Register now! Main Menu. Who's Online. There are currently 68 users playing Freelancer on 47 servers. Just popping in. Group: Registered Users. Posts: 2. I decided to install Freelancer with a few of my friends again as we wanted to play it again, i've had the game for quite a long time and always had great memories of it, so i installed it, patched it and was ready to go.
Loaded up Freelancer, sorted out controls and stuff, clicked new game, and it crashes, i'm not sure why, and i've tried updating my drivers earlier, which doesn't work, i've tried turning off all of the extra features in the Nvidia control panel as im using an GT Card, but i've had no luck in sorting this out and have completely run out of ideas, so any help or suggestions would be awesome.
I'm having the exact same issue. Inititally, I thought this could be a font corruption issue, but I have now tried working with multiple files and performing multiple tasks and the program is still crashing. I had the exact same issues. Illustrator crashed 12 times within 4 hours of working it. I uninstalled my entire Creative Suite and reinstalled everything and I deleted all of my preferences. None of that worked after reinstalling everything.
I lost an entire days worth work because of this crap. This is a very unstable update. So, I reverted back to I just lost an hour's worth of exploration work, thanks Adobe.
Not even a recovered file. And that wasn't the first time it's crashed. I'm going back to the old version. Permanent Crashes. Very annoying, very frustrating, lost at least working hours because of it since i updated a few days ago. I am working on Print Files, i need to import a lot of different file formats which are stored in a Network, it seems like it is crashing a lot because of it. Higly recommend not saving in I can't even log a crash report with your latest I, too, am having this issue.
It's crashed 5 times already with no popup to send a report or anything. It just closes. At the very least it's given me recovered files, but this is incredibly annoying. I'm going to do what others have done and revert to the previous version. Adobe please fix this asap. I see responses to revert to the old version. How do I do that? The update happened automatically for me over the weekend, now I can't do my job. Go into the creative cloud under all apps, You should see the previous version of illustrator listed, just redownload it.
While submitting the crash report, please use the same email address with which you are signed in on this community. This will help us find the crash report and help accordingly.
Once done, please try installing version We can put homeowners, but sometimes we can have multiple personas. We know from talking to Rebecca that they work with residential clients, but she mentioned two big categories.
She mentioned renovations, and new home construction. Why are we doing that? Because, by creating unique stories for each persona, each kind of client or customer, we can look for overlaps, and we can look for distinctions.
So, two personas, how about the next part. What do renovators, homeowners who are coming to the business for a renovation project, what are they looking to learn or do? We have a bunch of options here. Another thing they might want to learn about is price.
A third option is they're just looking for a great interior designer, and they want to validate that this is a great interior design firm. How do they do that? This goes back to trust and authority. And those things can be established in a number of ways. Design done. End of content strategy session. Stacy says no. But to focus this, we have three options on the table. Thoughts that a homeowner whose renovating their house might have.
For Hayes Valley Interior Design, what are people looking to achieve? People could be looking for their own inspiration. Seriously, this is often the most common reason people visit interior design sites. They want to be inspired. And the business might not see direct value from people visiting the site to look at pictures of interior design work. So, a more business appropriate goal might be this: the homeowner whose renovating their space wants to see beautiful interior design work so they can pick this interior designer with confidence.
And it can help inform our process as we develop this user story into an actual site. Homeowners building a new home. For homeowners building a new home, these people might have similar thoughts and reasons for seeking an interior designer.
And it could be because they want to learn more about the process, or the price, or maybe they want to see that the interior designers here do great work. What are the distinctions? Well, the consultation location could change, but is that distinction relevant? On our call, Rebecca mentioned that a junior designer from her firm goes out to take measurements. No structure, no home to measure. What about the goal, the ending intention?
Well, new homeowners just like existing homeowners want to confidently pick a designer to work on their new home project. So, this exercise is really important. Sometimes this is what we end up with, two personas that have really similar intentions.
As a homeowner, I want to see great interior design work so that I can pick this interior design firm with confidence. Let's turn this into something we can use for our information architecture. Now a lot of content strategists and user experience designers like to use that term, information architecture. So, how do we apply it? How do we develop the right information architecture, and how does that information architecture inform our content strategy? More importantly, why are we going to make one in the first place?
Information architectures are life-changing, in that they rest upon the synergistic notion the world is getting smaller and -- you know what? This is industry jargon. So, at the center of everything, the starting point, is the home page. And from the home page we link out to our other top-level pages.
Sometimes we look at a home page like the center of a wheel, with spokes going out to all the main areas of the site. What are these main areas? A portfolio, or a work page, and second we have process. Now, could we include information about process in the portfolio? Sure, but our goal here is to surface the most common things that preemptively address client questions or concerns.
We know featuring their work is of the highest priority to us right now. And, if process is the how, then the who is the team behind the work. What about FAQ? We could add an FAQ so we could organize common questions inside, but most of those questions we can put inside process.
Finally, we want to surface the most important thing on the site, a way to get in touch. Grimur, can we get a replay? So what we were talking about on the call was really important. The goal of the site from the perspective of Hayes Valley Interior Design, is to get clients.
But is it really? Rebecca and her team, they get clients. This is an important distinction and it drives content in a huge way. Should it? Probably not, because the goal of the website is a lot more direct than that. The goal of the site is to get clients to reach out, to contact the interior design firm. And, there are a few ways to do that. It could be a phone number, maybe they want to call. It could be an email, Rebecca really likes the contact form process.
Maybe they want to send a certified letter, probably not, but we should probably include the address anyway. Develop a content strategy for each part of your site: the homepage, portfolio, process, team, and contact pages. So, front and center, we want great design. We make homes look beautiful. Again, the goal of the site is to get clients to reach out. Any of these can work. We can use what John calls an escape hatch, a second button. The user wants to pick the design firm with confidence, but to do that, they need to see great, beautiful work.
Explore our portfolio, or even see our work. Remember if we anticipate questions and concerns we can preemptively address them. One idea would be to have a list, one quote after another. But, interior design is often communicated best through imagery, so what if we combine the two? We can show a handful of client projects that Hayes Valley Interior Design has worked on and combine that, we can combine the images of these projects with quotes from the homeowners about each project.
So, the homepage, is that it? For now, yes. We might come back to this, in fact a lot of people recommend doing the homepage last so it more accurately represents the entirety, the scope of the whole site. We could put this all on one page, but Rebecca is sending us a ton of examples.
So what if on the portfolio page, we link out to separate pages for each client project? On the portfolio page we can add a photo from the project, the name of the project, and a blurb underneath, but then we link out to nine different pages, one for each link on the portfolio page.
This might sound like a lot. But, our CMS is going to do all the heavy lifting for us. Location of the project, the date the work was completed, maybe even the team members involved. Finally, on the project page, we can show that testimonial, that quote from each of the clients.
So, portfolio, a top-level page that links out to each of the projects they want to feature. And each of those projects has its own page. Each of those pages has details about the project and beautiful images of each renovation or new home build they worked on.
Our H1, our main heading, can introduce what the page is all about. The subheading can expand on that a bit. Each of these steps has a heading, and a paragraph describing each step.
Next up is team members. And each of those is going to link out to a bio page, a unique page for each team member. Imagine you're visiting the site and you're reading different bios. We have the main team members page, and that links out to specific pages for each team member. Okay, next, we have the contact page. A heading, a subheading, and we want a contact form, and we want to ask for details: name, email, phone number, an optional message, a submit button.
When do they open? When do they close? But let's go back to the subheading here. This is another one of those lightbulb moments, or at least it was for us when we were in pre production on this course. John was talking about visitor anticipation, or mind control, and he brought up this point. So many forms out there are willing to ask us for this information, but very few of them tell you what they're going to do with this information, what happens next. Remember, we talked about this much earlier in the course, but that was in the context of our clients.
We want to set expectations. Now, one more note about that contact form. We might want to use it a lot. Again, our user story works best if we can give the user a quick and direct way to contact us. We can have a heading and a brief paragraph for that, plus a button that takes them to the process page to learn more. Same thing for the design team, meet our team, plus a brief paragraph there too and a button for linking to the full team page.
As for contact, well a few moments ago we decided to add that to each page, but look at that, our homepage now has representation for each top-level section, each top-level idea in our information hierarchy. Now, how else can we represent this? We can use a navigation bar, a navbar, to show the company logo and to really surface the information architecture, represent it in a really clear way. And we can add a footer, a map, contact info, site navigation, logo, and we can put both of these, the navbar and the footer, on every single page.
We have each of our top-level pages for the site. We have separate pages for all top-level pieces of our information hierarchy. And we have breakout pages, individual pages for each project, and for each team member. Now, is this the only way to do it? Of course not. There are an infinite number of ways to develop a content strategy. Outlines, diagrams, flashcards, word clouds, you have to pick the process that works best for you.
Something that sentence failed at spectacularly. Any time you hear someone say great design skills are just something you're born with, stop listening at once.
Some people think there are simply those with taste and those without. They think design skills are something you inherit, so we reached out to researchers at the University of California Berkeley to do a longitudinal study at the intersection of design skill and heredity. So what are we going to do for this next part of the course? Now, how does this fit into the rest of the course?
These are things that anyone can pick up and apply to any work that involves design. This video is about design. A lot of times designs look cluttered, even busy. Because they are. Why not add a red, glowing, spinning, rounded button to each link on our page? The problem with this kind of design, and this could be your favorite thing ever, but if we treat each element equally in terms of visual excitement, suddenly everything vies for our attention.
You leave the page, you shutdown, unplug, open the window, grab your laptop, open it back up, turn it on, and write a letter. At that point you can choose how you want to sign or maybe not sign your name.
The best way to create the right kind of visual cues, the ones that guide a user to the most important elements first, is to create a visual hierarchy, an order of importance or significance. And this can be different for every design. But how do we design around what we want people to focus on? Twitch is a live streaming platform for gamers. They gave visual prominence not to text or their logo, but the content they are featuring. The first thing you see is a giant video stream, you can start watching immediately.
The stillness and the size make these things less visually prominent. Plus, we usually start looking at or reading a webpage from the top. So, our primary focus is the big video at the top which is playing.
Size, motion, and placement. The designers who made this page thought that was the most important thing to feature. The secondary focus is that row of other live channels. And what about the third? This is the third part of our hierarchy. Think about how much less effective this top section would be if it said Twitch is an online platform that lets you watch people play games. Their logo is small, it takes up less than one half of one percent of the page, no giant, bright button or call to action.
And what about Apple? Front and center, the iMac. Above that we have our site navigation, and our Mac navigation, this is how we can learn more about different Mac related products.
The most prominent thing on the screen is the iMac, the very nature of scrolling down places each of the subsequent sections, the Macbook Air, and the Macbook Pro, their position makes them secondary on that visual hierarchy. Whereas the above sections get a full distance from left to right, each of these gets about half.
What about the second level in our hierarchy? They break it down into three features. Three things Slack does for enterprise customers; each of these gets a smaller boundary, and a much smaller headline treatment. Each of the paragraphs gets a slightly lighter font color and a smaller font. The relationship between the headings and the paragraphs themselves establishes that clear order of importance.
The heading is the big picture, the paragraph expands upon and supports it. How do we know that? They also want to communicate each of these features that support that statement. Even when you scroll down to additional sections, none of the headings are ever as prominent as the original heading at the top of the page.
When we begin designing, sometimes it helps to create a rough sketch of all the content, what elements go where. We can identify the most important elements we want users to see first.
First we want them to see this, then we want them to see this, then we want them to see that. We should plan to style these elements to follow our hierarchy. The first element, that can be the biggest or the brightest or the most obvious. The second one, it should be the second most obvious. The third, you get the idea. Setting up a hierarchy that guides us through the things you want to emphasize, that gives people a chance to notice those details.
And that can start the process towards achieving beautiful design. What we covered in the last part of this course was how a visual hierarchy adds clarity and emphasis to the right parts of our design. But we all know design is a bit more involved than just hierarchy. We can also create consistency in our designs, and a great way to do that is with repetition.
Repetition, Merriam Webster defines this as the act or an instance of repeating. Merriam Webster defines this as an act or an instance of repeating. Repetition is in many ways the perfect counterpart to visual hierarchy. We can use repetition to manage how users browse something, how they understand the design. This is really important for digesting all the information we put on a page. Look at these buttons. Each of these buttons has a different shape, a different color, a different size.
Because now someone has to do a ton of work to figure out that each of these elements is a button. They have to decode what each of them are. But if you repeat the same visual style, the user can understand at quick glance what they are. They are all buttons. This consistency, this repetition is huge for form elements.
We can look at two examples here. One, where the elements of the form are all over the place, inconsistent. Repetition in these cases, reusing these visual patterns, it creates consistency in the buttons. And, it creates consistency in these forms. What about headings? Navigating this content is a pain without consistency. But, by repeating the heading styles users can quickly understand how this information is organized.
Repetition saves our brains from getting overwhelmed. It establishes patterns. Repetition sets the rules. By establishing consistency, we can break our rules and draw even more attention to something, like this button. And, breaking that pattern is what brings attention to it. Sometimes the best kind of design is the design that gets out of the way, and leans into the idea of using repetition to create consistency. Amazon does this really well.
Take a look at the products, they repeat the pattern over and over. They have the product image, the price, they tell you whether it has prime shipping; they repeat the same exact pattern over and over. Imagine if each product got a different treatment. And what about the Mac page we covered when we were talking about visual hierarchy? Each product has two calls to action, learn more and buy. And what about BBC News? This is a really solid example of not only visual hierarchy, the featured article gets significantly more visual prominence based on the size of its container and the size of the heading, but it also serves as a great example for repetition.
Each article has an image, a headline, a brief thesis, or summary, and at the bottom, the time since publication, and the category. Even the next sections repeat that same basic style. The images and headings are the same. So, with anything it helps to ask this question: on this one element in our design, how many visual variations do we have? How many heading styles or variations of that type of content? By constantly scanning your design and being fully aware of reducing complexity, the more you can make your design functional and delightful.
Grids can be used for almost anything. In the context of roads, this means more flexibility for pedestrians. Alignment itself is core to a lot of disciplines, like orthopedics, and orthodontics, and orthovisual design on the web, which is visual design on the web with ortho in front of it. In English or Spanish for instance, we read from left to right. Languages like Hebrew and Arabic, from right to left. The alignment of this text gives humans a consistent reference line.
In visual design, we can align other edges of other elements. In many ways, the more we visually align things, the better they look.
Enter knolling, the art of placing stuff at right angles. Randomness becomes beautiful, if only we organize it. Seriously, you can have the messiest desk in the history of the world. Watch this, if you employ a simple knolling technique, things get better.
But for now, how can we take this to the next level? Well, we can use grids to help us. Grids help us align things vertically and horizontally, and unlike graph paper, not every grid has to have the same size for every row and column. So, when do we use grids in our designs? Well, sometimes starting with a grid is a good way. Some people start with guides, this is a twelve column guide. And sometimes starting with this can help us make decisions about where to place and size things, a reference.
Well we asked a senior software engineer that same question. But, what about horizontal lines? This is a grid. Create some guides, align stuff, things look great, work done. Circular or curved layouts are tough on their own. If you try to start aligning this stuff to a grid, not so great.
Same with one-dimensional l ayouts. A lot of these involve stacking or sorting things in different widths. And sometimes elements of the design have different widths, take a look at Google Images. Ok, so I have a rather odd problem. Several months ago, I switched to a new laptop which has Windows I installed Freelancer and Discovery and had no issues at all. Recently, I've wanted to go back and play the single player campaign again. After installing a separate instance of Freelancer, I have encountered the above problem, BUT the Disco install still runs fine.
I have followed the instructions to no avail, Thoughts? Any help is appreciated. A database of helpful information. Ace Razgriz. Posts: Threads: Joined: Feb Langolier I think the vanilla install does not work at all, I've tried as well but to no avail, many compatibility packs but nothing worked.
I'm not an expert on the subject but I'll say I had the same issue and couldn't really find any solution. Well, that's discouraging. I might add I have tried 3 different ISO. Hmm, hopefully there is a solution out there! Trying to play freelancer while disco is installed doesn't work and the game won't start. You need to install freelancer again, best option is on another drive otherwise it can come to issues with discovery and maybe a total broken Freelancer.
If it still not work, download the community patch and install it.
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