Thursday, May 21, 2015

JS Help: Automatically point all external links to new tabs...

I was recently tasked with going through a site with around 50 pages to set a target of _blank to any external URL.  (one page had 240 external links)  Instead of going through the manual work of stepping through each CMS entry and CMS content part to find and change these, I added a short script to the foot of the site.  This is not a perfect duplicate, but its pretty close.

[Copy/Paste slows learning...]

This depends on JQuery and FontAwesome.  

Part 1: 
 - Waits for the document to complete.  (document ready)

Part 2: 
 - get the current URL that is constant to any links within this site.  

Part 3:
 - JQuery gets all the 'a' tags, and for each of them gets the 'href' tag.

Part 4:
 - if the href begins with "http" (an external link) and does not part of this site
 - - Then Add a target of _Blank to that link.  

Part 5: (optional)
 - w/FontAwesome, append an external icon to each link.


Monday, May 18, 2015

Lynda Course in Design: Unity 5 2D Procedural Terrain and Living AI

So I've recently been approved as an instructor for Lynda.com, and just had my initial course syllabus approved.  A 2D Infinite terrain AI.  I've worked with a variety of terrain systems, both 2D and 3D, limited to singular maps, and infinite expansions.  Back when I worked with XNA, I developed a terrain engine that requires very little work, no tileable textures, and develops rich terrains.

I did a few experiments to import the engine into Unity's 2D tile system, and had excellent results.  I'll be building the class around it.


The smooth infinite terrain is only the first 30-45 minutes.  Then we'll also cover biomes, cities, caves and building interiors.  We'll also cover techniques for balancing and managing the expense of saving vs the expense of AI processing.  I'm still working out some of the details now, but so far, I'm pleased with how easily everything is applying in Unity.

Anyway, this probably won't be ready to record for another month, and possibly another month of editing after that.  So hopefully by August it will be ready.