Hi, I feel almost spent now but I have enough left in me for one long post!!
I do not know if this will interest any body here however I will write it anyway in the hope that it does!
Over the last months I have been involved in creating a chart interface for some people who compile statistics for all of the cracking and trainer making groups in the scene.
This chart is similar to the old Eurocharts but it is only dedicated to the release scene.
This is why I am not sure that this post fits on this forum because this is all about programming intros and effects and stuff but it was an interesting project to be involved with.
There are a few text based scene reports doing the rounds in the game scene, these are usually just plain old text files, groups are given points for certain types of releases, there are several sets of scene rules in existance actually.
Since the demo scene and the games scene are not really connected any more these days, the scene has changed.
You do not see so many cracktros and todays trainers and installers have very average looking code.
In fact you just dont see trainer menus released any more into the demo scene because it is just usually a simple window with a logo and perhaps a scroller and that's all.
The people who compile the game scene charts used an adapted trainer menu for a long time to release the charts, it was released as a text file and a simple exe which didnt run properly and crashed like a bastard.
The thought was there to try and make a real menu though and after a lot of issues are released I became involved and coded a rudimentary interface... I will post a link here;
http://www.defacto2.net/magazines.cfm?mode=detail&title=The%20Game%20Scene%20ChartYou can download all the game scene charts at that page, the issues from December onwards to March use my first engine.
Now I have just finished a new interface, the latest edition (April 2008) is released today.
I have no doubt it will find it's way to Defacto2 so you'll probably be able to get hold of it there in the next few weeks.
I won't release it personally because it is private for the games scene first, it will leak out to defacto2 though.
Anyway I used this forum extensively during the development of the charts and I owe thanks to these people;
Rbraz for Tint_PTC ext, Bin2bas, Bmp2raw
Shockwave For his help with some of the tools I needed to develop for the editorial team of the charts.
The makers of Ufmod
Slippy for OSME (although it is not used yet)
Jim for Tinysid (although it is not used yet)
Everyone on this forum for creating a really useful reference place.
Without all the cool posts from cool people here there is no way I could have completed this project.
Now I am going to develop the charts even further, I have a lot of new features I want to add to it, no doubt I will fall back on this community again to help me.
