NightLight September 2021 Update

It's been just over 6 months since I made NightLight public and the site has come such a long way since then. I want to thank everyone that taken the time to try the site out and an even bigger thank you to those of you who support it on Buy Me A Coffee. As we're at that 6 month mark I felt like pushing the boundaries of the update a little I hope you like the new additions as much as I do.

Tags

The first feature I’ve added are tags, these are really cool and give you the option to track other information about matches. If you’ve got the advanced mode enabled on match review, you’ll be able to create and assign tags to matches, there’s a few global tags there to get you started. Assigning tags lets you do a few cool things, for instance, there’s a new graph for them on the Overview and if you’re a supporter you can also filter by them. In addition, on the reworked Matches page, anyone can filter by tags. Also, there’s a new page where you can manage them which you can find under the user dropdown menu.

Matches Page

The matches page was always a little lacking and with this update I’ve tried to do something about it, there’s now a filter system you can use in addition to the search box and an improved table (which is now viewable on smaller screens). You’ll also be able to view and filter by tags here, there’s still a couple of things I want to add in a future update but it’s now in a much better spot.

Match Editing

Each match now has a unique page where you can view and also edit it (yay, finally). Currently, you can only edit the map and tags but I’ll be looking to add more depending on what requests I get. One thing I’ll mention about this is you can edit these attributes before you’ve reviewed a match, because of this I’ve added a link to each valid match in the upload page’s “Processed” table. If you’re one of the people who like to make note of the map but don’t want to immediately review it, this might be useful for you.

Community Build Challenge

While working on this update I noticed that NightLight has “only” seen 30,000 or so unique builds and I was slightly curious how many are possible… apparently it’s a bit over 5 million. This sparked an idea - I’ve wanted to add a random build generator for ages but I didn’t know how I could make it “NightLight”. What if instead of making it random, I made it unique? A few hours later and I had build a system to track how many unique builds each of us has uploaded to NightLight and I’ve made a new page and leaderboard out of it. You can find it at Community Build Challenge - NightLight.

Overview changes

As we’ve getting SBMM very soon I’ve moved the rank graphs out of the way in preparation. I’m not sure how statistically useful the new Grades will be so until we know more these will be staying out the way.

On another note, you’ll find a new date range selector which is a lot more customisable. One downside to this is for the time being, the date range won’t be “remembered” and will default back to 30 days when you next open the page. Depending on what feedback I get for this, I may look at options for making it persistent once again.

Supporters have a new Tags filter which I think gives some interesting opportunities for queries, you can filter with any tags, global or custom. There’s also a Tags chart which is available for everyone.

Friends Favouriting

This is a small improvement but you can now mark friends as favourites on the friends list. Doing this will put them at the top of the friends list on Match Review. This should make life slightly easier if you have a lot of friends and only regularly play with a couple of them.

Item & Offering Recognition (Experimental)

It’s been a long time coming but Item and Offering recognition has now been added. Apparently just adding this wasn’t enough of a challenge for me so as part of this update, I’ve gone and updated all existing matches with this data. As this is a new feature, it’s probably not going to work perfectly but I’ll be keeping an eye on things and would appreciate it if you let me know if you encounter any issues.

Of course the recognition by itself wouldn’t be much use so you’ll find a new Items chart along with two offering tables on the dashboard.

Final Thoughts

This has been a whole ton of fun to work on but it’s not all I have planned, there’s several things left on my list and I had more ideas while working on this. I’ll be taking a break for a day or two and then I’ll hopefully have another update with some of these things out in a week or two.

If you’ve made it this far I’m genuinely impressed and appreciate the interest. As always, please let me know if you encounter any bugs or other issues.

Changes

Features

  • Added Tags
  • Added advanced filtering to the Matches page
  • Added individual match pages with editing functionality
  • Added the Community Build Challenge
  • Added new Tags and Item charts to the Overview, improved date filter and added a Tag filter
  • Added a way to favourite Friends to prioritise them in friend lists
  • Added item and offering recognition, review process, & graphs

Changes

  • Moved notifications to nav bar
  • Made Overview graphs slightly taller
  • Moved Overview rank graphs to a less prominent spot until the usefulness of Grades is known
  • Raised upload file size limit slightly
  • Increased match share notification grouping to 30 minutes

Bug Fixes

  • Made the matches page table viewable on mobile
  • Fixed an issue which could cause certain uploads to fail without warning
  • Fixed Escape & Outcome chart tooltips duplicating their values
  • Removed random killer & survivor tooltips from the Overview
  • Fixed a bug where marking all notifications as read wouldn’t immediately update the count
  • Fixed a bug that could cause select boxes on the register page not to load properly after failing validation of a field
  • Fixed an issue with lower case perk page URLs

Other

  • Ported the JavaScript to TypeScript in an effort to preserve my sanity and improved a lot of it in the process
  • Redid the ID system for everything, so long UUIDs (you won’t be missed)
  • Restructured the database and made various performance and storage improvements
  • Many, many other improvements and optimisations
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