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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
Following on from April, I've been working on the Xenoblade 2 Map. All the Collectible, Location and Salvage points have been imported.
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.
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.
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:
As with everything, I'll decide on a few things and improve it as I go.
April saw a steady progress towards open sourcing FrontierNav and the gradual introduction of collaborative tooling. The interface has been tidied up too: consistent colours, cleaner layout, better navigation. On top of that, Xenoblade 2's map is almost ready!
It's nearing the end of May now but it's worth mentioning May's update will come in June as usual with Progress Reports. This update was delayed by some weeks.
The data for the maps is available now. It's just a matter of linking it all up, making sense of it and making it presentable. Can't wait!