FrontierNav Weekly: 17 August 2020
Changes
Profiles
- Added a "Now Playing" section to user profiles.
- Organised user profiles into a single column layout.
- Includes various changes to how user profiles look.
Maps
- Fixed maps having visible edges because the background wasn't absolute black.
Other Changes
- Game-specific settings now link to global settings.
- Settings under the user dropdown now navigates to game-specific settings instead of global settings when available.
- Added a slight gradient to page backgrounds to give them some texture so the content stands out more.
- Navigation icons are now slightly larger.
- All pages now use the same tab-like navigation bar for consistency.
- More maintenance work.
Work in Progress
- Continued working on Community Guides (not released yet, read below)
Contributions
Xenoblade Chronicles: Future Connected
- Added all Giants' Treasures (contributed by Lessagono)
The Witcher 3
- Added all maps (no content yet).
Support the project
Thank you to this week's patrons!
If you would like to support FrontierNav, please consider donating on Patreon. Doing so helps fund development and keeps the project going. Thank you.
Community Guides
I've got a solid idea now of how the first release of Community Guides will work. I haven't released any of it yet since it might confuse people to have a finished "guide" feature that doesn't properly guide.
Essentially, it will be one big text block (in markdown), similar to how Discussions are created. The plan being to merge "Discussions" and "Community Guides" to use the same form, and gradually add more types of "blocks" to increase functionality. Images, videos, maps, queries, etc.
The text will be made interactive using links and it'll also support generic text search. The links will allow guides to be listed on Entity pages and the text search will allow people to search the content of guides for specific Entities that might not be explicitly linked.
The latter is important as another benefit of focusing on text first is that I can ask authors of existing guides, especially for older games, to publish their plain text guides on FrontierNav with minimal effort.
To give an example of how guides will work: the Tyrant entities on Xenoblade X currently have a "Notes" section that gives battle advice. This was something I migrated over from another guide (that no longer exists), but it is useful to have. However, "Battle Tips" is subjective and people may have their own tips to share so it doesn't make much sense to have it in the canonical database. Instead, they're better served in a "Battle Tips" guide written by a specific person. So people should be able to go to a Tyrant page, see the "Battle Tips, by Author" guide, click through to it and be taken to the section mentioning that specific Tyrant's battle tips.
Guidance
There are two major parts to FrontierNav (as visible in this poll): guides and completion tracking. Community Guides will progress the "guides" part, and previously Lists were added to help with the "completion tracking" part. Once I've released first version of Community Guides, I'll switch back to improving tracking.
The current flow of tracking is very loose. There's no guidance and it's up to people to stumble upon the various features and use them if they need it. That makes it very difficult for people to know what FrontierNav is about. So I'd like to make it more intuitive. Essentially, I need to create the rope that ties all of the completion tracking features together and guides new users through FrontierNav.
Next Up
I'll be finishing off the first release of Community Guides. It's almost done so it should be out before next week's report. Then, I'll be putting more thoughts into improving "Guidance", as mentioned above, in preperation for the week after.
Thanks for reading.