New version of the GLE Index

[Tomalla]

I was fiddling around with Gruntz Level Editor the other day and wanted to look something up in the GLE Help Files. Unfortunately I was working on Windows 7 where the format of the provided help files was long deprecated - I wasn't able to open it without help of additional tools which had always been a hassle to install and use. So I went ahead and looked up the Forum version.

I can't remember when was the last time I took a look there, it must have been few years at least. But I'll tell you what: the index looks very rough! Everything's white and black with default browser coloring. It really could use some styling with CSS. It would increase both visual appeal *and* readability. It's really worth at least a try.

What do you think guys?

[SwordGrunt]

I'm ok with it, you're just supposed to ctrl+f what you need, but it would sure be nice if we had categoriez with imagez - for example, "enemy gruntz", "powerupz", "toolz", "hazardz"... that would help beginnerz a lot. It'd certainly help my 9-year-old brother who goes crazy trying to make Gruntz levelz, lol.

I'd be willing to try and make some graphicz if other people like the idea.

[GooRoo]

Oct 12, 2013 13:32:08 GMT -8 SwordGrunt said:

I'm ok with it, you're just supposed to ctrl+f what you need, but it would sure be nice if we had categoriez with imagez - for example, "enemy gruntz", "powerupz", "toolz", "hazardz"... that would help beginnerz a lot. It'd certainly help my 9-year-old brother who goes crazy trying to make Gruntz levelz, lol.

I'd be willing to try and make some graphicz if other people like the idea.

The Forum's Gruntz Level Editor manual containz ooooodlez of imagez ... and cross-linkz to related topicz.

Enemy Gruntz and their Goo

[GooRoo]

Oct 12, 2013 11:25:24 GMT -8 Tomalla said:

I was fiddling around with Gruntz Level Editor the other day and wanted to look something up in the GLE Help Files. Unfortunately I was working on Windows 7 where the format of the provided help files was long deprecated - I wasn't able to open it without help of additional tools which had always been a hassle to install and use. So I went ahead and looked up the Forum version.

I can't remember when was the last time I took a look there, it must have been few years at least. But I'll tell you what: the index looks very rough! Everything's white and black with default browser coloring. It really could use some styling with CSS. It would increase both visual appeal *and* readability. It's really worth at least a try.

What do you think guys?

An index is just that ... an index to related topics. There may not be anything fancy in the index, but to click on a link bringz lots of imagez ... and color to the page displayed.

So what is it that you think the Index needs?

[SwordGrunt]

Oct 12, 2013 15:32:04 GMT -8 GooRoo said:

Oct 12, 2013 13:32:08 GMT -8 SwordGrunt said:

I'm ok with it, you're just supposed to ctrl+f what you need, but it would sure be nice if we had categoriez with imagez - for example, "enemy gruntz", "powerupz", "toolz", "hazardz"... that would help beginnerz a lot. It'd certainly help my 9-year-old brother who goes crazy trying to make Gruntz levelz, lol.

I'd be willing to try and make some graphicz if other people like the idea.

The Forum's Gruntz Level Editor manual containz ooooodlez of imagez ... and cross-linkz to related topicz.

Enemy Gruntz and their Goo

Yeah, I was just thinking of something like more newbie-friendly categoriez with imagez. It could help people who have little english knowledge, for instance, but I don't think it's really needed.

[GooRoo]

I suppose I could add (roughly) 32X32 pixel imagez next to appropriate entriez ... like the Gauntletz Grunt next to the entry dealing with the Grunt equipped with the tool, and the Tool image next to the entry for the tool. Is that what you were considering as a change?

[Tomalla]

I see it all boils down to adding new images to you, right? Look, images are always welcome to every page, but the most important thing is the "wrapper" for all of this. Imagine this forum for instance with white background instead of Gruntz screenshots, forum posts and threads with no colorful gradients and plain not-so-fancy colors, no variety at all. That's what the "wrapper" for the content is for. You can easily see the divisions in the content, you can quickly tell one subject from another. And it's simply nice to look at.

Oct 12, 2013 13:32:08 GMT -8 SwordGrunt said:

I'm ok with it, you're just supposed to ctrl+f what you need

Oct 12, 2013 15:38:12 GMT -8 GooRoo said:

An index is just that ... an index to related topics. There may not be anything fancy in the index, but to click on a link bringz lots of imagez ... and color to the page displayed.

Oh, so just because it's an index for things it's got to look like a page from a mathematical textbook for students? I think you missed one thing: it's still a website and the fact it's using images and links doesn't mean it's using its full potential. It doesn't mean it's vintage either. Adding some layout to a page is never a bad thing. Is it an index? Fine, have nothing against it. But someone could simply pay attention to it to look at least half-decent. The biggest number next to "Windows" is, the more people will be forced to use it. Me included.

[SwordGrunt]

Oct 13, 2013 4:54:36 GMT -8 Tomalla said:

I see it all boils down to adding new images to you, right? Look, images are always welcome to every page, but the most important thing is the "wrapper" for all of this. Imagine this forum for instance with white background instead of Gruntz screenshots, forum posts and threads with no colorful gradients and plain not-so-fancy colors, no variety at all. That's what the "wrapper" for the content is for. You can easily see the divisions in the content, you can quickly tell one subject from another. And it's simply nice to look at.

Actually my point was large imagez separating everything into categoriez, to make it easier to find what you're looking for - for instance, a new designer might want to add a flying bird into their jungle level, but doesn't know the logic name is 'ObjectDropper', so a category for 'Hazardz' would help them to find it. So I'm pretty sure we're talking about the same thing. Obviously it would still be one large block of data if it just had small imagez added next to some entriez - that's not what I was thinking of.

[GooRoo]

Alright! So can someone put together a single page (letter size would be nice ... printable) as an example, based upon the existing Index?

I tried very hard to make the manual printer-friendly, so that people could print out the subject that particularly gave them trouble ... or simply interested them. At one time, I even considered breaking the Index, itself, up into individual pagez ... but there were so few people who even indicated they ever used it, I thought I would only be doing it for myself.

Apathy is the natural state of humanity:
"Johnny was fifteen years old before he spoke his first words 'the toast is burnt'. His parents were aghast! Johnny, we didn't know you could talk! Well, up til now, everything has been fine."

We seldom remark about things that are satisfactory, but pipe up real quick when something goes wrong. So the drawbacks, shortcomings are a direct result of lack of feed-back. I asked for people to provide information about the GLE on-line project, and didn't get even a dozen responses. So what exists is entirely the result of my own poor efforts ... and lack of training in Hyper Text Mark-up Language. All I see elsewhere is acres of HTML set-up code that thoroughly obscure the information being presented, when you look at the raw code. So I use simple tables. All of those <span...> and </span> entries look like cr*p, when <b>cr*p</b> is so much more readable.

[Tomalla]

Oct 13, 2013 8:41:58 GMT -8 GooRoo said:

Alright! So can someone put together a single page (letter size would be nice ... printable) as an example, based upon the existing Index?

I tried very hard to make the manual printer-friendly, so that people could print out the subject that particularly gave them trouble ... or simply interested them. At one time, I even considered breaking the Index, itself, up into individual pagez ... but there were so few people who even indicated they ever used it, I thought I would only be doing it for myself.

Apathy is the natural state of humanity:
"Johnny was fifteen years old before he spoke his first words 'the toast is burnt'. His parents were aghast! Johnny, we didn't know you could talk! Well, up til now, everything has been fine."

We seldom remark about things that are satisfactory, but pipe up real quick when something goes wrong. So the drawbacks, shortcomings are a direct result of lack of feed-back. I asked for people to provide information about the GLE on-line project, and didn't get even a dozen responses. So what exists is entirely the result of my own poor efforts ... and lack of training in Hyper Text Mark-up Language. All I see elsewhere is acres of HTML set-up code that thoroughly obscure the information being presented, when you look at the raw code. So I use simple tables. All of those <span...> and </span> entries look like cr*p, when <b>cr*p</b> is so much more readable.

It's so true. I know from my experience how irritating a lack of any feedback is. But to justify myself - I always comment on something I like in particular. Alright, maybe I haven't really explicitly expressed my joy of using the forum itself, but you can't expect everyone to comment on your project either. It'd be mad, however satisfactory for the author himself!

Actual printing of the page is something I haven't really taken into account. I had no idea the lack of formatting is related to it either ( I'm pretty sure that as the time flies less and less people are printing anything from the Internet. I mean web pages directly. But maybe I'm wrong ). However - CSS allows to specify rules which will be only applied for printing. So you can define i.e. two sets of rules: one for viewing the page in a browser and the other for printing it. Hell, you can even use custom fonts Imagine: seeing a website with Gruntzy Turkey Sandwich font! I wonder if it's copyrighted. If it is, where's a copyright note of it? Anyone?

I know CSS quite well so I can try to make a page demo. Don't expect it any time soon though, I have some things on my head right now too. Cheers

[GooRoo]

Whatever you do, I'm sure it will be useful, possibly even attractive. I use GruntzScrooge.exe almost every day ... every day that I am doing Gruntzy thingz, that is ... and it is an extremely useful tool for me. Going through this correction of broken linkz, I have come across a few CLz that do not have statisticz for the Statz Page, and (with your tool) I am able to quickly gather the information to post it.

Regarding the link problem ... there is absolutely nothing common to the onez broken ... creation date, graphicz set, Designer, difficulty ... the errorz are all over the map. I had errorz in 2000 releasez, and 2012 releasez; (some of) GooRoo's levelz(!) and Colin's CLz; Rocky Roadz through Gruntz In Space. What is even worse, a link that is good in the overall alphabetical index may be broken (for the same CL!) in some other index(es), so I cannot dismiss an entry as fine, based upon its listing alphabetically. This has me a bit 'tender' regarding anything Gruntz right now, so I apologize for my testiness about the GLE Index.

[Tomalla]

Here's something I've just put together, for comparison:

My version of GLE Index page
The original GLE Index page

One thing to note though: I'm not a designer. I can be given remarks or instructions on how a page should look like and I'd modify it accordingly. Though my own attempts at designing a web page usually don't wind up anywhere close to being pretty.

Ergo - I'm waiting for feedback lads.

[Zu]

Hey, it actually looks pretty damn good. When I was reading this thread earlier, I didn't think an update was strictly necessary, but now that I can see a comparison... this would definitely help make the index much clearer and nicer.

[SwordGrunt]

Looks nicer, that's for sure. I assume it's not too troublesome to get done, though... there are dozens, maybe hundredz of pagez on the GLE.

[GooRoo]

Oct 21, 2013 8:14:50 GMT -8 SwordGrunt said:

Looks nicer, that's for sure. I assume it's not too troublesome to get done, though... there are dozens, maybe hundredz of pagez on the GLE.

Hundredz of pagez in the entire Gruntz Level Editor Manual (replacement for the so-called GLE 'Help' file) ... every tool, toy, powerup, spell, curse ... not to mention tilez and logicz ... cross-referenced to related topicz.

BTW, I just attempted to remove the over and under "Cheat Code" heading, and was initially successful with Toyz (width=15%) ... but the same value did absolutely nothing when I made the same change in Toolz! I gave up when I reached 24% and it still was over and under instead of side-by-side. I will try again, removing the multiple tablez, and replace headingz with colspan=3 to see if the first heading definition can be made to work for both Toolz and Toyz.

P.S. Not counting the first 4 lines, there were 90 linez of set-up code before the first actual display text appeared ... which were 72 linez. That is a LOT of overhead to create the effect. Just another example of Microsoft dictating to the world, increasing the size of everything. Bill Gates: "You will never need more than 640K of memory" ... NOT!!!

Just what is the benefit of <strong><span...>...</span></strong> over <b>...</b> anyway?

Some people just never heard the phrase "keep it simple, stupid" ... and blow everything all out of proportion.

[Tomalla]

Oct 21, 2013 12:10:56 GMT -8 GooRoo said:

BTW, I just attempted to remove the over and under "Cheat Code" heading, and was initially successful with Toyz (width=15%) ... but the same value did absolutely nothing when I made the same change in Toolz! I gave up when I reached 24% and it still was over and under instead of side-by-side. I will try again, removing the multiple tablez, and replace headingz with colspan=3 to see if the first heading definition can be made to work for both Toolz and Toyz.

Frankly I don't really know what are you talking about. Are you talking about your page or mine? What over and under? What side-by-side? What width=15%?

Oct 21, 2013 12:10:56 GMT -8 GooRoo said:

P.S. Not counting the first 4 lines, there were 90 linez of set-up code before the first actual display text appeared ... which were 72 linez. That is a LOT of overhead to create the effect. Just another example of Microsoft dictating to the world, increasing the size of everything. Bill Gates: "You will never need more than 640K of memory" ... NOT!!!

Just what is the benefit of <strong><span...>...</span></strong> over <b>...</b> anyway?

I suppose that is a comment to my version of a webpage. I can easily give you a bullet point list contradicting your opinion.

1. 90 lines of "preparation". It's a lot to you, right? Let's see: It's about 1814 characters which hardly reaches 2 kilobytes of data (assuming 1-byte encoding) . For comparison: a background image to this very forum board (at the time of writing it's the Yellow Peril custom level) is 4 megabytes large, which is just 2048 times larger than this "overhead" ... Now that's an insane (euphemism) idea to me. Is it even worth it? Don't think so.

That'd be a problem back in 90's. You know ... My point is it's been quite a while ago.

2. Microsoft sure is the company which I'd send a hate letter or two, but ... what the hell does it have to do with what we're talking about right now? Give me at least one reason. Did it invent CSS? HTML? Maybe WWW?

3. <strong>? <span>? <b>? Choose anything you want. Does anyone forbid you? I feel like you're trying to make a policy for selecting the only righteous tags out there. There is none. Do you like <strong> tags? Use these. If you're dreaming of them in your darkest nightmares, use <b> tags instead. What is exactly the problem?

4. So you're complaining about the "70 line overhead" ... Fine, you can do everything inline. All of the declarations out there. That'd mean all of that code would have to be written as arguments in tags. Just like you've been doing. For instance:

<table style="font-size: 16px; font-family: Trebuchet MS, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color: white;"></table>

It looks less appealing than simple <table></table> declaration, doesn't it? It also separates the styling details from the semantic meaning of the content. Anywhere you'd type <table></table>, a beautiful table pops up. You don't have to worry about anything else. Just the content of the table. It's a win-win to me.

Oct 21, 2013 12:10:56 GMT -8 GooRoo said:

Some people just never heard the phrase "keep it simple, stupid" ... and blow everything all out of proportion.

OK, that might actually fit Microsoft rather nicely. But what you're missing here is the scale and nothing else. Comparing a dust speck to an elephant in terms of simplicity doesn't make things any easier.

Don't get me wrong, I just want to clear things up. Sadly for me, I feel like if I was trying to convert you to my religion ... which is surprising, considering you had been working with computers professionally, right?

[GooRoo]

Yes, I worked with computers from August, 1964 through May, 2000. Those years of experience taught me that 80% (minimum) of the effort of a computer program in business was spent in maintenance ... at most 20% in the initial creation of a program. To me, all of those <span> (etc.) things just obfuscate what is truly important. Which means a lot more digging to find the mis-spelled word (manually), or the correctly spelled word that is a homonym for the correct word.
"Find" is a neat solution for those problems, but seeing "I can't bare the thought of" is quicker than scanning for the word in a treatise on nudism.

My rant on Microsoft: they don't seem to be able to write truly re-entrant code, so new copies of code are frequently inserted each time a certain type of call is made. My first personal computer was an Amiga, and I wrote a program for a local business that was 22KB in size, with incredible flexibility for the owner (printing medical test-tube labels) ... one program (at $300.00) replaced well over a dozen programs (at $50.00 or more each). Each new customer previously meant a new program had to be written ... now one did everything he ever asked for ... for years. Microsoft put Amiga out of business, and he wanted the same program to run on an Intel machine. So I ported it ... at over 3MB! Pragmas did not recognize that a certain module was already in the program, so it simply would include another one. Wasteful! Draw a line was one module; draw a square was a module that called the line module ... repeatedly. Want to have a computer for the trip to Mars? Don't have Microsoft involved in the preparation ... we couldn't generate a powerful enough lift module.

I believe that all of those "set-up" instructions may be created once, and stored in a central place. Then a simple one line call would invoke all 90 lines in your set-up, right? That would not give me any problem ... except to learn CSS ... and at my age, learning is NOT a high priority item. (I even regret the 15 minutes a day I have to spend with the razor ... time I would rather spend on other things. ... like Gruntz.)

Toolz

Cheat Code

What it does (over and under)

Toolz

Cheat Code

What it does (side-by-side)

[Tomalla]

Oct 21, 2013 14:59:46 GMT -8 GooRoo said:

Yes, I worked with computers from August, 1964 through May, 2000. Those years of experience taught me that 80% (minimum) of the effort of a computer program in business was spent in maintenance ... at most 20% in the initial creation of a program.

... unless a program requres no maintenance at all in which case the creation process part raises roughly to 100%

Oct 21, 2013 14:59:46 GMT -8 GooRoo said:

To me, all of those <span> (etc.) things just obfuscate what is truly important.

That is true. I'll tell you what: CSS is a funky language which makes it possible to change the behavior of all of the tags a page consists of. You can make <b> tags make letters italic, <i> tags can make text red etc. in which case the semantic meaning of those tags becomes unclear. But HTML introduced a variety of tags for a reason. <span> tags for one don't do anything by themselves and they just separate parts of text in a document in a more of a semantic way. But since everything can have some CSS styles applied, so can <span>s.

Oct 21, 2013 14:59:46 GMT -8 GooRoo said:

My rant on Microsoft: they don't seem to be able to write truly re-entrant code, so new copies of code are frequently inserted each time a certain type of call is made. My first personal computer was an Amiga, and I wrote a program for a local business that was 22KB in size, with incredible flexibility for the owner (printing medical test-tube labels) ... one program (at $300.00) replaced well over a dozen programs (at $50.00 or more each). Each new customer previously meant a new program had to be written ... now one did everything he ever asked for ... for years. Microsoft put Amiga out of business, and he wanted the same program to run on an Intel machine. So I ported it ... at over 3MB! Pragmas did not recognize that a certain module was already in the program, so it simply would include another one. Wasteful! Draw a line was one module; draw a square was a module that called the line module ... repeatedly. Want to have a computer for the trip to Mars? Don't have Microsoft involved in the preparation ... we couldn't generate a powerful enough lift module.

I see where you're going with this. In my opinion keeping the size of a program as small as possible is ... possible. What makes a program way larger than needed is the inclusion of libraries that reside on your PC, let it be the graphic, math library of other APIs (like WinAPI). Of course you can strip down and remove all of these libraries and it will work on your machine just fine. But then it will lack portability and the machines which lack these libraries will not be able to run an app at all. The other problem being all of these modules are simply too large - drawing a single line with DirectX requires the inclusion of all graphical function which take some space obviously.

Oct 21, 2013 14:59:46 GMT -8 GooRoo said:

I believe that all of those "set-up" instructions may be created once, and stored in a central place. Then a simple one line call would invoke all 90 lines in your set-up, right? That would not give me any problem ... except to learn CSS ... and at my age, learning is NOT a high priority item. (I even regret the 15 minutes a day I have to spend with the razor ... time I would rather spend on other things. ... like Gruntz.)

Now I see what you meant exactly. And I completely misunderstood the reason for your disgruntlement.

Of course the "set-up" code will be placed in a separate file eventually. Then every web page will link to that file (a "stylesheet" to be more precise) with a single line of code. It's just easier for me to do everything in one file for design purposes. Hell, I have a project with 640 lines of this CSS "setup-code" and 1670 lines of JavaScript code - all in one file alongside HTML code. That's because at the end I'd have to separate, minify and obfuscate the scripts anyways. Also it's way easier to find something in a one file with CTRL+F and bookmarks than flick through 5 different files only to find the one which I want to modify and upload that specific file to a server. It's definitely not worth it, not at this stage of development.

Should you learn CSS? Well ... it's one of those languages which can't be learnt from a textbook or any official language specifications either. Different browsers interpret CSS differently and skip some of the official implementations in favor of some new, sometimes fancy additions. The language itself also has some troublesome quirks which seem contradictory at first. But some general knowledge on how things work is never a bad thing.