New weapons help document & HTML template

[raynor]

Thanks for the comments, y'all. I'm glad you liked it and that I could give back a little to the SE4 community.

Oh, hi Will. Er, I may not have much in the way of my share of work on the manual since I spent some time writing this program instead. What can I say? Programmers much prefer writing code to writing documentation.

ColdSteel, it would be great if you could create an HTML template for the index page. We definitely, definitely want the program to generate everything. That way the program will work also for those folks who have added their own components.

This program is written in Object Pascal (Borland Delphi).

[ColdSteel]

Okay, I'm on it.

[ColdSteel]

raynor, I noticed one thing in your program that you might want to change. It's currently putting in the "Family" number rather that the "Weapon Family" number in the templates. As an example, for the Anti-Proton Beam, the Family number is 2000, while the Weapon Family number is 1. I chose to plug in the Weapon Family in the template because that's the one used in the AI_DesignCreation.txt file. We could always put both in there if people want them, I just thought the Weapon Family was the one most used.

Still working on the Index template. Bear with me, this is my "learn HTML at Last" fun project for the week.

[ColdSteel]

raynor, here's the weapon component html index. Just a few notes on it:

1) I included the SE4 Version number in there so folks can see what Version the document was created from. If you can turn the Version into a variable and pull the latest one from the top of the history.txt file that would be great.

2) I created the weapon links entries as two columns and only created the first 6 entries to establish the pattern for you. You can use whatever order you want to populate the tables. Probably just listing them in the order they come in from the data file would work fine. They're probably in order by Family or Weapon family in there anyway.

3) I made the index page title a link to the botton of the list and put in some brief "about this document" info and a Version number there. Feel free to change anything there or add stuff as you see fit.

4) I wanted to ask if you thought it might be better to create the index file in the same directory as all the other html files or instead stick it in the top directory all by itself and put all the other html files in a subdirectory beneath that. Your choice on that, whatever you think best.

5) There's a message right below this one that describes a very minor glitch in the first template for the Weapon Family entry.

Thanks again for helping with this little project. It's been a lot of fun playing with the html and I think its turning out even better than I thought it would.

If this utility is well recieved, what do you think about us extending it later on to handle the rest of the components as well?

[ColdSteel]

raynor, after I posted the two Messages below here, I realized that the original weapon template was missing a very important piece of information. That information being the Weapon Reload Rate. I also found two small HTML errors in the original template toward the end where the range and damage tables are displayed (in the very Last two tables). This is a copy and paste error. The error sections look like this:

</TABLE>
</TABLE><TABLE BORDER=1 CELLPADDING=5 CELLSPACING=1 BORDERCOLOR="#545A8C">

There is a repeated "</TABLE>" entry on the second line that doesn't belong. The lines should look like this instead:

</TABLE>
TABLE BORDER=1 CELLPADDING=5 CELLSPACING=1 BORDERCOLOR="#545A8C">

Posted here is an updated Version of the template that adds the Weapon Reload Rate entry and corrects these two errors.

The Main Index Page HTML template is available in my previous post this evening.

Thanks and mucho sorry for the changes.

[Will]

Not a problem on the Manual, raynor... I ran into some trouble myself, this lab report took longer than I thought, I only have a little done on it myself

We can just incorperate these programs into it

[raynor]

Over in the Mod Forum, I posted a new Version that also generates an 'index.html' file. I fixed the Weapon Family problem, added the Weapon Reload Rate and, I think, got the HTML right. I went ahead and alphabetized them. Let me know if you think it would be better to put them in Weapon Family order.

I think adding the Version number is a good idea but I didn't have time for it tonite. Do you think it would also be a good idea to let folks type in their own comment that will appear in the index page if not at the bottom of every page? That way they could include a comment like: Dave's Mod.

It's a good idea to put the HTML files in a different directory from the HTML files. That should make it much easier to find the index file. It is something to think about for a later Version.

It's pretty cool when we can both have fun working on a project like this that might be useful to others. If we get some more positive feedback, I think it would be fun to expand this program to include all the components.

Oh! BTW, do you know any way to alter the HTML for the table so that the single, double and triple digit damage types all line up? I think probably it is just a matter of specifying absolute pixel widths for each table cell? Thanks!

[This message has been edited by raynor (edited 19 March 2001).]