Let me set a scene for you. You’ve got a project you’re about to make available to the world, the thing is, you haven’t really made one like this before. It’s got 3000 lines of this weird language you’ve never really used called Javascript and a bunch of uhm “interesting” design choices. As you work on it more and more you come to realise the value in certain things (like breaking code into multiple files…). Over time you work to improve these things but at the end of the day, the core of the project is still the same as when a 3000 line code file seemed manageable.
Why am i saying this? Well, NightLight has evolved a lot since it’s inception. Just about everything has been added to and changed and that can make a mess of any project but especially one when you’re learning “on the job”. That combined with the fact I made a point of learning from the ground up (keep those frameworks and their magic away from me, I want to know what’s going on) meant that the code behind NightLight started to fit in with the genre of Dead by Daylight.
Enter “it seemed like a good idea at the time” thought #972:
Let’s do it, let’s fix it. Let’s rewrite everything we don’t like. (haha why did this seem smart i need help). It’s now I don’t even know how many hours later and it’s done! The (almost) entire frontend has been rewritten in a really cool framework called Remix. I say almost because I have the uncanny ability to underestimate the the time things will take and I’ve also had to make significant changes for the new scoreboard (and stats it brings). The last couple of things will be sorted very soon.
What you can expect to see:
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Today: Rewritten UI rollout with various changes including a new Dashboard, and upload/review process. The main pages I’ve touched have been bought more in line with the styling on the rest of the site and as part of that, usually have more room for additional features (there’s some really cool stuff in the works). Unless a miracle has occured, there’ll be some bugs but I’ll be actively working to sort them as I’m made aware.
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In the next few days: Once I know that everything works with the new scoreboard and nothing critical has changed from the PTB I’ll add the UI for the new datapoints to the review process. There’ll also be a couple of charts appearing on the Overview and Rank/Grade charts will be phased out (showing only if you have eligible matches and the date range extends back enough). The Teachables page will also take on a new look to reflect the changes in the game. I’m also going to attempt to reprocess all existing matches (I say attempt, there’s quite a lot of them now… we’ll see how it goes).
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After that: There’s several cool things I’ve been working on (including two new stat pages) which need a little more work (partly because the new scoreboard is giving me more options for them). I’m really looking forward to getting them finished and keeping my sanity (or well, some of it) thanks to the rewrite.
Notes:
- A couple of things are temporarily disabled, they’re mainly build challenge related (like the availability checker or the count that shows on the Overview after reviewing) - builds are still counted and the UI will be back soon.
- Identification settings are gone! The system hasn’t relied on them for a fair while now and it tripped a good few new users up. Instead, I’m going to be providing more information when an upload fails to point people in the right direction.
Changes
- Rewriten the UI to be more managable and user friendly (no more loading screens!)
- New Dashboard (hopefully less useless now)
- New and improved Uploader
- New match review process (with support for both the old and new scoreboards)
- Restyled the account page
- Changed the date and select boxes to fix several bugs and provide a more useful experience
- Made various identification improvements including some that are yet to be revealed
- Made a whole lot of things more clickable
- A whole bunch of other stuff, I’ve spent at least a hundred hours on this
