Wallpapers for all!
Site news, by Dr. Cossack on 24 April 2007 at 23:06
X-Shunin strikes again! He recently sent me an impressive set of 19 new wallpapers, which are now all available for download in the appropriate section. These focus on characters from the ZX and Battle Network series, and are mostly available in 1280x1024 format. This updates also marks a first: Playstation Portable-sized wallpapers! Four of them are to be found among the new files added.
New affiliate
Site news, by Dr. Cossack on 5 April 2007 at 14:20
The latest affiliate to join the selected club seen at the bottom of the menu bar is Final Destination Pixelation, where you'll find many sprite comics featuring official and fan characters involved in various situations. Regulus and team have been hard at work to constantly improve on their previous efforts. Check it out!
The day after: who was fooled?
Site news, by Dr. Cossack on 2 April 2007 at 0:16
Yesterday's news about the website taking a new direction were obviously false and served as this year's April's Fools joke. I hope that none of you were too shaken! The purpose of the website will not change, since I like the way it currently works. Part of what was said is true, though, so read on.
What you saw yesterday as the website's apparent new layout was actually a lite version of the true, new layout which is now available for you to see. This is the fifth version of the Mega Man PC Website: Dr. Cossack's Lab, the last major update happening way back in 2002. The former layout was old in it's coding, which made creating new sections and maintaining them more annoying than it should be. I believe that this one looks better, as well as making the text easier to read (personally, I was tired of the yellow font too). This update also has another result: some pages, such as the Truth Corner, hold the same content while the filesize was cut almost by half!
Additionally, the design flows much better with varying screen resolutions. It used to be that the news page's right column changed in width depending of the visitor's screen resolution. That's not an issue anymore. Some sections, such as FanArt, have been looked over as well. While 800 x 600 users won't really notice much difference, people such as me with higher screen resolutions will see that the available files will try to fill the screen as much as possible instead of being stuck in a smaller vertical column.
All the sections are obviously back online, since I'm not planning to remove anything from what has been here for years. However, several sections are still in the old design: I decided to go ahead and do the change gradually. Otherwise, it would have taken me some more months to complete everything. This is still a work in progress and I expect some details to change as I tweak some elements to improve them. The older menu, still seen on the pages that didn't receive the update, has been reorganized in order to be consistent with the new one.
A big thanks goes to Ultimate X who designed and drew the new website logo! I think it's a nice change from always seeing official art all around, and it fits well with the theme of the site.
A new direction
Site news, by Dr. Cossack on 1 April 2007 at 0:00
I've been thinking about this for quite a while, and I've decided that it's time for the Mega Man PC Website: Dr. Cossack's Lab to go in a new direction. New game releases have been getting slower and slower in the last two years, to the point that a generic website no longer works as well as before to cover the Mega Man series. As such, this website will now only focus on fan-made content, such as FanArt.
As you can see, the website has been overhauled to support this new focus: the layout has been updated, a new logo (that doesn't feature official art anymore) has taken the top spot, sections not related to fan interaction have been removed... Not all of the new sections happen to be available yet, as I'm still busy converting them to the new format. They'll follow in a few days or weeks, depending of the complexity of the task.
The oekaki board's theme has been updated accordingly: it will now only accept pictures related to the Mega Man series. Older pictures that no longer belong have been removed.
Exciting times are ahead!