forge

Fuck. Missed a deadline here. Bottom line I wasnt happy with the the art being produced.
Am going to slam the anchors on this problem section move onto KINGDOM.

No future updates to the player on the cards – as such have moved the progress updates from the vox blog to here.

Sweet, the PHP version is running below, based on HTML embed code generated by the gen3 editor, which is using PHP to display the current content in the library (exported to XML)

What does this mean? Apart from setting the directory to search, there’s no config setup. Page counts, chapter names, player heights are detected by PHP and how the folders are named.

After using 2 for a space of time I think the editor has made things more trouble than its worth, so i’m refining the approach by ditching the editor/xml combination in favour of a basic PHP approach. Flash functionality remaining as is using a generator html like the blackpreview for the object/embed

update: Generator 3 online for testing. Radically stripped back with PHP organising the stories, chapters, page counts and page sizes automatically. All that is required is pressing the generate button. Dropped rss feeds from the xml for this version.

Cosmetic tweaks to the player made – icons for thumbs, positioning elements. Live demo now running POC stories

Still a couple of tweaks to do to the player, plus the generator. Until then tho heres a widescreen story

Working on the preview engine showed that while being able to preload content is great, holding it all in memory tends to make things chug a bit, therefore I’ve been reworking the master engine to accommodate caching of a set of images, unloading any that are out of the immediate scope, not watertight yet (drop down causes issues) but close.

link test:
Link to page 16
Jump to chapter 2 (no js in wordpress posts, ok in html)

New page link to page 10
New page link to chapter 4 working in FF3 not IE (in wp)

Update - No longer stretches navigation content in fs mode.
No more additions, just testing/fixing from this point. More…
download

New vers with a few tweaks. With homepage+embed active in player below.

Embed code (displayed using the preserve code formatting wp plugin).
<object width="210" height="320"><param name="movie" value="http://forge.theblackgates.com/preview.swf" /><param name="quality" value="high" /><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><param name="flashVars" value="storyname=SOUR&pages=5&file=http://forge.theblackgates.com/sour/page1.jpg&pageheight=920&pagewidth=604&player=http://forge.theblackgates.com/preview043.swf&homeURL=http://forge.theblackgates.com&action=order" /><embed flashVars="storyname=SOUR&pages=5&file=http://forge.theblackgates.com/sour/page1.jpg&pageheight=920&pagewidth=604&player=http://forge.theblackgates.com/preview.swf&homeURL=http://forge.theblackgates.com&action=order" src="http://forge.theblackgates.com/preview043.swf" width="210" height="320" allowFullScreen="true" quality="high"></embed></object>

Clicking the mouse without dragging brings up the thumbnail list.
Using the mousewheel moves between thumbs
Click again to jump to page.

This is a test to see how the preloader/caching is handling the load.
This version doesnt support mac wheels
Note: I used AEN’s accelerated scrollwheel as a basis then reworked to my need.