Rescuing AC's official website - saved by BUncle

[DrazharLn]

Can you note the oversights somewhere, if they might be relevant to the in-game text files?

[Buster's Uncle]

Oversights of mine - wrong addressing of links, mostly, and stuff I didn't catch the first time through, like apostrophes replaced with ’ and a few missing pics.

[Buster's Uncle]

Let's see.  About 20 minutes ago, caught up on my morning routine, I resumed scrolling through tech mini-pages, one at a time and checking all the crosslinks -the only way I'll catch everything- and noticed the apostrophe problem on Graviton Theory  .htm.  Armor11.html, Armor12.html, Armor13.html, and Armor14.html all had bad addresses crosslinked to earlier armors, and one of them shared with Armor9.html a bad previous link on the scrollbar.  Little chance of a bad next link, as I used them to load the next page in KompoZer as I edited through each category, but I have to scroll all the way back through each set when I reach the end.  All those pages have been corrected -at least the problems I noticed- and uploaded.

I started working through checking categories systematically last night, back to front, so I should have caught everything in Terrain and Terraforming, Societal Models, Unit Abilities, Units, Chassis Types, and Armor.  -At least the bad crosslinks and previous scrolls, maybe any missing pics.

Please alert me if anyone finds anything I missed.  Weapons is next.

[Buster's Uncle]

weapnum=22.html, weapnum=24.html, weapnum=25.html and weapnum=26.html all had address number agreement problems -linked hovercraft chassis instead of missile, one off- and one also had the tech prerequisite miss-linked the old way.  Also noticed and fixed a page layout problem with prereq Unified Field Theory  .htm.  All corrected and uploaded...

Secret Projects is going to take a while.

[Buster's Uncle]

Ugh.  Actually, the secret projects were looking pretty 4-square, with a bad prereq link to fix in The Weather Paradigm, all the way up to Clinical Immortality, with a Supreme Leader link leading to Blood Truce instead - which revealed a real bed of snakes in Concepts.  There ain't no Supreme Leader page-ette, despite a lot of pages crosslinking to on.  In fact, in conceptnum=30.html, Victory and Defeat, there are seven links to victory conditions, ALL. SEVEN. WRONG.

Something's missing...

[Buster's Uncle]

I found something on Wayback -fun, just getting into the category, with the mainpage link broke- it has to do with the -broken- way pages are addressed and advanced and basic concepts sort.  Adding to the fun is, none of these victory conditions pages seems to have the previous button working, and I got in at not-the-beginning; and they switch what order advanced and concept is in in the address, and it's just a mess.

It looks like there should be 14, but I can only find from 4-up.  Time to boot up the game -again- and have a look at the datalinks category, what's in it and how it's sorted.  Probably have to create three -or four, as they often start at zero- pages...

[Buster's Uncle]

Well, I needed to take a break, so I haven't gotten a lot of work done - and now I have to break off and cook supper.  I have got all the Victory Conditions page links pointing right, and have edited four of the 11 pages I found; seems right to straighten them up before I re-create the missing ones.

I'll get back on it after supper, and now that I've decided what to do, the rest should happen in fairly short order...

[Buster's Uncle]

Draz, at the bottom of the Story page, there's a Wayback link to an excerpt from a graphic novel - it's a shockwave flash thing, way over my tech paygrade.  It still works in IE and Edge; what do you recommend doing about it?  Would it be best to patch together something non-interactive with screenshots that'll work for everyone?

http://web.archive.org/web/20030808030543/http://www.firaxis.com/smac/images/graphicnovel.swf

?

[Buster's Uncle]

Alas, poor Effects category; back to being orphaned, like Reactors.  I filled out Advanced Concepts, making the first four pages, and have got it indexed properly on the Technologies page.

-Now error-checking those; it's a short set, though I found an error on the first page I started hitting all the links...

[DrazharLn]

Draz, at the bottom of the Story page, there's a Wayback link to an excerpt from a graphic novel - it's a shockwave flash thing, way over my tech paygrade.  It still works in IE and Edge; what do you recommend doing about it?  Would it be best to patch together something non-interactive with screenshots that'll work for everyone?

http://web.archive.org/web/20030808030543/http://www.firaxis.com/smac/images/graphicnovel.swf

?

I think so.

[Buster's Uncle]

Added to my build queue, then.  -Probably best to create a subpage with the usual buttons and top-Unity, and a scroll-down column of pages in the content area of the page; they'll be a pain to assemble with all the dialogue, one panel at a time, but nothing compared to what-all I've already done.  It's not that many pages...


Nothing else to fix in the secret projects, though I did notice and fix another gibberish apostrophe in Controlled Singularity.htm while checking crosslinks.

Looking through Base Facilities for oversights next...

[Buster's Uncle]

...After all these years, I still [ctrl]Q over and over until the voice begs me not to go for the sake of the drones when I'm exiting the game...

[Buster's Uncle]

Facilities is cleaned up - four link problems -and four technology page problems while I spotted them checking links- fixed and uploaded.

The technology section, next.  86 pages with a lot of crosslinks each, plus a long tech tree index.  Fun, but a short nap compared to time already spent.

[Buster's Uncle]

I just noticed -and corrected- that the Cyborg Factory had the description from the previous secret project page, The Pholus Mutagen.  It was in the original -I checked- but it underscores that I have distinct mental blind spots, having looked at that page so many times before.  -For instance, there are a lot of tech images wrong, because of a strange numbering scheme that's often one off, and I never paid any attention to those images in the game, and only noticed I'm missing a lot because some are the wrong color for the tech category they're in.  I also never use many of the facilities, ex. the Bioenhancement Center, and am easy to fool there, too.

This needs a second set of eyes.  I can go through hundreds of little pages myself, if I have to, and check every. single. crosslink.  -and have been doing so since sunset Sunday, but there are details my eyes habitually skip over, and … I hate to leave it less than perfect, after putting SO much time and tedious work in...

[Buster's Uncle]

Well, I've found everything I can in the tech tree, and uploaded the fixes.  All that's left is Basic Concepts - I carefully went through all the crosslinks in Advanced as soon as I made and posted them in the middle of debugging secret projects.