I'm starting this topic in an effort to bring back dynamism to Burnopedia's community. Project: Rebirth is a long-term program I'm initiating now which will, once completed, give Burnopedia a new face and more contents. Burnopedia has changed appearance several times until now, and time has come for it to change again. I'm expecting Rebirth to last for several months.

There are two distinct sub-projects: one will deal with giving a new appearance to the site, and the second will deal with our image resources.

Behind this Project, I'm also preparing Burnopedia for Burnout 6. Indeed, I'm afraid to realize that we focus a lot on Burnout Paradise, to the point where we could say that we are actually "The Burnout Paradise & other-older-unimportant-Burnout-games-that-we-include-just-for-the-sake-of-broadness Wiki". Frankly, this could be our title, and no one can deny this seeing how scarce and minimal our contents about previous Burnout games is. Burnout Revenge gets a little attention, then again, Revenge and Paradise are more recent than the now 9-year-old Burnout.

Get ready for a big wall of text, I really hope you will read this, this is a Wiki-wide issue that concerns each and everyone of us.

Presentation Edit

As mentioned, two sub-projects will draw-out the two main objective lines of Project: Rebirth:

• Rebirth through Redesign - The renewal of Burnopedia's appearance.
• Rebirth through Restoration - The care-taking of Burnopedia's image database.

Rebirth through Redesign Edit

Basically, I'm proposing that we change the skin of the website.

But Why? Edit

Well first off, don't you think the skin is getting old? It's not a bad thing, but I think it is time for innovation. Nowadays, a good site is a complete yet user-friendly interface with appealing colors. Our interface is more-or-less complete and relatively easy to use. However, from a purely artistic point of view, I'd say the skin is getting passable.

The site looks faded away, it lacks contrast in certain areas. What we cannot seem to achieve is this crucial effect of depth and dynamism. This is because the skin looks very generic. We have a cool working color scheme, true. But the few images we use as skin assets (elements of the skin that are actual files and not coded colors) are poorly finished, layer transitions can be distinguished, pixels sometimes pop out, image sizes are not well thought out and some areas are left blank for some completely unknown reason...

On the whole, the interface's skin isn't bad but it is far from flawless. It looks too bi-dimensional to me and I suggest we give it the third by creating new assets with special effects to liven it up, giving it a less static feel.

The thing is that, to me, the age of websites decorated simply by code-generated layouts has passed. Unfortunately, we are still part of those now defunct or restyled websites.

And How? Edit

A website's skin is governed by .CSS files. The important one is Monaco.CSS as some of you may know. Common.CSS also plays an important part for more advanced appearance tweaks. We are able to modify these files with the help of expert users.

I'm currently thinking that we ought to give depth to the skin, very literally. This will essentially be done thanks to fancy "Gloss" techniques applied to the new assets that we will create, shadows could even be added to produce a real sense of perspective.

Essentially, I propose that we redesign everything, well not quite everything, but around 80-90% of what we already have. And we can also add things too, for instance: we have not yet customized our User Mastheads (that bar you can see on User pages, with the avatar, name and edit count). Things can be done.

• Colors

Colors can be changed a little, we can keep our gray/orange color scheme, but we could darken the gray, especially the general background, the background of this very text. I'm not saying we turn it black, but darken it towards a hue closer to grayscale (#111; #222; #333; #444...). Font color will be conserved, in my opinion, white text on dark background is easier to read and, less-importantly, closer to the gaming style.

• Image Backgrounds (Site Header)

Our header is the most important element of our skin, it had been decided to keep it displayed for all the pages, and so we must respect that decision. However, it is imperative to redesign it. As explained above, we should give it depth and a less generic appearance. Finding new and higher quality images will make it look better instantly. Brainstorming a new or altered format is the second part of the redesign: we could move certain parts of the image here and there like the title and sub-title, add effects to the logo, change the fonts maybe, etc.

Another of my early ideas was to actually slim the image down vertically, it is actually pretty thick in comparison to other sites! Resizing it will lighten the general appearance of the skin. In a time where everything gets "Slimmer" and streamlined, having a bulky and fat header isn't the best strategy. We should keep in mind that we use it to represent the site: Burnopedia and that a new user will see that image before anything else.

• Image Backgrounds (Secondary Headers)

These smaller images have their importance, they are found on the left, they are on the top of widget boxes and one can also be found in the main button bar (edit, history, etc). This should also be redesigned with either a repeating pattern or a refined image.

Positioning of these assets is of utmost importance, besides the actual image, it needs to be placed thoughtfully. One might immediately think about using several image areas to create a whole image, like the GTA Wiki does it. I don't think this is a good solution. However, when going for originality it does the job really well and I'm sure we can still use this method.

The GTA Wiki also thinks about its growing widescreen-equipped readers, the header image is actually 1900 pixels wide (In Firefox, press CTRL+minus several times to zoom out and see the full image) so even on the PS3's browser in Maximum Size display area, the entire section in which the bar fits is devoid of black areas (unlike ours). We must absolutely change the header's size so that widescreen displays don't show empty areas!

We could give the skin appeal-O-meter a whooping boost by also working with transparency (the skin supports .png files if I'm correct) So it would be interesting to see what ideas we can think of with this in mind.

• Miscellaneous
  • Rounded Edges - I think that we'll need to set up more rounded edges, especially if we plan on applying gloss effects. Square corners get old, a bit like Windows 98... This is 2010!
  • Game Icons - Like here, I think that Game Icons in the top right (above the article title separator) would be a welcome addition and may remove the need to use the game = input in our currently set up infoboxes. By pushing these images' placement farther, it would lighten infoboxes and articles, in addition to making the page look more professional and neater. Remember that a picture speaks for 1000 words!

With What? Edit

Tough question to answer alone. Burnout is the only game that showcases hot, brand-new cars, shining in the sunlight, but at the same time sponsors heartbreaking moments of ruthless violence and total destruction. I'm pretty confident that the CEO of Bugatti in Mulsheim curses this series for such shameful blasphemy against refined automobiles.

So what should we go for? Shiny and brand-new like the iconic Tempesta? Or down-right filthy and worn-out like our good old Trash Truck from back in the day? My immature mind would go for wrecked and worn-out, but my emotionally attached heart (and the somewhat reasoned part of my mind) says shiny. And indeed, I think this is the way to go. Since Burnout, CG have always focused on high-tech racing cars, researched body work and paint-jobs with awesome detail. We should definitely concentrate on polishing our appearance to be smooth and neat, making good ol' Ettore proud.

Cheesy references aside, if we are going with neat and streamlined, Gloss effects are indeed possible (and recommended). What would be our main pattern/texture?

• Imitation of a metallic or sparkling paintjob?
• Carbon fiber weaving?
• Brushed steel imitation?
• Flat colors with gloss effects? Gradients?
• Car grill imitation?
• Chrome effects?
• Leather?

I think we can actually combine some of these together (ie: Chrome and Metallic paint, gloss colors and carbon fiber). For the moment I'm only thinking about headers and bars but we can apply such effects to anything basically.

Conclusion Edit

So I've enumerated most of our current issues about the skin, and brought to you my thoughts and some ideas too. I'm sure you have plenty tucked tight inside your heads too! So why not suggest some below? Also while we're suggesting, here are several Wikis I got inspiration from and right now I'm getting 100s of ideas at a time, combining elements from some and using coding from others.

Here they are:

Comments about Rebirth through Redesign Edit

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Rebirth through Restoration Edit

In a nutshell, I plan on taking extensive care of our image database. We have several missions according to me.

• Housekeeping

Sorting out older files, eliminating obsolete images (too poor quality to be used anywhere). Browsing through some of the files, I have marked some of the worst for deletion.

• Restoration

Replacing important files by uploading better quality files (notably older Burnout games vehicles).

• Setting Standards

After examining our files (and from certain standards already imposed by Burnout), we should establish a code of minimal specifications a file should comply with (size for certain types of images, height and width ratios for certain types of images, effects applied to images, etc) for future uploads. This will enable us to standardize our library and I'm sure we'll have more "good" images in relation to our total number of files than what we have right now. Our current ratio is scaringly weak.

• Ordering and Categorizing

Already underway thanks to Rappy and I. We should precisely categorize our files, once achieved, the Category Tree will be able to serve as a file browser for users and we'll be able promote this method of file viewing and browsing.

• Innovation & Addition

Viewing other wikis such as The Vault (Fallout Wiki), I realized how generic and faded our own infoboxes looked. This previously mentioned wiki actually uses tablebackgrounds and PNG files to show objects in infoboxes, like here. The use of semi-transparent cut-outs in addition to generic gradient backgrounds is appealing to me. We could do the same with our vehicle images for infoboxes.

One last sizable problem: We are still in the need of several (read: many) images! The situation is unimaginable, we must get our hands on more pictures!!

But Why? Edit

We are lacking images!! I have, personally, never actually stumbled across wikis needing images. What's the deal with this? We must remedy this situation at once!

Also, it's essentially one hell of a mess. Finding Guerrilla soldiers in the Amazon is actually easier than finding a specific file for a specific need. We had literally thousands of uncategorized files that I still haven't even finished dealing with, along with those are the files which need licensing templates, I figure that they will be more numerous than the uncategorized ones... What's more, some of our files aren't of excellent quality, and it is more likely to occur for older Burnout games than for Paradise.

And How? Edit

• We should review all of our images, category by category, combing them following our objectives listed above, deleting and replacing when necessary.
• Set up a steady and foolproof category setup which will be easy to use. This is already underway.
• Establishing the upload specifications and trying to implement that into the upload form. This should include the messages stating the need to categorize and set a License type directly after the upload, to avoid uncategorization.
• Create cut-outs for vehicles. This is already possible thanks to some images already here. For Paradise, a PC user will be asked to take screenshots of these vehicles in the same spot and with the same camera angle for all of them.
• Users owning previous Burnout games will need to find a way to take decent pictures of their games. This is the only way for us to fill those redlinks...

Conclusion Edit

Here 's the SitRep sirs. A heap of mess, old pics, bad pics, duplicated pics, lost pics, needed pics, unneeded pics, non-standard pics, poor pics, unknown pics, good pics, irrelevant pics, strange pics, her pics, his pics, seeks pics...

And we have to regain control of our database. I think that other wikis have their pictures well organized. And if they don't? Well I don't really care about them, we should maintain order in our files!

Comments about Rebirth through RestorationEdit

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1. Articles Needed

OK, let's face it: we're missing hundreds - if not thousands - of articles from pre-Paradise, not to mention a good few events and locations from Paradise itself. I propose that a group of "speed writers" do the outline of an article (like I did on North Mountain Drive, along with a few other roads). This is very basic writing, and will produce stubs.

2. Article Improvement

After this, another group of people (possibly admins?) look over the article and add the details needed. It'll probably take a few days and contributions from people to do this to the high standard needed. The articles can then be de-stubbed.

3. Pictures

Unless anyone else can do photos of games, this will be mainly reliant on Le Mans Racer. After the de-stubbing, the article is placed in a picture needed category. The photographer(s) will check this category and, if possible, upload photos of the articles needed.

4. More pictures

The next step will be for a "pic man" (any better suggestions for a name are welcome) to insert these pictures in the relevant pages. If this pic man feels that an image is irrelevant, or that a better one is needed, he will contact the photographer who uploaded it. Once this is done, the article can be removed from the picture needed category and placed in an overview needed category

5. Overview

Next, someone will give the article one final check to make sure it is a good article. If this person has any complaints, they should contact the person whose job it is and ask them to sort it. Obviously, if it is only minor, the overviewer should just do it themself. The article is now complete

Status Edit

• Organizing images IS DONE.
• Sorting images is NOT done.
• Restoration of images is NOT done.
• Image standard setting IS DONE.
• Addition of images is NOT done.

General Conclusion Edit

So these are the two focal points of Project: Rebirth. Distinct projects that deal with more or less the same substance, images.

I reported the situation in which we're in and I hope you can see as well as me how critical it is. I think it is imperative that we get a move on, making modifications to areas I have listed. This change will not only make the wiki look good, new and fresh all over again, but it will also motivate the rest of our users, which will then be encouraged to contribute. I'm sure that we'll get new members if we redesign our skin too! I also believe that the change will make the process of article writing exciting again.

I honestly can't wait for this to happen.

Seeks spoke, and I'm looking forward to reading your responses and replying to your queries.

Thank you.