Chrome extension: Conversion Helper

Fallen London
1

I’ve created a small Chrome extension to make it slightly easier to keep track of item conversions, which was whitelisted on 6 April 2017. Details are below, after the download links:

The extension is available from the Chrome Web Store here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fallen-london-conversion/bajlcoahedhgjfpfgahdfaoeohmjbhfb
The Firefox Add-on is available from here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fl-conversion-helper/
The source code is available from Github here: https://github.com/gallmarch/fl-conversion-helper

Basically, I’ve been doing a lot of side-conversions of Tier 3 items lately (grinding Making Waves), which requires a lot of scrolling through the inventory and keeping track of where I am in the conversion chain. I thought it would be nice if I could see my items arranged in the order of the chain, displayed in a way that would make it obvious whether I had enough of a particular item to convert. So I wrote a small Chrome extension to do this, and then expanded it to cover Tiers 1 and 2 as well. It looks like this:

The extension adds three new categories to the top of your Inventory in the ‘Myself’ tab: Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3. Within each of these categories, the items you have are arranged in the order of the 50→51 conversion chain (starting, arbitrarily, with Academic). If you’re missing a kind of item, you’ll see an empty slot. (In the image above, I don’t have any Tier 3 Infernal or Rag Trade items, for example.) If you don’t have enough of each item to perform a conversion, its icon is disabled (in this category only, of course, not in the main inventory). I more or less only ever do the large-quantity (slightly profitable) up-conversions (500→105), so you’ll only be able to click if you have enough to perform one of those:

The extension is designed to be as unobtrusive as possible. It doesn’t have any effect on the rest of your inventory. The three categories start out collapsed (like the categories in the Qualities section), but the extension will remember your preferences, so if you like to keep Tier 3 open all the time, you won’t have to click to expand it every time you return to your inventory. If you would like to completely hide any (or all) of the tiers, there are options to do so in the extension’s popup window:

Feedback and bug reports are very welcome. The Tier 1 and Tier 2 up-conversion quantities are a bit odd, and I can only test with the items in my inventory, so I may have missed something somewhere.
edited by Gallmarch on 4/6/2017
edited by Gallmarch on 6/12/2017
edited by Gallmarch on 10/3/2018
edited by Gallmarch on 10/3/2018

2

This has been added to the whitelist.

3

Oh, this is delightful! Those conversions were driving me crazy. Thanks ever so much, Gallmarch!

4

I’m trying to load this in Firefox but I’m not being very successful.
I create a user script and paste the code from content-script but I don’t know what to do with the popup script, I guess it’s important because just the content-script code doesn’t do anything that I can see.

5

[quote=Rui Rodrigues]I’m trying to load this in Firefox but I’m not being very successful.
I create a user script and paste the code from content-script but I don’t know what to do with the popup script, I guess it’s important because just the content-script code doesn’t do anything that I can see.[/quote]

What do you mean by user script? Greasemonkey? That’s not the same as “temporary add-on”. The gear button in about:addons extensions tab has “install from file”, that’s probably closer.

6

Well, that way doesn’t seem to work either because the folder from github doesn’t seem contain an installer firefox recognizes for that.

7

Sorry for the delay in responding — real-world stuff got in the way. The Firefox version is sitting in a queue waiting for approval by Mozilla (currently #118), but in the meantime you can install it as a temporary add-on:

Temporary add-ons only stay installed until you restart Firefox, so you’ll need to repeat the last steps (the ones in the mozilla.org link) each time you restart your browser. It’s not terribly convenient, I know, but there isn’t anything that developers can do about it.

8

Ahh, thanks, that was it.

9

Just a quick note to say that Mozilla have approved the Firefox version. You can grab it from here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fl-conversion-helper/

10

Just a quick note of thanks for the great extension. Wonderfully useful for MW cycles. And it collapses nicely!

11

Thank for this! This is somewhat out of scope for this named extension, but could you consider adding the Renown Conversion items into a similar pulled out area? I always keep forgetting what adjectives cover those and look for Typewriter instead of Ornate.

12

I was just going to suggest the same thing! I keep forgetting what the Church item is and where can I find it…it would be incredibly helpful.

13

Sounds like a useful addition! I can’t imagine that FBG would have a problem with this, so I’ll push an update (with details) tomorrow, when I can physically bear to look at the FL interface again. (I’ve just finished two weeks of hardcore card-flipping and Notability grinding, so right now I want nothing more than to punch the Affectionate Devil right through my laptop screen and all the way into Parabola.)

14

I agree it’s a great idea.

What I’d love to see is an inventory section which shows all Favours, just to see how many there are at a glance, instead of searching for them under the Contacts section.

15

Version 0.2.6 is now available from the Chrome Web Store and is awaiting manual review by Mozilla. The update adds two new categories: one for Tier 4 items (since it’s occasionally useful to up-convert these) and one for faction items that can be used to increase Connected/Renown. (The faction items are listed in the order their factions appear in the ‘Contacts’ section of the ‘Myself’ tab.)

The faction items’ icons are always enabled, whether or not you have the requisite Favours/stats/items for conversion. This limits the category’s utility, but in order to fix this I’d have to make a few server calls and reproduce a fair amount of the game logic: technically feasible stuff, but enough to tip the extension over into what feels like ‘FBG might nix it’ territory. I’ll contact them to ask, but don’t hold your breath.

As a workaround in the meantime, the Item Search extension also works for qualities, so you can do a quick search for ‘favours:’ (including the colon) and it’ll just show you a list of your faction Favours:


It means installing an extra extension, which isn’t ideal, but it’s what I do and it works OK.

16

First of all: thank you for all the work improving and adding features.

As for Favours: the item search extension is a good idea. But I was looking for a way which doesn’t need lots of clicks (nor typing). So that one could see at a glance how many Favours there are of all types. I tried to do this myself, but sadly I have no experience in coding extensions…

edited by dov on 8/28/2017

17

A really dirty but probably trivial way to do it would be scrape the HTML displaying the favours from the Contacts section and use that to get the number of favours.

18

Thank you for the Favors update! That’s immensely helpful.

19

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

20

Thank you for the faction items update! That is wonderfully helpful! Keeping track of them all in different spots was such a nuisance. Thank you!