The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Remember about a year ago I said I would be writing a game?
Well that was not idle talk! Even though its no where complete it has come to a point where I can make screenshots. So far it’s basically a 2D physics engine with a simple GUI interface.

Here is the first screen shot is of a large number of objects orbiting a invisible gravity well. (Notice the spiral taking shape?)
(http://jon.ssofti.com/screenshots/LargeNumberofObjectsOrbiting.JPG)

The second screenshot is of a ship that I can control running though a large number of boxes.
(http://jon.ssofti.com/screenshots/runningThroughBoxes.JPG)
The last screenshot is of allot of boxes organized into 3 groups that are linked together via a spring joints. And my ship is firing triangle shaped projectiles at them.
(http://jon.ssofti.com/screenshots/springsystem.JPG)

The problem is I have come to the point where my own knowledge about physics is falling short of what I need to do.
Here I a few things I need to know about:
Fixed joints. (Basically 2 objects welded together.)
Pin joints. (Basically a Door and a Frame.)
Resting forces. (So objects won’t fall though each other.)
Anti Tunneling Algorithm (So object won’t jump over each other in one time step if there velocities are too high.)

 I’m working on the “Anti Tunneling Algorithm” right now and think I have it figured out, but all my previous attempts have failed.

I’ve implemented a new Collision Detection algorithm which has solved my needs for the Joints and Resting Forces.  8)
 I tested Resting Forces by making a small planetoid with gravity and having objects fall on it.  :D
 I also tested the joints by making my friends name from rigid bodies and then had the object I can control shoot objects at it. I then sent screenshots of this to my friend for his birthday.  ;D
Im still working on the Anti Tunneling Algorithm.  :-\

Woah! Very cool!

What language is it written in? How many lines?

C# 
which proves i wrote all of it myself. since if you search for C# and 2D physics engine you wont find anything. at least i didnt.

The reason for me programming in C# instead of the more traditional C++ is becuase i didnt want to have all the hassel of the extra work involved in C++. Also since this is only a 2D engine i doupt i would need the performance boost C++ would give me, and so far that has been true.


I havn't counted them yet, but its a large number.

I never saw your original posts, are you planning on developing this into a new SC game, or at least a melee? Seems like a damn good engine for the job....

Also, I saw on the web yesterday that they are now making physics accellerator cards, in a similar fashon to 3D accelerator cards - eventually you will plug then into your PCI or PCIe slots, and then they will handle the physics calucations on supported games. Cool.

- Dean

The Plan is for the game to have a SC type melee in it but have to so your entire fleet joins the battle. I plan to have it so all the ships are modular like how MechWarrior 4 did it, but the modules will define the shape of your ship.

I’m still deciding on the storyline and how the NPC Ship commanders will work.

I’m conflicted on if I should have them just people you hire (like MechWarrior 4 mercenaries) or people you pick up along way (like Knights of the Old Republic)



Im pretty sure those cards will only do 3D physics. So they most likely will not be able to help me, I also assume they will not have dynamic gravity like i want. There are other things that im going to be putting into my game that i have never seen in a physics engine.

Sounds good!

I mention the physics cards only as a point of interest. They WILL be only for 3D, and won't be much use in a 2D environment.

I'm suprised noone else's interested in this. Don't forget to post your engine on PlanetSourceCode.com when it's done - there's thousands of people ready to praise your hard work.

- Dean

I'm working on a similar project... sort of. Except it's based on timewarp, and I didn't start from scratch.

Oh? Tell me more.
Like will it be part of the SC universe?
What new features you plan to put in?

Ive got some more Screenshots fo you!

This one is of the pin joint system. These are a bunch of bodies joined together to make the shape of humans.
(http://jon.ssofti.com/screenshots/bodies.JPG)

This one is of the resting forces in action. its of a bunch of bodies falling onto a planetoid that has gravity.
(http://jon.ssofti.com/screenshots/resting.JPG)

Im still working on the "Anti Tunneling Algorithm."

That's too good - you're gonna have to SourceForge it when it's done. I look forward to seeing the final game....  ;D

- Dean

How would i go about doing that?

Just go to sourceforge.net, then create an account and a new project. It's easy, and you'll get a LOT of exposure - and you'll be joining over 100,000 other open-source projects.

- Dean

The Code isn’t anywhere close to being ready for public scrutiny, but that is slowly changing.

I plan for it to be very friendly to people who decide to use it, but right now its not really useable.

The hardest part of this project so far is that no one writes about 2D physics they only write about 3D physics. I don’t know how many times I’ve spent hours trying to understand equations and code that ended up being totally unneeded in a 2D engine. So if anyone asks if this is going to end up being a 3D engine, the answer is an unwavering NO.

awesome im still learnin to program and to see a game like this bein made from scratch thats cool keep up the good work were rootin for u

Thanks for the encouragement.

I’m just confused why so few of the registered users have posted.
It seams they are not interested in what I’m working on.  :'(

Well, I WAS registered, then promptly forgot my password. Does that make you feel better?  ;)

Seriously, this is INCREDIBLE work. Once you whack it on PlanetSourceCode.com and SourceForge.net I can assure you that the tips, suggestions, praise and marriage proposals will come flooding in  ;D.

- Dean

I'm eagerly reading this thread every day. I'm just the kind of poster who almost never posts. I'm sure there are plenty others like me.

I too am working on an SC style game.  And I eagerly await the day that I can present cool stuff like you did.  Keep up the good work.

"I'm eagerly reading this thread every day. I'm just the kind of poster who almost never posts. I'm sure there are plenty others like me."

Yes, like me. :)

I've been watching this thread, but have not posted on it because I'm on a posting diet. My profile says I post an average of 3 times a day, which is like 10 times more than the other profiles. This would seem to indicate that I have no life, so in order to get one I must lower my average. The problem is that by analyzing the post counts of profiles I have again given a boost to the theory that I am lifeless.

So you see, I think your game looks interesting, but I'm just really busy fighting for my life.

There's not really much for me to say accept that it looks good, and I'd be interested to see where you'll be using this engine for.

About hardware acceleration (both graphics and physics), a plane in 3D will be 2D, and as such there may be some opportunities to make use of 3D acceleration. Just set the z coordinate to 0. Now the question is how much you'll actually win by that, as there will be extra calculations on the z coordinate which are unnecessary.
UQM can use OpenGL for hardware acceleration. I don't really know much about it, but if I'm not mistaken, bitmaps are used as textures, and OpenGL is just used for scaling.

I’m pretty sure the bulk of the physics processor will be dedicated to matrix math, since most of the 3D engines I have run across have relied heavily on matrixes. My game does not have a single matrix in it so accelerating matrix math is a moot point.

 By going down to 2D physics I eliminate a lot of operations. For Addition and Subtraction operations the cost is 2/3 of 3D. With dot product the cost is 3/8 of 3D. So in the end a 3D engine does a lot more calculations then a 2D one.

Though I like speed and all I’m writing this game not to be blazing fast but to be understandable. In my game’s source code you will rarely see variables like c1 or FL2d. It ends up making some rather long lines of code but you will be able to know what its doing without having to look up the variables.

 I’m also making it heavily Object Oriented all related variables that can be grouped together are being grouped together into separate classes.

So there’s some more information for ya!

Also here’s an old demo of the game:
http://jon.ssofti.com/screenshots/MyGame.zip
I made it for some friends and thought I might provide it to you guys.

You will need the .Net environment and DirectX.
It has a readme.

It may involve more operations, but dedicated hardware would do this much faster, and it could possibly do multiple operations in parallel.
I didn't expect you to use matrices, as it is more managable without them then it would be in 3D, but it would still have its advantages conceptually.

Short variable names aren't going to make a compiled program run more slowly. It may give the programmer a bit more speed, but that benefit will be lost if someone has to read the code lateron. Though overly long names aren't going to help readability either (using "arrayIndexIterator" instead of "i" for instance).

It's looking promising. I'm a big fan of SodaPlay so joints and little colliding stuff is very appealing to me.
 I have an SC project aswell, but it's on ice for the moment cuz I'm busy with other stuff. Links: (1 (http://www.itchstudios.com/psg/main.php?id=sce)|2 (http://dynamic.gamespy.com/~starcontrol/forum/index.php?topic=828.0)|3 (http://itchstudios.com/psg/sce/intro_story.htm))

That was not what I was trying to say, but now that I reread it I understand how you could think I’m saying that.
Basically I was trying to say is that I’m more concerned with readable code then fast code. Then I went off on a tangent.

There are areas in my code that could be faster but become quite ugly as a result.

its more like "VelocityAlongNormal" instead of "Van"

To Arne:
Those are some pretty sweet drawings in the second link.

Hi guys it’s been I while since I posted and thought you would like to know what progress I’ve made. I’ve completely rewritten the collision detection and reaction again. This is because of some problems I was having, were impossible to fix with the old version. The more recent version is actually a lot faster as a result and the code is a lot cleaner, since I put a lot more thought into it. Tomorrow I plan on finish up the resting forces then start working on a tunneling algorithm.

Basically tunneling is when an object is going to fast that in a single time step it passes though another object with no collision being detected.

The way SC2 seams to solve this problem is having a max velocity (I’ve not actually looked at the code). The problem is that I don’t want to put in a max velocity like SC2. A typical way, I have found, to fix this is find all the object that are moving to fast and run multiple time steps on them so no collision can be missed. There are other ways but they all assume that the object the high velocity object will collide with is not also going at a high velocity. The reason for this seems to be that most engines and games assume gravity will always be a constant acceleration in pointing down towards a floor that will stop an object’s motion. They also assume that there will always be a frictional force causing an object to decelerate. As a result they seem not to worry about 2 high velocity objects running into each other. I do, because in space there is no floor to run into and next to no friction. So you can have 2 spaceships going at extremely high velocities fly right through each other.

If you managed to understand what I’m talking about maybe you can help me figure out an algorithm that will work or tell me where I can find one.

I would be really grateful for any help.

The only thing I can think of off the top would
be to move (in memory only, not on the screen)
the objects a little at a time. The number of
move/checks would probably be in line with
the object's speed. Then, once you've found the
new position, draw the object.
For example, if you have an object moving
at 7units/second and one at 3units/s move the
fast one first. Then check them all. Move it, check....
This will slow things down a bit, but it's faster than
drawing them every time. And, if things get really
high speeds, the game will slow down. :(

The only thing I can think of is probably very ineffiencient, but might not be too bad if you only have two ships to worry about.

For each frame...
   if ship velocity or angle have changed
      Calculate the current path for each ship.
      Find the coordinates where the paths intersect.
      Determine from the path information if they will be at that point at the same time.
   if the time they intersect is equal to or less than the current time
      Collision!!!

Something like that...  If I took the time to try programming it I could probably figure out if this'll work or not.

I finally Finished up The Contact/Resting Forces and started messing around with gravity. I finally realized that with the new semi working forces I can try out some new things. So here is a screenshot of the newest test I wrote:
(http://jon.ssofti.com/screenshots/Dominoes.JPG)


BTW if you were wondering what type of physics implementation I am doing its the one from this paper:

http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~rbridson/docs/rigid_bodies.pdf

That looks pretty cool.

Real life exists to give programmers something to do.

I just made the Source forge project and here is the address:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/physics2d
I have yet to do much to the project but that will change in time.

I will be putting what I have in terms of source code on there in a while, and maybe you guys can help me figure out a "few" of the bugs I have.

I put the sourcecode for the Physics part on SourceForge a while ago, but not the part that renders it. I Finally fixed a problem with friction so i most likely will put up a new version on SF.net I Do Plan Put up the driver part so you guys can screw around with it.

Once i do 2 primary things and a billion little things ill start on the game itself!

I might be rewriting a few parts of it in C++ to see if that speeds anything up.

Keep up the good work.

I got my undergrad degree in Physics but I'm sure my understanding of mechanics would be enhanced by understanding your code. 

Any plans to simulate relativity?

I entertained the idea when I first started, but I would need to recode a lot of things and it would constrain the engine to a single point of view at a time. That would make it useless for multiplayer. So I have given it some thought.


When it comes to the actual game I’m making I plan to have a hyperspace or something to that effect that ignores the relativistic effects of traveling near or faster then the speed of light. Just like most games out there.

While talking about traveling faster then the speed of light I just had an idea. According to the equation thought up by Einstein an item traveling faster then the speed of light goes back in time. So that led me to think about time travel. It made me think of a rather interesting concept for a computer game or a sequel to SC2. 

The idea is as follows:

After the ship explodes you have a vision out of time just like in SC3 but instead it’s of the past. You see yourself doing things that you have never done. Like giving a warning to the Talio about the Dynarri So that they would have the mind shield built right before their destruction or causing the Starship factory on Vela to go into sleep mode so it will be functional in your time. So the Game would consist of you going back in time to make sure all the items that were there for you use to be there when you used them.

could also make it so that on each mission it would be more of a “splinter cell” stealth mission then “If it moves blast it” game. You would have to avoid certain races or ships and such.

I think it would be an interesting game to play. And if anything it would be an interesting fan fiction. I just wanted to get this idea out there.

I don’t claim to be able to write in English but I try the best that I can.

Now About the Game Im Writing
I’ve fixed a few problems and added a run able project to the file releases on the source forge project. I have even added a webpage.
http://physics2d.sourceforge.net/  (http://physics2d.sourceforge.net/)

Good idea for making StarControl 3 never happened.  You shifter time lines by going backwards.

Like the string theory episode of TNG where Enterprise C and D meet and Tasha Yar is alive.

BTW, have you thought about encoding the entire 11 dimensions of string theory into your physical model?  I was thinking of going back to college and taking a class in String Theory and the Grand Unification attempt with Euler's theorum.   Coding that into a program would certainly help me understand it much better.  You seem capable of understanding this more easily than I will be able to.

Dimensional shifts like in SC2 are possible:  The dimensions are like sliced bread and every so often two touch at a point and interact.   

Trying to wrap my mind around 11 dimensions/degrees of freedom is ....  wee ooo hard.

And while you're at it, encode a reverse disco sandwich duck in your physical model. With ketchup and fractal parking.

would you like fries with that?    ;)

Just had a brief look at your source code. I'm only a lowly C programmer, but I'm already im the process of signing my future house over to you...

But seriously, i'll have a more in-depth look tonight - should proove interesting. I didn't see yet; is there any documentation along with it?

- Dean

I’m a firm believer in self documenting code, and I have tried to follow that concept by giving all the variables names that have meaning and that are not acronyms. The main reason for this approach is if I spend that time to comment code and then decide to radically change the code then I would have to re write the comments.

Since good naming of variables names can go only so far, I’ve put into the upcoming new version I’m working on there are a lot more comments on some of the more obscure classes and methods and the ones that most likely won’t change.

As for MSDN type documentation? Its gunna be a while.

But, since I’m a programmer not a writer I apologize ahead of time if my comments make absolutely no sense.  :-\

Well I Updated my Physics engine again and this time I Added Explosions and an event that is used to make things explode.
Take a look:
(http://sourceforge.net/dbimage.php?id=45857)
Its getting to the point where still images can no longer do the engine justice.


I just got a line count and it is 5,752. Only if I had a dollar for every line I’ve written then I could pay for one semester of tuition!



Is this close to what you were thinking about?
(http://jon.ssofti.com/screenshots/DiscoSandwichDuck.JPG)

I havn't got a decent version of Studio.NET - can you email me a binary? It is acessable via ActiveX API's, or just the .NET framework? I'd love to be able to experiment with this!

Pfft to the number of lines. I wrote a VB program called "DeepLook" which, incidentally, profiles VB projects and it tells me that it has over 9,000 lines.... :D

But seriously, you need to advertise this or somthing. It's WAY COOL and I want to be able to interfact with it with good ol' VB6....

- Dean

Close. But this looks like a forward disco sandwich duck to me.

I went for a sentance per sentance reply.
Like the kohr-ah did when they said
We did. You did. Yes we can. No.


You should get one - I did. It is .Net so i dont know about active x.

Number of lines is not a good way to gauge programs since you could write and entire application in one line in perl. If you got a dollar a line you could pay for 2 semesters.

I would be happy to but I know nothing about advertising except it costs money. Thanks.

Is this better?
(http://jon.ssofti.com/screenshots/ReverseDiscoSandwichDuck.JPG)

Marvellous. And yes, I'd like fries with that. :P

I have figured out how I am going to do my anti tunneling algorithm unfortunately I will need to deal with 3D geometry. Do any of you know where I could get a solid 3D geometry library that I can steal code from while keeping the project as a LGPL license? Hopefully code that can be easily changed to C#.

I will tell you guys about my algorithm and why I need to deal with 3D geometry in a 2D world. Give me some time to write it up in a way that makes senses. 

Are you going to be hosting that duck indefinitely? I want to avatarize it... or should I photobucket it?

....
...
..
.
One Mans Junk is Another Mans Treasure

I looked up indefinitely in the dictionary and it states:
So yes I plan to host that duck for an unknown amount of time.


Now that I have been a smart-aleck I'll answer the intent of the question.

In the Foreseeable  (http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/Foreseeable) future it will be there. I will not intentionally remove it or intentionally let it be removed.

It's better to scale it down anyhow. That saves people's bandwidth (in particular BioSlayer's) and page load time.

I didn't say I TREASURED it per se, but it is amusing.

It will be tricky to scale it down without losing 'fractal parking', in particular in mirror-writing.

How's that any different from letting the browser do the scaling?

Well, you get to choose the algorithm. Some scaling algorithms may preserve this text better than others. And if I do it manually I might be able to sort of force it back in with a bit of painting, but that would be too much work for something that, while amusing, isn't astonishingly fabulous.

Yes, manually scaling would only give you the chance to do it better.
I took your remark "It will be tricky to scale it down without losing 'fractal parking'" as an argument not to scale it.

Since i could not find any and since none you guys didn't either, I've started writting my own. Man its a pain writting a 3D geometry Libary. Its really slowing my progress down.

You are in luck now.
You can now get a free legitimate version of visual studio 2005 express from Microsoft.  (http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/visualcsharp/download/default.aspx) These tools are insanely easy to use. You have to download a separate version for each language, but you get to use them free of charge for a full year.
There is no need to worry about converting my project to .net 2.0 since my program wont fall victim to any of the backwards compatible breaking issues (to the best of my knowledge).

you will also need to Direct X SDK to compile my project (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=1C8DC451-2DBE-4ECC-8C57-C52EEA50C20A&displaylang=en)

Ive put up another release on my game/Physics engine.
There is a version of pong and another indescribably funny 2 player game you should check out.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/physics2d


The count is now at 10,706.  ;D

4 Strait posts in a row makes me feel like a spammer. This has 3 possible explanations:
A. My work is SO impressive that it leaves you speechless.
B. You are all on Thanks Giving break a week early even in Europe.
C. Your lives do not revolve around the 2D physics engine made by a collage student.

I’m thinking A since my ego needs boosting constantly.

Now onto a new feature i just coded.
I have a treat for you guys. I just recently finished part of my engine that allows me to make a rigid body to have more then 1 polygon to describe its shape.

This allows me to make objects that would have been impossible or very very CPU intensive using joints.

The first thing I modeled with this technique was 2 boxes attacked at a weird angle. I could have showed you a screenshot of this but I decided to model something a little more complex. I decided to model a Ur-Quan ship. Then put a lot of them on screen.

The first one is on a large number of them. (I Am Red Leader!)
(http://jon.ssofti.com/screenshots/Ur-Quan_Armada.JPG)
The second one is of the ship I am controlling ramming a few of them. (I Dont Have Insurance!)
(http://jon.ssofti.com/screenshots/I_Dont_have_insurance.JPG)

Since your ego needs a boost and since I'm impressed....

THAT ROCKS!

I second A). Bravo.

- Dean

"B. You are all on Thanks Giving break a week early even in Europe."

You guessed it. When Europe first heard of TG's lousy premise, it was rejected. But when we told them that it was celebrated by stuffing your face and watching football (we didn't tell them which type of football) they decided to give it a shot. Little do they know, but this is merely the first step in converting them to our system of thought. Soon they too will be overweight watchers of the TRUE football sport passing the time by fighting 3rd world nations.

Also, Thanksgiving is now celebrated early as you said. Why, you ask? Well, why the hell is Christmas celebrated early? It's not like some roman is going to toss you in the lion pit if you don't. It's probably because Christmas is trying to kill Thanksgiving. I mean, the Christmas shit is coming out in stores before halloween now. Just to preserve itself, TG has to move further into the past, in order to escape the expanding madness of Christmas!


But I digress, excellent work on your game. I for one continue to enjoy watching it grow, even if I don't have anything intelligent to add (if you don't believe me, re-read this post) and thus try not to flood your thread with my nonsense.

Here's the reason as for why Ur-Quan prefer to work alone. They're all such lousy drivers they need a lot of room! ;D

And it's A all the way. Great work!

We Canadians avoid the Christmas rush by celebrating Thanks Giving in
October. It's when our crops are harvested anyway.

After Smiting Bugs upon bugs caused by the new changes I decided to model the earthling cruiser.
Or course I could have done the exact same thing I did for the Ur-Quan. But I decided to be a little different this time.

I realized that ms paint has some pretty powerful features for what it is.



Here is a "screenshot" of the earthling cruiser getting into trouble.


(http://jon.ssofti.com/screenshots/SurrenderOrDIE.JPG)

He got 2 options from the ur-quan surrender or die.

of coarse this was edited just a little.


I’ll be putting up the source code of this release pretty soon. I’ve really cleaned up the code and commented nearly everything of importance (in my mind).
So make sure to download it. (helps my projects stats) 

Ouch. There's only one thing left to do. Arm all nukes and prepare for detonation at my mark. Helm, take us in, RAMMING SPEED!!!!

And those were the last words of the brave hero, who singlehandedly destroyed the entire Ur-Quan armada in a nuclear hell.

(Unfortunately, the Kohr-Ah had no one to fight and proceeded to wipe out all the races in the sector without being interupted. :D)

But looks fun. Though I admit I wouldn't want to get in that position. Nice picture.

I Just Updated my Physics 2D project on SF.net
Check it out:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/physics2d

Well I have posted another update.

Now I have a Question:

Do any of you want to work on the webpage of my physics engine and make it look all spiffy?

I was thinking some one might be interested in helping out this project in a small way. Remaking the simple webpage should not be all that hard. Ill even make you a member of the project (if you want).

Hm... you're welcome to use my Elite Strike website (http://eliot.bambi.net/elitestrike/) as a template if you want. It's written in standards-compliant XHTML Transitional 1.0 with a seperate CSS file, so it should be easy for you to tinker with. I'm more than happy to offer you assistance if needed.

Of course, I could do all the work for you, but where's the fun in that?  ;)

[EDIT: I just cleaned up all the XHTML to make it easier to read and modify.]

I was looking for something that would conform with source forge's look and feel.

Do you mean in terms of layout, color scheme, font, or what?
Most of those things are easily changed by editing the style sheet- in this case, main.css (http://eliot.bambi.net/elitestrike/main.css) (layout can sometimes require editing of the XHTML).

If what you want is an exact copy of SF's layout, I can help you make that too... but I've never seen an SF project that didn't have a look and feel of it's own in the webspace area.

Been here?

http://www.oswd.org/

I think you should go for something like a simple column with a description, introduction, features, plans, goal etc, then a column next to it with screenshots. If there aren't a lot of content one page and plain HTML (maybe some CSS) will do just fine IMO. Screenshots are the first thing I go for when I want to find out what's going on, so I think they should be presented prominently.

Edit: Just a quick rough in NotePad what I mean in terms of function. Link (http://web.telia.com/~u48508900/test.htm). Hardly spiffy though :/

Edit: oh I see this is discussed already in the other thread, nm. then :G

Actually, I think that's a fine idea. Thanks for the template Arne, it's definitely worth checking out.

As to HTML vs XHTML:
I prefer XHTML because it forces you to be a bit neater. I'm also accustomed to pure xml syntax, which is enforced in XHTML, so it's my web markup language of choice.

Plus, it's hip!  ;D
Hype aside, there are really only four differences between HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 Transitional
1. All tags must be in lower case (values can be uppercase)
2. All tags must close. Empty tags end like so: <tag />
3. Tags must nest properly (children elements must end inside their parents). Ex. <b>foo<i>plus</b>bar</i> is allowed in HTML, but must be <b>foo<i>plus</i></b><i>bar</i> in XHTML.
4. Documents must have a proper <!DOCTYPE> declaration.

And that's all (although xhtml 1.0 strict and later versions have a number of outlawed tags)

Can XHTML do URL variables? What I would like is an XML file with all the info about the images on my site for example, then a client side interpretated ?HTML/CSS file that extracts and formats the info in the XML file. This would reduce server load (only images would be loaded).

The closest I got is this (click the XML file) (http://web.telia.com/~u48508900/temp/).

There's 2 fundamental errors with the method I used here. First, the XML file is used to link to the XSL file, but it should be clean from references to any formatting files. This might cause problem 2. I can't use url variables, maybe because; it's the XML file that is accessed first, or, XSL can't do url variables anyways.

Since I can't use URL variables the whole point of using XSL is nullified, I have to hardcode everything and create cloned code for each gallery page I have. Adding a third language might remedy this, but I'd really like to stay away from mixing another language like JS or PHP into the whole mess.


Right now for my site I use plain HTML and CSS, along with PHP SSI for footers and headers. I've used SQL, JS and all sort of fancy database systems before, but in the end it's easier and much more dynamic to update with just plain HTML, letting the CSS/SSI add the layout around it. Since I type in note pad I like to use capital tags, and the forgiving nature of plain HTML is always nice to have.

I see what you're trying to accomplish here... unfortunately I don' t think I can be of much assistance. I don't know XSL at all... the sum total of my XML formatting experience has been to actually use CSS (which does work, but is pretty hack-ish).

My experience with this kind of stuff only really covers static pages, not trying to use XML and XSL as a kind of dynamic page. I don't think XHTML will provide many more options than you have already with just HTML.

A quick fix would probably just be to have an XML file for each gallery page. Then you don't need to worry about URL variables... you can just have static URLs.
Probably not ideal in any sense, but it's the best I can come up with.

BTW, I type in notepad too (actually,metapad (http://www.liquidninja.com/metapad/), but it's pretty much the same).  :)
I didn't have trouble switching to XHTML, but if you have a certain style that you are quite attatched to (such as CAPITAL tag names), your mileage may vary.