Haven't written a blog entry for a while, so I might write one for a little something that I've been working on for the last day or so. Nothing too exciting, probably more boring , but it's just a little insight into the backend of things in the PR Dev world.

I'm sure everyone knows of the new news ticker in the PR main menu that was introduced in 0.86. Due to the flash engine in BF2, certain things don't work, so workarounds have to be done in order to get things working. This basically means for the news ticker, instead of loading dynamic text for the news ticker, it works by loading images from a website. The images are of text, so it basically looks the same . For the linked websites for each news item, since we can't update the menu every time we want to update the news ticker, the links go to a static redirect website, which we dynamically change to send you to the appropriate link.

Now, the problem with using this method, is updating the news ticker would be a fairly heavy task. You would have to write up a message in Photoshop or whatever, save it, upload it, then edit the redirect page, save it, upload it. Then do that multiple times for the 5 different news ticker items. Not really that great, more of a chore updating the news ticker, leaving it go unused and ending up with no one reading it .

The solution is some sort of web form that allows any Dev easily update the ticker in a matter of seconds. So, through the wonders of PHP and JavaScript, you end up with something like this:



Anyway, I really like how it has turned out. It's turned a 5-10 minute task into a 20 second task, so hopefully we'll end up with a constant stream of dynamic info going straight into the main menu, which means more advertising of news, events, competitions, whatever .