The Scripts

This contains links to some Greasemonkey scripts that I created to modify the interface of Nexus War slightly. (For some reason this hosting on Googlepages appears to not open the script as a page for easy installation, but what are you going to do.) This, of course, requires that you have Firefox and the Greasemonkey plugin installed.  Once you have it, download the files, open them with Firefox, and an "install" button should be visible.

• Nexus War, Full Health Remover will remove the little red dot indicating full health.  This allows one to pick out injured individuals more easily. An example rendering of this script enabled and disabled is shown to illustrate the effect. (Version 0.1, May 30 2006)
• Nexus War, Event Compressor will compress multiple identical events into a single report, thus providing an abbreviated summary of the often long message list one gets upon logging in. An example rendering of this script enabled and disabled is shown to illustrate the effect. (Version 0.1, June 1 2006)

More Information on Making Scripts

There was some interest from some people about how to make their own user scripts for Nexus War using Greasemonkey. If you are not familiar with Greasemonkey, basically, Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension which allows you to excute JavaScript code whenever a page loads, allowing you to have your way with the page.  There are a tremendous number of third party Greasemonkey scripts available, and you may of course write your own. If you'd like to do that, I'd suggest Dive into Greasemonkey by Mark Pilgrim. It contains many examples that are trivial enough to be immediately comprehensible, and still very close to what you probably want to do so they are quite useful. If you want to go beyond this, the Mozilla developer documentation, in particular the Gecko DOM documentation, is enormously useful.

If you're like me and don't know JavaScript, regrettably, all tutorials I found appear to be aimed towards web developers, and are consequently too dumbed down to the point where any useful information is lost in a sea of explanations as to what a variable is, not to mention the pages upon pages explaining the concept of addition. However, don't worry as it's pretty easy to pick up the basic syntax from examples provided you know C or Java or something, though the semantics seem to have some differences I don't quite grasp.

When you are making a script for Nexus War, if possible, make sure that you are testing out your script on a local copy of a saved HTML from Nexus War instead of continually hitting the server. Firefox's ability to save complete web pages is somewhat useful here, though you have to download the .css files yourself as it does not catch those.

In closing, I would like to state that using Google Pages has easily been the most frustrating thing I've attempted to do all week. It's absolutely terrible.