OMNIDEX

General Info

The OMNIDEX was an aspect of both the Hazard Labs website, as well as the fictional flying Hazard Labship which the site was based upon.

In the Hazard Labs fiction, the OMNIDEX was centrally located in the Labship, and generally housed numerous rare creatures, sometimes just for transportational purposes, and other times for study. It was capable of holographically reproducing the native ecosystem for the subject at hand, to help them better adapt to their captive environment.

Outside of the stories, the OMNIDEX was a large repository of video game and website data, ranging from informative text to scans of manuals and maps. It was composed of various sub-sections, to help classify its varied content:

• Omnidex - Fictional characters and creature information
• Artigraph - Items, tools, and power-ups
• Cartograph - Maps, blueprints, and travel guides
• Biograph - Website members

Combined with the categorization was built-in search and indexing capabilities, as well as classification by "Family Sigils", which allowed for entries to be grouped based on a number of different aspects, ranging from what game they were from, down to their elemental sources.

Development

The OMNIDEX was a feature early on in the development of Hazard Labs as a website, existing during the pre-FyberOptic era. Entries were all HTML-based at the time, requiring hand-editing of each one, resulting in a very small amount of them due to the work involved.

During FyberOptic's tenure, with his incentive to always reduce workload on himself by automating as much as possible, he implemented a text datafile method of storing entries, which involved hand-editing only text files instead of entire HTML pages, which would be loaded and parsed by newly written OMNICORE software, and then be displayed appropriately. It also allowed for the introduction of "Family Sigils", a function mentioned previously, along with various other improvements. However, despite the overall intention of this overhaul of the software, FyberOptic remained the sole user creating entries.

This lead to the eventual drastic restructuring of the OMNIDEX software, now storing all of its data in a MySQL database, and the implementation of the OMNIDEX Editor, an elaborate piece of software which, due to its ease of use, allowed for an entirely new security rank to be created. The new Rank O members were selected specifically for OMNIDEX editing, which, combined with the normal Rank S (staff) members, allowed for a vast amount of entries to be created.

The new restructured version of the OMNIDEX public interface also provided much improved search and categorization features. Over time, small improvements would be made to the software, such as the capability of including multimedia aspects in certain entries, but it would mostly stay the same throughout this final version.

Currently

The demise of Hazard Labs unfortunately meant the end of the OMNIDEX as well. This came as a disappointment to many, and was possibly the reasoning behind the creation of Fiktionary, a somewhat similar wiki-based version located on a separate domain of the same name, as opposed to being a part of the Hazard Labs offshoot, Snipe-Hunt.

It is rumored that the OMNIDEX still exists in its entirety on a backup server of FyberOptic's.