New menu and project

New menu and project

The meenu has now been replaced. The thing I didn't like about the old menu was that it was absolutely positioned on the page, it caused a fair bit of problems when the page, for one reason or another, would be offset as the menu would not follow the page. The absolute positioning was done because it allowed me to place the menu code last (making it load last), but I really don't think it makes much of a difference if the menu loads before the body or vice versa. That is certainly not true for heavy DHTML/JScript/Flash style menus but the menu was a light CSS menu so it was just a matter of bytes.

The new menu is a slightly modified version of the menu in the Son of Suckerfish Dropdowns article. The article describes a very light and portable CSS menu and I highly recommend it if you're interested in CSS.

I would also like to point out that the project menu does not contain all of my projects, I remove projects from the menu whenever I introduce a new one in order to avoid flooding new visitors with projects. A full list of all projects can however be found by clicking on "Projects" in the menu.

With all that out of the way I would like to introduce my next project: Magnetic Transports. The project is an attempt at making a simple game with OpenGL in Java (using JOGL) and is inspired by my Magnetic Gliders project, which was cut short because I didn't have the resources required. The goal of the game is to, given a map with obstacles and towns, construct a network of transport "roads" between the towns. The thing is that the planet (far far away) is magnetic so the transports are a form of magnetic gliders that glide on the surface of the planet.

The gliders are quite cost efficient, they generate their acceleration- and lift force by exploiting the magnetic surface. They lack any kind of steering though, that is why the player has to place magnetic pillars around the map to guide the magnetic gliders via magnetic influence to their goal (the next city). Though the surface does not always provide the glider with the same accelartion force, some parts of the surface have higher "power" and create larger forces than others. That means that the glider will move through the landscape at varying speeds, making the placement of the magnetic pillars harder to calculate.

There are three new things in this project that I have not done before.

• OpenGL in Java: I have had experience with OpenGL in Delphi but it will be fun to see how much I remember (although this project will hardly require any low level OpenGL).
• JRE 1.5: I have been looking forward to this one, Eclipse 3.1 is finally out so I will now make the switch from 1.4.2 to 1.5 .
• 2D images: Creating graphics is not my strong point. The 3D graphics in previous projects was simple enough but making the 2D sprites for this one might be a problem for me. This is likely to be a part of this project that I will never really be satisfied with.

I have made an initial draft of the classes, actually I have made two versions. I started out with a game idea that involved making money on the transportations, but that just complicated the idea and has been done to death anyway. I will however display both the drafts so you can see the difference. I really think this is one of those times when simpler is better, some might disagree though.

Simple:

Complex (same as simple but with money):