New Theme Available

[VincentF]

So I tried something with the icons... but if pixel-art look is a requirement, then the only thing I would change is to remove the 3d-look and maybe reduce contrast for the borders. Can't post bitmaps in this topic, but I can send a PM if you like?

It was a starting point, not necessarily a requirement (not at all the fact that I can only do that ... haha ). Sorry if that topic doesn't allow posting images (I also see every comment needs to be manually reviewed before appearing here, it may be related to some configuration). No problems about sharing your ideas via PM, would be glad to have a look at them!

I also have a suggestion for the blue icons right in front of the topic titles, which are "hanging" considerably.
Add the following to the style a.topictitle:
vertical-align: middle;

I see what you're talking about, there is also those post icons that doesn't quite seem to know where to stand. I'll try to find a fix to them as well as including your fix.

Thanks for your help!

[Java Cake Games]

I don't use the forums a great deal, but one thing I liked about the old theme is the whitespace surrounding the page is a darker shade. This both makes everything look more contained rather than floating about in space, and darkens the overall screen a little so there's less #ffffff in your face.

Buuut I'm aware this is the way the world's going. Look at Wikipedia's redesign, for example - they did away with the darker heading and sidebar area - now it's just white everywhere except for a few elements such as infoboxes. If you want to be trendy, don't listen to me.

Also, the "Ian Bradley" link in the footer goes to presumably one of those sponsored pages. I'm not disabling my ad blocker to find out - I just saw the address it redirects to looks super sketchy. The domain will have expired and been snapped up by someone else.

Overall, an improvement over the old theme. Nice work!

[desertfish]

@Java Cake Games I'm using darkreader extension to turn all flashbang websites into more manageable ones.

[Merri]

By the power of asking permission or opinion from nobody, I've been playing around with Commander X16 inspired phpBB3 theming. My thinking is to throw away pretty much all compatibility to proSilver and do the front-end from scratch as I think the UI of these classic forums is rather flawed, especially after responsiveness got forced in and it was solved too often by adding dropdown menus. And there is a lot of technical side stuff that is rather odd, wrong, and/or badly outdated.

The bad thing is that I have no estimate when, if ever, this work will finish. And probably all the existing mods are incompatible in one way or another. That's what happens when considering from scratch. But the good thing is that there is freedom to re-think the layout entirely and ignore limitations caused by backwards compatibility.

So far I've only worked on the forum header and footer, fonts, and recreating the butterfly logo as an SVG.

I can't embed images so here are some screenshot links:

• 360px
• 960px
• 1280px

The design is fully fluid, currently works pretty nice from 240px to as big screen as you can buy. There are some font rendering issues caused by subpixels, that is something that can be fixed but it is better to do it once the whole design is more or less ready.

The actual content area needs to be in lighter color than what the surrounding area is. That is because phpBB allows people to use any hex color value in text of their messages, so that is a huge limitation that forces the light message background. Don't know yet if I want to play around with light & dark mode support as it is some extra work and to get this anywhere useful I'd rather need to start solving the needs of the main content area.

The "Pet Me" fonts are great in that they support pretty much all known PET characters and also include modern useful stuff like the euro symbol. They even have a character for X16 butterfly logo! So far haven't asked from Rebecca if it is OK to use the font as a webfont (since I don't know if I even finish this work). The original TTF files are not compatible with browsers and no WOFF/WOFF2 converter works with them. But I found out that BitFontMaker 2 could import them, so I could then export them again (with a lot of trial and error for good settings).