FL extension: Urchin Helper - Discussions

Fallen London
1

Greetings, my delicious!

Keeping this discussion on reddit as well!

Last year, while I was sent to a corporation, my free time was more abundant so I decided to expand my developing knowledge. Being a newcomer here I had troubles with the ToT side conversion for MW as I was always forgetting where I’m at so I decided to take a look into Chrome extensions.

During the following months, from a little curiosity, I ended up with a WIP lovely extension, contacted FBG about the feature they agree with, all was well, but I got back to my employer, the Mothership! :D There’s always something to do, my eagerness never dropped, extra project (payed ones) had a bigger priority so the extension stagnated. With the recent changes, specially with Renown/Favours I see that it’s becoming very hard for many of us to keep track of the favours and renown level.

Due to a leg injury which will require surgery, I had to cancel all my holidays so I’ll have more free time and I decided to restart the development!
Here’s a demo to make it easier to understand

Image link available as well.

So, here are some features:
1st column) Display a set of items (fixed) so it’ll be easy to track the progress. Here’s where I would like some opinions! What would be better? ToT side conversion or Fidgeting or anything else? This is accepted!

2nd column) This may be for nothing as FBG stated they don’t want Air values displayed! But if they agree to this column, here some options will be highlighted depending on your Air value. In this example, you can see the 4th and 5th highlighted which are for Arrange a duel outside the Black Ribbon (26-75) and A furtive duo seeks your expertise concerning tattoos… (26-50). Even if not displayed, you can guess the Air value is somewhere between 26 and 50. If FBG will be oki with this, what options should be present?

3rd one) Easy to guess! It represents the number of favours/Renown level. Dock icon will have another number which will represent the number of expedition supplies. The icon will have the red highlight if one has 7 Favours while the background of expedition supplies will turn red if you have 96+. Waiting for the approval here as well!

Now, all these 3 make simple requests when the page is loading and the updates are done by scanning the page for a certain text. Problem is when selling items it doesn’t update the quantity and there may be texts I didn’t included; for example when gaining first point of renown.

The select on the right side is self explanatory and it’s the ability to change outfits. It will also refresh the story (if opened) to correspond with the selected outfit. FBG is oki with this! :) I have an issue here when changing your outfit from the Myself tab; need to work on it.

Not visible and don’t have an oki with it, but I can add the possibility to select a text, right click and have a button that will take you to the wiki page of it. This way you can just select the name of a story and check wiki for info. Here are some two issues as capitalization is a problem if the wiki page isn’t exactly as the one in game, but you’ll be taken to the not found page in any case. The second is that when I left development, the option in the context menu appeared in all browser pages when text was selected; I’ll need to isolate this to FL only!

Other features developed:
D1) Auto scroll to the Onward button if it’s not visible; example when picking a story on the bottom of the page.
D2) The navigation bar (Story, Messages, etc) becomes sticky if scrolling under it
D3) All the buttons were shrank to add an UP one.

Work in progress:
W1) Ability to add a story/card to favourite or blacklist from right click menu. This is kind of done, but it requires more testing as I’m using Chrome storage API and my intention is to use the cloud storage so all the styles will be available if you just log in the browser with your account. This will require extra research to cover all the possible cases (local storage, copy to chrome, autoupdate if possible, merge local and cloud, etc)
Adding a card to favourite will remove the Discard button while the blacklist one will add a style (probably make it red?). When talking about stories is the opposite: highlight the favourite one while remove the Go button of blacklisted ones.

W2) Admin panel. This is going to take a while as I need to do some rewriting; meh, I had very little dev experience one year ago, but I want to make this clean. Here I would like to give the user the possibility to add/remove options, load these options to Chrome cloud, copy from cloud to local and vice-versa, see/update/remove the favourite/blacklist stories/cards

Possible options:
P1) Add a favourite category in inventory where, using the contextual menu, you can add items there.
P2) Add all connection items in a separate category.
These two will add a copy of that item there as I would like to keep them in their original location as well.

Will NOT add:
N1) Ability to open a story from a shortcut
N2) New outfit
N3) One click travel option

Can’t say anything about Firefox yet as I didn’t even checked how extensions there work, but I guess it shouldn’t be an issue. Probably the only problem will be the storage APIs, but we shall see!

Opened to discussions and opinions!

And sorry for keeping this in development for such a long time, but, as I mentioned, my free time is pretty limited. No, no one forces me to stay extra at work, I have a regular 8h shift! But I’m investing in my future and the extra projects that I may have, well, I need extra cash! :D Don’t blame me!
edited by Skinnyman on 6/3/2017

2

Here’s a better demo to get the idea. You can see the last card (mood) doesn’t have the discard button visible.
I’m sorry for not making it so clear, but I’m looking for your opinion on which items (set/chain/tier) should be present in column 1.
And, if FBG agrees, what London Air options should be inserted in the second one?

3

That second picture makes things much easier to understand! If I had to choose, however, I would prefer Fidgeting Writer in first column, mainly because there is an extension already for grouping Tier 3 items. However, having FW items always on eye. Also, I cannot second the idea for changing the outfits directly! I failed a bunch of Dangerous challenges because I would forget to go and change outfit.

4

I would suggest being able to customize what appears from an options page. That way the user could enable/disable specific columns or the outfit menu as they wish. (Also, perhaps a way to reorder the columns.) It’s a big ask, but I’d also love a way to add additional custom columns, selecting specific items/qualities to display there.

For the first column, I’d actually suggest the ability to display both T3 and Fidgeting Writer items at once in two separate columns. A way to reorder the items in each columns would also be nice, if not necessary.

If column two is approved, I’d like the ability to choose which icons to show and to add additional ones from the options page. Adding them would require choosing an image, Airs value, and hover text. (I assume there’s hover text to identify everything?

For column three I’d suggest an option to not display the number of Expedition Supplies over the Docks icon.

5

There will be an admin dashboard (W2) where you could select any option, but that requires a lot of work. As I mentioned, I started this long time ago and I want to publish it even with just a few basic features. This way, I hope I’ll be more motivated to clean and add the existing features and to continue the development of new and better ones!
As for being able to add new qualities/items it’s an almost impossible task; the qualities are pulled from the server only on load and after than everything is done by scanning the text. For example, for Favour/Renown I need to do 3 checks which are hardcoeded; I have the feeling that it’ll fail to scan if you have 0 renown and just gain your first point.

I will have to check how it’ll look and a smaller display and I don’t intend to encumber the page. But it is a WIP! I was also thinking of adding extra tabs in the inventory for Fidgeting, Renown items, a favourite (user input) list.

[quote=Optimatum]If column two is approved, I’d like the ability to choose which icons to show and to add additional ones from the options page. Adding them would require choosing an image, Airs value, and hover text. (I assume there’s hover text to identify everything?
For column three I’d suggest an option to not display the number of Expedition Supplies over the Docks icon.[/quote]
Probably it isn’t that hard to add new ones, but the user will have to add them (icon, name, values, hover text).
The ability to rearrange the columns will probably be the last things to implement as I find it a fancy feature; I would like to focus on helpful features first. :)
edited by Skinnyman on 6/4/2017

6

Thinking about the looks and I wonder if the first column should be removed and just make a category in the Myself tab. Something like this! The favourite tab will take some time as I want it to be user input and save it via Google cloud for easy accessibility. If none of the items would be present the respective category will not be visible so it won’t clog the layout for nothing.