FrontierNav Report: March 2018

Changes in March

Following on from last month's update, this month has been a stable continuation in all aspects. More code has been split out towards an open source future, more of the data pipeline has been fleshed out, and more visualisations are being introduced.

Xenoblade 2 Maps

Xenoblade 2's maps have been imported into FrontierNav. While it looks very similar to existing maps, it's using an entirely different approach.

The (now on-hold) Wiki platform did a lot of the initial work for the new maps. And with the recent progress in datamining Xenoblade 2, having all relevant locations in place may not take too long.

What kind of things are possible? I'll be able to show some of those once there's more data to work with.

Text Guides

I've looked into ways to get more community engagement on FrontierNav. One thing I mentioned before was the ability to create and import text-based guides. It's simple and a pretty useful way to dump information. So I'll be implementing this using the work I already did on the Wiki. It'll be a gradual roll out to reduce any moderation burdens it may lay on me.

Smaller Steps

So turns out all the Wiki work wasn't a huge waste of time, it just had to be broken down into smaller features!

Describing FrontierNav

When I first built FrontierNav, it was only a map for Xenoblade X. I didn't plan to make it anything bigger, so a lot of it was very ad-hoc. But over the months and years it's been growing slowly into something a lot more dynamic.

A lot of the conversations I've had about FrontierNav can get a bit difficult. Right now when people land on FrontierNav, it's not very obvious what it provides. And that's expected, since it provides what I felt like making at some point in time. But at the same time, I have a long-term goal for FrontierNav which I fail to describe succinctly.

So, here's the shortest description I can think of:

FrontierNav is a data management and visualisation platform for video games.

Is that too generic? Maybe. Is it realistic? I mean, sure the tooling isn't there yet, but it's getting there. Each new piece of functionality is a step towards that goal.

Next Up

This month I'll implement the Text Guides interface hoping to capture the Pastebin audience and get to work on the Spreadsheet interface to capture the Google Sheets audience.

Once Xenoblade 2's map data is available, I'll focus on getting the maps ready for players to use. In addition, I'll link it up with the Affinity Charts to make completion a lot more streamlined. So for example, "Kill 5 enemies" clicks through to a map of where those enemies are.

At some point, likely not this month, I want to try out releasing a Dat version of the web app. Though experimental and not really popular, it seems ideal for FrontierNav and it would be a neat proof of concept.