Help and technical assistance
This page is for technical assistance and dealing with problems using the timeline. If you have a question about how the dates of the timeline were determined or future plans to expand the timeline see the FAQ page.
This page is for technical assistance and dealing with problems using the timeline. If you have a question about how the dates of the timeline were determined or future plans to expand the timeline see the FAQ page.
Unfortunately there is nothing I can do about this problem. Trust me on this. I spent many long hours banging my head against the desk in frustration over this one. The problem is that Javascript and checkboxes do not mix very well when you have multiple means of checking and unchecking a checkbox. Thankfully the easy solution is to have them both switch off when you click the link and then just switch on the single element that you want to view.
This problem is related to help 1.1 above and usually occurs when you try to switch off both the character and the trail together. While the checkbox appears unchecked Javascript thinks it is still checked, a very irritating problem I know. Again there is an easy solution which is to check the checkbox, which will have no effect on the animation, then uncheck it which should definitely switch the element off.
This problem is caused by different web browser versions using slightly different rules for CSS positioning. I have tested in the web browser/OS combinations available to me but there will be some I have not been able to look at. Please contact me with details of which web browser/OS combination you are using and I will try to fix the problem.
This is another problem I have seen caused by different web browser versions using slightly different rules for CSS positioning. Please contact me with details of which web browser/OS combination you are using and I will try to fix the problem.
This would be an example of a problem I have not come across during testing. Please reload the page in your browser and if the problem still persists then please contact me with details of which web browser/OS combination you are using and I will try to fix the problem.
This would be an example of a problem I have not come across during testing. Please reload the page in your browser and if the problem still persists then please contact me with details of which web browser/OS combination you are using and I will try to fix the problem.
The script which tests to see if events are shown or hidden takes about half a second to run and so the event symbol will appear briefly during this time. I found a solution to this problem which hides the symbol for the duration of the test while the animation is playing, but navigating by day bypasses the frame of the animation where this happens.
I have not seen this problem occur during testing but if it does happen to you then click the link to show events, which should have no effect, and then click the hide events link which should hide them again. If this does not work please reload the page in your browser.
It is assumed that when you navigate by event that you want to see the event symbols and for this reason they are switched back on if they are off. I recommend using a bookmark or the day navigation buttons to move along the timeline rather than the event navigation if you don't want to see the event symbols. Or an easier solution may be to just press the Play button and press Pause when you reach the date you want to look at.
It is assumed that when you navigate to a specific event that you are interested in that event and so I have programmed the animation to zoom in on the event to show it in detail. This function cannot be switched off.
For some reason the first option in the selection list cannot be chosen. Originally I wanted to have the links to the books at the top of the list which is when I discovered this did not work, but it is probably better like this since when you first load the page you are at the start of the timeline anyway. If at any time you do want to return to the start of the timeline use the Rewind button instead of the bookmark.
I have not seen this problem occur during testing but if it does happen to you then please reload the page in your web browser and if the problem still persists then please contact me with details of which web browser/OS combination you are using and I will try to fix the problem.
At the moment the flash animation file is around 2mb which should load fairly quickly unless you have a very slow Internet connection. However, this file size will increase as the animation gets longer and more complex. Please be patient for the animation to finish loading before using any of the controls. If the download bar stops and will not continue then please reload the page in your browser. If the problem persists then please contact me with details of which web browser/OS combination you are using and I will try to fix the problem.
Please make sure you have the latest version of Flash player installed in your browser, though with that said my copy of the Flash application is rather old now so I can only create animations up to Flash Version 8, but that should definitely be compatible with the latest version of the player. Please reload the animation in your web browser and if the problem persists then please contact me with details of which web browser/OS combination you are using and I will try to fix the problem.
This would be an example of a problem I have not come across during testing. Please reload the page in your browser and if the problem still persists then please contact me with details of which web browser/OS combination you are using and I will try to fix the problem.
You can pan the map by clicking anywhere on the map and dragging the mouse pointer in any direction.
UPDATE 21 August 2010: It turns out that some users were unable to pan the map by clicking on it and dragging the mouse so I have added four new button controls for this functionality. Unfortunately they are not as good as Google Map panning controls but hopefully they are useful enough. Please let me know if you encounter problems using them.
or - why Adobe need a good smack in the head
Let me assure you there is a very good reason why Adobe need a good smack in the head. Since aquiring Macromedia a few years ago Adobe have taken on the development of Flash and up until the most recent update of Flash Player (I say recent it was July 2010) I thought they had been doing a pretty decent job. However Flash Player 10.1 is an abomination unto Flash developers everywhere.
Let me explain. The Flash Player plug-in lives in your browser and helpfully plays any Flash movie or animation for you and Adobe in their infinite wisdom have decided to make a universal change to all players in any situation whereby if a Flash Movie object is off the screen at any time, for example when you have scrolled down the page, then that Flash Movie will pause. Their thinking is that this will be beneficial to users on iPhones, Androids and other mobile devices since it will save memory and speed up resources. All well and good for them but this is affecting home desktop PC users too and while I am sure this is useful for stopping all those irritating adverts from hogging your browser memory, for someone in my situation where I have two separate Flash animations (datepane and mappane) which need to run in perfect synchronisation it is causing a considerable problem to say the least.
When I first noticed that the date and the map were out of sync I thought I was going crazy. After a bit of googling on the problem I vented a vile stream of curse words for Adobe which I dare not repeat here, suffice to say I was not happy. But it turns out that Adobe do have a solution which is to add a new parameter to the HTML code which is supposed to give an animation priority so that it never pauses even when off screen. Only problem is this code is not supported by any web browser known to man so that's of fuck all use to anyone.
For this reason I have been forced to make a change to the Animated Timeline Map adding the Event Number to the text boxes in the map animation which is something I did not originally want to do. The event titles were much neater without them but unfortuantely they are going to be necessary so that you can make sure that the datepane animation is showing the correct details for the event being shown on the map. If you do notice that the event numbers no longer match each other this can be corrected by simply clicking on any of the Day or Event Navigation buttons which will sync the datepane with the current position of the map animation.
An even better solution is to avoid facing this problem altogher. My advice is to ensure that the datepane remains on screen while the animation is playing. For Section C this should be easy since Event Navigation is the way to go and those buttons are above the datepane on the page, but once we start getting into the more complex stuff with characters and armies moving around, the events will be sparsely disbursed along the timeline rather than being sequential and this means the handy event numbers won't be around to point out this error if you have scrolled down too far.
But I hold out hope that Adobe will address the problem with a solution that actually works before I get that far so that this stupid and irritating thing does not happen anymore. Feel free to send an email to Adobe telling them exactly how hard you want to smack them in the head.
I will be updating this help page as reports of further problems come in to me. Please let me know if you are experiencing a problem not covered on this help page by contacting me with details of the problem and the browser/OS combination you are using, thank you.