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We Are The Lambda Generation. LambdaGeneration is a website dedicated to the video game Half-Life. ( We're basically really passionate about crowbars, headcrabs and anyone who has goatee with a PhD in theoretical physics… )

Welcome to the New LambdaGeneration!

Community & Projects Other

Hello and welcome to the new LambdaGeneration!

It’s been a while since LambdaGeneration was last on your screens, but the good news is we’re back and ready to re-serve the Valve Community with a whole line of new features and fresh content.

You maybe asking: Why did LambdaGeneration go offline for so long?

Well the answer to that lies between two factors, one being our hosting expired, which would have cost a lot of money and time to renew and restore the previous site. The other, being that the site was already in a poor state due to the departure of Vic and the general lack of content at the time. It was therefore decided to hold the site and focus all efforts on creating the new one.

You may also be wondering: How come it took so long?

The answer to that is of course, Valve Time. (Or that making a bespoke WordPress theme from scratch is pretty damn hard!)

Welcome to the New LambdaGeneration!

The main point is, we are back, and hopefully for many years to come.

The new website was both designed and coded from the ground up to enable LambdaGeneration to fulfil its aim and its requirements.

In a way, the new LambdaGeneration is what we had always envisioned, however at the time of making the original website, a lack of technical knowledge combined with a lack of experience and establishment meant that the previous site was always a sort of a ‘beta’ or startup to see if it would work, which is probably one of the reasons we have always mentioned about ‘updating’ the site for so long.


New Features!

Below is a run down of some of the new features, two key components/concepts of the new LambdaGeneration are  ‘Community Spotlight’ and ‘Spectrum’.

Community Spotlight

Community Spotlight is the large banner which can be seen across the top of every page.

The purpose of this feature is to give a dedicated platform to the diverse amount of community generated content that is out there.

Screen Shot 2013-09-29 at 01.13.12

We will be showcasing both new and old work from a wide range of mediums giving content creators the opportunity to have their work independently showcased by the international community, for an entire week!

Check out this article for more information relating to Community Spotlight.

Spectrum

‘Spectrum’ is the name for the division of six key sections across the site. You can see the main ‘spectrum’ by viewing the colored boxes top of our new homepage or by viewing one of the sections directly.

Screen Shot 2013-09-29 at 01.13.49

We spent a great deal of time naming and deciding upon how to spilt the sections into areas in which we feel best represented the ‘Valve Community Culture’ today.

The six sections are as follows:

  • News & Rumours – Here you will find all sorts of news-based articles, mainly relating to Valve and their products, as well as general news around the community or the entire gaming industry.
  • Discussion & Analysis – Over here we will be posting a range of opinion orientated posts, mainly in the format of editorials and features which attempt to explore, addresses or conclude a certain subject.
  • Modding & Development – Here you will find content relating to the world of modding, including reviews and releases of mods and maps as well as tutorials.
  • Multimedia & Film – This section focuses on releases, reviews and promotions of things such as short films, movies, animations and releases. If you need a Half-Life or Portal fan-film fix, this is your place!
  • Art & Creations – Here you will find creativity of all kinds, from fan-art to physical objects, as well as anything else deemed as some sort of creation. Check out our Tumblr for a taste of whats to come here.
  • Community & Projects – Here we will be sharing other websites, or community based projects. If your after some Half-Life nostalgia be sure keep an eye on this section.

Every single article has to be in one of the sections listed below, and one only. These sections wont change, nor will any additional sections be added or removed.

You can see a summary of all of the sections combined on the homepage, which displays the most recent article from each section respectively. You can also email the staff members involved with these sections by emailing either news@ , discussion@ , modding@ , multimedia@ , creations@ , community@ … lambdageneration.com (same as the sections url).

You may of already noticed that the colors of the six sections correspond to the six main colors in our logo (and the color wheel). The original logo’s idea always revolved around each color attempting to represent the various sub-cultures of the Valve community or lambda generation. This idea has been further brought forward into the main site as a way for you to easily identify the context of each article, to ultimately enable you to establish if something is of your interest or concern.

The name ‘spectrum’ was just the codeword that was used for development, you don’t need to know about it but I thought I would share it anyway. What’s important is that it gives you the ability to filter and customize the site to your interests. For example if you are mainly interested, you could bookmark the Modding & Development section (/modding) or subscribe to it’s own RSS feed.

It also allows for content to be sorted in a more justified manner and ultimately preserves the longevity of articles, to stop them getting buried and forgotten, which was a problem identified in the previous design. Since we post a wide range of articles with different formats such as reviews and editorials (that don’t necessarily lose their significance over time like news reports or releases), this was an essential feature.

Sub-Categories

In addition to the six sections talked about above, the new website is also divided into sub-categories which relate to the range of subjects we cover, which are listed on the sidebar. This includes all of Valve’s games (both as a series and down to individual games) as well as software and services such as Steam and Source, Valve as a company and anything else (there is even a Ricochet sub-category!).

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These sub-categories can be altered or additional titles can be added at any time. If we feel a certain subject deserves its own section in the future, we can promote it (such as a chance of the return of Day of Defeat).

Each article is given a ‘primary sub-category’ which inserts the icon of whatever that maybe to the header of most instances where that article is listed, to allow you to get a brief insight into what the article is mainly about.

The main purpose of this, like explained in the ‘spectrum’ introduction above, is to provide you with the ability to filter or focus on one certain area of interest, for example if you’re just interested in Portal content, you can stick to /portal.

Formats and Tags

To further archive and collect articles, you can also find posts based on their ‘format’, for example ‘reviews’ or ‘tutorials’. You can get to these archives by clicking the format link in the articles footer or by visiting (the upcoming) sitemap which will list them all. New formats maybe added in the future if we need any.

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Articles can now also have tags, which describe the names of people, projects or items mentioned in the article, for example the tag ‘Half-Life 3 T-Shirt’ will collect all the articles talking about the great infatuation that was the Half-Life 3 T-Shirt.

Steam Sign-In

You can now sign in with Steam. This allows you to comment with your Steam Display name and Avatar and also allows you to skip both the email and spambot fields and will remember you next time you return.

We realise some people may not wish to or may not have Steam, so you can still comment as before, there are just some extra fields to fill in.

In terms of security, all of the sign-in side is handled by Steam’s web login. We dont request any other information other than your Steam Display name, Profile URL, Avatar URL and an encrypted Steam ID Number. The information which we access is already publicly available on your account, you can access this by entering ‘?xml=1’ after your public profile URL.

Please note this feature does not work with private or hidden Steam accounts.

‘Around the Community’ & International Support

Like on the previous site, we wanted to continue to help and support other sites in the community by offering a place on our sidebar to linking back to other Valve-related fan-sites.

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We also will be supporting sites in other languages by providing link-backs to articles in other languages similar to our own. You can expect to see some links to sites such as ru flag Half-Life Inside, de flag Half-Life Portal,  ru flag SteamVK and many more.


A note on older content

In terms of old content, you may have noticed the majority of feature images are missing and that most posts are currently in the News & Rumours section. Unfortunately this is due to the change in feature image size and the re-structuring/addition of sections and categories. We will be working over time to restore articles and sort everything correctly, however with over 900 articles, this will be something that is periodically done over the next year.

Bugs & technical issues

It is  anticipated that there will be the odd bug or two here or there (most likely if you’re using Internet Explorer!). If you spot anything that looks like a problem, or want to suggest or provide feedback on anything, please feel free email our admin email address.


Whats Next?

Over the next week we will be releasing a whole load of new articles, including a Summer re-cap post to summarize to catch-up on some of the things we missed whilst LambdaGeneration was down. The first Community Spotlight also starts on Monday 7th October (1 week) so stay tuned for that.

It is intended that there will also be a series of smaller updates to the site. We have plans to revive the forums/discussion board as one of these, although that is not likely until sometime in 2014.

We have a lot of confidence in the new LambdaGeneration and we intend for this new design, structure and direction to serve us for many years to come.

I hope everyone will enjoy using the new LambdaGeneration, it was sure enjoyable to make.

I hope that it can serve and satisfy the Valve fan-base in a way which reflects the dedication, creativity and power of the Valve & Half-Life Community in it’s highest form.

 

Alex, 
Founder & Designer

17 Comments

  1. Excellent revamp, and excellent orientation article. Good luck in the future!

  2. One thing I didn’t miss though are these spam bots that keep flooding the comment sections.

    • Can only assume the one who posted then was a human, we no longer accept comments unless they are posted right from this form (WordPress allows comments posted to the page from external servers by default for trackbacks/ping backs). Will re-install a spam filtering system we used to have if it gets bad.

  3. Fantastic website redesign! Glad to see LG back online.

  4. Nice to see it returning in a new, slick design

  5. Rise and shine, LambdaGen!

  6. The site looks amazing, Alex! It’s great to see LG up again, and I look forward to contributing to it.

  7. Thanks for all your feedback, guys! 😀
    I have to agree with you guys regarding the spectrum. We’ll fix this soon in a little update!

  8. Good job guys!

  9. λwesome d3sign!

  10. The new site really looks amazing, and I am personally amazed by how fast it loads up every page (sidenote: I have a really poor mobile internet stick right now so surfing the web is a huge pain.).

    So far haven’t encountered any major problems, but I second the bouncing issue Amy pointed out.

  11. Good pump?

  12. The new site is so awesome.
    Only thing that bugs me is the sliding text animation of the categories previews. I think it’s be nicer if when it goes up it wouldnt bounce like that.

  13. The new site looks fantastic.

    The main navigation (spectrum) has a few problems: can’t command-click to open in new tab. The animated effect IS ANNOYING! It’s too slow and erratic.

    Are you sure separating content into the different categories so strictly is a good choice? You say it will help against content getting “buried and forgotten” but I imagine the opposite can happen if now we have to check 6 different pages to stay fully up-to-date.

    • Hi,

      Thanks for the comment 🙂

      The slider seems to have some problems in some versions of Firefox or on machines with very low graphical capabilities. I will try to improve its compatibility in the future but unfortunately I’m not a great coder and everything has been made from scratch and I have no doubt that there maybe better methods.

      To stay up to date, you just need to visit the homepage, it lists everything from all categories. The sections are an optional feature for people who may have a keen interest in a certain area.

    • Hi,

      If you have a clickable mouse wheel, it can be used as an alternative to cmd-clicking to open the spectrum articles in a new tab.

      • Thanks. I do have a mouse with clickable mouse wheel but I don’t always have it with me (laptop). Actually, I use side-buttons to open links in tabs and I have noticed that with certain sites it works or doesn’t work while command-clicking does/doesn’t. I can get used to using one or the other but without my mouse I really can’t work around this unless I right-click the “read more” text and choose “open in new tab” which isn’t very fast.

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