FrontierNav Report: January 2019
Changes in January
Preview
General
- Added community forums for each game.
- Pretty basic right now, but more features will be added over time.
Blog
Thoughts and writings.Creating a Community Forum for FrontierNav
One of the oldest feature requests for FrontierNav was to have a community forum. A place to ask questions and network with other users. I've finally decided to introduce this feature, albeit in a primitive state.
Rationale
Why does FrontierNav need a forum?
FrontierNav's focus has mainly been to introduce interactive guides (e.g. maps) for games that aren't available on other websites. However, there are other ways FrontierNav can improve a user's experience. One of them is the question and answer flow.
Creating a Forum with Firebase
So you've decided to create a forum... using Firebase. Let's go through the entire process. This guide assumes you already have some knowledge using Firebase so it's mainly focused around modeling the data to work with Firebase's limited access controls.
Unlike traditional databases, Firebase's Real-time Database is accessed directly from the browser by users. This allows real-time push updates whenever the data changes without the user needing to manually reload.
Data is written individually by users. A user can attempt to write into the database, and the database can say who's allowed to write there and restrict the data with simple rules. For example, "a property can only be changed by User A and it must be a number".
However, due to the nature of Firebase, it cannot enforce complex rules. For example, "you can only add a new post if you haven't created a post in the last minute". This generally requires going through all posts for a given user and finding the timestamp of the most recent one. Not possible in Firebase.
FrontierNav Report: December 2018
Changes in December
Preview
General
- Added standalone entity pages.
- This lets you search for an entity and go to the guide you need rather than having to pick a guide first (see video).
- Added category listing for entities.
- This lets you find an entities by category if you don't have a specific thing to search.
- Continued making the application more modular.
- Pretty much done now, a few small hairs left.
- Various UX improvements
- More preloading of scripts to reduce loading points.
- Better indicators when certain details are linked to other pages.
- Navigate from one guide to another. For example, you can go from an entity page to the affinity chart to the map (see video).
Xenoblade Chronicles 2
- Added Enemy Drops
- Includes things like accessories, core crystals, aux cores, etc.
- Improved Affinity Charts
- The icons and mugshots are now best quality.
- Rewards marked as complete now appear as such.
FrontierNav Report: November 2018
Changes in November
Now that FrontierNav is open source, it's a lot easier to share changes for the month. You can find a list of changes on GitHub.
However, it's a bit low-level so to summarise:
Architecture Improvements
- Continued tidying up the code so that it's easier for others to understand.
- Made some rendering performance improvements
- Looked into Dat / Beaker as a way to serve FrontierNav without a central server (read below).
Xenoblade 2
- Improved enemy map markers and spawn details
FrontierNav Report: October 2018
Changes in October
FrontierNav is now open source! I've spent most of the month planning this switch over and thinking about what it means for the project going ahead.
By virtue of being open source, I'll be more open about priorities and plans. There's an Issue Tracker for feature requests, planned changes and bug reports. I've also written some documentation for people to get started so that they can make their own code contributions.
You can find the code repository on GitHub.
FrontierNav Report: June 2018
Changes in June
For Xenoblade 2's map, legend toggles have been implemented, allowing you to choose which map markers to show. However as the data bundle now contains substantially more data -- roughly doubled by adding all enemy spawn points -- the current approach to data management may not be feasible. So I've spent some time looking into alternative approaches.
Always Log JSON
After years of writing log lines and trying to find a perfect format, I've come to a conclusion: Always log JSON.
Logging to JSON makes your code read more consistently, you save time thinking about how to log your message and it allow you to separate concerns between logging data from processing it for various use cases like debugging, generating reports and performance.
I'll be using JavaScript as an example here, but my opinions apply to all languages.
Most Anticipated Games from E3 2018
Now that the E3 hype is passing, it's time to look back and see what games are truly worth anticipating for the next years.
FrontierNav Report: May 2018
Changes in May
Following on from April, I've been working on the Xenoblade 2 Map. All the Collectible, Location and Salvage points have been imported.
Xenoblade 2 Maps
The relationships between Collection Points, Collectibles, Blades, Field Skills, Regions, etc. are all linked up so you can easily navigate between them and find related pieces of information.
Performance Improvements
It's probably not very noticeable on a desktop computer, but I've optimised a lot of the rendering logic throughout the app. There were a lot of unnecessary calculations going on when navigating around, causing a slightly longer wait time. As more data is imported, it gets more noticeable.
Things should feel a lot smoother now. There's more improvements to come in the same vein.
Next Up
I've started importing Enemy locations to the Xenoblade 2 Maps. Before I push that out though, I'll need to introduce a Legend toggle of some sort to reduce the types of markers on screen.
It seems pretty straight forward at first, but there's a lot of decisions to make. Things like:
- What markers to show by default.
- What to show when a user comes from an external link.
- Whether to persist visible markers so that link sharing is consistent between users.
- The most convenient place to put the toggle menu for desktop and mobile interfaces.
As with everything, I'll decide on a few things and improve it as I go.