Heya folks! I'm working on stuff, did ya hear?
I am plugging along at a fairly nice pace for the new Avatar Editor. Here's an image reflecting what I've currently got on it:
Working draft--styling, layout, and button looks are not final.
The buttons, from top left down, then to the right are:
Save, Avatar Closet, Favorited/Starred Items, Avatar Facing, Undo, Clear Avatar, Revert Avatar, Redo
I am, of course, not a web designer by trade, so when I do web design it ends up being simultaneously with my technical development...thus things look quite ugly for a rather long time.
As things stand, I have it properly displaying currently equipped items on the avatar, all items in user inventory. The avatar editor should overall load
much faster as you jump through tabs now, especially for those of you with huge ass inventories. I still have more optimization and adjustment to do to ensure that'll go smoothly, and much more testing is needed moving forward, but it's there.
Let's talk a bit about how the inventory will be laid out in the editor.
You can see in the image there, I have a few tabs up top, and then more underneath. The categories and subcategories are still in a draft state, so are subject to change, but here's the full listing, if you're curious:
The key thing about this is that the categories will not be exclusive. Donation items in particular are likely to show up in multiple tabs. Should make it easier to find specific kinds of things.
If you're looking for an item in particular, there will also be an inventory search feature, where you can search by name or tags (which includes colors). That in itself will end up being a very large undertaking, because items at present only have a single tag on them, and we have many, many items.
Which means before I'm done with the avatar editor, I'm going to be working on another feature that I think people will like: Item Viewer. You will be able to view an arbitrary item like in the shop, whether or not it's currently buyable.
And I'm going to have a page involved in that which will present you with an item without tags and ask you to assign it tags. In return you'll get some aurum. (Or something else. Haven't quite decided, yet. This is a new idea as of yesterday.)
Naturally, a feature like that will have some oversight and approval, but "crowd sourcing" the tags will still make it
piles easier for us, if people are willing to identify items for some Au.
Now, if you're curious about what kind of technical things I've been doing for this thing...
I recently planned out and implemented (portions of) a RESTful server for providing item information, which means page apps (like the Avatar Editor) can ping a single url that doesn't require a lot of parameters and mucking about and receive a JSON object containing what items they have in their inventory, equipped, in a closet entry, etc.
That will, as pages are updated, make it easier to manage shop things, the editor, inventory, trades, displaying to curious users what items a person has equipped (Ever wondered, "how the hell did they do
that?" I know I wonder that often. Now you shall know!), and possibly other stuff.
Why a RESTful server? Well, I like the architectural style of it, and it also means it'll be easier in the future to replace server-side code without having to adjust client code.
As always, thoughts and comments are quite welcome!