Script Summary: Shows random images in some cases when the expedition brings nothing
Version: 1.06
When an expedition doesn't find anything, the report often contains witty messages about strange animals being found, or beautiful photos of a supernova being made, etc. The players of the Russian language version of OGame proposed as an improvement to the game to make it so that the expedition at least shows some pictures of the things that the messages are talking about - as some kind of consolation price that nothing of value has been found.
While the chance that the game designers will make such a change to the game is virtually zero, it occurred to me that I could do it myself with a script. All that is needed is a collection of relevant images somewhere on the Web and a script that parses the expedition message and displays a random picture. The picture shouldn't be "too random", in the sense that each time the user looks at a particular message, it should show one and the same picture.
Pictures are shown in the following cases:
1) When the expedition report says that some "quaint pet animals" were found;
2) When the expedition report says that "beautiful pictures of a supernova" have been made;
3) When the expedition report says that "an energy being" has hypnotized the crew;
4) When the expedition report says that some "anomaly has induced hallucinations" in the crew;
5) When the expedition is lost in a black hole.
Currently the script supports the following languages: Bulgarian, English, German and Russian. I'd gladly add more languages, if you tell me what are the exact expedition messages in those five cases. Please paste in the Discussion section the exact messages - don't give me a free interpretation of what you remember them saying. Also, make sure that you take the messages from the redesign (version 1.x of OGame) - they might be slightly different from the corresponding messages in the old design, if different translators have produced them.
The script should work in Firefox+GreaseMonkey, Opera and IE+IE7Pro.
Known problem: The script doesn't work properly in Firefox 2.x. (It works in 3.x.) There, if a message is opened by clicking on its title, the picture isn't displayed. If, however, the user moves from one message to another (by clicking on the "next message/precious message" arrows), the picture will be displayed. If the message is opened on a separate tab, the picture will be displayed too.
I don't know how to fix this problem. Initially I thought that it was caused by the AJAX technology used by the game, which loads the contents of the message after the script has executed. However, changing the script to run every second and look for an open message didn't help. If anyone knows how to fix the problem, please tell me.
2009-10-23: Version 1.02. Fixed a few typos. This version should actually work. :D
2009-10-24: Version 1.03. Fixed another typo. Arrggghh.
2009-10-26: Version 1.04. One of the Russian language messages contains an additional space which is not visible, because the browser displays multiple consecutive spaces as a single one. However, the difference meant that the message was not found by the script. Fixed.
2010-09-24: Version 1.05. Removed much of the code related to messages that weren't really used in the redesign any more. Modified the German message from which, apparently, the comma has been removed in the game. Added Polish language support.
2011-06-17: Version 1.06. Added French and Dutch language support. Removed the Bulgarian language support, since the Bulgarian universes were closed down by Gameforge, sigh... Removed several of the pictures, since they were no longer available on-line.
