philcha

.... relying on php is a bad idea is people want to view it on their pc, as I imagine the majority of gamers here don't use a php enabled server to view manuals.

Looks like we have a misunderstanding. I was suggesting that one person with a PHP-enabled PC (as I have) could run a PHP script which: walks the directory structure; copies CSS, JS & images to an output directory structure; and generates pages in the offline manual's wrapper and writes them to the appropriate place(s) in the output directory structure. Then: check results; if OK, ZIP and FTP to the site from which other RS enthusiasts can download.

What a charming bunch of flamers!

First I make a simple suggestion about the format of the manual, with a few reasons for it, and Paradox goes ballistic at considerable length and eventually some profanity.

Then I looked at how the downloaded and online versions could easily be kept in step, and Jeeves condescendingly suggests I should learn some HTML and PHP and apply some logic.

For Jeeves' information:

• I already know quite a lot of PHP and HTML - I've developed Web sites using them.
• The "wrapper" technique I described is a standard way of building Web pages on servers that use PHP or other server-side programming languages, and RS's online pages show the usual evidence of having been built in this way.
• My suggestion on how to automate the generation of a downloaded HTML manual is a simple extension of this technique.

... obscure file formats are really not necessary in this day and age.

Since when are Web pages an obscure file format?

Not PDF! Try Googling for "PDF sucks" to find a million reasons for not using PDF. Some of my top ones:

• Does not re-flow to different screen resolutions or window sizes.
• Fonts are fuzzy because optimised for printing rather than reading from screen.
• Acrobat still destabilises systems. And takes forever to start up.

The RS home page offers online documentation (is it current?). It would be less work to start with Web pages and keep the online and downloaded versions in step than to keep Web Pages and some other format in step.

The online version is wrapped in rstorm.cncguild's standard layout. I assume this is provided by PHP code, since the URLs of individual pages are all the same PHP file with different parameters. That actually makes it easier to convert the layout for offline use (since the offline version should not have the site's standard menu links). But that's easily done, by putting the same content in a different PHP-generated wrapper, which is just one PHP file. There are at least 2 ways to get plain HTML files from this for the downloaded version:

• For each page, View Source and Save.
• Automate this by making the PHP wrapper for the offline version save the generated HTML as stand-alone files - you just have to create a PHP output buffer before generating any HTML then write its contents at the end. You could even totally automate it to produce and HTML manual with just 2 click. Even with this refinement the PHP coding is about 1 hour's work that only has to be done once.

NEXUS's howitzers are good for bombardment. Get them near an enemy's base and they'll give the enemy headaches.

I prefer to use units for attack as they're more flexible.

Can you build one howitzer off another? Freedom AI appears to do this with Hellstorm Cannons, extending chains of them far away from non-combat buildings and garrisoned buildings.