June 2019

June 1

Shippuu wrote:

May 23

My next module that I had set my eyes on was the ability to save Character profiles. As I went to manually edit my save data to add the tab to my page, I realized that I had a more immediate feature to implement. The Settings Prompt.
...
It is looking promising that I might actually have something to show regarding this new prompt as early as tomorrow, even if it's mostly empty on every other tab. The tab to manage Armory modules is already half done.

Oh had I only known then what I was getting into. This rather simple goal led into an incredibly comprehensive refactoring and rebuilding of numerous site-wide objects and classes, and the merger of several of those.

Oh and I also needed to build a mechanism to save and load settings to and from the server, since that didn't exist at all either.

Fortunately that work is now done. When logged in, window configurations now save to the server 10 seconds after your most recent change (to prevent wasting a lot of bandwidth sending redundant changes). When not logged in, saves will go to localStorage with a 5 millisecond delay, provided that you have given the Armory permission to use localStorage (laws and all that).

The Tab Manager on the Settings window looks like this for now:





(Ignore the duplicate tabs or odd tabs, a lot of these are just test dummies at the moment.)

Tabs that are open on the page somewhere will be lit up, and tabs that are not, are not lit. Clicking on a tab's button will summon it to button, based on your tooltip alignment settings (the same as on the older Armory). If the tab was already on the page, clicking on its button will dismiss it from the page and remove it from whatever tab it was on. If it was the only tab on that window, the window itself will be removed.

With this massive unexpected hurdle done with, to my great relief, my focus is once again on a Character Profiles module. To be clear, as mentioned in an older Dev Log, the v4 Armory will not handle profiles like the v2 Armory did. Character Profiles will save character data such as character type, level, skill ranks, titles, etc. Equipment Presets (name undecided) will save all equipped items on the Gear tab, on all ten tabs. This split was to reduce the data burden on loading a single profile, and to require the use of fewer mostly redundant saves in general.

On release, the Armory will only have access to the "Simple" calculation mode; "Simulation" mode will come at a later date. Simple mode functions as the old Armory did; base stats will represent your stats from level ups, titles, skill ranks, Ein Lacher medals, Redeemers progress, and anything else. This will include the same issues as before, with always active buffs such as VIP and Partholon Vanguard.

Simulation mode removes the Base Stats tab, and enables use of the Skills, Titles, Redeemers, and Ein Lacher tabs. It will be slower to use, but in turn its capabilities are significantly greater. Those capabilities will come up in future, when Simulation mode resumes development.

Despite simple mode being, well, simple, there will still be some interesting challenges in creating the Character Profiles module. Even though Simulation mode won't exist yet, it still needs to support it. This means the server must be able to accept save data in either format. While those save formats don't have to be 100% finalized now, I need to get pretty close to save myself a refactoring headache in future. Titles in particular will be rough, since there are thousands.

The next Dev Log will either be a draft of the UI of the module, a post announcing the module is complete, or a rant at some other unexpected roadblock.

June 15

It's been two weeks since the last Dev Log, and not for any good reason. I seem to have temporarily burned myself out of development stuff since the 1st, but I hope to be back to working on things in the next day or two.

I suppose I'm not fully back to my ability to churn out code like I used to years ago before I majorly burnt myself out. Getting there though.

June 24

I'm still lacking on actual Armory additions to talk about, but progress is picking up again as I find a balance between RuneScape, these Vindictus events, and doing Armory stuff without BlackCipher banning me when I go to do Vindictus events.

After a few iterations, I've decided on the look and layout I want for the table of character profiles. This is what it will look like:





I started off with it being a text table like it was on v2, but this felt somehow wrong the entire time I was making the mockup, and looked wrong even after. I feel a lot better about this version. The primary benefit, aside from looking rather nice visually, is actually having room for large descriptions. I will take the rest of this Dev Log to go over the design, as there is no functionality to it yet (except that it is loading from my account's data on the server.)

I've decided to think of these blocks as "profile cards", due to their shape; for this overview, I will be referring to these blocks as cards. Each card has only three components, to make it easy to skim through them if you have a large amount of profiles. At the top is the name of the profile, these names do not have to be unique. If the name is longer than fits on the card, it will be abbreviated with an ellipsis at the end, such as "Long_User...". Most obviously, the portrait of the character will sit on the background of the card. Then, at the bottom, the most recent save/update date of the profile, in Day/Month/Year format. Sorry US people, even though I am one, this format makes more sense.

As shown in the image, when you hover on a profile card, you will get a tooltip of extended information about that profile. On mobile devices, tapping the profile card will pop up this tooltip.

As the current Armory only has "Simple Mode", only the tooltip for this mode of profile actually exists to show. For profiles saved in this mode, you will see the most relevant of the saved base stats, and the description you have saved onto the profile. The max length of the description isn't yet determined, but I will ensure it is long enough for just about anything reasonable a user could want to store there.

When "Simulation Mode" is added, this tooltip will show instead: the profile's level, title count, total spent AP, Ein Lacher medal counts, Redeemers progress, and description.

While these profiles can load into the table if they exist on the server, I have a lot of work ahead of me before they can actually be used, updated, or created. As the most immediate issue, the way that the Base Stats module works doesn't play nice with the idea of saving Base Stats, so I need to fix that. A rather silly oversight on my part.

From there, I need to create a process to load the profile data out to every relevant module. In Simple Mode, this is actually pretty simple, funnily enough. The only two modules that need to be updated are Base Stats and Overview. From there, I need to port some code from UI data updating to profile data updating. Hopefully I can make this a generic Armory function to skip this step for when I implement saving equipment sets.

In-between all of that, at some point I still need to add the right-side options block to actually create, save, update, edit, and delete profiles. I've decided to not use double click on desktop since double tap on mobile seems annoying and I want the experience to be relatively the same on any device. For this, the right-side options block from the v2 Armory will be making its return, albeit with a look and feel befitting the v4 build. Exactly what changes this will be, are yet to be determined. I will know when I "play test" it at the time.

I do know that the main concern on my mind is the possible clunky feeling of having to click a profile card, then move the mouse over and click the option to load it or whichever you are choosing to do. I will definitely be sinking a fair amount of thought into how to mitigate or minimize any such clunkiness.