website?

Currently, I want the FAF website to be a Supreme Commander + FAF portal. Currently Supcom has no website anywhere. Therefore, as we are continuing its development of Supreme Commander, we also need to “sell” it to new players. So besides showing off all the new changes and developments we have made, we need to show off what supcom is. However, I also want to hear the community feedback because I want this to become our website.

And that’s pretty much it, I believe this project might see implementation in 4 – 12 months. Currently I’m still learning to code but I got the basics down and I’m able to create a full website. Nonetheless, I don’t have the experience for the login info, letting people download the client and so on. I’m only doing front-end (all the pretty pictures, backgrounds and words, None of the database/server stuff). Ergo, the biggest risk is the lack of back-end knowledge. But I’m pretty sure we’ll find a way to implement those things (I mean, there must be someone in the community with the knowledge xdxd).

Anyways, I would appreciate any volunteers or feedback you have! Currently, the website is entirely just HTML, CSS (grid) and JS. I’m writing the HTML on PUG out of sheer comfort (hate seeing 100s of <div> and <> stuff, PUG takes out all of this garbage and lets me see my code cleanly). Currently this project seems to be headed into me and Rowey being the main workers on it but if you are interested in helping, let me know! You can contribute anything from actual coding to images, writing suggestions or just feedback!

Also, here is the github repo! https://github.com/FemboyJavi/Javi-FAF-Website
Also I just managed to host this draft in github pages so feel free to see it here: https://femboyjavi.github.io/

Hello Everyone! I come to bring the finalized design of LoTS Player Cards, these are meant to be shown on the groups stage, for casters to use during the stream. They were not meant to be a "serious" component but more for entertainment and to have fun.

This was achieved mainly due to a contribution of mine and FtXCommando, me being the artist (design of the card) and he being the historian and statistician (data, quotes, scores on macro, micro).

Here there is a 1920x1080 image draft of what it would look on LoTS, obviously it needs a background but just imagine the four cards have different colors, avatars, names and info on them.

Currently, the colors and images of the players are somewhat arbitrary. I'm willing to ask the players for the color of their choosing (1-2 colors, for example, archsimkat chose jade and gold, inspektor_kot chose dark red). If I can't contact you easily, a color scheme will be chosen for you (see Nexus-).

As for the avatars, if you have a funny/witty idea about a player, feel free to bring it up! Something to some extent memey that describes the player well and is funny as well.

If you have any design changes or ideas, due to LoTS being around the corner, I might not be able to implement your feedback due to time constraints. But if you feel very strong about it, I'm using adobe illustrator to make the cards and I accept help lol.

Tomorrow Wednesday, I'll start the mass production of all other cards. So if you have something to say, say it now because once I start making all the cards, I'm not re-doing all of them lol.

Here is the first Batch (Group B)

Here are all the individual files for each playercard in case anyone is interested in them.![

Hello Everyone!

As some of you may know, I'm about to finish the new FAF website (which hopefully will release before November ends). However, one of the biggest new things on it is a better onboarding for new players considering that in order to play FAF, you need to do steamlink, download and install FAF, open SCFA at least once locally, find a directory, etc. Which is quite a lot for new users.

Therefore, now instead of letting users just download FAF and figure out all of these issues, I added a "guide"/checklist for new users to have a clear set of steps they need to follow in order to play.

You can check it here https://test.faforever.com/play

There will be also improvements on the steamlink and goglink process (putting the guides with images on those pages just in case user is having difficulties linking their accounts correctly).

I take any feedback you have about this page! However just know, I'm trying to keep it as simple and direct as possible. I do not want to scare new users with walls of text but instead easy and simple steps they can follow without being overwhelmed.

TLDR: Give feedback about new onboarding process for new players considering its a bit of a hurdle unlike other games where it is download game then play game.

Hello! I'm Javi and as you may have seen, lately FAF newshub has been pretty slow / showing old events and not really getting updates. Currently the Newshub is working with two people (Fury and I) when we used to be a team of four. Nonetheless, we are looking for ANYONE that can help with any of the next:

• Linking videos, tournament posts or other FAF contributions that you think would be interesting for most FAF players.

• Writing a title and a small descriptions (1-2 sentences) for news such as tournaments or an amazing cast.

• Creating Images/Media for the newshub (such as simple images with a text or something related to the news being presented).

Here below you can see an example of all three things together.

You can help us whenever you want and how ever you want, you don't have to be the next bestselling book author or Leonardo Da Vinci in photoshop. We are just looking for people that want to lend a hand to FAF and this is a very good yet easy way to give back to the community.

You can either post your discord tag/contact info and what you can do OR join the FAF Newshub Discord at https://discord.gg/WxzQU795YA

Hello everyone! As some may know, I'm currently working (and learning) on the FAF Website 4.0. Ergo, I come for some of your sweet juicy feedback.

So here is a link to the new leaderboards https://test.faforever.com/leaderboards

Do you like it? Hate the colors? Think its unnecessary? Want to see +1 year old leaderboards? Then comment it down below! All feedback and critique, no matter how rough and raw, is appreciated!

PD: Global isn't part of the leaderboards since it has bugged winrates for older players (like tagada,bh and others having a 0.5% winrate) AND I don't think custom games deserve their own leaderboard with the new Matchmaker queues out

@t_r_u_putin yes but that’s for dual gap. Outside of dual gap, one nukes makes opponents create 3-5-8 SMDs, easily making the nuke pay itself off just in making opponents waste stuff on SMD and then nuke can still destroy armies/navy, adding more value to itself

Here is my submission, fresh af from the oven xD

https://youtu.be/1HEdFMceFo0

I love how it seems the submissions all had different ideas in mind, we ended up creating multiple FAF trailers that are equally sick!!!

@biass I mean it's a work in progress that has a couple of hours only so that's why it's so sloppy. Also the other "menus"/scenes are going to be updated as well to fit the blue/grey theme. as @BlackYps said too, I do agree it's too slow and looks like a loading screen. I wanted to fish some feedback before keep working on it to know what the community thought.

In a completely different point, I do think the way you bring feedback (a bit harsh), call it effortless (by saying "where?" is the effort) and call it cringe is a bit unmotivating. I have a thick skin so it doesn't bother me that much. However, you could say the same without adding these comments. I appreciate your feedback but there are better ways to convey the same message. I cherish your opinion because I think you are a good designer but you can do better than this.

I bring this up to your attention because other contributors might not bother contributing if their work is treated as harshly as you treat mine.

Also things do improve, my initial design of LoTS compared to the current one are vastly different. It did improve. And even if what is being created isn't an improvement, our contributors will gain practice from it and be able to do a better job next time. It's better to try, fail and retry than to never try to be better.

To voice my personal experience regarding the candidates...

When I entered FAF, I clearly remember the FtX dude with a mongolian icon answering all my beginner questions on #gameplay-and-training channel

At this point, I didn't even know that I should ctrl-K to quit, but Player Councilor FtX helped me. He was the guy that was always on the Discord chat answering questions. No matter how thoughtless or obvious the answers were, FtX is there a great deal of the time answering questions.

That's a guy that cares about the community because HE IS in the community. Before this election, I would have never had an idea of who the fuck is Francias, Morax or Emperor Penguin.

I know FtX isn't some saint but god damm he does a good job, I prefer having a hard working dude that shows up than some randoms appearing out of no where promising me to make FAF perfect and magically change everything for better (but only IF they get elected).

Okay now it's really finalized lol

I agree T1 and T2 torp defense need a buff. Every time they are built is always looked as a desperate attempt/joke rather than a real threat.

Makes the navy game feel very much of a who has more frigates since you can’t create static defenses in the sea at any point in the game.

Hello everyone! As some of you may know, I've been working on the website 4.0 (with help from Rowey). Now we are working on the news and I got some exciting news! The client newshub MIGHT (maybe, not 100% sure, etc) receive an update soon because guess what, its just one page in the website. Therefore, it could be a lot easier to implement the new newshub without affecting the current website.

Anyhow, I want your feedback on what you want to see on it, you want to see a map of the week? developer of the month? What sort of feature/thing do you want to see when you open the FAF client?

Here is a WIP (Work in Progress) image of what I currently have, I'm still working on it and yes some stuff is out of place or missing a background etc. But the design will be something along these lines.

So please, throw your feedback at me, no matter how harsh it is, I welcome all feedback so I can create a newshub that the community likes and wants to see.

Thanks.

TLDR: What do you want to see on the newshub? Map of the week? Dev of the month? Times dualgap has been played? etc.

I present you my beauties, they still need more polishing but I'm quite happy with the results I'm getting

@gabitii I mean the whole point is that almost everyone except 1-2 people (depending if it’s a 4-8 team) can surrender. It’s not fun being held hostage on a game you think it’s lost. I’m sorry you had a bad experience because of this but we prioritize majority over minority’s satisfaction.

What made you stop playing ladder

Too much work, got to 1.6k and it feels like I either need to know the BOs or I'm going to get crushed by better players. Too much of a time investment to get better and also not finding players quickly.

Have you tried a ladder game? If so, what has the experience been to date?

Amazing, best FAF game mode. Feels like its the only place where T3 and experimentals are epic strong units and not just your day to day. Love how T1 and T2 have such a huge role and aren't trash after minute 10.

Also love the fact that agression is rewarded and stalling is punished. I absolutely hate with my whole being a match where nothing is happening because attacking is going to put you at a disadvantage.

How much often did you play it before?

everyday 3-6 matches

What would motivate you to play ladder once more or try it out.

mapgen only queue maybe, feel like 1v1 mapgen would be really good than our current state.

What you find uninviting about it since you have not tried it?
Lack of knowing who's playing, I see 5 people in queue, is it 5 800? is there a 1400 in there? Waiting multiple resets is pretty annoying not knowing if Im the odd one or what.

That is what the forum is about. We are looking for long term contributors.

Also purged the deleted topics. Wasn't aware they are visible to the public.

Long term contributors =/= unpaid job

An unpaid job is doing free work because you don't have the experience or are in training like an internship, it sucks.

A contributor or volunteer is someone that gives part of their free time to help and develop a community or project they enjoy partaking in. They do it out of love.

Now I know this is purely semantics but there's a difference with us saying:

"The community needs X person doing Y job, its is unpaid, here are your responsibilities and expectations"

"The community needs help in X issue, we need a Y volunteer for this, you only need to put a couple of hours a week to contribute and these are the things you would be doing"

I don't make graphics for newshub because it's an unpaid job, I do out of enjoyment for doing and helping the community. I get some control of the decisions of my work because I'm the volunteer in charge of that. In a job you do as you are told.

And I don't know anyone who says "I have an unpaid job helping my community clean up", people say "I volunteer to help my community clean up", same action but clearly different connotations which people will perceive differently.

Also I appreciate you making sure the deleted posts aren't being seen. It made it look way cleaner.

Would you know who I can talk to start a solution/update to this part of the forum? Maybe Gieb is the correct person?