Project Nightshade (a farewell to frames)

Project Nightshade

Nightshade is a complete redesign and rebuild of the Neuron Games website and server code.  As much as I love the look and feel of the current website, there are far too many technical issues with new ones seeming to appear each month or so. 

The problem is that our current site was initially designed back in the “sloppy” HTML days with frames.  Then it was rebuilt in XHTML and iFrames, but that provided more problems so we had to return to frames even though they don’t comply completely with the XHTML standards, arghh! 

Then just when things were working nicely the main menu stops being loaded when some people visit, or the submenu system wouldn’t keep up with what the user picks in the main menu.  We narrowed this down to local connection issues in flash being discarded in the new IE 8. 

Great, so now not only are frames being deprecated, but now flash is being compromised as well. You see, we have the main menu in one frame that is flash that communicates with the submenu in another frame that is also flash through local connection which now only works sometimes and it is a throw of the dice when it decides to break.

So given all this and trying to maintain the site, we have opted for a clean “frame free” site.  We have learned many lessons along the way, but here are two big ones I will pass along.

1. Don’t use frames, they are starting to go away, they break the whole bookmarking process.  Search engines also hate them and sometimes get confused.  If you have them you have to wire in special crap code in javascript to make sure that a HTML page isn’t being loaded outside the context of the frame set….blah blah blah.  “Just say NO to frames”.

 2. If you use Flash, don’t make it dependant on any other flash movie since local connection protocol in IE is iffy at best now. I am not going to wait for the fix. (They will just break it again in the future anyhow) :-P 

With any luck we should have a new site up in a week or two.  In the mean time you can still visit the site, but if it doesn’t work, we understand.  You can still follow us on Facebook or Twitter at the following links.

You can read more and follow me and Neuron Games, Inc. here: