July 2019

July 1-22

I am alive, nothing bad has happened, and development hasn't hit any issues. Just wanted to get that out of the way first. I had made a self-resolution to never post another Dev Log about nothing happening or bearing bad news, so it led to a bit of a long gap. Too long, in this case, and I wanted to avoid any concerns arising that the project is MIA.

As I think I mentioned in a previous Dev Log, I play RuneScape 3 also. This month has had some very tempting offers ingame that I could not ignore, so I've been taking advantage of those. After Bonus EXP Weekend also ends on the 29th, I will be having some serious catch up days on the Armory.

However, there is progress from the last Dev Log. I just wanted to hold off until it was fully complete to talk about it here. Given that it has been a month though, I didn't want to keep the silence going.

First of all, spacing between profile cards has been adjusted, and the right-side options have been added to the tab.




(The button icons are placeholder, and the selected card colors are still not finalized.)


As can be seen, the buttons are grayed out when the action is not available. Clicking a profile card once will select it, allowing you to Edit that profile, or Delete it. Double clicking (or tapping) a profile card will load that profile out onto the Armory, and allow you to Edit it, Delete it, or Save changes made.

This will unfortunately sound more confusing than it is in practice, but I will try my best to explain it as simply as it works. Even while a profile is loaded onto the Armory, you can click another profile card to select it for editing/deletion. On the older v2 build that was online, it had a limitation where you couldn't actually delete/edit other profiles if you already had one loaded, forcing you to individually load the ones you want to work with. I have pre-empted that this time around, it was very annoying and clunky.

Upon clicking Edit, you are presented with this prompt:





The Display Name will be prefilled with the currently set name of the profile, and the same for the description, to whatever you have saved it as. Multiple profiles can have the same Display Name, and while potentially confusing, the Armory will have no issue with this at all. I have not yet determined a length limit for descriptions, but it will likely lean toward being more chars than most will realistically use. For the obvious part of this prompt, clicking Save will save name/description changes (and only those), and clicking Cancel will leave the name/description as they previously were.

Edit is for changing the name and description of the profile, and Save is for saving changes to the actual data of the profile, such as base stats, level, or the character it is. Both Edit and Save will update the "last changed" date shown on the profile cards. The date doesn't actually change on my copy currently, but it will determine the date in dd/mm/yy format based on the time the server says it is, to avoid any instances of time travelling due to time zone shenanigans.

Create and Delete don't work at all currently. Delete will be very fast to implement, and will have a confirmation prompt before actually deleting the profile. Create will take a bit longer, since it needs to be inspected by the server and all the usual security stuff. If nothing goes wrong, both will be done in the two days left of July after Bonus EXP Weekend.

Looking to August, my next job will be to reuse the profile code to create the Equip Sets module, for saving and loading sets of equipped gear. Maybe in August I will think of a proper name for the module too...

July 31

The Profiles module is pretty nearly done. It actually is done, as far as my previous list of objectives goes. I still need to add a sort functionality to the profiles grid, and I plan to add a search box above the table to search for profiles by name. Tentatively, I am thinking to cap the amount of profiles per account at 100. The character limit for names is tentatively 16, and the description is up to 500 characters. Naturally, none of these are final, it will depend on how the space situation looks when I start preparing to go online.

Regarding the work I've done on the Profiles module since the last Dev Log, it is as I mentioned. Bonus EXP Weekend has finished on RS3, so I am back to work on the Armory. Profiles can now be created and deleted, whereas before you could only work with existing profiles. Just for display's sake, these are the prompts you receive upon clicking New and Delete:








The server also now has validation checks to ensure that nobody is trying to use fishy data or sending scripts. I will need to retroactively add these checks to the older server-side checks, but this should be a simple task with the implementation I have setup.

Work in August will be on the Loadouts module, which is the counterpart to the Profiles module. The Loadouts module will allow you to save and load gear sets from the Gear tab. Each loadout will save one set from the Gear tab. I expect most users will have a lot of saved loadouts, so even though I will be able to reuse a lot of the code from the Profiles module, there are substantial challenges here.

At this moment looking ahead, I believe the biggest challenge will be efficiently navigating the table of loadouts in the first place. My initial idea for the table, to distinguish loadouts from one another, is to actually send over the data for the weapon and armor, colors and all. This would mean that unlike the Profiles table, there will only be one loadout per row. This would mean that there would only be about six loadouts visible at a time.

If you have something like 50+ loadouts, browsing 6 at a time is obviously too few. Offhand, I don't know quite how I want to deal with this issue, but it will be my main thing I am thinking on until I come up with solutions. In plural. More navigation means people have an easier time using it, which means more time using the Armory instead of fighting the UI. I may even rework the UI design itself to allow vertically resizing certain tabs, but that would be one of the crazier options I go for.