NightLight has been a massive learning opportunity for me and is the biggest project I’ve ever worked on by a reasonable margin. My enjoyment of Dead by Daylight comes and goes as it does for many people, but I’ve found my interest in NightLight (and development in general) to be much more consistent. It’s got to the point I’m rather wanting to pursue a career in the world of software development and I’m rather lucky to have been offered an (albeit unrelated) job with reasonably flexible hours. I intend to use the time around that to advance my skills and fill out some gaps in my knowledge. I have some other projects lined up, but NightLight will likely be receiving a good bit of attention - I have a fair list of ideas already but if there’s anything you’d like to see me work on, let me know!
Okay, onto the update…
Design updates
In the last update I added the new menu which was very much needed and seems to have been well received. Following on with the design changes, I’ve taken a pass over most pages on the site and introduced a bit of a new look. I think it still need some refinement but generally speaking I think it better differentiates information and looks a lot cleaner.
Something else I’m always wanting to do is improve the accessibility of the site. One step towards this is ensuring colours are suitable those with impaired vision. In this update I have changed the colour scheme of the graphs to be more colour blind friendly. I realise this is a big change but after working with it for a bit I’ve grown to rather like it. I realise it likely won’t be universally liked though so if you have any thoughts on it, I’d love to hear them.
Perks & Builds
Oh boy, these pages have been bugging me for so long. With this update, you will find redesigned Perks & Builds and Perk pages. I’ve tried to push myself here once again and I think the design has turned out pretty well - the idea of sharing it certainly embarrasses me a lot less that’s for sure. There’s a really cool addition I’ve made here too which is historical perk usage which currently spans back 182 days or approximately 6 months. This period should show the impact of two DLCs and I’ll definitely be looking to increase it in the future.
Now, before you go “aaaaaaaa my eyes” I have decided to add another use for the perk usage data. This takes for form of the perk icons having a not-so-universally-purple look to them. The colour is based on the perk’s usage in the last 14 days, there’s more information about the logic behind the colours on the Perks & Builds page if you’re interested.
Badges
As we’ve reached the 1-year mark I thought it’d be nice to have some way to show the annual milestones of being a NightLight user. I’ve always wanted to add some sort of badge system, but it’s (unsurprisingly) never been a priority… and still arguably isn’t - but it was fun to make so here we are. Just making a system for one badge seemed a little silly though, so I’ve added a few for various milestones and actions. You can see your badges on the dashboard and on your profile.
Relaxed upload requirements
I’ve been working behind the scenes to improve my and the recognition system’s flexibility. Unfortunately, I ended up having a lot more success with one than the other. That being said, I think it worked out well for NightLight’s as it’s now somewhat able to work with screenshots of other dimensions and UI scales (as well as with the dynamic scoreboard location on console). There’s still a long way to go in this regard but I’ll be gathering data and improving it as more varied screenshots are uploaded. That being said, there are limits to what I can achieve (mainly because there are only so many pixels to work with) so the crazier your settings are the worse the results will be.
Basically, it’s you can upload with (almost) any settings you want and see what works, I’ll be working where I can to improve recognition for the most common things.
Recognition Display
As the upload requirements have been relaxed, I realised I need some way of showing how well your screenshots are being recognised. We’ve currently got the unknown icons of course but with some more extreme settings or filters I’ve seen it decide that a slot is closer to being empty than anything else. That’s obviously a big issue as you don’t have any clear way of knowing when issues occur.
In an attempt to remedy this, I’ve added what I’m terming the “recognition display” which you will find on the match review screen. It overlays the icons it has recognised onto your scoreboard image and can be toggled on and off. This should make it really easy to spot if anything has been incorrectly identified. If something has been, you can click on the icon and correct it. This has the really cool side effect of making it so you can edit match icons on their pages which has been requested a good few times.
Note: The recognition display is currently not available for grades.
If you do visit a match page, you’ll also find a new “Edit History” section which funnily enough happens to be a log of edits. In order for me to know of and monitor recognition inaccuracies I’ve added a log which will store edits for a certain period. As I have this information, I figured I’d expose it on the UI for convenience in case of any mistaken edits and also to aid in the communication of recognition issues. For convenience I’ve also added the map and tags to the log as they’re the easiest to mistakenly edit.
Match Notes
I’ve had so many requests for this so I’m happy to be able to finally add it. As it is, it’s in about the most simple form it could take but I’m open to building on it if anyone has any ideas or requests.
To aid in finding notes, I’ve added a “Note” system tag which will appear on the match list for any matches with well, a note.
Match History & Tag Limit Increase, and Filter change
Finally, as we’ve reached the one-year mark I’ve increased the match history period for supporters to 720 days (my intention for it is to be effectively unlimited but I don’t want to commit to anything I can’t guarantee needlessly). I’ve also increased the custom tag limit to 10 and 20 for regular users and supporters respectively, as part of this I’ve limited the Tag chart on the Overview to the top 15 tags. I may well end up changing that chart to a table, so the limit isn’t necessary, but we’ll see.
If you’ve made it this far, I’d like to give you this imaginary cuppa as that was a whole lot of reading.
Changes:
- Killers page: Changed compact mode to show the bar titles once at the top
- Killers page: Fixed a scenario which could break the layout
- Killers page: Updated the stats to only include Survivor side matches
- Uploads: Added the option to raise the upload size limit in the rare scenario a user can’t reasonably meet the current limit (e.g. 4k console screenshots).
- Match review: Limited available maps to those of the selected realm (if one is set)
- Match review: Added perk/item/offering images to select box rows for unknown icons
- Match review: Fixed a bug with advance mode and enabled it by default
- Match review: Made the Advance mode toggle a lot more obvious and improved the layout generally
- ShareX: Improved the loading/error screen and handled a couple of edge case errors
- Fixed an issue that could Friends to incorrectly be displayed on the match preview modal
- Fixed an issue causing the homepage to not properly scale on mobile devices
- Fixed an issue with the page height on the matches page
- Fixed an issue causing the NightLight “logo” text to link to the dashboard even when logged out
- Increased the width to which the compact sidebar will remain active
- Fixed an issue which could cause some inputs to be auto-filled to an invalid state by some browsers
- Improved Shrine notification text
- Fixed an issue which caused subtle corruption in perk icons
- Fixed an issue which could cause the sidebar controls to render incorrectly
- Fixed an issue that caused a single corner to not be rounded on one specific thing for the sake of my sanity
- Fixed an issue causing tag name requirements to be inconsistent
- Added a button to the match preview and view pages of unverified matches that will let you review it directly
- Changed the way global tags are displayed and added a new “System tag” category
- A good few other things and some things I’ve probably forgotten