News / NE4 Genesis

Today, geewhzz and I (posix) are excited to unveil what we have been secretly working on ever since we were made admins 2 years ago. This is the new NE, our NE, the NE that between geewhzz and I always went by the name "NE4"!

The following post is intended to tell you everything about how the idea of NE4 was born, and all the things that happened behind the scenes from then on. It'll walk you through the whole process of how the site was developed, starting from conceptual layout sketches and ending with what you are seeing right now. The new core features of NE4 we decided on and that will be introduced in great detail below are: (1) an all new site design, (2) a park database (NEDB), (3) a portal system frontpage, (4) a player ranking system, (5) new parkmaker pages, (6) new release preparation handling and (7) new release pages.

In the beginning
The time when geewhzz and I were made admins was characterized by insecurity and inexperience about NE3's processes. We were pretty much thrown into cold water, neither knowing how anything worked, nor receiving the necessary instructions on how to help ourselves. We had to find our way around ourselves. What we found was the site in miserable state both technically and organizationally. You might remember when we posted about domain and hosting ownership issues. While to secure the backbone of the site was a very important step, what we really wanted to do was to apply changes to the site that would help back on its feet makeing it grow stronger than ever. From Day 1, we started discussing what would be good for the site. We also sometimes did these discussions together with other people asking for advice, and it was in one of these group chats where Adix told us about a vision for NE he had always wanted to make happen but had given up upon years ago. It was to give every park on the site a unique ID in a database that would allow to archive, identify and link parks for downloads from wherever one needed. May it be on a parkmaker page, on a contest page, on the frontpage or just simply in a forum topic. geewhzz and I loved the idea instantly and began developing the concept for the "New Element Database" (NEDB).

The Coding Problem
The problem that came clear to us pretty quickly was that we had no one who could actually code the NEDB and integrate it into an online portal for us. Neither geewhzz nor I had ever coded a website, much less a complex and sophisticated database system that would have to be designed custom to our specific information needs. We were trying to find modifications for our IPB forum standard that would allow the addition of a database, hoping for some freeware solutions already available somewhere on the internet. What we found were countless unsatisfactory solutions of which not one seemed worth trying. We had high expectations and knew exactly what we wanted. We were not going to settle for less. After this initial frustration, we turned to the phpBB3 forum standard, knowing that it had a bigger modification scene and hoping to find something useful there. We had planned to convert our forum database to phpBB3, as IPB is not free and causes extra cost for us. We set out to find guides on how to convert properly without losing data. This task proved to be very problematic. Adix actually advised us to not even try it and instead start fresh completely to save us a lot of pain and struggle. We both agreed however that this meant losing all the forum content, and with it all of NE's history, something we absolutely were not going to let happen. We believe that NE's 8 years of history create its identity. No other RCT fan site has ever lived this long or has this much content to offer both in releases and forum discussion. We decided it must be treasured, even if at a high cost.

We continued our efforts to convert the forum database. We consulted riven3d who tried to help us with conversion. Unfortunately, he hit the same problem that geewhzz himself always encountered: the conversion process would fail and abort after a certain amount of data was processed. We found that NE's forum database was simply too huge to properly convert. A certain feeling of helplessness and frustration spread among us. Meanwhile, we tried to find people who could potentially become coders for us. We had a chat with Yorick, a former admin of RCT-Guide.nl (now shut down), who told us he was done with the site and would be willing to code a phpBB3 database add-on for us, under the premise that we would be fine with him releasing it for public use. Since we had no problem with that we began to concept a guide for Yorick to use when coding. After this initial contact, Yorick disappeared on us completely and we were never able to contact him again. We also noticed that the amount of information for the database that geewhzz and I created through discussion was very diverse and specific, thus extremely difficult to explain to a third person. We began to doubt whether inviting someone unrelated to NE on board was a good idea. Nevertheless, we needed a coder. While I was searching for attractive phpBB3 portals, I found alphaportal.net. As the portal was still in need of a logo, I told the admin I would do it (see the wolf on top), hoping it would earn me his attention for our coding problems. A bit of a naive plan that did not work out.

A few weeks later, geewhzz managed to do what until then seemed impossible and successfully converted the complete forum database. He was overjoyed to show me his success. Unfortunately though, I felt the conversion, while technically perfect, left much to be desired, as certain types of information are handled very differently between the two standards, and could thus not be converted properly. As a simple example, phpBB3 has no topic descriptions. These would be lost completely. More serious problems concerned member titles, certain bbcodes other than the very basic ones, avatars, private messages, signatures, polls and attachments. What followed was a week of discussion whether it would be okay to require all members to re-upload their avatar and signature, whether it was a problem if everyone lost their private messages and attachments, whether topic descriptions were really necessary, etc. In sum, I felt the loss and potentially required workaround to some of those problems was too big to deal with. Furthermore, we had to acknowledge that IPB had certain features not available in phpBB3 that we didn't want to miss. In the end, much to geewhzz's mental upset due to all the work he had put into conversion, we decided to forget about phpBB3 and its entailed troubles and instead just stick with IPB. geewhzz analyzed whether the differences between the IPB v2 NE3 was using and the IPB v3 that was available to us were worthwhile, and concluded they were. We are now using IPB v3 and will apply updates whenever available and workable on our system.

After this detour and debate over forum standards, the NEDB seemed further away than ever. Since we saw no way out of the dead end we had hit, we focused on the present NE3 and turned our efforts towards creating the Accolade Panel, the new release paradigm, and finishing up the Pro Tour 3 contest that was still left over from Kumba's time as admin. Still, we did not lose any of the desire to shape the site's future. The realization that we had exciting ideas all figured out and ready to be implemented that promised to help the site out of its misery but no one to turn them into operable code was very demoralizing.

The situation weighed upon us for a few weeks, until geehwzz was so fed up that he made a consequential decision when he told me: "Fuck it, I'm just going to code it myself". What this meant was that he took it upon himself to become a website coder, never having written program code before. In an effort that still perplexes me to this day, he self-taught himself the PHP scripting language, MySQL database editing, Javascript, and all there is to know about internet server setup and its technical intricacies. With this acclaimed knowledge, he went on to figuring out how the IPB forum standard is composed and functioning. Despite being a full-time student, it took him considerably little time to become pretty well versed with it. It was a huge breakthrough for us.

Now that it was clear geewhzz would take over the coding part, and since I had a certain command of Photoshop, the roles of coder and web designer were decided. I began my job by drawing sketches of what I envisioned NE4 to be like. Like geewhzz had never coded a website, I had never done web design. In the beginning there were a few pitfalls and beginner mistakes to experience. We went over several different versions of the site and discussed the sketches for weeks before the first serious go at it. What you are seeing now is the third version of NE4. Here are some of the early "Making of NE4" sheets dated sometime Spring 2009. They show the very beginnings of everything and the canceled first two designs of NE4.

Initial Sketches

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NE4 ver1

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NE4 ver2

With my third attempt at finding a web design that pleased us, I found something we both liked and noticed was flexible enough to be used for most pages. You'll notice the top controls bar directly under the banner. This was inspired by MS Word 2007's ribbon panel. To create our own, we went over the most needed tools the site should ideally offer and analyzed what people used the most. After several changes, the ribbon became what you see on top of the site now. We found ourselves getting used to and fond of it very quickly as it speeds up site navigation tremendously.

geewhzz was rapidly improving his coding abilities, causing the NEDB to grow. Accessible from the ribbon under the group "The Game", this tool is intended to hold all RCT1 and RCT2 releases ever published on the internet, and offer them to you immediately. What this means is that you will never have difficulties to find a park you are looking for again. No more topics asking if anyone has Park X and no more painfully searching through old forum content to find them. The DB is also a great tool for time travel. Sorting via the date filter, it allows you to see which park was released in a time-line layout. You can also add a filter of a certain member, seeing all of his releases at once. Alternatively, you can sort by score or download count, allowing you to quickly find the most popular parks on the site. The amount of information that is retrievable here is gigantic. We invite you to play with the search filters we decided to offer and hope to hear your feedback on usability. It must be mentioned that the NEDB is of course far from complete. There are many parks missing as of yet but we hope to add more and more parks as we go and receive your help with finding lost releases of very old parks.

An old version of the NEDB

When searching the database for a certain member, you will notice the results look very similar to NE3's parkmaker pages, just that the description of each release along with its aerial is missing. geewhzz and I had long been unhappy with the parkmaker pages for a couple of reasons. First, they were static. Whenever a parkmaker had a new release, his parkmaker page would not be updated accordingly. It had to be done manually. Second, the parkmaker himself had no direct control over his page. If he wanted to change any information on it, he had to ask an admin to do it for him. Third, they were hopelessly outdated. This was mostly due to the first two problems. The amount of work created to maintain all these pages was just too much and we knew we had to change them completely. What we did was to analyze what the parkmaker pages were good for: We found most important was the fact that a parkmaker page would act as an archive of all the works someone has done, allowing to look at his origins and baby steps in parkmaking. This aspect is now covered dynamically through the NEDB. What we also found was that having a parkmaker page was proof of having the notorious parkmaker status, which acts as an instrument of prestige among the community. It's easy to see that many people have been making it their goal to become an NE parkmaker. However, it's also easy to see that once achieved, many people would stop playing almost immediately. This was later labeled as the "parkmaker's curse". We concluded that prestige is important to our members but with how it's currently managed, there is an end to the process of achieving it, which takes away the fun. To salvage the prestige aspect of the parkmaker pages, to tackle the parkmaker's curse and finally, to add a site feature that I have longed for for years, we implemented a points system, which will be used to calculate the "NE Player Rankings".

The NE Player Rankings
Undoubtedly, you will have noticed by now that every member has two rankings under his avatar: "Current Rank" and "Hall of Fame". Former is determined by the points earned through a player's won accolades and then depreciated over time. The latter is the very same, just without any depreciation whatsoever. In more detail, the current rank is intended to depict who is among the best players today. In other words, who has had the most releases in recent time, and whose have been the best score-wise. In the current rankings, one point per day will be subtracted. If a player doesn't have park release in the past year, they will not show in the current rankings. Again, Hall of Fame rankings are the more holistic and unadjusted, free of any time frame kind of ranking, which turns it into a listing of the most famous and notable RCT players of all time. It's thus the more prestigious ranking of the two.

Point Details
Players earn points by sending us a submission and choosing one of the "Competitive" submission types (either Spotlight or NEDesign). Submission handling is among the things we have revamped completely. It's now done by choosing "Submit Park" from the group "The Game" in the ribbon. The player's submission is uploaded directly to our server. E-mailing submissions to us is now a thing of the past. The different Accolades we offer to win vary in difficulty. A Bronze accolade is much easier to win than a Gold or Spotlight accolade. Therefore, more prestigious Accolades will receive a higher point reward than more regular ones. This is done by "Accolade Score Multipliers". The respective multipliers are as follows: x13 (Spotlight), x7 (Gold), x5 (Silver), x4 (Design), x3 (Bronze).

Winning Spotlight rewards you with more points than winning three Designs or four Bronze parks. A Spotlight Accolade is the ultimate tool to make a noticeable improvement in your rank. Contest entries will not receive multipliers. Instead, a fixed point distribution will be decided when a new contest is announced. We have added points to all past contests the database contains. Furthermore, we solved the problem of pre-accolade-panel releases that do not have a score by averaging the scores from within the same release category and taking this average times the multiplier. This means that old releases are linked to a dynamic score that changes with every release added to the respective category.

If a player chooses "Non-Competitive", their submission will be added and made available on the site immediately pending Admin approval. It will not be scored and thus not allow the player to gain any points. This option is intended for people who just want to make a park of theirs available for download as soon as possible. If either of the two "Competitive" submission types (Spotlight and Design) is chosen, the park will go into the new release preparation center, where panelists can vote and depending on the vote outcome, write-ups and logos will be automatically distributed. When release preparation is complete, a chain of automatic events is launched: As the system publishes the park on the frontpage, the park will be added to the NEDB, points will be calculated, added to the player's profile, and finally, the ranking will update accordingly. All of this happens automatically and plays into our goal of making the site as dynamic and autonomous as possible. We hope this will make the site more eventful.

The Shares System
It's important to mention the shares system for parks and submissions that have more than one player. In the case of a competitive submission, points will be distributed among players according to how much either player contributed to the final product. For example, if a player has done a duo project with a friend and both decide each have done 50%, the points the park will make are shared equally. Another example would be that someone has done a guest appearance on what otherwise is a solo. In this case, it could be decided that the shares are 95% and 5%. It's of great importance that shares are entered correctly, to ensure fairness. If you are a creator of a park, you have the ability to edit shares when submitting the park. Be advised that your share distributions will be closely examined by the admins, and that egoistic and unfair behavior will not only be punished but also announced in public. In fact, we are considering to make the change logs of shares public by default on each park's page in the future should it be necessary, so everyone could monitor them at all times.

With the current rankings, we feel the prestige aspect of the parkmaker pages is much better represented because the rankings are objective and fair. Before, it was up to an admin to decide who was to be selected and who was not. This was subjective and arbitrary. Now, the rankings not only solve the parkmaker's curse, they also allow to distinguish who is a good, and who is a better player, by comparing rank by rank.

The last aspect of the parkmaker pages that we considered useful were the descriptions players could send to be shown next to their releases. These can be very interesting to read as they often allow the creator to tell stories about the building process of a park. Our solution was to give every member a "My Parks" page. You will find it beneath the submission handler. Simply go to your profile to get there. When viewing your own parks page, you can add comments to each release to tell people whatever you think should be known about the project. We encourage you to enter some background information to all your releases. If a park has more than one player, each player can tell their side of the park's story on their profile.

You can also click someone else's nickname to see that member's "My Parks" page. With the "My Parks" pages, it's now easy to get a quick but yet pronounced idea of what someone has released during his RCT Career. If you find there are parks missing on your page, please submit them.

This about rounds up the introduction of the most core features of the new site. You will most likely notice a few more things here and there, but they are all designed to be self-explanatory.

I would like to close on a reminder of what we do here at New Element: Our goal is to approach the game professionally, creating a certain form of art with the game. With the new site, a major step into this direction has been made. We look forward to the future together with everyone here, and hope to present you with new masterpieces of RCT for years to come.

Sincerely, geewhzz and posix.

Oh, did we forget to mention NE4 also comes with a new Spotlight? Congratulations to Six Frags for snagging the first Spotlight on NE4, Europa Park World Showcase, propelling him to #1 in the Active Ranks. Can you take him down?

I seriously just jizzed in my pants. YOU GUYS DID OVERVIEWS OF ALL MY OBSCURE WORK WTFOMGBBQ???

Oh my god. This is amazing.

Wow, wow, wow... Even unfinished parks are in there... :0

Well i knew this was coming but i never thought u had it this far along.
Posix and Geewhzz this is awesome.

Wow!...sorry that's all I can say ATM

I cant view the NEDB parks, it gives me "nedesigns.com Driver Error".

First of all, congratulations. The site is absolutely fantastic. I dont think there are even words strong enough to describe my pure amazement.

Well done guys on making the best site around even better. After a quick look around, I am majorly impressed by the slick design and hi-tech look. The features are incredible. Having a play around with them now, I can tell that there is going to be a whole load of new things to discover and I cant wait to discover them.

Again well done on all the hard work and thankyou for producing such brilliance. You commitment to NE is outstanding.

[Edit: Goddammit you guys, now I have to re-do my signature FFS ]

Where do we discuss EPWS?

Uh, wow?

You guys had me worried when the homepage started redirecting to your hosting service. I'd seen you two talking about an NE database before, but didn't expect something on this scale. Awesome.

-ACE

Outstanding work guys. Almost a bit too much to take in all at once and like Louis, will take some time to understand and notice it all.

Incredible work! It'll take a while to adjust but it's totally worth it. It's great to see you guys care so much about the community to do all this stuff for it.

Do the Danimation spotlights count as points???

Edited by Wanted, 08 July 2010 - 10:39 AM.

NE4 is sexy.

i think you guys just became legends.

god, guys, i'm equally speechless ...

we've both been working on this site for SOO long it feels, seeing it all the time, knowing it will do well to the community but still having to keep one's mouth shut all the time and mess around at the poor ne3 instead, not responding to new contest needs but instead trying to move the "greater good" forward and stuff. it wasn't easy ...

i'm soooo glad it's out.

a few quick notes:

- commenting on epws somehow has an error. geewhzz is on it. please don't comment about it in here though, it has it's own page and topic.
- some maps and downloads for your parks aren't done yet. you see the db holds over 1300 parks, of which we have ~900 mapped. downloads for rct2 require some tricky preparation thats linked to a new feature still in development for now , so they take time to be completed. thanks for being patient!
- download counts are currently not in the site, gonna be updated in time, as well. we just felt this wasn't launch-critical for now.
- old parks like dnet spotlights are incomplete. and you will notice the db is missing some lesser known parks, but again, this will all be sorted out in the months to come


Let's just enjoy the site for now with all the new features!

@wanted, i know it's long, but please read the post before asking too many questions.

Thanks for being brilliant admins, you two.

One thing I'm curious of is how future contests/unofficial releases (especially things like the unofficial QFTB) will operate under this db and earn one points. I can see the static values but releasing non competitively won't add in points will it? Does an admin now have to handle the DB after a round of a contest to plug all that in?

It's so much to take in but so awesome. Thank you very much for this.

Alright I understand it all now! Next time I should actually read all of the original post before overwhelming myself with the new features.

Big congrats and thanks are in order for both gee and posix.