FrontierNav Weekly: 10 August 2020
Changes
- Some icons have been changed for Lists and Replies to be more self explanatory.
- Open sourced the map tile generator.
- An older version was previously open sourced but I forgot to update it.
- Various bug fixes related to community forums.
- Lots of maintenance work. If you find any issues, let me know.
- Mainly preparing to migrate to React 17, so removing deprecated APIs and stale dependencies.
Work in Progress
- Started working on Community Guides (read below)
Support the project
Thank you to this week's patrons!
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Community Guides
Sometimes people, including myself, want to write more traditional guides. That is: linear and mostly plain text with some images and videos. Not only does it allow more ad-hoc data entry compared to the strict nature of Data Tables, it will allow the interactive parts of FrontierNav to be summarised. So instead of asking people to use Universal Search to find what they're looking for, Community Guides can provide a ready-made solution.
Search Engine Benefits
A side benefit of this approach is that search engines will be able to better understand what FrontierNav is offering. When someone searches for "primordia collection guide" on Google/DuckDuckGo/etc., they should see a "Primordia Collection Guide" on FrontierNav. Currently, since FrontierNav is so specific, it'll never show up in these search queries.
Powering Other Features
Since the core of Community Guides is the ability to create documents, it will also improve other parts of FrontierNav. Forum posts, notes, wikis, news, reviews, and so on. All of these will be able to share the same editing interface.
Next Up
The scope of Community Guides can be huge. I've spent most of this week researching document editing interfaces, weighing pros and cons and finding a good fit. From plain text it can become a code execution pipeline like Jupyter Notebook or even Observable; allowing anyone to create interactive guides.
Of course, getting there is a lot of work and it will require experimentation. So as a first step, I'll be writing some simple guides for games I'm currently playing. Right now, that's The Witcher 3 which I'm aiming to 100%. A huge pain since it has branching paths and missable content; something FrontierNav hasn't really dealt with yet. The game is a few years old but it's quite popular so there's a regular stream of people playing it. It's a good chance for me to get a feel for the existing data and map editing tools and completion tracking, improving them where needed.
Before I get into that, I'll finish off what I can with Xenoblade Chronicles' data. Mainly treasure drops and NPC locations (where possible).
Thanks for reading.