Praze to 360MONSTER team!

[TRH]

Hi again!

I just wanted to give my praze at how amazing 360MONSTER is, especially the "FEATURED ARTICLES" flash virtual 360 dashboard type layout:cool:

Mant, could you talk alittle on how you done that, It's just nothing like I have ever seen in a flash file before, it loads superfast, for you to add a game to it do you need to re-do the flash file or have you magically coded PHP/MySQL to do it for you? :)

Could you also talk about how you operate the homepage from a backend, how this does that, what it is, is I am trying to get into PHP/MySQL, or to better explain that I know the basics of PHP/MySQL I just want to improve my brain :D, maybe even to one day join the 360MONSTER team! :) "/me dreams lol"

Edit 1: one more thing i'd like to add to this post, I buy stuff from play.com, now that I have seen the play.com button on the 360MONSTER homepage ill buy my stuff threw the link to support the 360MONSTER site!. :)

Edit 2: I was wondering Mant as to why you'r using Flash for the game media (videos) instead of using something like .wmv?

Thanks!

[brum]

lol seems very intrested in everything but you all do deserve some praze!!

[backin-strachan]

Yeah it is a stunning layout.

APPLAUSE again Mant

[AK.]

its best lookin site on the net imo

[Mant]

Thanks for your kind comments TRH, always good to hear people loving the things I take my own time out to do.

Right your questions...

Flash Feature Blades:
Once I became full owner I wanted to make something special for the front end of the site. We bashed our heads together and initially it was just going to be our old feature layout but with flash video instead of stills. Yeah that would have been good but I wanted to do something extra unique and better.

Being a fan of the flash feature that CNET did and later on Gamespot did, and then IGN did etc, etc... I thought we could have something like that on the site but maybe with a twist. So taking the 360 dashboard and making that the holder of the videos and feature content was my idea. Doing this was a little tough though as it was done all before I could get the console myself so I had to rely on videos from the net and some captures from some of the staff here of the dashboard. Blades we created from scratch in flash and the middle dashboard content was created to contain the game title text and external videos.

So how’s it done, well simple flash with external video pulled in and generic scripted movement for the blades. The blades content is pulled in from a database and can be edited via a backend area in our custom CMS. Videos are created by myself, takes around 30mins to knock-up each one. This involves taking a video from the mentioned game, cutting it down to 3-5seconds long, cropping it to size, publishing it and then importing it to flash. This gets uploaded via our CMS along with a witty strap line and descriptive text and the rest is pulled in automatically from the games database.

So that’s pretty much it, I don’t want to get into too much detail, as we’ve had many thieves/copycats of this idea and we need to keep these cards close to our chest.

Support:
Thanks for supporting us by using our Play links, I have also added GAME to our affiliates (not had the chance to widely announce it) but buying any games through the GAME link will also help support the site a little bit.

Game Media Videos:
Before you found us we did use choice of Quicktime and Window Media Video, but at first we never had enough hosting space until we moved over to our dedicated servers. Video takes up A LOT of space as I’m sure you know so hosting 1 video for each game on our database would fill up our space in no time. So this is why we haven’t flooded our site with video content.

Storage limits has also been the reason I decided to use Flash Video. It’s much smaller in size while (if using a decent bit rate) keeping quality. A 100mb AVI/WMV video can be reduced down to around 10-20mb. Using divx/xvid is messy as not all people have those installed where as a good percentage of people have flash installed in their browsers. Now I know people like to keep video or download them and this will be addressed very soon also via HD downloads (Top Secret). So bottom line FLV is used because it’s a smaller footprint on the servers storage space, quality can be kept and overall it’s a more wider supported single format on the net than supporting two large videos with QT and WMV.

Hope that answers all your Q’s, thanks for showing interest in what we do here.
Cheers

[HotFish]

Yeah i noticed the Game link Mant.

I sometimes look on Gamestation's website and they have an affliate link. Might be worth it as people buy from here aswell. Gamestation is owned by Blockbuster grp - so mayby there might be a rental service in there somewhere? I have included a quick link for you, because every penny helps!

Cya

http://www.gamestation.co.uk/

[Mant]

Cheers Lenseleven, We do have gamestation on our list of affiliates, just no buttons have been added, we did have a banner for it but that got removed also. The main reason is they sell there titles online at street prices like 45.99-49.99 per title and with play/game being cheaper I thought we'd cover them more. I'll add a gamestation one very soon, as you say, every penny helps :)

...it really does.

[damien©]

Have you checked out a similar thing TeamXbox.com have done. It looks as if they have a "similar idea" over there, it's not as good, well not even close.

Ok so I might aswell do my bit, I normally order of Play.com or Game.net so what do I do to give you a slice of the cash?

[TRH]

Ok so I might aswell do my bit, I normally order of Play.com or Game.net so what do I do to give you a slice of the cash?

All you have to do is go to the 360MONSTER homepage and click on the Play or Game logo at the bottom right menu, its their somewhere, when you do a slice of the cash will automatically go to Mant (i think)

[Mant]

Have you checked out a similar thing TeamXbox.com have done. It looks as if they have a "similar idea" over there, it's not as good, well not even close.

Ok so I might aswell do my bit, I normally order of Play.com or Game.net so what do I do to give you a slice of the cash?

Yup we've already had a heated debate about TXB incarnation of our blades, so thats laid to rest.

As for using our affiliate links, they sit inside the games pages on the right and also on every page (except the forum) at the bottom right of the page, you can't miss them.

Clicking these will you take you to their sites, as long as you buy something during this session, we pocket a little bit of commission which helps us with server cost on the site each month, which is a heafty bill :(

We will be doing a selection of monthly banners (you've seen the madden, dead rising and Saints Row ones that have been doing the rounds) that link to the games pages on the affiliated site, either game, play or gamestation. If you click those and buy at that same point (session) then we will recieve that commission. Its pisspoor but every little helps.

[HotFish]

Note for Dcontrol - he swore - tell him off! -im only joking! (lol):zip:

Note that i will click the link before i visit play.com - does it just have to be games - or do you get something for cd's/dvd etc if i was to visit play from here and purchase things?

Cya
:)

[TRH]

well if you click on (http://www.360monster.com/adserver/adclick.php?bannerid=59&zoneid=0&source=&dest=http%3A%2F%2Fplaycom.at%2F360monster%3FLID%3D 10%26DURL%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.play.com%2Fplay247.as p%3Fpa%3Drbrowsea%26page%3Dtitle%26r%3DX360%26titl e%3D667331) for example any buy that then Mank will get a cut of it, im not sure about other products, if i had to say so then Mank should get a cut in whatever you buy but i could be wrong on this, im sure he will clear this up.

[Dcontrol]

Note for Dcontrol - he swore - tell him off! -im only joking! (lol):zip:

Who? What? Where? When? ;)

I was thinking if I cancel all my preorders on www.play.com and then go through monsters affiliate link and order them all over again you should get a little bit of commission or would they notice what I have done? :brow:

[TRH]

they would notice it but they wouldnt do anything about it because at the end of the day their still getting your custom :D

[Mant]

Note for Dcontrol - he swore - tell him off! -im only joking! (lol):zip:

Note that i will click the link before i visit play.com - does it just have to be games - or do you get something for cd's/dvd etc if i was to visit play from here and purchase things?

Cya
:)


Anything from play, so CD's, DVDs... and TV's ;)

As long as you enter Play using our link and buy anything during that session we will get something. If you got to Play direct we wont get anything.

[damien©]

What kind of commision percentage do you get?

Is it worth it?

[Mant]

2% so 80p per game :( but it helps with the server fund that i have to dip into my own pocket each month.

[damien©]

Do you know what you should do is have a link to Play.com and Game on the forums instead of just the banner at the top.

As it would be easier to remember to go through that instead of going directly.

Just a thought