I went to look up Homesick for a bug report:
- No link to the campaign list on the Hard Light site.
- The criteria for items on the right is unclear. There are three different game engines (FS1, FS2, and FSSCP) in the same list.
- Right-hand list items aren't ordered according to any critieria
- Right-hand list items also include non-TC related things, like Jobs and Search
- Search doesn't work, but I assume that's an under-construction thing
- The page that comes up when you click on a TC is unnecessary. It should be replaced by the campaign listing page, with a link to the standalone mission page at the top.
- The campaign listing also needs to be revised, with some kind of information. There's no way to tell what campaign might be something that you're interested in besides the name. "(n/a)" should be replaced by the description or short description. Things like Ratings, number of missions, and version requirements should also be listed, possibly in a horizontal bar to conserve vertical screen space.
- The progress bars and finished bar should be replaced by something easier to read, and should be more obvious at a glance as to what they're telling you (eg "Finished" should be a different color than "In progress".) "In progress" should also have its own indicator. The progress bar does not work very well, because there's no way to tell how long it would be when the campaign is completed.
- The site can't be navigated without Javascript.
- Both the "pages" and "sort" buttons at the top of the lists should turn bold when one of the items is suggested. Also, the pages buttons would be better moved apart from the information, to show that they control it. A "Next page" and "Previous page" link at the bottom/top of the pages wouldn't hurt, either.
- All items that can be sorted by should be visible from the main page.
- The ratings for "Casualties of War" appear to be inconsistent - two rank icons appear below the name on the campaign list, but the campaign info shows "N/A" for ratings.
This is the first time I've looked at the campaign list for several months, but I'm disappointed in the form that it's taken. I remember that the old one was good for browsing through campaigns, but this one is only good if you've already decided what campaign you want to look at. It's not possible to tell how long a campaign is or what it's about. If I want to, say, play a short campaign (5-6 missions) one evening that uses one of the TCs that I have installed, it'll take me about forty-two clicks for the first page of Freespace Retail alone.
So some summarizing comments: the days of 56k are just about gone. There's no point in cutting the campaign list up into separate pages. It doesn't look any better, it takes ages to search through it, and it doesn't offer any benefit at all considering the logo alone takes up 26kb, more than the rest of the page combined (according to Firefox).
Finally, the use of Javascript is (to me) unnecessary and inappropriate. A far better solution would be to use PHP to dynamically generate the pages from a database (or file) of the campaigns. This would still allow the use of template pages, and it would also allow you to add a submission form for campaigns in the future. If server CPU time is an issue, then get rid of the logo and make the PHP script generate HTML pages. The overall page size will be less, and it won't break for people who don't want/need Javascript enabled on every web site.
In the end, after searching through every single TC, I didn't find Homesick. I had to use a Google search instead.
