2023 Progress

July 15

Given my consistency, or lack thereof, it might look better and be easier to just have one thread per year and let it reach a few pages if that ends up happening. Among other major changes to these posts, I need to find an image host other than imgur nowadays, never know when they will decide to fully transition to social media instead of image hosting...

A lot of things contributed to this delay, only some of them being actually good excuses. The end result of what happened is that I got thrown out of funk and also simultaneously hit a creative block on fixing some tedious issues with the Settings window.

Today, I am posting that I have resolved around half of that tedious work. The root of the problem was the Color Themes tab in the Settings window. Its layout was completely antithetical to the design of everything else in the Settings window. It was horizontally laid out, while every other tab is vertical for ease of reading/use. Changing the design over to being vertical instead of horizontal seems like it would be an easy thing to do, and it really should have been, but this is where creative block started kicking in. Questions like which settings were more important and therefore got to be at the top of the page, what should a horizontal button row even look like since the Armory has never had one before this point, etc.

As part of cleaning up the Color Themes tab, I actually ended up reformatting the HTML of the entire Settings window. Instead of clicking a named tab on the left to open that page of settings, they are now all one unified scroll-able page. Clicking the left-side tabs will now jump to the start of that page's options. Incidentally, this caused me to discover a design flaw of my custom tables/panels that had never appeared before this point. The Color Themes table was inside of the scroll-able panel for Settings, and they do not support being nested. They would target the first scrollbar they saw, even if it was not their own. Oops. To fix this, the class that makes tables and panels work now looks for the scrollbar that identifies itself as belonging to that table/panel, via an extra attribute in the HTML. Simple and effective, always the way to go.

On the positive side of changing everything to one unified page, this allows for a cool feature idea I got from Old School RuneScape, where I can go back later on and add a search bar to the top of the Settings window itself, and allow users to text search to find the setting they are looking for, even if they don't know what tab it is categorized under. I can operate this via CSS filters just like the Item List's text search, so it will filter in real-time and be super fast too.

It turns out that the auto-settings for equipping items in the Gear tab require even more width than the Color Themes tab did, so the entire Settings window has been widened a bit to accommodate this. Taking advantage of this since I had to do it anyway, I widened the Color Themes table to show four themes per row, and the sub-tabs for editing the active color theme now show three color values per row. To keep the text information regarding each option in Settings easier to read, I capped their width a bit less than the full Settings window so that it would not require as much left to right eye motion.

The look of the Settings window at this point of the reformat is not even at what I would consider a beta state, so no images today. Auto-settings for the Gear tab are fully functional, as they were in January, but while the options for it exist in the Settings window, they still only exist as dummies. They are present and look right, but don't do anything yet.

Once I finalize the look and layout of the Settings window, I will need to go back and code in the auto-settings options to actually work. That will be a huge amount of tedious work, so hopefully I won't burn out again before it is done. This Settings window stuff is the last of the really tedious work on the entire Armory project, I believe.

August 3

The distraction of this cycle was the suspense over my new GPU arriving in shipping or not (BestBuy's provided info is TERRIBLE), but it finally arrived and playing around with it derailed me for a few days.

I've made good progress getting myself back into things on coding for the Armory over the last month now, generally trying to get myself to do at least a small bit of work each day. As of now, the Settings window is in a pretty good state, but not what I would call 100% on base functionality. I still want to add that search feature.

I am trying out this forum's default image hosting today, so let's see what happens long-term. Sorry in advance for poor cropping, this is significantly harder on Windows 11 since the background is so damn bright.



Aside from a bit of polish to the look of the Settings window, the main differences you can see are two details:
1: The left-side tabs no longer light up, as (currently) it is no longer possible to tell which pages are in view and which are not. I might figure out how to do this at a later date.
2: Each section of settings, which was formerly its own independent page, now has a header title to indicate transitions between groups of settings.

The settings visible in this image are those for the Gear tab and for Auto-Parameters, which has been the main source of complexity for the entire Settings window's implementation. The main settings are still dummied out and not functional, but I have included them to show what they will look like in use. The default values for these options will be exactly as shown here.

As for the more detailed Auto-Parameter settings per each slot, these are now fully dynamically loading. The design of these settings is also finalized. All that is left is to add in the last bit of code, for actually saving the values you set here. Here is a second image of Auto-Parameters, this time with a slot fully loaded in:



The default visible group is Weapons/Armor, which is self-explanatory. Accessories 1 includes the set of four enhanceable accessories (Earrings, Belt, both Rings), and Accessories 2 contains the other five accessories. Parameters that are not applicable to the item, such as Power Infusion on Artifacts, will not be present on that slot's options.

Auto-Parameters is nearing finalization, but it is not the only thing I am working on currently. I have also been renovating the code itself a bit, so that it is easier to read directly. This is taking some extra time, but should pay off in the long run. The next post will be when Auto-Parameters is fully completed, including the currently dummied out options for composite items/bracelets.

September 19

Auto-parameters are fully complete and fully functional. Not only that, but every setting for the Gear module is now completely functional and can be set in Settings. In the process of this, I decided upon a small change in how the auto-parameter settings work.

Previously, you could enable inheriting the parameters of the item previously equipped in the slot. So for example, if you equipped an Orna Helm over a +15 Cool Advance Ardri Helm, you would now have a +15 Cool Advance Orna Helm in the slot. You could also enable auto-parameter, which would set the items you equip to whatever you define in Settings, with fallbacks automatically handled for things like enchants that have restrictions.

These two were mutually exclusive, so you could not have both. They can now both be used together, if both are enabled. If both are enabled, inheritance will take priority whenever it is possible. So auto-parameters will be used if the slot is empty, and parameters will be inherited from the previous item if something was equipped.

I have also added explanatory hover tooltips to the default roll options for composite items and bracelets. They detail what rolls you can expect from each setting.

Finally, after that anchor of a job, I can now start on forward progress on the Armory again. New functionality! I am now in the drafting phase for the Buffs module, which will handle enabling/disabling any relevant status effects. This is the semi-final module for the Armory, with the last one being a Share module for sharing and loading Profile/Loadout pairs that are set to be public. I also fully intend it to be possible to share impromptu links like the old Armory could, but storing data in the address to the page is no longer feasible. I will need to look into something like temporary public links for that, but I absolutely will find some solution to allow the capability.