LummoxJR

I can at least post my own CSS tweaks I've just worked up in a stylesheet. In making this stylesheet I noticed there's a real problem with the way CSS is being used. Those classes like pt-4, pb-6, etc. are basically little better than inline styles. Most of the elements on the page aren't given functional class names, but instead have classes that define styles on them. Styles like this are hard to maintain and hard to override for readability. The mod list page needs more functional classes like these: page-header page-header-nav page-header-game-title sort-options results-count content-block-notice mod-tile-image mod-tile-title mod-tile-author mod-tile-time mod-tile-desc mod-tile-stats Classes whose only purpose is to specify a specific amount of padding and such are fundamentally at odds with how CSS is supposed to be written. I know this kind of thing has infected a lot of sites, but I think we can do better here.

I just tested all of these (except for Open Sans Condensed). PT Sans Narrow and Saira Condensed are absolute winners at the current font size of 44px. Encode Sans Condensed would be fine at a smaller size, but it's naturally bigger than its peers for some reason. Out of all of the fonts I've looked at, Saira Condensed is my favorite. It's striking and still leaves room for longer mod titles.

Following up on my comment about the title font on the mod pages being terrible, I have some alternative suggestions from a quick browse of Google Fonts. All of them are condensed or have a bit taller aspect: Athiti: Highly readable sans-serif, with a little bit of personality. Antic: A humanist sans-serif that isn't quite as wide as Inter. Open Sans Condensed: (I'm not sure why it disappeared from Google Fonts, but it's free for commercial use.) This one has a slimmer profile that's more in line with what Bebas Neue brought to the table, without being all-caps. PT Sans Narrow: Condensed humanist font with a high midline. Not my favorite, but it is distinctive. Encode Sans Condensed: Another condensed humanist font with a high midline. It has a lot of similarities to PT Sans. Fira Sans Condensed: The midline on this one is more pleasing IMO, but it still has a nice tight presentation. Saira Condensed: This one has a slight sci-fi feel, but only slight. I think it maintains some of the visual interest that Bebas Neue had. Any one of these would be a better font for the titles on mod pages than Inter.

I came at the new design open-minded, and on the pages I use most—individual mod pages and the listing of recent mods—I don't think it's horrible. It needs tweaks. My post was extremely long because my biggest gripes are from the insanely bad use of vertical space on the mod list. I could fix almost all of these issues on my end with a custom style, provided the site doesn't change up CSS classes like Facebook and Discord love to do, but I think these are universal enough problems that they need to be taken seriously. I mean really, does the designer have their monitor turned in portrait mode? There's only so much vertical space. Use it wisely! If they fix the vertical space issues, and the appalling title font on the mod pages, I think this isn't bad. At least not on the pages I use.

First impressions (all on desktop, not mobile): On the individual mod page, things look pretty decent except for the title font, which is too wide and a bit ugly. The old font being slim had many advantages, including being able to show longer titles. Inter is too much like Helvetica/Arial in all the wrong ways. Switch to something slimmer. It doesn't have to be Bebas Neue like before (although that font was great), but it's just way too wide right now. Otherwise I don't really have any big problems with it. The page where I browse mods, however, is terrible. The experience is a massive downgrade. For reference, I view mods in the last-updated order by default. Here are the bad parts, the main theme of which is WASTED SCREEN REAL ESTATE, especially in the vertical dimension. The header at the top of the page is completely wasted space. It should be vertically slim, no more than 30px high. The new header is 124px including padding, which is way too much. Nobody needs this. The new listings for the mods are too big. I used to be able to see 2 rows of mods per scroll; now I can only see 1 1/2. This is unacceptable, and results mainly from the following: Vertical padding in the entire block below the mod image is excessive. It's 0.75rem on top and 1.25rem on the bottom, but it should be 0.5rem for both. Too much padding is below the author. 0.5rem should be reduced to 0.2. The individual sections for mod category, updated/uploaded, have more excessive padding. Again this should be dropped from 0.5rem to 0.2. The mod title is too large. 1.125rem is too big; 1rem is better. The line-height of the description at 1.5 is nice and readable, but wastes too much space; the standard 1.2 is inadequate. A compromise of 1.35 buys back some space. This also helps with the mod title when it wraps to more than one line. Despite all I've said above, a limit of 4 lines for description text is often inadequate; change the -webkit-line-clamp to 5 instead of 4. It does undo some of the vertical space saving, but it's important. Nuke the min-height on the mod listing. It's currently set to 28rem. Without it, a small amount of precious space is recovered. The very bottom line with the endorsements/downloads/size has a min-height of 2rem which is wasting more space. 1.35rem is much cleaner. There's too much spacing between grid rows. The column spacing is fine, but the excessive row gap wastes vertical space. 2.5rem is absolutely insane; drop it down to 1rem and no one's going to mind. (Enacting all of the above changes gets me nearly back to 2 rows per scroll. I can live with nearly.) Right below the top page header, there's a ridiculous amount of vertical padding on the filter column and the main results area. Reduce it from 1.5rem down to 0.5rem, which is all anyone needs. 1rem if you must. Below the sort options at the top, there's even more useless padding. "Some mods may be hidden based on your content blocking settings" appears below the result count and the sort options. This is wasting more space. Put it in between the result count and the sort options, where you have a ton of empty space. At the bottom, there's a gigantic margin below the grid, before the pagination section. 2.5rem is too much. However, I do kinda think 1rem is too little. 1.5rem seems just right. The last-updated time for each mod doesn't show a date; it shows "<time> ago". As nice as that is in some ways, it's useless if I'm trying to see all mods that updated since a specific day. The only way to tell is to mouse over it, which isn't great. I can live with this but I'd prefer some customization or something. So that's the bad. Let's go over the good: Despite the loss of more vertical space it entails, I do like the larger images. Despite my massive concerns about vertical space, I think you can get even better results by dropping the grid column gap from 2rem to 1.5rem, which only costs a couple of vertical pixels. The filters being on the side are really nice. It's intuitive. I like that hiding them presents even more mods per row. Bottom line: Treat vertical space like gold and expend it wisely. Right now it creates a severely downgraded experience.

I have three small mods under my belt now and I have an idea for an ambitious-for-me but still small mod: I want to integrate Immersive Interactions - Animated Actions with A Cat's Life in a way that causes NPCs to pet nearby cats as possible idles. After giving this a lot of thought and a few false starts, the best way I can think of to approach this is: Have a main start-on-game quest with an idle topic, no dialogue, that runs a script. The script should find a nearby cat and start a second quest that handles a scene. In the second quest, the petter and the cat begin a scene. The petter approaches the cat while the cat waits, the petter plays an idle (IdleSearchBody), an appropriate reaction happens from the cat, and the scene ends, ending the 2nd quest with it. This will involve working with scenes and packages for the first time, but I find what I'm really struggling with is the scripting portion here. How do I search for a cat (Actor with ACLCatRace) within a certain distance of the "speaker"? This appears to be very possible in packages, but it seems to me that I need this information to set the aliases for the scene quest. So I'm all turned around here and could use some advice from modders with a lot more experience. (I got this two-quest idea from the way Inn-Tegrated NPCs handels the book scene. There's a main idles topic in the main quest, and the book scene has its own separate quest. However, the book scene quest sets its aliases by simply choosing any "Find Matching Reference" in the loaded area. The greeter (first alias) only has conditions that they should have a certain voice type and not be disabled, and the responder has the same conditions with an additional check that they're not the greeter. So I don't know that this concept would work exactly as-is for my cat idea.