cenotaph flight rising fame

I am seeing a lot of people ask for a toggle or a way to go back to the old site design, in a way that implies such a thing should be easy to implement. It does sound easy to implement. We have three different colour modes we can switch between, right? We can go between mobile view and wide view? They have all the old code and assets, why can't they just let people pick in their settings to look at the old site again? It's not how it works. It doesn't really matter what your feelings about the refactor are, and I'm not going to give my opinion on it here. I just want to help people understand what exactly happened yesterday and why it's pointless to ask for it to go back.

i. HOUSE

Imagine a house.

It's an old house. It's been around for a while. It was built many years ago, and it's creaky and weird but it's our house, and we like it. There's leaks and the wood is a little aged and it stands out in the block of modern flathouses, but it's still our house.

As much as we love this house, there are issues with the house. Not everybody can get into the house, or navigate in there while they're around. There are things about this house that we can't change while it's made of the same materials that it is.

This is a structural flaw inherent to the house. The house is two-storied. Not everyone can get to the second story. In terms of the site, there were features that were unfriendly for people with visual impairment, people who could only play on their phones, etc.

ii. DARK MODE & INTERFACE

What did the old site look like? Why couldn't we have dark mode? The site was built out of layers and layers of PNGs made to look exactly like the light mode interface. All the NPC images, the old message and friend request icons, they all had white backgrounds or white fragments around the image because they were made assuming the site had a white background.

You couldn't just make the background of the site dark, because every single feature and image was created assuming the background was and would remain white.

This is why the logo was 'doubling' upon itself when the refactor first launched. The Flight Rising logo was a part of the banner image. Now the banner has been removed from the image and it's a floating element on the top of the page. This means it can react when the screen is made smaller. This is the equivalent of being able to move our lightswitch.

What did the site refactor do? Among other things, it decoupled all of these in-built images and features from each other. They added repaintable 'drywall' separate from the site's structure. This was necessary so the site could be reactive. For example, the iconic red sidebar of the page was actually a background PNG with a white part for the site content and a red sidebar, built into one single background image. Now these parts are defined with CSS, which you can think of as the 'wallpaper' of the site.

Every single surface of our house can be repainted now!

iii. Rollback or toggle to old site pls??

This is the refactored site. Among other things, it's been changed to improve accessibility for everyone. It now looks a little bit more like every other house on the block, but it is still the house that we live in. It no longer has two stories to climb. It has a ramp, so people can get in and out with ease. It even has some additional rooms, and renovation is still ongoing. (The contractors are still fixing up the washroom.)

Yes, the site is now designed to be mobile friendly. It no longer has a second floor. It's going to look 'designed for mobile' (people who can't access a second floor.) It's going to look more 'modern' (because the materials people use to build houses has changed.)

People are not used to the new site, of course. Can't they go back to the old house? Why has the door location changed? They keep walking into the walls of the new building. The light switch isn't there when they reach for it anymore. This is understandable. It takes some time to get used to living in a new house. It's a big change. You're going to be fumbling at where the light switch used to be for a long time.

You may even hate how the new house looks. You may not want to live in it anymore. But you can't go back to the old house. It isn't there anymore. You can't have a toggle, because the new site is the infrastructure uploaded to the site's servers, where it is built, and while you can change the colour of the wallpapers or even move the location of the light switch on your own, the house is rebuilt and you cannot 'toggle' it back to the old house.

The database calls, the HTML, the javascript on the front and backends of the site are completely different. The walls and shape of the house are different!

iv. Conclusion

There is a reason there are bug threads and feedback forums for the refactor. You still have time to request that the washroom is a different colour, or the ramp should actually be less steep because the people it's meant for can't actually use it as it was intended. But the ramp, and the accessibility features are here to stay. Don't ask for a toggle or for the site to go back the way it was. It will not be going back to the house built a decade ago. Instead, figure out why the old site worked for you while this one doesn't.

Okay. My whole Tumblr in these guys, so I decided to draw them too. They're so weird, but I think I like it... ESPECIALLY THEIR BOB TAILS!

This is going to be strongly worded thoughts on PawBorough's Pelts system (the equivalent of custom skins/accents here on Flight Rising).

So I joined the Pawborough open beta test (servers opened about an hour ago), the cat-themed petsite that ran an extremely successful Kickstarter campaign back in 2022. It is one of the latest in the many, many petsites that have tried in recent years to offer an alternative to the Flight Rising-esque petsite demographic (think Dappervolk, Lorwolf, etc).

It's been interesting so far: forums use markdown which means that you if you want to show images you have to upload images directly to the Pawborough server. Which, just why? That cannot be scalable, but I don't know if they're thinking about scale or if that's just temporary? (For the sake of their own budget I hope it's jank left over from alpha.)

Anyway, you're not here for that, you're here to hear my take on the Custom Pelt system. I'm an artist, of course I want to see their take on custom content. My thoughts? It's sort of like if the worst bits of Lioden's custom decor, Flight Rising's sometimes arbitrary queue, and Furvilla's paintie systems were rolled into one giant heap of 'no, seriously, were you thinking about scalability here?'

PART I - Style & Limitations Guide

I don't know if users can view the guides without an account, but in case you can't, I'll run through just some of the chief concerns I have quickly. Let's have this series of images in their Style Guide speak for themselves:

That's right! No pure cel shading! No shading that's too 'soft!' What's that? You're using highlights on your custom Pelt? Nope, that's not allowed. Don't even think about using texture or painterly shading in your custom design. You think I'm playing around?

Get ready to get real familiar with the airbrush tool, buddy. What's next, you need to make sure that the light sources in your drawing is completely consistent with the light sources on the cat? Oh, wait:

If you're adding fur texture or markings onto cat, it has to follow the fur lines on the bases. Let's check out a few other bangers from their style guide. Can you tell the critical rule-breaking difference between these two?

That's right, line weight and softness must match the cat’s lineart, and direct from the guide: "The brushes’ “stamp” may not have any strong aliasing, nor texturing." So it's default G-pen and airbrush only from here on out? Got it.

Oh, there's an exception though.

We try to avoid completely smooth, digital gradients when possible. We either use [Grainy Airbrush], or [Blotchy Smudge] to give a gradient a bit of texture. See the brush packs for reference.

You have to use an airbrush, but be careful! Your airbrush can't be too smooth or digital, whatever that means. Uhhh, got it. So texture brushes are permitted and even necessary here?

It's not over yet: You're not allowed to repose any of the cat's limbs or put human features on them: (helllooooo, Furvilla painties!)

You can't use any existing PawBorough content in your Pelt design. So if there's a Pawborough-distinct animal/food item that isn't an existing accessory item, are you allowed to draw an animal companion? Or no?

PART II - What Kind of Culture Are We Creating Here

Pelts are PawBorough’s primary source of income, and participation in Pelt creation and trading by users helps to upkeep and support the game!

If I wanted custom content to be my primary source of income, I would attempt to make it as easy and welcoming as possible for artists to participate in the custom system. That's not what they've chosen to do here with their immediate and challenging style and limitations guide. Now, in all fairness they've put this up top:

But why are you monitoring for all of these in the first place?

If you play Flight Rising and you're following this blog, you'll know I've been making custom skins on there for about 5 years now. Flight Rising has far less stringent style limitations than this, two skin moderators dealing with custom content queue, and it still takes a week or more sometimes to get the first round of approvals/rejections on a skin approved. Most people who try making skins just stop here because it's discouraging. I've played Lioden which has a similar style limitation on its custom items too, and that's even more discouraging.

I'm not just speaking on player culture. I hope PawBorough will have one superhuman moderator for the queue that has 24 hrs a day to breathe down the neck of the custom content queue, because imagine getting your pelt denied for having shading that's too soft, you go and fix that the best you can, and then when you resubmit again now your lines aren't matching the 'site style'.

Humans have to check all that and make their own judgements on it, by the way! These guidelines all have enough 'artistic' wiggle room that it's completely unsustainable for if they want PawBorough to get huge. Why even make your own moderator's jobs harder, make it harder on the people you're supposedly relying on to be your primary income source, make it harder and feel worse for new artists to get started? And why even specify things like a furmap and using a textured airbrush if you also want to say 'but it's totally okay!! we'll be understanding and reasonable!!'

What is the point here? To farm out your own site content to users and have them pay you for it?

Also, there's this pose discount thing that feels like it's taken straight from the Flight Rising blueprint playbook, except if you think about it for more than a few seconds, you'll realize this will lead to people burning out and never completing pelt designs because you need to complete and upload all their poses at once for the best discount and most 'efficient' use of the premium currency.

And, by the way? PawBorough does not enforce and will not care if other people start closely copying your custom designs. Cool and awesome, right?

PART III - Closing Thoughts

At the end of the day, it's their site and they can do what they want with it. If they don't want to have custom content that doesn't match their vision of the site style on their site, that's ok! But I just don't expect this Pelt system to work in a healthy or sustainable way for players OR staff the way it is now.