Preserved Topic: new LOBBY for the asylum, testing some functions...

OK, check out http://www.ozoneasylum.com/lobby/ if you would. I got fed up with all of my slow and solid progress on the Znippets site, so I decided to just plunge in with this one, doing many [interesting?] hacks to the ozonicLabs code, making new, possibly clumsy (but better than before) changes to the movement code. Dragging is next, picture those menus waving in the breeze as you drag them around, and how they'll expand!

NOTE: Most all of the links are dead now, in the top menu listing you'll see options labeled "right" and "left", they're the only things that work now! I'm just gonna plunge ahead and do the code, as separate files, and hope to make it neat for the Znippets later.

Your pal, -doc-



[This message has been edited by DocOzone (edited 09-04-2001).]

Oh! I've checked this in everything from MSIE4.5 for the mac, through NS4.7x, to Mozilla/gecko, MSIE5.5 and MSIE6.x, it works on them all except for Opera! What is it about Opera, things just don't work, and I don't know how to get any error reports out of it so I can fix things! If anyone can help shed some light on this I'd appreciate it bunches, I like things to work.

Your pal, -doc-

Neat so far

One thing I found kind of...odd, not sure if you inteded it - if they are on th eleft (or right) and you click that direction again, they all move off screen. If you do it repeatedly, they will continue moving further away.

I suppose that would only be problematic for people who don't know their left from right though... And it could be endlessly amusing for some

Looking forward to playing with more options. At the moment the screen is rather sparse, and possibly a bit confusing.

{edit}p.s. I hate Opera. I've started using it only recently to check things out...nothing good to say about it!

[This message has been edited by DL-44 (edited 09-04-2001).]

Yah, that function for moving the values of where they should be was just a quick hack, move right, move left. The first test func() just moved right, and I had to keep reloading the window to get 'em back! I'm going to add some logic to handle hitting the edge of the screen, I already have the bits that let me know where that is, even if you resize.

Your pal, -doc-

works sweet here on NN4.72 on a Sun Solaris Workstation .. very nice work Doc

And it seems that when they're on the *right*, they're farther down on the page than when they're on the left.

BTW... you should be able to get movement to work in Opera, just not innerHTML or things like that. And I think there *is* a way to get the errors... or maybe not... I forget, I had it installed on my other computer at home. I'll install it here after class in an hour or two.

Looks absolutely wonderful in IE5.5

Doc, it looks to me like Zprime.js isn't even made to support Opera! It looks like Opera will end up with both layerstart and layerstyle == "". It should use document.getElementById.

By the way, I don't support your use of eval() =)

Looking good!!! The page worked fine on my PC for IE5.5, NS4.7, and Mozilla 0.8

The foo table wasn't full size in NS4.7 but I'm sure you know about that. The movement was plenty smooth for all the combinations of Zdelay and Zsnap.

I can't wait to see what you come up with for the exapansion effect.

Yah, I'm still having to do a lot of work with the table widths, I may just drop tables altogether and use <div>'s instead. I keep breaking and making it work, over and over, heh. I can get the movement to work in Opera, but as soon as I start any of the fancier stuff it simply stops working, and I cannot for the life of me figure why! I don't explicitly check for Opera in any of the functions, just for document.all, doucment.layer, or getElelmentById. I'll figure it out, hopefully.

Your pal, -doc-

Again, doc, is Zprime.js made to support Opera? I see browser detection for it, but no explicit definition of the layerstart and layerstyle variables.

No, I'm going to save the layerstart variable definition until the Zupdater.js script, I'm making some attempt to do as InI and Max and Slime all ask me, get rid of (or minimize the use of) the eval(...) function! I'm still using the layerstart, etc... variables in my demo, so that browsers that undertand gecko-style stuff use that, (which means NS6, MSIE 5.5 and 6, and Opera), IE that doesn't know getElement uses the document.all script, so it worked in my old copy of IE4.5, and netscape uses the document.layer flag. Seems the only reason that the Opera version is not working right now is the bit where I change the width and height of the divs on the fly, must have different format for that, or possibly no support for dynamically changing that attribute yet? I'll poke at it and figure it out, the moving of the buttons did work, but failed after I made all the panels into re-sizing <div>s.

Now that bit is working rather well, it scales nicely and fits whichever size browser you use, at least in gecko and IE. Opera gets the width part (with a few glitches), but fails on the height adjustment. (Plus I gotta figure just which bit of the code makes the button placement fail, that no good, hrmph.) My big issue here is this - I don't think I can make this dynamically scaling "thing" work in Netscape! Since re-sizing makes a Netscape window blow up anyway, I'm considering a SSI call for the base table layout, and if you have a gecko browser you get divs (which re-size), and if you have Netscape you get tables that don't. A pain, I am THIS close to jumping onto the BUI bandwagon, even though I still don't have a good browser for the mac that meets my specs. (I want all the new features, I just also want it to be faster than a 286 with lots to do, heh.)

So! For the moment, I'm going to break my own self-imposed rules and ignore Netscape for now, sorry my favorite old browser! I'll take care of you, soon enough. I'll actually try and tackle the Opera problems first, as I *know* I had the buttons working there before, if I don't fix it now I'll never know what the problem was. The Netscape hack is actually kind of easy, all of the floating things work as they should, it's only the <div> elements on the bottom of everything that have problems right now.

Next! Make the buttons draggable, or work on making them open from where they are? I'm thinking activating dragging first. Then, make them open up (the z-index changes when they become active, so it will be on top of everything else, and since they could be anywhere, I can ignore the buttons underneath, I don't need to move them out of the way, whatta relief!) ((Think of what happens if the one on top pushes the others down, too low, which activates the "move back up" routine, ugly.)) I expect I'll launch the content for all of these pages as free-floating "windows" in the content area (yah, I'm still hooked on this concept), or possibly as just one big window with different content loaded into it.

Still on it! Worky worky, I'll check back here as I go.

Your pal, -doc-

A quick recomendation for eliminating many evals:

function ZgetElementStyleById(theID)
{
if (document.getElementById) return document.getElementById(theID).style;
else if (document.all) return document.all[theID].style;
else if (document.layers) return document[theID];
}

Then also make sure the left and top variables are defined, to be either "left" or "pixelLeft", you know the deal, and you can use:

ZgetElementStyleById("myelement")[left] = 500;

To be really standards compliant (not that *I* am), you could say "500px" instead of 500. Unless pixelLeft is being used, which *expects* an integer rather than a string. Oh, it's all so complicated and silly.

Hah ha! Yah, major big-league silliness involved in all this stuff. I found by accident that IE now claims "3d" as a reserved word, wonder what they have planned? I like that little function, looks like something I'll use in there, although maybe with a shorter function name! I just got the dragging working in both MSIE6.0 and Mozilla 9.2, haven't checked it in any other, probably won't tonight, it's late and I'm tired, maybe? (Thinking about that one for a sec, yah, probably tired. =) I just axed that "left/right" function, I was getting too hung up on it, distracting me, it was! Since virtually every object on that screen is in the Zobject array, I expect I'll have some fun at launch time with some silly animations, just hide everything off screen and let it all scurry into place onLoad, should be fun I hope.

Man! I have learned SO MUCH in this past week! All the great feedback I got from the Znipplets project, and now with this one, all of my code is radically different and more efficient than before. New things I've learned and/or finally started using...

• .prototype functions, woo-hoo!
• return this and return that, I like return.

Hmm, seemed like more when I started this list. Ah well, two MAJOR bits of programming tidbits that I'm liking a bunch, let me tell you! Slime, you are the man, I've learned so much from you and Max, and if RoyW shows up around here, give him a big handful of black pills somebody, OK? He wrote me this 4 page letter concerning the Znippets project, with tons of great code snippets for me to learn from, it was a huge help.

Gad! I frigging LOVE learning new stuff!

Your pal, -doc-

Dragging works fine in IE 5.0! Except there's no vertical boundaries to the dragging.

It's possible I may follow your example and create some sort of API myself, even for just my own use, because it sure would be nice to get all the compatability issues out of the way and just have fun with the actual programming!

Very cool. I agree with slime some vertical boundries would be good, I tossed all the menu's off the top of the screen the first time I started playing with it.

Yah, I only wrote the side-to-side trapping for that one, the top boundary will be easy, but the bottom has some issues, like what happens when you drag into it? Will the children get squashed, or will they hold tough and the main button slide back & forth? (I need to fix the right boundary, too, move it out maybe 20px or so.) We're still in "toy" mode yet, it doesn't really do anything usefl as yet, but it will, and soon! Slime, do it, do it! You'll love yourself afterward, I'm at the stage I can really start churning things out now that the grunt work is mostly done, I'm happy. I'm going to step through and strip out all of the hard variables, and all of the function codes that actually *do* something, and place them all in one file, the "Zcontrol.js" file. This is going to rock, only the fun bits will need to be done, and I can stop inventing this thing called "wheel", seeing as how my other invention called "fire" ended up in public domain, heh. On to the fun stuff!

Your pal, -doc-

BTW, go here http://www.ozoneasylum.com/Forum8/HTML/000204.html

They wont expand for me

That's OK; they won't expand for me either! I suspect it's because the lazy-ass programmer responsible hasn't gotten around to writing that bit o' code yet, he's still obsesing about the dragging function, wanting to finish that before moving on.

Your pal, -doc-

quick question....

why the use of eval() isn't really liked?

The poster has demanded we remove all his contributions, less he takes legal action.
We have done so.
Now Tyberius Prime expects him to start complaining that we removed his 'free speech' since this message will replace all of his posts, past and future.
Don't follow his example - seek real life help first.

Plus it's ugly as heck. Compare:

eval("document.all." + theid + ".style." + leftstr + " = 3;");

vs

document.all[theid].style[leftstr] = 3;

There are certain cases where eval is a good idea, but it's overused. I'd elaborate, but I'm trying to learn the Dvorak keyboard layout and it's driving me crazy. This post has already taken me way too long to type. =)

I gotta get into coding this is cool.

The poster has demanded we remove all his contributions, less he takes legal action.
We have done so.
Now Tyberius Prime expects him to start complaining that we removed his 'free speech' since this message will replace all of his posts, past and future.
Don't follow his example - seek real life help first.

quote:

---

I'd elaborate, but I'm trying to learn the Dvorak keyboard layout and it's driving me crazy.

---

Slime, you scare me.

The poster has demanded we remove all his contributions, less he takes legal action.
We have done so.
Now Tyberius Prime expects him to start complaining that we removed his 'free speech' since this message will replace all of his posts, past and future.
Don't follow his example - seek real life help first.

Bwa ha ha, I'll scare you even more when I'm typing at 200 words per minute!

heh...

slime: where the heck do you get a dvorak keyboard from???

every1 with psycho10esis raise my hand

looks great doc! but are you planning to use that as a new asylum interface?

::Slime::

What's the diffrence between a dvorak keyboard and a regular keyboard layout. (Could you post a pic or something)

Dark:
http://www.mwbrooks.com/dvorak/layout.html http://www.cse.ogi.edu/~dylan/dvorak/ http://sominfo.syr.edu/facstaff/dvorak/ http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/jcb/Dvorak/ http://highplainslander.tripod.com/dvorak.html

That's excelent!! Great!! Beautiful!!
I like this, as the Azylum Main entrance looks perfect...

BTW, i downloaded the Adobe Atmosphere and i'm working with it, very nice, so i'll try to make an Asylum structure!! you know, the east wing where you (they say) can see the sun sometimes, the VP's room, a dog biting everybody, west wing with all the cells and stuff like that, i'll post as soon as i have something developed...


.-rotate script by Mr.Max

The poster has demanded we remove all his contributions, less he takes legal action.
We have done so.
Now Tyberius Prime expects him to start complaining that we removed his 'free speech' since this message will replace all of his posts, past and future.
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Thanks for the links Lallous

Ouch!, any other recomendation besides atmosphere??

The poster has demanded we remove all his contributions, less he takes legal action.
We have done so.
Now Tyberius Prime expects him to start complaining that we removed his 'free speech' since this message will replace all of his posts, past and future.
Don't follow his example - seek real life help first.