Archive for the ‘impworks’ Category

I’ve wanted to improve the display of the code for my Vue python scripts here for quite awhile but I was never entirely happy with the code highlighters I’d tried. I’ve installed and fiddled with a new one tonight and I think I like it but since its really for you (well at least if your here to look at my Vue python scripts) I thought I’d run a little poll to see what you think.

The new style can be seen on Terrain Matcher while the old style can be seen on EcoRotate.

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The poll will run for a week and at the end of the week if the vote is in favour of the new style I’ll update the other python script pages to match.

I didn’t intend to make site changes today. An unexpected interaction between a plug-in and an update of WordPress set me off trying to find a fix. I also spotted another tiny problem with one of my own plug-ins so I fixed that and then checking in IE noticed that MS Word html had crept into a post and was breaking the site in IE.

Then I’d been thinking about making some modifications to the navigation: moving the blogrolls to a page to free up some space (analytics showed they were not sending a lot of traffic to anyone anyway). Then I tweaked the feeds block to add twitter and switched to some new icons. I also added a plug-in for related blog posts (I’m not sure if the configuration is perfect yet I’ll have to tweak it as time goes by) and fiddled with the styling of posts a bit. That led me to switching my font stack to one that hopefully covers even more visitors available fonts. That had a knock on effect on some of the layout sizing so I tweaked that and a few of the colours too while I was there. So what was supposed to be a little fix and a tweak has eaten nearly three hours but I’m happy with the changes and hopefully visitors will like them too.

I’ve been exchanging emails with Paul, a Vue user, who was having difficulty visualising how big objects should be in Vue. He uses real world measurements but his pictures didn’t look right because he was struggling to get the objects to be the right size and making the distances between them realistic. That was messing up the quality of the lighting and making things look a bit weird. He mentioned the Father Ted episode with the Cows…

“Now concentrate this time, Dougal. These (Father Ted points to some plastic cows on the table) are very small; those (he points at some cows out of the window) are far away…”

I’d suggested he use a cube and make it about the right size for a real world object and then size the model to match. Similarly using a cube sized to a distance to help lay out things. He wasn’t really comfortable with that. It was helping but it was slowing him down.

Then I realised he was a football fan so to help him get a sense of scale in his scenes I made him a quick football pitch model. Nothing fancy just two squashed cubes. He knows how big a football pitch should look and can size and space objects using it as a guide. Once he’s happy he can delete it and render the scene.

Since it worked for him I’ve expanded the set to include thirty-four sports grounds and pitches and posted them here tonight for anyone to download. I’ve made a page for them Vue Scaling Objects.

If there is interest I’ll do some more packs: vehicles, people, plants, buildings, planets and animals all strike me as possibly being useful. Leave a comment if you’d like any of those or something else saying which one(s) you’d find helpful…

After a (small) flood of unacceptable comments that didn’t get past my blog’s spam and flood control I’m posting living room rules.

Just a quick note: I support freedom of speach.  You have the freedom to say whatever you want on your website.  Quoting the 1st Amendment to me is a bit daft as I’m in the UK not the US.

Since I needed to get a simple explanation up in a hurry I’ve borrowed this from the excellent explanation posted by John August.

I’ve made a few minor CSS tweaks here.  A little one should give the breadcrumb trail at the top of the page a bit more space when it gets long so it doesn’t do weird things.

The bigger tweak is adding some conditional CSS that should (hopefully) imporve the display of the site for Internet Explorer users using IE 6 or IE 7.  The left hand navigation boxes should now look neater with less space to the left of the links.  If your using IE 6 or IE 7 I’d like to know what you think of the change and anything else you think I could do to make the site look nicer for you.

Until today I’d included the Add this Button on both this site and on my unofficial Vue News blog.  Having looked at the usage I’ve taken it off this blog.  Quite simply, despite having tried it in a few different places, it wasn’t being used.  On Vue News it gets a low level steady stream of usage.  Here it had 3 clicks in 12 months.  So to slightly improve this sites performance Add this is now history.

In an effort to make this site a bit more of a Quatro and less of an Austin 1100 I’ve painted gzip go faster striped down the side of all the html, css and js files it serves up tonight.

My apologies to anyone who was trying to download anything directly from impworks.  I managed to knock out the download handling so all the links were broken.  It’s up and running again now.

I’ve just added a Translate.This button in about 5 minutes to the left hand menu. Looks to be a nice little JavaScript implementation of the Google translation service. I know there are WordPress plug-ins to do this but I’ve had mixed experience with those in the past so I’m going to try this one out for a while.