FrontierNav Report: February 2018
Changes in February
Unifying Interfaces
Previously, FrontierNav only had one visualisation: a map. With the new Affinity Charts for Xenoblade 2, I've been looking into various approaches to present the same information along side different visualisations.
For example, showing both the Affinity Charts, and allowing users to navigate to the map while retaining their view of the "entity" they're looking like, like the Affinity Reward or the Enemy requirement.
There are a few candidate ideas I'll be fleshing out a bit.
- One's a windowing system like any Operating System with the visualisation as a background.
- Another is a "bubble" system, kind of like Facebook's Android app and Samsung's Touchwiz window system.
Data Imports
More raw data has been coming out for Xenoblade 2, so I've started writing a parser to transform it into a compatible format for FrontierNav.
Keeping track of all of this work and keeping it organised has been a bit of a pain. I'll be organising frontiernav-data to be a bit more, well, organised.
Open Source
Due to the number of moving parts and complexity of the project, open sourcing it as-is isn't as worthwhile. With the lack of documentation it'll be difficult for anyone to contribute or make use of it.
So, to get the web client into a state that can be open sourced, I've been splitting out bits into their own project. A mono-repo approach has worked well for this as it means I don't need to juggle multiple Git repos and branching dependencies.
Next Up
I'll be continue to work on the things outlined above. There's a lot to do but I'm getting a better idea of where to take FrontierNav by doing it.
Having to play new games, enjoy the first playthrough, then figure out their intricacies while also extracting data and building new features in a timely manner is really difficult.
Once Xenoblade 2's data is imported and guides are stable, I'm thinking of moving onto more classic games. The main reason being that all the data is already available and I can use them as an opportunity to build FrontierNav into a state where it's a lot easier to add new, recent games.
What games? There's quite a few. I've had an itch to replay Golden Sun Books 1 & 2 recently.