One week ago, Blizzard announced that the beta would start this month, but has now confirmed that the beta has launched. Initially, the beta would have started much earlier, but was postponed because the new functionality of Battle.net was not ready. Blizzard opened the sign-up for the beta as early as May 2009, but had to announce in November that the test would not take place until 2010. The developer had previously stated that the game was postponed to 2010, which led to some unrest among shareholders of parent company Activision Blizzard.

Blizzard has also posted the minimum system requirements for the beta of StarCraft II announced on the support pages. The developer of the new RTS stressed that these specs are liable to change and therefore not definitive. The requirements are modest, according to the specs page that Blizzard has made. A 2.2-GHz processor meets the minimum and the beta requires at least 1GB memory and Windows XP SP3 is played. For Windows 7 and Vista is 1.5 GB.

Blizzard also announced that 4GB of free disk space required will be minimal and that the type of video card GeForce 6600GT or ATI Radeon 9800 Pro and that it should be a minimum of 128MB memory is available.

On Wednesday Blizzard announced the closed beta started and thousands of players joined the game on the new Battle.net. A Mac version of the beta software is not available at the start, but will come when the beta progresses are available, as is mentioned in the faq.

The best part about all this is that it wont take long for the beta to leak! Which means its likely that we will soon all be playing!

Well for those that didn’t get into the beta, heres the official cinematic trailer so you can still have a look at the game:

Update: Here are some live streams i found from www.1up.com where they recorded a game played in the Starcraft II beta

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

This also means that everybody has to register again, really important guys, so do it and get your game on!

Also not everything I wanted to have done before switching to wordpress officially is done, and i will continue to work on it on regular bases. So if you see something you dont like, or you have a great idea let us know!

Because we are now running WordPress instead of E107 you might not be able to find things that you did find on the old orangeswarm. That is the reason we are stil hosting the old orangeswarm aswell, right here: Link to orangeswarm on e107.

Well thats it for now, hope you guys like the new look and feel of OrangeSwarm!

This will also be the year that we will start using the new CMS (WordPress) and we hope that you will contribute allot of articles and help us grow to become a big and supporting community!

We wish you the best of health and fun in 2010!

Greetings,

The OrangeSwarm Staff

This is heroin’s list:

1. Highlight Reel – Square images (stretch looks ugly)
2. Four main news items – Square images (stretch looks ugly)
3. Frontpage, recent comments – I dont think we need it atleast not initially
4. The stuff under the googleads? My fault idk remove that shit
5. The news (New CMS: Day 5 item) can you change the background color? I think it could look slicker
6. Theme hack to make the comments look like these link
7. Change the thumbs icons
8. The right column on the site, decrease its with a bit so there is more room for forum (decrease it 15% or something?
9. Load user from site registered
10. Use user avatars
11. “Comments are closed.” on the forum page.. why?
12. Avatars are now 80×80 px. Thats fine but bigger is better right ?

And so i responded:

1. You can get good images in this size, the exact size (for perfect and no stretch) is width: 200px, height: 120px. So as long as you get something close to the dimensions 2:1 its fine. square images are harder to find good ones for.
2. same as 1.
3. I removed it, it was mainly filling and the filling was no longer needed.
4. Removed it before
5. Yes i can, lighter? darker?
6. I will start working on this
7. Change of plans, no mode fingering up and down on comments i made it so theres a star rating for the article, and i think thats much better… i mean who the hell gives credits to a comment…
8. Forum will go full width.
9. i will not load the orangeswarm users… we will send them all a e-mail. main reason for this is that wordpress uses different password security making it impossible to uuh well make it possible to login, cuz they type in the “wrong” password
10. I believe this is there alreaddy
11. Needs to be removed.
12. Thats right, they were 80×80 in the settings, but hardcoded for 40×40 in the template, changed that when i changed the comments template!

Also i did some other stuff in the template, optimizing and so and did some tweaking on other parts.

I still have to fix the freakin left/right arrows on the slider… the image is hardcoded to a other website, and yes i can change them… just cant find the right images to do the trick :S when i find them its like 30 seconds of work so you have have some nice ones laying around, please lemme know.

Also i still have to get the forum fixed, chryseus can you look into it to make it full page? i think i know how i can do it but i dont know if that way will interfere with the performance… contact me on msn?

Well ima go get me some food and than i have to get back to studying, dunno or i will fix more today.

Update 20:30 GMT:

Finally got the forum to full width and im loving it, now all thats left is to get it to fit in the theme. Also i got the comments fixed, and i think they are looking totally awesome! tell me what you think of both!

Oh yeah forgot to mention before, and almost forgot it now: You can upload you’r avatars from now on. this can be done on your profile page. you can also still use your gravatar! Its set up this way: First we check or you have a gravatar, if you do we put that as your avatar. if you dont have it, you get the default mystic man image. You can upload a avatar in both situations.

Anyways, enough of this, time to get to work.

Yesterday late i ran into a problem… well not really a problem but its a tough issue concerning the category’s and i need your ideas about it. Chryseus submitted a article, which is about installing morrowind on linux, using Wine. Now where are you going to place this? Chryseus placed it under Software > Linux. I would have placed it under Games > Setting up.

It actually fits in both, because it’s about running a piece of software on Linux, but that piece of Software is a game, which makes it a Setup Guide. Maybe someone has a simple solution for this? The first thing that came into my mind was adding it to both categories so to “Setting up” and to “Linux”. What do you guys think?

Also i added a forum to wordpress, thats currently functional and you can check it out… does need allot of changing.

And i added a login menu, that was a big must… but it should be placed higher up in the sidebar.

I came up with the following category tree to start with (i will most likely come up with different category’s and might even remove some later, as its a work in progress).

• Games
  • Reviews – Reviews of games will go in here
  • Setting up – This will include downloading and installation guides
  • Walkthroughs – Walkthroughs for games
• Media
  • Movies – Everything related to movies
  • Music – Everything related to music
• News
  • News Flash – All the news concerning OrangeSwarm will go in here
  • Downloading News – All news that concern downloading, like court decisions
• Software
  • Windows – all software running on windows
  • Mac – all software running on mac
  • Linux – all software running on linux, this includes getting software to work on wine.

Also I have been thinking about what we need. So far I came up with the following:

• A Forum
• Visitor Statistics – update: we will be using google analytics, fixed that.
• A Download area
• Reply on comments – update: fixed, just needed a plugin
• when submitting it says “comment is submitting, please wait a comment” that should be changed to “submitting, please wait a moment”
• Recode the post php so a default image is picked when no image is added, chryseus idea: add generic default images, depending on category the post is submitted to.

Again I will certainly come up with more, and of course again if you know something we really should implement, please let us know! we need your input.

Update (20:21 GMT) : Alright, so I made some minor changes to the theme which I think were really necessary, like the theme name image at the right bottom, and as a suggestion from chryseus I merged the 2 sidebars into one, witch give it more space and we can place something nice in there than. For now I placed the last 7 comments in there, which I think is fine until we find something better.

Oh also I just came up with the idea to never ever add a chatbox to this website, ain’t that a great idea? I think it is. Why? Because I think its good for nothing, chatting can be done true other ways, and if its something you really wanna share you can also just post that in the forum (soon to come when that god damn bbpress installer.php doesn’t show a blank page… i really have to get a fix for that). I’m thinking about adding a “spam” part to the forum, for everyone’s chatting needs, that works fine as well i think!

One final thing for now, I really need people to add some nice content. if your willing to help please do because I need it for testing purposes. If you cant seem to figure out how to add articles ask here in a comment and I will get back to you as soon as possible (or someone Else can help you).

Ow just when i submitted this i figured id go add some content, went to orangeswarm.com and i realised we don’t have a “Server” category, I’m thinking about adding this to the main category Games, and than adding a subcategory called “Dedicated Servers”. Also, with every post you “need” a image atm.  I’m thinking about recoding it so there is a default image when you dont add a image, i guess thats a good idea? Altough people should just add images to their post’s.

The main reason is that lately we decided to start using the Content Management Plug-in more and it is just so god damn hard to customize, and it does not do what i want it to do. And after a month of trying new things, like simply adding google ads i gave up since even the hardcore E107 users could not help me.  (i even send e-mails to users that asked similar questions 2-3 years ago in the e107.org forum and they still didn’t have solutions). The reason this is so important to us is that we want to get away for the “forum” type of website, and have more solid articles, and besides that a good forum. But i came to the conclusion that E107 is basically a news system, with a attached forum, and yes plug-ins like chat box, and polls but nothing really big…

Also i found out that allot of successful other websites either run their own custom made CMS, or use WordPress. The main reason for this is that WordPress is very easily customisable to almost any form, and E107 in the end is pretty limited. Yes you can change looks and stuff like that, but that simply does not meet our (my) requirements for a good CMS.

So here we are, trying out on WordPress, hoping for a successful ending. Please keep your thumbs crossed and if you have any hints / tips / suggestions don’t be afraid and let us know!