DevLog Michael's dev log

[MikeHart]

Hi folks,

like Martin, I was a little bit busy too. Not as much as him but still busy.

As you have seen already, we have a logo for Cerberus X. Once the name decided on, my mind switched into design mode. I wanted it to be simple regarding its shape, but somehow reassembling the name. Of course I googled what was already out there. I am glad you guys like it. When I read comments like "the logo it to menacing, I will never use such an evil language", i think I nailed it.

Btw. if you ask yourself "why orange?"... Martin and I love that color.

Currently I am rebranding the existing documentation. Means everything Monkey turns into Cerberus X and every .monkey turns into .cxs. Adding to that, Monkeydoc is renamed Cerberusdoc. As we want to keep Cerberus X backwards compatible, I will work in the next step on the MakeDocs app to be able to understand both worlds.

Once we have the first version of Cerberus X out, I want to work on the documentation. Add more examples, add sample code to the existing docs, etc etc. Also give it a visual facelift. One thing Martin and I would like to see is an online documentation where you can add stuff yourself. Like the Blitz3D one had. Hopefully we can make that happen.

These are really exiting times for us and we are happy that there is still love for a great product and that you share it with us.

Thank you for your support
Michael

 

[MikeHart]

Hello hello.

It is weekend (sadly soon to be over) and things go more or less slow on my part. When you have a family and a dog,
you want to spent time with them, I am sure you guys understand. So what did I do?

• Makedocs now understands CerberusDoc folders and the file extension .cerberusdoc.
• I finished mostly of the rebranding in the main documentation.
• MServer is also rebranded and is called CServer now. Quite logical.
• I made a few app icons for Martin to choose and integrate into Ted and the launcher.

Well that is all for now. I hope your weekend was a good one too.

Take care
Michael

 

[Phil7]

Hey,

that's a lot for someone with a family and a dog and I only have a family.
Maybe it is better to rebrand the words like MSomething generally to CXSomething or CerbXSomething, because there might be
some confusion with the programming language C or C++.

bye,
Phil

 

[MikeHart]

Yes, actually the dog is the most demanding part here. This not so little fellow keeps you on your toes.

 

[MikeHart]

So now that the first release is out, the real fun begins. As you can see, the rebranding is done. Makedocs understands both extensions and documentation tags. I have tested a lot in the last days so we were pretty sure that Martin didn't brake anything crucial.

For the next steps I have planned to work on the following things:

• Integrate a syntax highlighter for this forum (done)
• Beautify the itch.io page
• Spice up the front page. Flashy graphics sell
  
• Integrate a nice gallery display
• Make my mind about how I want redo the docs. The online version should have the ability to add user comments, that's for sure.
• Work on the IPv6 implementation for CX

That is quite a bit already and I hope I will be somehow fast with this.

 

[MikeHart]

Another thing to have done... a dark forum theme. Yes!

 

[MikeHart]

As you might have noticed. The front page got a nice looking slider, showing off some games made with MX and so Cerberus X. I need to finish the frontpage and other pages, so newcomers get enough information and motivation to try out CX.

Another thing is that we have now some user badges/banners for our Patreon supporters. Btw. the itch.io page got some content too.

Also I have pushed 2 small patches (nothing major) to Github which you can download there and will be in the next release of course.

So much to do, still having fun.

P.S.: What I love is that we have already 32 people besides Martin and myself who signed up here. That is frickin' awesome!

 

[MikeHart]

Ok, maybe you have noticed, the defualt theme is switched to a dark one. If you prefer the light one, you can always set that in your user preferences.
Also in both themes, some font sizes got raised by 1 unit as this might be more easy to some eyes. Hope you like it. I still fighting with the extra pages that will describe Cerberus X to newcomers better. Fighting.... because at the same time I am learning CSS styling and stuff like that.

Can't wait to get back to my drawing board

 

[AndyAndroid]

Looks nice Mike! I have not been a big fan of the dark themes just because they can sometimes affect my eyes when going from a bright page to dark, but your color scheme works quite well.

 

[MikeHart]

Thanks @AndyAndroid. As you prefer the light theme, you can permanently set this for your user in your preferences.

 

[MikeHart]

Short update. After fighting with Xenforo pages and battling against the styles and their css settings, Martin and i decided to give Wordpress a shot. Xenforo is an awesome forum but for the website itself it might be better to go a different way.
Now i need to find a nice theme which i can adapt to look similar to todays homepage.

 

[MikeHart]

I think it is time for another update. Well... Have you ever created your own Wordpress theme from the ground up? Well I did now. And it was/is well worth it. I studied this great tutorial on Youtube to help me getting started:

I can only recomment it. With these tutorials, I was able to create a theme that is similar to this dark forum theme. Something that was important to us.

The new landing page will look like this:

But there are more pages of course. Features, how to get help, the team, etc.

Besides that, I have created some merchandize and we will let you have a complete look at them when the new site goes officially online.

Here is a small preview of some products:

I hope to have it done by Sunday so I can concentrate on the real stuff again! But we want new users to get a good impression of Cerberus X as we want to spread the word more and size this community up. Bringing in new blood is always good.
We are super happy to have 50+ others on board who have interest in our tool. But I would not mind for more!

Exciting times ahead.

 

[MikeHart]

Good morning people.

While the new main website was well received, the efforts of improving Cerberus X and its environment are not standing still.

Besides making my head about the reorganisation and improvement of the docs are now my main CX target, I also want to improve
some module functionality. 2 things that will come soon with an official update:

1. 9Slice/9Patch scaling
2. Loading of .FNT files for better Bitmapfont display

The first one will let you help scale UI elements. Most of you will work with fixed UI elements, but if you need to have them in variable sizes, then this is one way to go.

The second will let you design bitmap fonts inside well known editors and then load the created font into Cerberus X and display it with DrawText. With Kerning!
Good morning people.

Both functionalities will be available for mojo AND mojo2.

Have a good start of the week!

 

[Phil7]

Nice! I really like where you are going. These things are really what have been the first bummers, when I started with Monkey: What ... I have to put in this effort, just to display text in an acceptable quality?

And me again with an idea for the new home page. I just read some articles on design and it might help if the white space above and below each div (i. e. padding) is much bigger. I tried 50px instead of 20px on desktop screen and it looked much cleaner to me.
They say there are some associations with the amount of white space that influence the general perception of the page:
little -> cheap, restless
much -> confident, luxurious, relaxed

Another thing I noticed: You know I'm into readability ;-) and I would abolish the shadow on the plain texts below each headline. For me it is hard to read and to answer an old question of you, I don't have any health issues with my eyes, just normal defective vision where you can but you don't need glasses (-0.5 diopters)
As always, I hope you can use my annotations somehow as I just want to help you improve this great site.

 

[MikeHart]

Thanks @Phil7 for your suggestions. I think you are right about the padding. About the shadows, I will try without and see how it looks.

 

[MikeHart]

Ok, I have changed everything regarding your suggestion and it does look much better. I couldn't remove one shadow because the white font color was blending with the background image to much. So I gave it a slight greyish color and a subtile shadow.
Thanks again!

 

[Phil7]

With this colorful background image I would keep the font white and make multiple blurred shadow to produce a bigger soft dark background for the font:
text-shadow: 1px 1px 7px rgb(88, 88, 88), 1px 1px 20px rgb(0, 0, 0), 1px 1px 20px rgb(29, 29, 29);

 

[MikeHart]

With this colorful background image I would keep the font white and make multiple blurred shadow to produce a bigger soft dark background for the font:
text-shadow: 1px 1px 7px rgb(88, 88, 88), 1px 1px 20px rgb(0, 0, 0), 1px 1px 20px rgb(29, 29, 29);

Done! Thank you for the CSS code. It looks perfect! All this HTML/CSS/Wordpress theme development was totally new for me. Learning by doing was what I did.

 

[MikeHart]

Quick update. The 9Patch image drawing is done in Github. Locally I have bitmap font loading and drawing done for mojo2. I will work on the mojo1 implementation soon. When this is done, I will upload it to Github too. Don't expect an official release during the next two weeks as Martin is on vacation right now. A well deserved break.
In the mean time I have designed the look and feel of the new documentation. If you want to have a peek, look here:

https://www.cerberus-x.com/doctest/Modules_os.html

I still need to find a way to split the single functions and class methods of a module into single pages. Then I could use Disqus to add comments. With a non OOP language like Blitz3D or AGK, these single command help pages are perfect. But I still have to see how it will look within docs for an OOP language like CX is. Does anyone have a good example on the web?

When all this technical stuff is done, I will try to work on the content of the docs.

 

[muruba]

Nice, responsiveness as it should be