General Category > Unofficial F/A-18 Acceleration Pack board
The Greenie board comes back
Paddles:
Ok, guys
Let's talk about the Greenie board again and here's how I see it could be done.
Usually in a virtual squadron there's a person assigned to carry out LSO duties, including maintaining the Greenie board. The procedure is simple: virtual aviators send their vLSO logbooks (or selected parts) to their LSO and he then processes them, fills a greenie board and uploads it to a squadron's web page.
There are many possible ways to maintain the Greenie board.
Generally speaking a greenie board is a plain table where rows and columns represent each pilot's record with graded passes, or landing attempts, for a given time period. The LSO could draw this table on paper, then scan and upload it. Or he could use a software such as Excel to fill the table... Many ways to do it manually. ;-)
Any web page is a HTML, or hypertext, document. The hypertext format has a number of tags specifically designed for tables, so the table paradigm could be easily implemented in HTML format.
Again, there are many ways to create a greenie board HTML table. Some advanced techniques like PHP or CGI, especially using SQL servers, would require certain skills and knowledge from the LSO, so I think the easiest way would be to use a static HTML file, which would require some basic skills only.
To start off here's my quick and simple Greenie board sample:
The sample source files are attached for your convenience, so you can play with this sample to grasp the idea. What is what:
sample.htm - the main HTML file
greenieboard.css - the sample cascading style sheet, or CSS, file
\images - the images folder
\images\*.png - sample pictures of grade badges (the PNG format supports transparency)
\images\*.jpg - two background images for the sample
Both HTML and CSS files are plain text files, so you can use Notepad, or whatever text editor, to edit them.
Doubleclick on the sample.htm to open it in your default browser.
I think the part of this file between the <!-- Start of the greenie board --> and <!-- End of the greenie board --> comments (or even the whole file) could be created programmatically. How? I don't yet know ;D
Any ideas, suggestions and feedback from virtual squadrons are welcome ;)
Wood:
Hi Paddles
Got your email/ Thank you. We will definitely put something together with this.
Wood
GOONIE:
Very nice!
GOONIE
Reject:
Hey guys, new here but i have some ideas, if the logbook is formatted in xml or json, its not all that hard to have a php file read the document and either upload it to a database or even to a text doc that gets read out as html?
The php file could be included, and could be handled by people without much knowledge of the language?
I would be more than happy to write it up as well.
Regards Nick.
Orion:
I had asked a while ago if it was possible to read the logbook format, but I was linked to this forum post:
--- Quote from: Paddles on February 14, 2013, 12:57:20 pm ---At the very beginning of this project I've spent a lot of time evaluating suitability of various logbook data formats, and no viable solutions other than a binary format were found. This binary logbook format is kind of proprietory, or 'closed', format which is specific to this program. Due to its binary nature it is very uneasy to modify and tweak or fake one's stats. I don't mean it's impossible, I mean it's quite difficult, to say the least. ;) Thus, anyone claiming he's a super-duper-hooker would have to present to the community his RAW logbook data to prove that. 8)
Should I think about some additional 'anti-cheating countermeasures'?
However, the other side of this binary nature is versions incompatibility, because some data being added, some data being removed from the data structure. For example, the upcoming 0.7 beta will not be compatible with any previous versions....
--- End quote ---
I guess XML serialization isn't an option?
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