Sheep Tag Community

General Category => Community Discussion => Topic started by: Alph4bet on October 01, 2013, 10:31:46 am


Title: Advancement of St Community
Post by: Alph4bet on October 01, 2013, 10:31:46 am
So SwedishChef.Lc sent me a message on youtube or w/e, since then I have been trolling these forums for the past month or so, I never bothered to make an account because playing Sheep Tag does not interest me that much anymore. What does interest me is seeing this game take off. I made one today after seeing Tollisons post "Revo and the STC"

The point of my post is to let the community know the abilities I possess at the moment(due to my time at uni).
As some know I have been studying Computer Science at Swinburne University, one of the best technological Universities in Australia. This Semester I'm having to design and implement a league website for some Soccer League in Victoria(We are given real clients lol). Without going too in depth of what that entails I can port what I do for the Soccer League and use it in Sheep Tag.

If you, the community are interested in this then keep reading as I describe the features and what it means to the st community.
Now first of all, my aim will be the same as I had a long time ago, the website will have multiple aims.
Aim One: Create an intricate system where all parts of the system will interlink with one another to provide the following features.
1. A Member Login System
All members will have their own bio page and will be allowed to create/join a Sheep Tag Team.

2. A Team System
All teams will have their own about us page, where their members will be listed, their past competitive matches with links to possible replays, The teams logo, a little bit of information about their team, who the captain is, what league they are in etc... It will be really easy to access this team page with a url link looking something like this "www.sheeptag.net/Teams=StH".
All teams will be added to their appropriate league(At the moment the community is extremely small so there would only be one league at the start).

3. A League System
A league will have the following:
.A fixture giving a detail of who is vsing who, and during what time period.
.A Ladder showing who is coming first/last etc.
.A possible Prize.

4. A Light CMS
This will be used for several backend things and will need quite a few volunteers helping out with its usage. A CMS stands for a Content Management System, it will control what is seen on any of the main pages of the Sheep Tag Website. For example news articles etc...

5. A Guide section on how to do different techniques in sheep tag etc..

6. A Media section displaying embedded youtube videos of Sheep taggers

7. A forum where the community are actively involved on the following:
-They can suggest possible map changes where the map developer looks to for inspiration.
-Where just like right now community discussions can occur about any topic.

NOTE: we can use this forum, I don't care, the only thing is, that eventually after everything is complete it would be more user friendly to just use a forum I make, because if you do not, you will have to login twice instead of just once(That's fine, I don't care it's up to the community).

Aim Two: Make this whole website responsive(Meaning that it is mobile/tablet friendly). So you can access it no matter the device.

Aim Three: Market the website and have all Warcraft III realms increasing in activity. (This is most likely not achievable, but what I would like to do is have the sole reason for people to play Warcraft III at all, would be to play Sheep Tag. A lot of my friends in real life didn't play war3 until they heard about Dota 1. They were playing it for ages and got involved in the dota community(I joined later of course). The feedback I would like to receive is that people are starting to play war3 again, but not for ladder, or for dota, but for ST!)


Now I leave you with just three last things.
1. If I were to develop this the community would have to be serious in how they treat the game, for not only is it costing me time, but it would cost me money repurchasing the domain name and possible tournament prizes.

2. If you are wanting this and are willing to help make st active again then I require a few things before I start work to ensure that I'm not wasting my time:
A. All of you band behind one map creator and actively discuss possible changes. The map creator doesn't have to implement your change, the creator should only feel inspired by it. If the creator does implement your idea count yourself lucky, don't boycott etc... Give honest feedback not trolls.
B. All of you start to make teams of five, get more than just one or two teams, create multiple teams and vs each other nightly in a competitive state. Upload these replays onto this forum, giving the results and make plans to vs each other again. Try to get at least 8 teams together. Don't smurf and when you create a team, make sure that you're all on team speak and you are listening to each other.
C. Host the map on both reign of chaos and frozen throne and make the game end after one round, get more people into the community! If all of you go out and get two people each, this community would be growing in no time! I had 50+ Aussies playing during the week most nights before I left last time, if this dumb Aussie can do it, then surely you intelligent Americans/Europeans will be able to do tons better.


3. If you are wanting this, and perhaps want to suggest add-ons to the features I have listed, comment below.
Title: Re: Advancement of St Community
Post by: Chiefhero[sks] on October 01, 2013, 07:45:44 pm
a project like this seems to be good for the community. the only thing that bothers me is that it will cost you a chunk of money.

purchasing a domain seems acceptable (how much does this cost anyway?). seems like a good idea to postpone the prizemoney until later though (possibly have teams chip on @ the prizemoney so that mike/alphabeth doesn't have to carry the whole burden).



ideally => buy this new domain, copy all the content from this forum onto the new one, and move on from there. this forum is down 24/7 and censors everything + limited possibilities.

this was a nice idea, i support :D but calm down on the ambition, don't spend a shitload of cash at this project from the get-go. i don't think it will be worth it.
Title: Re: Advancement of St Community
Post by: SHEePYTaGGeRNeP on October 01, 2013, 10:58:51 pm
I agree with Amir.
I do think that this is really good for the community, but on the other hand I don't think the community is serious enough for ladders and teams etc, then again only one way to find out.
I for instance do not play this serious anymore and therefor would not need the teams section and everything.

But I like your spirit!

Let's see what everyone has to say about this.
Title: Re: Advancement of St Community
Post by: Shyamora[SkS] on October 02, 2013, 12:27:06 am
I love the idea. I will do everything I can to support and help it!

'1. A Member Login System
All members will have their own bio page and will be allowed to create/join a Sheep Tag Team.'


Expectable and good. Especially the team part. Perhaps though expand it to sheep tag teams within a clan. So like 'RoOkIeS' - Clan StH.

'2. A Team System'

Love it. Everything about it.. The bio page, the automatic league adding, logos.. This'd be great..

3. A League System

4. A Light CMS
I will gladly help to the fullest of my abilities.

5. A Guide section on how to do different techniques in sheep tag etc..
If we get public players to visit the website, this is an absolute must. Would be great if we get this started with a collaboration of people. Making guides etc.

6. A Media section displaying embedded youtube videos of Sheep taggers
Could be fun, though I think a section in the forums for this would be enough since there's not that many sheeptag videos anyways.

7. A forum where the community are actively involved on the following:
-They can suggest possible map changes where the map developer looks to for inspiration.
-Where just like right now community discussions can occur about any topic.


Essentially the same as we had for years, and definitely a must if we're going to create an overall platform website for sheeptag. The map suggestion part is new, and perhaps should be limited to a section in the forums, same a sheeptag videos =). As Amir said, just transfer the content of this forum to that one, if possible, if not, go for that new forum alltogether I'd say.

Aim Two: Make this whole website responsive(Meaning that it is mobile/tablet friendly). So you can access it no matter the device.
Would be cool though I'd personally not use it.. I don't think there's a huge demand on this, but is a nice extra if it's not too much trouble, work on the computer site first though.

Aim Three: Market the website and have all Warcraft III realms increasing in activity. (This is most likely not achievable, but what I would like to do is have the sole reason for people to play Warcraft III at all, would be to play Sheep Tag. A lot of my friends in real life didn't play war3 until they heard about Dota 1. They were playing it for ages and got involved in the dota community(I joined later of course). The feedback I would like to receive is that people are starting to play war3 again, but not for ladder, or for dota, but for ST!)
This is insane. I love the idea of it, but I do not think it's very possible. This would mean marketing on a scale that we have never even thought of before. This'd be going to websites and posting adverts about 'sheeptag on wc3!'.. That's crazy just thinking about it ^^
Love the idea though, seriously.

Now I leave you with just three last things.
1. If I were to develop this the community would have to be serious in how they treat the game, for not only is it costing me time, but it would cost me money repurchasing the domain name and possible tournament prizes.

The money thing for now should only be the domain, nothing more than that. But yea, I'm very serious on this aswell, and I would gladly spend a lot of time helping in whichever way I can.

A. All of you band behind one map creator and actively discuss possible changes. The map creator doesn't have to implement your change, the creator should only feel inspired by it. If the creator does implement your idea count yourself lucky, don't boycott etc... Give honest feedback not trolls.
Support from me on this point. The problem is that there's a lot of <65 IQ people in this community, so there'll always be people who want to boycott etc. Besides, we need to find a dedicated map editor who will create the map according to the community and not to his/her own wishes. This'll be hard to find since there are very few people with advanced map-making skills : /

B. All of you start to make teams of five, get more than just one or two teams, create multiple teams and vs each other nightly in a competitive state. Upload these replays onto this forum, giving the results and make plans to vs each other again. Try to get at least 8 teams together. Don't smurf and when you create a team, make sure that you're all on team speak and you are listening to each other.
Am already in a team =) I don't think we currently have enough people to get 8 teams together though. (tbh, I'm sure we don't) but the idea is a good one, and I would like to see other sheeptaggers creating these teams aswell to bring back competitive sheeptag!

C. Host the map on both reign of chaos and frozen throne and make the game end after one round, get more people into the community! If all of you go out and get two people each, this community would be growing in no time!
I've been saying this for weeks (except for the TFT part, though I've tried that) and I agree wholeheartedly. People need to act more for the community and less for private games. Private games will increase once the community grows. Making public games is an investment for sheeptag, and automatically for your own gaming-pleasure.

Cheers Mike. Love it all!
Title: Re: Advancement of St Community
Post by: HaWkys on October 02, 2013, 12:29:48 am
ye give the toilet money so he can waste it on himself and say its for the community lol
Title: Re: Advancement of St Community
Post by: Shoop on October 02, 2013, 12:45:17 am
Give us a new forum and make me mod. This one sucks balls...
Title: Re: Advancement of St Community
Post by: HaWkys on October 02, 2013, 12:49:25 am
the shoop hitler will never gain power
Title: Re: Advancement of St Community
Post by: Alph4bet on October 02, 2013, 03:23:17 am
@Shoop, My intention is not to make a new forum, Swedishchef.Lc has done a decent job on this one. At the start of the websites life I'd use this forum until I've developed the cms/league, once those two are developed I'd of course like to develop a forum to interlink with that so you only have to login once, instead of twice. It would also mean that you could click on peoples account names on the forum to view their bio page, then you could navigate from there to view their team/clan.

@Amir, the only money I'd need to use is for the purchasing of the domain name. I've already got hosting space(chatcraft.net is still using it). I may need to purchase a different package later on, but that will be my issue, not sheep tags. On chatcraft.net I have also archived the old maverick forums. However having said this, it costs me a lot of time. I don't want to waste the amount of time that it would cost to port this over.

@Shyamora, your help would be much appreciated should the community want this implemented.

If you guys do the things I require, I'll do whatever is needed for the community.
Just to list one more time what they are
A. All of you band behind one map creator and actively discuss possible changes. The map creator doesn't have to implement your change, the creator should only feel inspired by it. If the creator does implement your idea count yourself lucky, don't boycott etc... Give honest feedback not trolls.
B. All of you start to make teams of five, get more than just one or two teams, create multiple teams and vs each other nightly in a competitive state. Upload these replays onto this forum, giving the results and make plans to vs each other again. Try to get at least 8 teams together. Don't smurf and when you create a team, make sure that you're all on team speak and you are listening to each other.
C. Host the map on both reign of chaos and frozen throne and make the game end after one round, get more people into the community! If all of you go out and get two people each, this community would be growing in no time! I had 50+ Aussies playing during the week most nights before I left last time, if this dumb Aussie can do it, then surely you intelligent Americans/Europeans will be able to do tons better.

NOTE: You do not need to have 8 teams before I start working on it, but you do need to have atleast 4 teams of five.
20 people actively playing isn't that hard. Even if it's StH team one CsB Team one, CsB Team Two and Some Random mix.

If you are willing, I will also need someone who is good with graphics, I do have people that are good with layouts and stuff, but I'd want someone who is able to create really good pictures to the quality of the dota pics. If you know anyone suggest them here.
Title: Re: Advancement of St Community
Post by: Shyamora[SkS] on October 02, 2013, 12:09:20 pm
We've got a SoR team one =)

I'm sure CsB can create a team or two, and some mixture of other clans will work aswell =)
What about yourself Mike, are you joining us sometime soon, even if it's only now and then?
Title: Re: Advancement of St Community
Post by: Alph4bet on October 02, 2013, 03:39:13 pm
My priority at the moment is uni, the only reason I'm on st at the moment is because of Adam. He's actually playing lol. I'm going to try and get some old aussies back deadly_sheep/phooey/arkSheep and see where i can take it from there. But I wont be investing too much time into this, however the making of the site I will invest time, provided the community is serious.
Title: Re: Advancement of St Community
Post by: Shoop on October 02, 2013, 04:04:33 pm
The only problem is that we dont have any mapmaker.
Title: Re: Advancement of St Community
Post by: Chakra on October 02, 2013, 04:35:39 pm
@Mike
You could very easily set up battle.net validated accounts as well (via bots, which I can easily provide with ~95% uptime).

@Everyone else
If we are serious about the marketing stuff, I might consider redeveloping the map (IE, rewrite the code from scratch) to be more programmer-friendly. At the moment, it looks like it was developed through five years of neglect: the code is mismatched, convoluted, leaks memory, etc. It's hard enough to read and frustrating to the high-ends to modify. I should be capable of making a replica in pure ZinC within a week or three.

A pure ZinC solution would mean the map would definitely require NewGen to modify (which it already does), but then any programmer who has worked within the C family (C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, etc) would be at home in working on the map. The map would, of course, always be open source.
Title: Re: Advancement of St Community
Post by: SHEePYTaGGeRNeP on October 02, 2013, 06:17:30 pm
I work with C#, so ZinC would seems like the perfect solution.
And the public game auto start would be really nice for hostbotting.

Somehow though im still not convinced that sh1t will actually change, as in
Shoop and other oldies actively playing sheep tag again. :/
Title: Re: Advancement of St Community
Post by: Alph4bet on October 02, 2013, 07:37:01 pm
@ Chakra, what's the five percent downtime due to?
Title: Re: Advancement of St Community
Post by: Chakra on October 03, 2013, 03:05:01 am
My power randomly dying or Internet connection randomly dying.
Title: Re: Advancement of St Community
Post by: Alph4bet on October 03, 2013, 05:48:25 am
That could be good. Chakra you'd have to explain to me the steps you would take to implement this. I'll talk to you on skype about it later.
Title: Re: Advancement of St Community
Post by: Shyamora[SkS] on October 09, 2013, 03:42:00 am
How's the ideas coming along Mike? Have you started work, do you need any help or whatever? Have you heard from any of the old westies perhaps? :D
Also, drop by STC in Europe some time =)
Title: Re: Advancement of St Community
Post by: Alph4bet on October 09, 2013, 08:56:16 pm
I'm working on my project atm, will port it over to st as I finish each section bit by bit.
So how projects like this work is that you use a framework and construct each component on there own(So that they can work independently of each other).
At the moment I'm creating a CMS which has a few functions.
1. Article Editing - We will be able to feature articles on whatever page i like(Which I will make the default the home page), where it will list all of the news articles on one side and then display a little teaser on the other side, an example of this can be seen at playdota.com.
2. Page Editing - We will be able to create any new pages we would like in just a click of a button EG the about us page.
3. Issue tracking - This is meant for my team that is working on my project, but I'll implement in the st website as well because it will be a continuous project, I'll get some help from competent people within the st community I'm sure(EG: Chakra), therefore this feature will come in handy.
4. Dynamic Navigation - I'll store all navigation links in the main navbars in a database that where the admins can change it by simply going into the admin section of the site.

I should have this up fully for my teams website in 2 weeks, that includes the Website design of it etc.. However to port it over to st because I want to make it more user friendly, It'll take a bit longer than that, especially since I'm having to code this already(My mate alex, apart of my team at uni is doing the issue tracking component, while I'm doing the page editing component, both of those features should be completed by the end of this week).

After I've created this CMS I need to finish off my Secure Login so that all of this is strictly backend(At the moment it's only half done lol. A few methods I need to iron out).
Title: Re: Advancement of St Community
Post by: SHEePYTaGGeRNeP on October 09, 2013, 10:19:08 pm
Can we get like a sneakpeak picture when there is something to see?
Title: Re: Advancement of St Community
Post by: Alph4bet on October 09, 2013, 10:27:33 pm
Sure,
I should be able to give three or four pictures at the end of this week(Of the edit page/issue tracking systems).
All pages are responsive(So it's easy to view in mobile view).
Title: Re: Advancement of St Community
Post by: Chakra on October 10, 2013, 03:07:01 am
Why make your on issue tracking stuffz? Literally thousand solutions for that, like Google Code, Github, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc. ._.
Title: Re: Advancement of St Community
Post by: Shyamora[SkS] on October 18, 2013, 05:00:38 pm
I've been approached by Alph4bet to write news articles etc.
I'd love doing that ****, but I think we need a second columnist once the site goes up. I'm not good at trolling, and it might be fun to see some geek that can flame / curse the **** out of everything, but still make it a column would be fun for the website. Whaddo you think Mike?
Title: Re: Advancement of St Community
Post by: Alph4bet on October 19, 2013, 08:20:46 pm
Could be good, I'll make that as a sub column though lol, cause it looks unprofessional otherwise. But it'll be very entertaining.
Title: Re: Advancement of St Community
Post by: VsKatshuma on October 20, 2013, 04:41:59 pm
All this sounds like an unbelievably good idea. I'm surprised and happy that someone is willing to try something like this for ST.

If I wasn't so busy in my private life right now, I would volunteer to help you right away.  :( If something epic gets implemented I'll probably have to come back to playing ST actively though.  ;)