Drupaling Along

Well, a couple hundred hours of red and blurry eyed coding later, I am 'there'. The basic mechanics of how to host an animation oriented comix-engine inside of Drupal are known to me...within a few remaining wrinkles anyway. I ended up trying a lot of blind alleys -- my lowest point being when I finally learned about the enormously subtle timing issues in javascript, when your data and your page come together at different moments and can't talk to each other at all. I was in a cafe for 8 hours coding and buying my obligatory muffin every hour and a half and my variables would print to the page...but never feed my animation beast. I went home, and fell asleep.

Waking up at one a.m., I decided to abandon the variable-timing problem and just sneak some script over to the 'other side' of the Drupal core with everything declared in a 'literal'. And that failed too. BUT, when I awoke in the morning and clicked over to my page prototype -- it worked. There was some sort of caching issue, and I was back in black.

And yet! -- my travails had just begun. I had been developing my comic with its pieces in absolute coordinates, which was hosing Drupal when it wanted to move things around. For instance, when the reader wants to write a comment about a given piece, they have this moment where they preview what they have written, and at this moment the comic needs to fly down to the bottom of the page. So...I had to shift to relativistic coordinates...and those are cross-browser badlands, nothing ever is consistent between development and posting, and all the cute thought balloons and special effects wander the page fruitlessly.

Wrestled that...90 percent. Will have to determine some kind of standard dos and don'ts for it and it will be 'relatively' well-behaved. Now I just want to stuff easing and bezier equations into the animation controls! (non-linear motion and curves...the only path to organic feeling)