Homestuck Doc
On the morning of April 2, 2018, Homestuck.com was updated from a simple landing page for Homestuck to a complete rehost of mspaintadventures.com. Almost the entirety of the comic can now be found there, and, within a few hours of the site going live, mspaintadventures became simply a redirect to the new site, effectively replacing it.
The new site is a minimalist take on MSPA, geared towards mobile devices and arranged in a way to direct new readers towards Homestuck. Flash pages are currently in a work-in-progress state, most of them directing you to an upload on the official Youtube page. Some of the interactive pages have been updated to HTML5 and will work on your mobile device! And some of the larger interactive pages, such as “Past Karkat: Wake Up”, have a new text-only way of experiencing them. All of the older main adventures still exist and can be found under the “Read” tag, and the site is still littered with the other odds and ends, like the Problem Sleuth FAQ page and the Commision Pages. Most importantly, of course, Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff is still present, with an official link on the Adventures page for the first time.
As I currently write this, the original MSPA can still be read here, but some links will bump you back to the new site.
Major Changes
- Flash pages are now set to detect the capability of your device, and redirect you accordingly to the new HTML5 version, Youtube mirrors, or text-based mirrors when available. This is mentioned as still being a work-in-progress in the newspost. The new HTML5 versions have a much higher sound quality, but suffer from artifacts and desyncing. The youtube mirrors vary in quality, with some as low as 360p. They also all share a generic preloader gif.
- The flashes are made using Greensock and the source code for them can be found within the Page Source (ex: John’s CD Rack). Sprite Atlas’ are stored on the server like regular images (Ex: John’s CDs)
- Project Wonderful is no longer used as the source of advertisements. Instead, Pop-up ads are present, but are currently only advertising Homestuck adjacent products, such as Hiveswap and the Hardcover Books.
- A new design that pushes viewers directly into reading the comic. Sections like the Page Log and News have been moved to their own separate web pages.
- Dead links are no longer present, removing any mentions of Hussie’s older comics or the MSPA Forums. The bandcamp is now part of a Shopping page, not having its own link on the header.
- The site re-themes for specific parts of the comic are now hard-coded to the specific pages, so it doesn’t seem possible to view the rest of the comic in the alt-themes like it was previously. However, at the time of writing, going to the Trickster portion of the comic through the Map uses a /trickster/ URL, which redirects to the main page. It seems keeping the alt-themes as overlays was used at some point in development and it got left behind on the Map here (which means these links on the Map are totally broken).
- A new privacy page exists, detailing the site’s affiliation with Viz Media and their legal information
- Paradox Space has been rehosted and is now part of the main site. Errrr close to it anyway, its actually being hosted on the Hiveswap website.
