Gary's Heroscape Site & Stuff

[silverwraith]

Very nice. I love bein able to group the personalities with such ease.

[GaryLASQ]

Originally Posted by silverwraith

Very nice. I love bein able to group the personalities with such ease.

I try to keep things simple.

Originally Posted by Agent Minivann

Gary, is there going to be a change to the site because of Firefox 3.5? The xforms add on doesn't look like it's going to be updated. I saw something about no SVG in Firefox 3.5 when I searched for xforms and Firefox 3.5

Thanks for the heads up. I haven't upgraded my own browser to 3.5 yet but I will soon. SVG should be safe and sound. That markup language is now an "industry standard" even though IE still requires a plug-in to use it (doesn't have native SVG support yet, like all other browsers do).

Any time there's a major Firefox upgrade, the XForms add-on is always in question unfortunately. If someone creates a 3.5 compatible version of it, that could take a few months. Which is one reason why I haven't been "going nuts" with XForms on my site ... yet.

There are some interesting developments over at W3C. To use XForms, your web page must be XHTML. If you notice, all the pages on the Firefox version of my HS site end with .xhtml, instead of .htm (Wish I had gone with .html rather than .htm, but oh well, same diff I guess. Also, to use in-line SVG, which I do on the battlefield pages, you must use XHTML.) Well, it was recently announced on W3C that the XHTML working group will stop work in order for the organization to give more resources to the HTML working group. What they are doing is moving XHTML into HTML-5 so that HTML-5 will have "xhtml options". HTML-5 will be bringing the XForms syntax into its language specification. So this is good news for the XForms language.

However, there are some serious concerns about the future of modularization and extensibility of XHTML in its new role as an option of HTML-5. An example of extensibility would be doing what I currently do with SVG -- putting the SVG markup in the same document (.xhtml file) as the HTML markup. (This method is also called in-line SVG).

In Firefox, open up the page below and view the source to see what I mean.
http://heroscape.glasq.com/battlefields/hsbf0004.html
The battlefield graphics are not image files. They are rendered via text instructions that the browser uses to draw the graphics each time the page loads. The Safari and Opera browsers may have implemented a few more SVG features than Firefox, but FF does a better/faster job at drawing the graphics, in my opinion.

[GaryLASQ]

Originally Posted by GaryLASQ

Thanks for the heads up. I haven't upgraded my own browser to 3.5 yet but I will soon. SVG should be safe and sound. That markup language is now an "industry standard" even though IE still requires a plug-in to use it (doesn't have native SVG support yet, like all other browsers do).

Any time there's a major Firefox upgrade, the XForms add-on is always in question unfortunately. If someone creates a 3.5 compatible version of it, that could take a few months. Which is one reason why I haven't been "going nuts" with XForms on my site ... yet.

It's not in the Add-ons section of the official site for Firefox yet, but someone did create a compatible version of the XForms Add-on for Firefox 3.5. Woohoo!! I only just installed it myself (so I haven't had a chance to make sure it's completely stable) and at first glance, it appears to work just fine.

Knowing that someone is keeping this Add-on updated (although I wish it was getting updated side-by-side with browser updates, instead of afterwards) encourages me to make improvements to the Army Builder on my site.

[Agent Minivann]

Thanks for posting that link. In the meantime I had a workaround of using xforms on Flock. All the stuff worked that way, but I usually don't use Flock that much.

[GaryLASQ]

The bits of info that we already know about Wave 10 and D&D are in the Sets tables.

[GaryLASQ]

Granite Guardians and Quasatch Hunters are up. (Haven't updated the "site download file" yet, or the Army Builder)

[Grungebob]

Thanks Gary!

[GaryLASQ]

"Battle for the Underdark" characters are up. Still need to put in hitzone images. Let me know if you see any errors with them.

Download file of site probably won't be updated until I have my set in hand. Still lots to do for getting in terrain symbols, battlefields, scenarios, glyphs, etc.

[GaryLASQ]

Terrain symbols and battlefields/scenarios (from the rulebook) are up. (You may need to refresh a page or two if you have been to the site recently.)

Plus a long over-due update of the Download file is done.

[GaryLASQ]

I have put what we know so far about wave D1 into the tables.

Some may have noticed I removed a couple of things...

1) The spinning "avatar" figures. It only went up to Orm's Return anyhow, and I have no plans to create "spinners" on my own for the many other sets that have been released over the years.

2) The Army Builder. Or, should I say army builder, since I wasn't really trying to use the term in a proper product-name kind of way. Another software company (not connected to Hasbro or WotC in any way) who has a trademark on the name "Army Builder", didn't see it that way and sent me a C&D email. No big deal. I may bring it back under a new name whenever I get time to work on it again. Battleplan by Mythacle is the best tool out there anyhow, so just use that!

[Aldin]

Yet more awesomeness. You are much appreciated, Gary!

~Aldin, who uses your site several times every week

[GaryLASQ]

Thanks Aldin.

More D1 goodness has been added.