Major Additions - Living Avatars

Introducing Living Avatars!

Today is a great day and I have something really cool that some of you are going to love! It's called Living Avatars, a new vBulletin addon that I've been working on for almost one year.

This program will allow your users to customize their avatars by using the mouse to drag and move items around (items such as clothing pieces, etc). In order to collect items, you need to spend points, the more you post on a forum the more points you get! Thus, Grow your Forum with Living Avatars!

Tour

Click here for the tour movie.



Here is how it works in detail:

1) Download and install Living Avatars to vBulletin (install instructions below).
2) Once installed, go to the Living Avatars admin panel and click 'forum integration'.
3) The user profiles of your members will now have an extra link:



4) Now, the more a user posts on your forum, the more points he or she will earn. If a user has posted 500 times, and then you install Living Avatars, then that user will start with 500 points.

5) Once users have a few points, they can then start spending their points to collect items:



6) Now that they have collected a few items, they can create their ultra cool avatar! Check it out:



I highlighted the canvas in red, in that box (the canvas) you can use your mouse to drag items around. It seriously works beautifully.

7) Now, press the 'Save Avatar' button and your avatar on vBulletin will be updated:



And that's it! Cool yeah?!

Ok, so on with the install instructions:

Installation Instructions
Installation is very simple, just follow these steps and you shouldn't have any problems (if so, then I'm sorry and I'll try and help you out asap!).

1) Download & Extract living_avatars.zip
2) FTP the living_avatars folder to your forum
Example: http://www.yoursite.com/forums/living_avatars/
3) Run Setup: forum/living_avatars/setup/
4) CHMOD the Living Avatars 'avatars' folder to 777 (this folder: /living_avatars/avatars/)
5) Delete the setup folder (/living_avatars/setup/)

Now that Living Avatars is installed, go to the admin panel of Living Avatars and click the 'Forum Integration' link, from there you can press one link which will update the vBulletin modifyavatar template to insert the Living Avatars link.

Upgrade Instructions

1) Download & Extract living_avatars.zip
2) FTP the living_avatars folder to your forum (overwriting previous Living Avatar files)
Example: http://www.yoursite.com/forums/living_avatars/
3) Run Setup: living_avatars/setup/
4) Delete the setup folder (/living_avatars/setup/)

Uninstall Instructions
1) If you enabled the forum integration link from the LA Admin Panel, then login to the LA Admin Panel and disable it.

2) Drop these tables:
la_admins
la_avatars
la_groups
la_items
la_items_purchased
la_packs
la_points_spent
la_positions
la_settings

3) Delete the living_avatars/ folder.

Why should I use Living Avatars?
"Grow your forum with Living Avatars" - Simply that! Not only is Living Avatars a lot of fun to use but it's also addicting. Users will want to post on your site in order to gain enough 'points' to purchase a certain item (ex: Sword of Doom!). Imagine having certain items that are rare & expensive, such as "Dracula's Cape" which can only be purchased 3 times and costs 50 points (aka posts)...get it?

Where can I download more Avatar Packs?
You can download free user created avatar packs here:
Avatar Packs

How can I create Avatar Packs?
Please read this tutorial if you are interested in creating avatar packs:
http://www.livingavatars.com/help/p2_articleid/2

LA 120 Released
+ New Frontend & Backend
+ New theme editor

LA 115 Released
+ Better vBulletin integration

LA 114 Released
+ Online/Offline feature now works correctly.
+ LA admins can be deleted from the admin panel.
+ Fixed a positioning bug in the canvas.
+ Fixed IPB and SMF userid/avatarid conflict.
+ Fixed PHPBB3 download.php file change.

LA 113 Released
+ SMF Support (1.1 -> 1.3)
+ Better Forum Link Integration.
+ Less Warning Messages.
+ 'Bring to Top' is now used.

LA 112 Released
+ Added IPB 2.3 Integration.

LA 111 Released
+ Added phpBB3 Integration.
+ Fixed Crop Tool.
+ Better LA link integration for phpBB2.
+ Fixed a bug that caused avatars not to show up in the forum.

LA 110 Released
Updates & Fixed Bugs
+ Database changes, redid a lot of the LA Grouping logic.
+ You can only reinstall LA if logged in as admin.
+ Fixed 'Items Misplacement Issue'.
+ Fixed mysql error when adding admin with high userid value.
+ Items & groups an be moved around & deleted.
+ Removed admin/forumlinks.php file.
+ Add/Remove Forum link added to settings page.
+ New layout for admin panel.
+ New groups can be added.

LA 102 Released
+ Avatar Packs can be upgraded.
+ Avatar Packs can be uninstalled.
+ Minor changes to the design layout of certain pages.
+ Fixed a points remaining calculation bug.
+ Fixed a mysql_connect() database warning for vB users.
+ Other small misc fixes.

LA 101 Released
+ Better error checking when saving avatars.
+ Update to work with the vBulletin File System.
+ Fixed some vBulletin & phpBB integration issues

Always Backup your Database before Upgrading
Living Avatars might have database changes during the upgrade. Please, take the extra time and backup the living avatars tables (the tables that are prefixed with 'la_' in your forum database) before upgrading to new versions. I always do as much as testing as possible before releasing updates but it's still better to be cautious.

[Blackhat]

why not use png instead of gif, gets better edges then

[Digital Jedi]

Originally Posted by Blackhat

why not use png instead of gif, gets better edges then

It uses both. When you construct an avatar pack, you have to make each image in both versions for browsers that don't support PNGs.

[PGAmerica]

I installed this in my 3.7 and it works fine, but the page that displays when a user creates an avatar does not look anything like my site at all.

How do I make this fit within the theme of my site?

[Digital Jedi]

There are CSS controls in the Living Avatar Admin CP that let you change the colors and font styles.

[PGAmerica]

But that does not make it look like it is part of my site. What about all the navigation and header logos that are part of my forums? I need this to look like it is a natural part of my site, not just the colors and fonts.

[Digital Jedi]

LA doesn't do that inherently. The best you can do is add the appropriate font colors and styles.

You can also do what I did for my forum. I created a separate vB page with the header and footer, and put the LA pages inside a resizable iframe. It's not terribly difficult to learn, but it will require a little bit of effort on your part to make look the way you want. Learning how to make your own pages is a useful thing to know anyway for other projects you'll want to incorporate down the road.

Here's the two tutorials:

How to create your own vBulletin-powered page! (uses vB templates)
Iframe SSI script II

Here's what an example of how I did it. Log in using test as both a username and password:

http://www.cogonline.net/forums/living_avatars.php

[PGAmerica]

Thanks for the help. It is a bummer though that a mod that claims to be compatible with vbulletin does not offer a way to make a mandatory page that all users must use actually look like it is part of the forum.

[PGAmerica]

Originally Posted by Digital Jedi

You can also do what I did for my forum. I created a separate vB page with the header and footer, and put the LA pages inside a resizable iframe. It's not terribly difficult to learn, but it will require a little bit of effort on your part to make look the way you want. Learning how to make your own pages is a useful thing to know anyway for other projects you'll want to incorporate down the road.

This was very good advise. Those two pages were the perfect solution. I also had to modify to the "living_avatars/includes/functions.php" file to make it run a bit smoother. For example, I no longer needed the "Return to Forum" link, so I removed it. And because it was in an inline frame, I added "target="_top" to some of the links. And anything in the LA code that referred to index.hp, I changed to my LivingAvatars_vb.php file.

If anybody else needs help in this area, send me a pm and I will help you.

[Digital Jedi]

Yeah, I've been meaning to make the same changes to mine, just haven't gotten around to it yet And so far, only one of our members has used the LA, so I figured I could get to some other things first (going to do some avatar packs once I get my Wacom Tablet). I'm glad it worked out for you though.

I've always presumed that since most mods use the forum header and footer, that there must be a particular issue with this mod that subduck decided to leave that out. Maybe an issue with custom headers and footers perhaps.

[PGAmerica]

Well, if you ever need help doing it, just send me a pm