Nocturne Alley Offline is released! (Version 1)

Here's version 1.0 of na_offline. It's currently hosted on donated webspace. It might not last long! Let's see:

http://wxwhatever.com/na_offline/na_offline_v1.0.7zip

To open the file, you will need the 7-Zip program.

For Windows: This can be found on the 7-Zip website, or directly from here. Once you have installed it, go to the location where you installed it (The default is C:\Program Files\7-Zip) and run the '7zFM.exe' program.

Once in the program, browse to where you downloaded the na_offline_v1.0.7zip, double click, select the na_offline folder, and extract it to a location. Then follow the instructions at Entry points if you want to start straight away.

For flavours of Unix: On Ubuntu, 7zip can be found in the 'p7zip' package in aptitute. Binaries and source code can be found on the 7zip website (linked above). Once installed (or if already installed) use the command 7z x na_offline_v1.0.7zip to extract the na_offline folder into the current directory.

Further operating system binaries etc can be found on the download page linked to on the 7-zip website above. I believe the instructions would be similar or identical to those for Unix for Mac and BSD systems.

For Mac: this seems to work quite well, though I haven't personally tested it. You'll need to rename the file from '.7zip' to '.7z' for it to actually uncompress it, otherwise it tries to compress it again! Silly programs not paying attention to header information.


File info:

The only version currently available is 'the whole shebang', which is a little over 40 megabytes. However, I will, if enough people want cut down version, make available the following:

na_offline_images.7zip (18mb) (contains external images)
na_offline_navigation.7zip (122kb) (contains frame-based navigation)
na_offline_posts.7zip (6.8mb) (contains posts, icons, and indexes)
na_offline_supplement.7zip (16mb) (contains supplementary material)

Obviously, na_offline.7zip contains all of the files offered above. If you want any one of the above archives, drop a comment and I'm willing to upload it for you. Obviously, individual archives are modular and can be combined with each other.

The posts archive would, however, be essential.

Those files are:

icons/
-All talk-page icons and userpics.
images/
-All externally referenced images and mood themes.
index/
-Index pages for each and every character.
navigation/
-Navigation pages for a chronological read-through including placemarking.
posts/
-The actual posts.
supplement/
-Supplemental material (externally referenced websites, two 'lost' journals (including Draco's "sekrit" journal), and other material found on the wayback machine).

Entry points:

This is probably what most of you people are looking for.

User-based entry points (or in simpler terms, places where you can start reading the game), are found in the folders: index/ and navigation/.

index/ contains a chronological index of all posts, including an entire index (nocturne_alley.html), and character-specific (character_username.html) indexes.

navigation/index.html (or more specifically, top.html and bottom.html) is a chronological, full-game, JavaScript and HTML frames navigation page (or series of pages).

This presents the page in the following configuration:


---------------------------
| Navigation bar          |
|--------------------------
| Journal post            |
| -> comment 1            |
|  -> comment 2           |
|--------------------------


etc. (This being top.html, the configuration reversed in bottom.html)

The navigation bar has 'forward' and 'back' links (don't try using them on the first and last posts; it will break and I have already uploaded the file so I can't be arsed to go and fix it now and have to re-upload), the username (and community), the timestamp of the post, the subject, and a 'bookmark' link.

You can copy and paste this into your address bar to come back to the exact point in the game that you were at, at a later date. You can also right click on the link and go 'add to bookmarks' to bookmark your point in the game.

Plain bookmarking the page will not work, as it will take you back to the first page ever.

Errata:

I'm sure there are lots of mistakes. Please leave a comment if you see anything out of the ordinary. However, some things that I know about and that I'm not going to fix at the minute are:

* Non-player indexes in index/ (an issue with the username base I used to build the index, based off comments on each and every page)
* Previous and next links don't work on the very first and the very last posts.
* Missing images appear with 'LOST'; if you right click and 'view image' (in Firefox), you'll be taken to images/lost.gif?url=, where is the original URL for the image. If you have this image, please comment and let me know.
* Missing links will take you to lost.html?url=, with a quick explanation of it, and a link to the wayback machine if you want to attempt to search for it there. I've looked up 93.9% of pages and have put what I can find in the supplement.
* nocturne_alley_8259.html somehow has the wrong icon/username, should be 'darque_pansy'.
* There was an issue with navigation bookmarks in the initial version that I posted. Either download the update or the next version to resolve it.

If there's anything you note not on this list, comment!