January 2019

January 20

Two years ago to the day, I ended activity on this Dev Log, following my decision to shut down my site in protest of some BlackCipher incidents that temporarily got me banned, and (at the time) had permanently banned Sanitee. Through circumstances, both of us happen to be able to play again, though Nexon NA certainly made no efforts to apologize for calling either of us hackers/cheaters. No such apology came from their volunteer moderators either, who were ecstatic over Sanitee's ban.

Two years later, things have changed pretty significantly. Those volunteer mods seem to be gone, and hopefully actually are. Everyone involved in the incidents of the time likely no longer works for Nexon, and any of us still doing community stuff are now properly aware the anticheat is willing to blindly ban us for our contributions. We can work with this, annoying as it is.

A few months ago, I started rebuilding the Armory (again). The build mentioned in the previous Dev Logs is v3.00.00 effectively, or would have been. I had clear goals for what I wanted v3 to achieve, and it did not meet them. So, v4.00.00 is now in development, as a near complete rewrite of v3. At this point, the amount of v2 or v3 code still present is pretty close to zero.

v4 comes with yet another facelift to the UI, but operates on the same concept that v3 did; you have individual windows that you can drag around, with each containing one or more tabs that you can freely rearrange or move between windows. Windows can be created and destroyed arbitrarily, and they can also be renamed.

Each piece of the Armory is now a single tab, operating like isolated modules. Through this, adding/removing/changing pieces is much less troublesome; I just have to keep the input and output consistent, and the rest no longer matters. Through this change and some other conceptual differences, v4 has achieved what v3 didn't, and is actually nice to work with.

This is already a wall of text, so no actual info today. Instead, have a pic of the module I've been working on most recently, along with just enough stuff around it to raise questions:

January 28

Gaps will generally not be this long, but the Gold Bracelet event paired with resolving a two year old PC issue ate up quite a bit of time. The last Dev Log didn't go into much detail on anything, so that is what this one will do.

Most of my Armory work this month has been on the gear prompt shown previously. It used to actually be a part of the Gear tab, but pretty much immediately evolved into its own module, though not one you can drag around into windows like the others. Currently it acts like a tooltip, appearing directly beside the clicked slot; this is likely to change, I suspect it will prove annoying in the long-term. If so, it will be a draggable block that remembers its location, but is not always visible.

For anyone who used the previous build of the Armory, the version online from 2013-2017, you'd recognize that this prompt has replaced the right click menu that used to serve this purpose. It has changed for two reasons. The first is that through this prompt, you can more quickly set all of the various parameters of the item as needed. The second is that on mobile devices, you can't right click.

Mobile has actually presented several challenges to design that I had never had to consider previously. For example, all clickable objects need to be more than a single line of text tall, else they will be hard to accurately tap on a phone. Additionally, where I had left click, right click, hover, and double click to work previously, now I need to limit events to left click, as mobile only has tap, double tap, and drag. Desktop versions will still have hover for things like tooltips due to its sheer utility, though I have not yet worked out how the site will detect this. Screen size is not a reliable method.


(To show what I mean by clickables being taller)

Working with this limited set, I needed to design a method to select all of the stats on an item using only left click and value inputs; even for complex parts such as material rolls. After a few layout drafts and a few feedback checks in the unofficial Discord, I finally had the design I wanted. The next step was to make it functional.

The first problem I noticed in actually getting Enhancement/etc working was that you were rather blind while filling it in. On the older version, you saw your stats changing in real time on the stats window as you set each parameter, since you had to do them one at a time. The new gear prompt sets all of them at once, so this was no longer the case. To resolve this, a block was added below the parameter inputs to show the cumulative stat changes on the item, from its current values to what the prompt will set them to when you click "Apply".

The second turned out to be the nature of how my inputs work, as compared to how the composite materials page works. My inputs and select boxes each have a class driving them in the JavaScript, to handle all interactions with them. For everything except composite materials this was fine, since they were never added or destroyed after the creation of the tab itself. Composite materials creates and destroys them on the fly, however.

This led to some interesting reconfiguring of the event bindings, due to a very particular quirk of JavaScript, so that they could be removed and not just invisibly pile up each time the menu was opened. Which leads to today. Those dynamically created and destroyed inputs now work, just the same as the others.



As it stands, the moment the menu is opened, if no stats are declared, the prompt will automatically fill in the equivalent of "Max Rolls" on the older build. This applies max to all stats except ATT Limit, which is left at 0.

My next task is to create a Settings tab at the top of the left-side tabs for composite materials that will allow you to configure this default behavior. My current intent is to offer options of "Min Rolls", "Max Rolls", "Super Max Rolls", and "Random". Random will assign stats randomly within valid bounds except ATT Limit, which will remain 0. I also still need to add in code for handling Abilities, which the Armory currently ignores the existence of.