About

This website provides constantly updated information about the upcoming PC game 'Dragon Age'. It archives all posts by developers on the Official Dragon Age Forums, copyright Bioware. The website 'syncs' with the forum every 15 minutes to get any new developer posts.

The website was created by Sendu Bala, comprising over 10000 lines of Perl. It uses CSS styles from the Bioware forum to provide familiarity. The star rating display was modified from komodomedia. Text and Audio icons from Icon Drawer.

Help

NB: Many features on the site require a modern web browser with javascript (ActiveX) enabled. Safari seems to have intermittent troubles, so use FireFox or Internet Explorer if possible.

All posts are displayed by default, 15 posts per page. You can then filter the posts according to their content to display only things of particular interest to you. Having done so you can bookmark the resulting page, turning it into a custom live search.

The FAQ page uses such bookmarks where the filters chosen are designed to help answer specific questions; it then displays the most recent post that matches the filter as the answer. The Statistics page shows various interesting stats about the posts archived here: they only consider developers, not all users of the Bioware forums.

Updates

The search, date and developer filters are always as up-to-date as the last sync (shown at the top of the page in 'mins ago'). However the topic and quality filters need me to manually categorise each post. I aim to do this on a daily basis: the 'updated' time given at the top of the page shows the last time I did so. The alerts page gives you two ways of being informed when updates happen: RSS or email alerts. Note: I've categorised all developer posts since the beginning of 2007, but only a select handful of posts before 2007.

Filtering

By default, all posts are displayed. Using just the search box, developer and date filters searches all posts. Using any other filter (topics, rating and quality) restricts the filter to posts that have been categorised.

Probably the most useful filter is to set the 'Min Quality' to 'Informative'.

In 'and' mode, ticking a single topic filter shows all posts that were categorised under (at least) that topic. Those posts may also belong to other topics. Ticking another topic filter shows only posts that were categorised under both those topics. Ticking all topic filters will return no posts, since no single post is about all topics.

In 'or' mode, start with all topics ticked. Unticking a single topic excludes all posts that were categorised under that topic. Unticking more and more topics makes the filter more and more specific. Be careful about becoming too specific: if you're interested in characters, you don't necessarily want to untick 'party' and 'romance', since some interesting posts about characters are also about those other topics and will be lost if you only have 'characters' ticked. Unticking all topics will show no posts, since you have asked to see categorised posts that were not categorised under any topic, which doesn't happen.

Posts

Each post shows the way it which it was categorised on the left. The '~' links next to a category name will set your filter to that category. The '[+]' link in the bottom left of each post will set your filter to match all the categories of that post, except for star rating; ie. you'll see all posts similar to that one. The '[+n]' link next to the thread name at the top of each post links to a page showing all developer posts in that thread, where 'n' is the number of other dev posts in the thread. To see the original thread (with user posts) you'll need to click on the thread name itself.

Ratings

Each post also has a 5-star rating. Posts get a default rating of 2.5 stars. You can rate the post yourself by clicking on the number of stars you want to give it. Your rating is saved in real-time. The final rating displayed for a post is then the average of all ratings from all visitors. If your new rating changed the average, you'll see the new rating without having to reload the page.

Searching

The search box is very powerful, allowing the use of Perl Regular Expressions (except for ?{ CODE } blocks). However, you don't need to understand the details of regular expressions to get a lot out of it.

  • At the simplest level you can just enter words seperated by spaces. This will filter for posts that contain all of those words anywhere within the post:
    these all of in order words any
  • If you want to search for one word or another word (requiring only one of them to be in posts), enclose both words in brackets, seperated by a '|':
    (this|that)
  • If you want to search for one word but not another word, start the word you don't want with a '!':
    wanted !unwanted
  • If you want to search for a specific phrase (words in a certain order), enclose them in double quotes:
    "words in this order"
  • You can combine all of these ideas. For example, to find posts that are related to liking zombie kittens or cats, excluding those that might be about disliking them, you might enter:
    ("I (love|like)"|"are (great|brilliant)") "zombie (kitten|cat)s" !("I (hate|dislike)"|"are (bad|rubbish)")

User Uploads

Anyone with an account can upload Dragon Age related files. To get an account, just sign up. Once you've logged in there will be a new section in the main menu on the left. There you will find an 'Upload Help' link, which explains how to upload files.

Support

If you need technical support regarding the website or your account, email me.