Introducing smashlounge 3
Today, we’re launching lots of new features as well as introducing the long-term vision for smashlounge. First, let’s check out what’s new.
- User Profiles
Register your account! Those of you who created accounts on our beta test don’t need to recreate their accounts, as they have been copied over! For those who haven’t, register your account and upload some cool information about yourself and your smash game. Your profile will display things like your main character, your 3ds friendcode, your craziest gifs and a pinned VOD that will appear at the top of your profile. You can also pin your profile on our global player map, which should help you discover new players in your area. This profile will also be used for much more interactive features in the future, but we needed to implement the account system first. This profile can also display your current regional ranking (using garPR), and will show your sponsor if you message us from a verifiable social-media account.
2. Learn with new, rich media interaction
We now feature an animated controller for some technique gifs. This allows us to show precisely which inputs are pressed, which is synched up to a gfycat that can be slowed down, or even scrubbed through frame by frame.
We hope this helps lower the barrier to entry for Melee by breaking down the execution of certain techniques. Building these animations is time consuming, but expect to see these controllers popping up on more gifs as time goes on.
3. A modular, open, evolving Smash database
The biggest thing this feature brings is some major database updates. Many applications and smash start-ups face the same problem — gathering data. Technical information is currently scattered, inconsistent, inaccurate, or outdated/archaic. We’d like to work with the community to provide an open smash database, and get all smash information into a searchable, sortable, and accurate set of data. This dataset will be expanded to provide precise data on every character’s move-sets, but we’re also focused on hosting regional group data (view an example XML feed here), searchable tournament results, technique data, and Gfycats (with associated controller animation JSON frame-data objects).
We’ve redesigned the submission process to allow flagged moderator profiles the right to approve and deny submissions with a simple click. Once approved, the data is migrated into our live database, which will immediately be queryable via our API, and will appear on our live website. We hope people really start to use our submission process, so we can build the most complete, accurate smash database ever. Our entire dataset will be open and transparent for anyone who wants to access it, free of charge, forever. We hope that people find this tool valuable, and will help us maintain huge amounts of data going forward.
So thanks. Thanks for a great beta test with 53 registered users, and a great community that supports us building this tool. Thanks for helping us hit 485,411 pageviews with 39,658 unique lifetime users. Smashlounge is a small team of 5, Kevin Toy, Boback Vakili, Marco Salazar, Dan Pagharion, and Logan Collingwood. We’ve decided to drop advertising entirely, and look forward to building the most complete smash knowledge-base with the help of our community. Follow us on twitter for constant updates and smash goodies, and make sure to let us know if you notice any issues with new features.
Thanks,
Logan Collingwood
Co-Founder/developer smashlounge
