Re: New weapons help document & HTML template
 

Ok, I'll have a look at it tomorrow (at work http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif ), fi I find the time for this.

Doing everything in CascadingStyleSheets in a seperate file will in fact make the programming a lot easier - you needn't care about layout etc., as you can adjust this later when the acutal HTML-pages are already generated ..

I hope I can get some example done soon !!

A.

Re: New weapons help document & HTML template
 

Guys, if you want to learn more about CSS, which really is very very cool stuff, go to Webmonkey. The CSS tutorial just rocks too hard for words.

A few caveats -

1. Netscape still does not properly implement some features of CSS.

2. Absolute positioning and z-index are massively cool features, but only really display properly when viewed at the same resolution for which they were created http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon9.gif

Re: New weapons help document & HTML template
 

If you need any help with all that positioning and stuff, send it along to me (e-mail is cerban_imperium@yahoo.com). I've been doing HTML for a hobby for about... wow... four years (this is where my young age starts to feel, very, very old...). I got into CSS and dHTML Last year, and am fairly good at making them cross-browser/platform compatible (though I can only test on Windows http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon9.gif )

For the alignment of the weapons, I haven't taken a look at the HTML code you have, but from looking at the problem the way you set it up, the following should work (the angle brackets will be represented by parenthesis ( & ), since forums seem to mess up HTML most of the time, even when they "shouldn't".):

(table)(tr)(td width="30" align="right")1(/td)(td width="30" align="right")2(/td)(td width="30" align="right")3(/td)(/tr)(/table)

That would give you a table with fixed values for the width, and the values inside the table data (td) tags aligned to the right (I believe that otherwise, they are aligned to the center, but, it's been a while since I've used tables). If you want to use CSS on the individual data stuff, you should switch from (table) to (div), but that's just a pain in the @$$, and more trouble than it's worth for something like this.

Oh, and sorry if the lowercase tags mess up anything that you've learned... it's not necessary to have them capitalized in HTML, and the new XML and XHTML specs call for lowercase only tags... plus lowercase tags have been my style from the beginning, because I found capitalized tags to be very annoying...

Some things on CSS: those two things are only problems if you don't know how to implement a fix to them http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif Give Netscape a break, IE doesn't implement some of CSS's features either, they just have a few more of them. Absolute positioning works fine with a bit of JavaScript to determine the user's screen area (between toolbars, statusbars, scrollbars, etc.), and z-index doesn't have much to do with screen size, but is buggy in all browsers.

You guys should consider helping out with the manual too http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

And, one final thing: WebMonkey rules. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: New weapons help document & HTML template
 

First of all, this is really great stuff. Thanks alot for all your efforts.

I was wonder if there is a neater way to do this than creating a pile of HTML and then an index page to refer to it.
It might be a little neater and also user invisible with regards to updates and changes of the weapons stats to create the html page on the fly (maybe to a temp file)and then display it, then delete the html file afterwards. Effectively making it a viewing program rather than a html creator program. This way the user can just run the program which brings up a (quickly created) index page and then as they click on a item it then creates and displays the relevant page. This would also relieve the average user from having to remember to rerun the program to update their html files when they recieve a new patch or mod.

Any thoughts? More effort than it is worth?

I apologise if this is well away from your intended goals, I mean no slight to your work and efforts.

Re: New weapons help document & HTML template
 

I posted a new Version (1.01) in the same message over in the Mod Forum. Pretty cool how you can delete your old files and upload new ones. The new Version fixes the crashing problem and tweaks the HTML for the range/damage section. Thanks to Arralen and Jourin for helping me find the bugs!

Thanks for the comment and the idea, Griffin! It is definitely something to think about for the future.

Re: New weapons help document & HTML template
 

Will -
OK, you know more than I do. My apologies for giving inaccurate information.

Cold Steel and raynor -
I love you guys; this is fine work. Thank you both very much yet again. I just grabbed the new v1.01 from the Mods Forum. Great work, just great http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

Griffin -
No, I have to politely disagree. I very much like having the HTML files right there where I can look at them. Maybe that's just me http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: New weapons help document & HTML template
 

Will, thanks for the offer. If I get stuck, I'll be sure to give you a yell. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

On the alignment issue, that's just exactly what I did yesterday to fix the cell problem except that I made them each 33 pixels wide instead of 30 as you suggested. Nice to know I wasn't way off base on that. raynor has the fix but he crashed early Last night and it may be a little while before he can get the new Version out. He also has some other things he wants to add to spiff it up some more.

I've been thinking about CSS and I'm leaning away from using that just because I want this to be as standard and compatible as possible. From my reading it seems that style sheets might cause some problems with non MS Explorer browsers and make maintaining this more work than I'd like it to be. I tend to take the K.I.S.S. principal fairly seriously.

As for helping out with the manual project, it's my hope that what raynor and I are doing can be directly incorporated into it. I think raynor is already working on that project as well. The advantage to the approach we're taking is:

1) The HTML documentation is easily updated in an automated fashion whenever new SE4 patches come out. Becuase of this the document information is never out of date.

2) Documentation can be generated for user mods just as easily as for the standard game.

3) A very wide range of SE4 information can be generated in an automated fashion that would take literally weeks or months to generate by hand.

We have some neat ideas on how this technique can be extended to document racesets, facilities, non-weapon components, ship designs, weapon comparisons, etc. With all the data files we have to work with there are a lot of areas in which we could use this approach. I can't help it, I'm a programmer, I'm always looking for ways to automate tedious tasks. So, okay, I'm lazy too, what can I say? LOL. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/ima...ons/icon12.gif

Now off to work (gah!).

Re: New weapons help document & HTML template
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Possum:
Will -
OK, you know more than I do. My apologies for giving inaccurate information.
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Well, I know more than a lot of people, but I wouldn't jump to that conclusion on this one thing... everyone can be mistaken about just about anything (that includes me, I've probably screwed up on details a few times in this forum).

Oh, and I agree that I would rather have actual HTML files... just stash 'em in a folder to keep those that don't know what they're doing safe http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

I'll have to go download that... sometime... many things going on at once, quite confusing http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif