|
Post by ViciousLothario on Jun 6, 2023 16:50:32 GMT -5
Entry #25: Company Sizes
Here I was developing the fed details menu, didn't make much of an advance on that front, but started to look at EWR screen and got some hints on how to do it.
When I realized, hey... I have the popularity being displayed but not the company size. And why? Because company sizes aren't database dependent. Well technically they are, but they are calculated using the popularity values stored in them.
I could add a column to the table which would keep track of the size or do the arithmetic operation on the fly everywhere the company size is shown. I went with option number 2. And got to work on the company sizes, I can also add a column afterwards to the table to keep it there. But it's just one big if statement.
Tomorrow I will post in detail how company sizes are calculated. But there are several sizes and some of them aren't easy to achieve at all. Also, american, canadian and mexican companies are a bit forced to operate in those areas, while companies in europe or uk can choose to expand to the japanese or australian market, and the japanese/australian companies in reverse order. But then we have mexican companies which are quite popular in their home country which lead me to think... If a company has over 75 pop on their region they are considered medium companies. Spillover will also be a thing but broadcaster will have to play a huge role on popularity gains and of course in the company wars, where not only match ratings\show ratings matter... Let's say a show of WWF broadcasts in japan, the ratings and crowd reaction for those will be calculated according to the superstars popularity in those regions. Because if you see a company which you don't know the wrestlers, you're likely to say, good match, good event but the draw won't be the same as it is in your company home region, because the wrestler isn't popular enough in those areas. So hiring wrestlers to invade a wrestling market can be a thing or loan your wrestlers to a company to work your superstar popularity in those areas in a faster pace.
There is a lot to cover still. But I'm on a good path, dedicating 3\4 daily hours to the game, is evolving at a steady pace despite of some slumps along the way, it's part of it.
|
|
|
Post by ViciousLothario on Jun 7, 2023 9:03:14 GMT -5
Entry #26: Companies Info, Roster and Titles
Developing the companies info when we expand row on pick a fed. I want it to show the roster and titles over there too, by pressing the according tab.
I still don't like the way the roster is being displayed on the tab, but at least it already shows all the wrestlers contracted to that specific fed.
So I want roster in one side, TVShows / Events Schedule in the middle(still deciding), and Titles on the right side, with title name, and current holder. No need to show title history there. These are just informative details about the company that can help you decide which company you want to assume control. When I detected a simple problem with title current holders because I'm making a lot of changes to titles and title history, title has information about the title and the title history is the one that has a field if the worker is the current holder of the title, but my conversion algorithm is doing this wrongly somewhere, because in TEW databases we have some values that are -1 on worker id, and those values are weird to say the least. But my database thought isn't better either.
So I need to go back to the converter, and have two options. Fix the algorithm or just copy the base tables as they are in TEW database, which would be easier than altering the algorithm. Need a little while to decide. Tomorrow I'm off work and even today will try to fix that. Despite not liking the odd database in TEW I think is better to just adapt it to suit our needs.
Also on the pictures front, like I said I would upload pictures to an external source, but now that I think of it, and since I will be getting a host, I think it's better to put them on the host, add an additional field to the game info which points to the picture folder and sanitize all the pictures to webp/compressed jpg so it doesn't ocuppy a lot of disk space so it reduces the number of external sources and cross origin errors, or even pathname changes since they aren't under my control. Let's see.
I guess I can also drop the tab concept there, and just work within a single page, yes it will be longer, but at the same time If I make the view compact enough, I reduce the amount of clicks to showcase all this info.
Also, each game area has a wrestling industry and economical industry associated to it... I don't want this numbers to be random, well economical factor kinda has to be, ut I don't want the economy to only impact how much you get from sponsors, but also the ticket prices and such, can people afford a wrestling show? Like Production Values, how much you pay for equipment in a particular area, and what's the quality of that equipment, so the universe actually feels alive and you can make some interesting choices based on it. Wrestling industry should be impacted by the ratings of the wrestling events as well and of course some randomness associated to it. Even if you are a smaller company, but deliver high-quality shows, why should your ticket sales be based on your popularity... So this are just some random thoughts, but it's all part of the plan.
|
|
|
Post by Mongo the Destroyer on Jun 7, 2023 17:01:27 GMT -5
Now so far most of the stuff you've been doing converting on has been the data itself, right? I don't suppose there's gonna be an easy way to "acquire" how shows actually run and is filtered through all the data, is there? And if you say "just do what TEW does" I might have to get violent, lol.
|
|
|
Post by ViciousLothario on Jun 8, 2023 3:37:38 GMT -5
Now so far most of the stuff you've been doing converting on has been the data itself, right? I don't suppose there's gonna be an easy way to "acquire" how shows actually run and is filtered through all the data, is there? And if you say "just do what TEW does" I might have to get violent, lol. It's not really just converting data. I'm converting data to the values that I think I will need to do the game logic and calculations within our game. At the moment, I'm developing game logic already. But as I am developing game logic, I've encountered a mistake of my part in the titles and title histories conversion. Titles only have one stat, which is prestige, there isn't a change there, is just prestige. But you have title history, number of defenses and all that jazz. And for some odd reason, when I developed the converter, to convert the TEW database to Wrestling Booking Warfare database, it isn't showing me the correct current holder. So I need to go back a few steps and take a look at what was wrong. But since the data in titles and titles histories is pretty much the same as it is in TEW scenario database, where I tried to optimize the database for faster queries, I might just use that database part of TEW or create my own database part to present data to the user. No calculations or whatsoever come from the database, at this point.
If you ask me, ok Titles have prestige, what does prestige does for the player? Or for the show? I might throw 1000 random thoughts about what I'm planning. But as of this moment, doesn't even affect anything. Is just a stat that I present to the user that comes from the database.
As easy way to acquire how shows run... Or the calculations behind them. I need to get to that part. Right now, I'm making the logic of the first screen, the lobby screen. Where you create the lobby specific database, and if you haven't picked a federation already and the database is already created you see the pick a federation screen. In this part you only see the company information, popularity, production, roster, schedule, titles and title holders, etc. This data is just a small information from what is the current state of the company. And when I wanted to show the titles, ran into this issue of certain data being wrongly input to the database.
Already have plans for the calculations and have plans for the pop gain. But can only really speak of those when I get to that part.
I have plans to add several features down the line, but this part is required to get to those features. And like I already said in the past, just because a certain value is stored in the database doesn't mean I have to use it for calculation purposes and might even remove that value from the database at all, if nothing good comes out of it.
|
|
|
Post by ViciousLothario on Jun 8, 2023 3:49:43 GMT -5
Another good example is company sizes. Company sizes are already calculated by me. Which is good, but now if you ask me... What does company size actually affects in the gameplay. Nothing, because there isn't a gameplay yet. I might have plans for it and speak some random thoughts in my entries, but we're building from 0. TEW part of it, just forget about that, the only part I worried about TEW was getting the user-made scenarios and databases and convert that data to what I plan to use in Wrestling Booking Warfare. That's the only role of it, nothing else.
|
|
|
Post by ViciousLothario on Jun 8, 2023 5:07:54 GMT -5
Entry #27: Titles
So I had to go back to the root of the problem and changed the titles and title histories database to be easier to work with. But now the problem of title current holders at the start of the game is fixed. And all of this is happening to show this information when we are going to pick a federation to be owner of. So we can see titles and current title holders. There are 3 types of titles, Singles, Tag Team and Trios. We can also set minimal and maximal weight requirements to a certain title.
|
|
|
Post by ViciousLothario on Jun 8, 2023 7:11:03 GMT -5
Entry #28: Fed Details on pick a federation screen almost finished
I know that my html and css abilities aren't the greatest, as a programmer my focus is always on functionality, but I think that we need to tidy up things at least a bit for functionality and readability. Without further ado, here's the idea I came up for the pick a federation and expanding fed details. The images are a bit loading even on localhost, but hey, it's not a 1 second wait that will define if you play the game or not, I could use pjax or ajax to load or lazyload, but I prefer that all the data is processed and then presented instead of sending some information and loading the rest on the client side as we go.
I process everything server side and the give it to the user, a mistake a lot of people do is lazy load. Please bear in mind that I don't have a .htaccess file here, where most of the caching will work for images and everything else... I'm running a development environment with docker-compose. So not only I'm rendering my OS GUI as everything else and ask for those files without them being cached.
But here it is! A little sneak peek, you see a blank space on the right bottom corner, that's on purpose. As I need to add TV Shows and Events there.
In the perfomance side I'm rendering all the view even with those details and loading times aren't that taxing for now. I could also apply, that only when you click on expand row it opens a request to the server-side that will answer with the fed details, but like I said, saving seconds or miliseconds on loading this page... Then would increase the loading time when we click on expand row, and it would open another request.
Request handling on a server is really the bottom-neck for any webpage. Because let's say I request the view for WCW fed details and Mongo for WWF, and 100 users ask for a specific fed. Some of those requests would be in queue waiting for the server to serve them. This way, not only I reduce the number of requests and send a bigger package in one request, rather than sending small packages in 10000 requests.
EDIT: OH and the roster and titles are scrollable... Just like EWR, I won't show any stats here for the wrestlers although I could since I'm loading the wrestler object. Titles being presented with a image is also cool. But if I added a worker picture associated with it, the package would be bigger. I want it to be so, that it doesn't show that many stats here, so there's a element of surprise, also want to put users a bit off the thing, book for ratings, but to book interesting shows that others can pick on, on their lobby. I would also like to add a user rating to the shows. So when you look at a certain show, you can comment it, rate it with stars and such, but I don't want that to be affecting ratings of the show, because you know... I would rate all my opponents show as 0 stars and say the show was boring and proceed to rant on a podcast like Vince Russo.
|
|
|
Post by ViciousLothario on Jun 9, 2023 4:42:55 GMT -5
Entry #29: Pick a federation completed
Pick a federation screen is already finished and the logic implemented, which will lead to the next step that is the game screen.
After giving much thought about it. I will go with News on the main screen a very common view TEW-like, with some changes. I want the user to see universe news, latest shows held within the universe, negotiations started, events scheduled, what other users are doing that is of public knowledge of course, all of those will be in the main screen. The header will always be the same across all views and all of them will let you advance to the next day or multi-day advance all in the same button. Which will open a modal also known as pop-up and you will have several options there. The navigation between game screens, will be done using the sidebar or the top navbar. So you will have two ways to navigate and manage your company. The sidebar and top navbar will always be attached to the lobby you are currently at. You will also have a button to leave lobby and go back to main screen where all lobbies are listed, information and other outside lobby information and you can also navigate to another lobby you are part of, and these will be shown on the bottom of the sidebar or navbar. You have buttons to go fullscreen, change the layout of some stuff in the website, like light/dark mode, fixed sidebar, etc, and the logout button.
Work is flowing steadily as possible, yesterday had a day off so it was enough to finish the pick a federation. Now I have to work on the menu items to be dynamic according to the user, because I won't have the same lobbies that another has.
I will have to create several views, like... Your federation, your roster, your schedule, etc. And lobby/universe related information, to see other companies, to see other wrestlers, etc, etc. I will use a lot of tabs even within a particular wrestler profile. Users also need the ability to edit certain wrestler details. So it reduces the amount of clicks and windows like we have in EWR or TEW.
So for the moment is more of designing a game-plan to address all these features, so I don't start writing shitty code just to get things done and when I open the Code Editor, I know what I'm doing, what I want to do and go step-by-step. In programming, sometimes it's better to lose time planning what to do, than doing and then editing what you've done. So the whole app design will take me a small little while.
In the meantime, I'm also doing some simulations in TEW and EWR playing those games to distract me and to learn some more stuff about what I think is vital and isn't vital when playing this game genre.
|
|
|
Post by ViciousLothario on Jun 11, 2023 5:17:37 GMT -5
Entry #30: Doing some markup for the main dashboard screen
Today I decided to do some markup for the main screen, for those of you that are familiar with TEW you might recognize what I'm doing here.
This page will be left blank for now, since there are no news being generated yet. I really need to start working on the menu navigation and the several screen we might need. This is just the main screen. Where I will list news, and latest events.
Not much else will go here. I want players to know what's going on and what other players are up to on a daily basis so going with this base seems like a good start.
|
|
|
Post by ViciousLothario on Jun 13, 2023 2:23:21 GMT -5
Entry #31: Menu work
Yes, that's right. The last few days I've been a little inactive with the game since I'm a bit overwhelmed with my current workload and have to work extra hours in my company. It is part of my job and my role, I work from home which is a big advantage but there are times when we have to work extra and extra, so when I turn off Visual Studio from work, I'm not feeling it to continue programming.
But that also helps in developing new ideas. Remember from last post that header with date, the game name and version and the button advance... That will be thrown away and we will use top navbar and the sidebar for that purpose. Game version is on the footer anyway.
So here is the menu work I've done in the last hour or so, as I am about to leave to work.
This is the current menu outside of the 'game'...
When we expand/click My Lobbies all the lobbies which we are part of are listed. And we can join them in a fast and easy manner.
When we enter the lobby, and go to the game, instead of having the date info and other info from last post on the top of the page we have this:
I will move the advance to the sidebar and that leaves more room for the content on the page to 'breathe'. This might not seem much, but I've managed to get the logic to build this menus dynamically with info pulled from the database, so the company name, logo, date, is all regarding MY current Company and such, if it was another user who controlled WCW it would show WCW info. You see on the first two pictures that little header that says Lobbies? I will use that same logic in the game. So with the logic out of the way, it's just a process of adding links to navigate and manage your company because I have the most important one, your company... Don't worry cause there is always an ACL check, if you can access something or not, and that ACL isn't easy to break.
When we collapse the sidebar, which we can... The content of the page expands to become bigger and we only see icons. And the top navbar that I talk about is something like this:
On the left side a button to collapse the sidebar... The blank space will be filled with text regarding the game, like Roster Dropdown, Company Dropdown so on and so forth, and on the right side we already have 3 buttons, the first is to go fullscreen. Yes... We can play on fullscreen, contrary to TEW, the other one is to manage our layout and last one is to logout from the app entirely. I might take that out, and only allow the user to logout on the lobbies/index screens and use that button just to leave lobby or advance to the next day, it depends, it might seem a bit unethical not giving the option to logout there. OH and about the layout, here are the options:
So every user can customize the theme/layout the way he wants on his browser, since all of it is rendered on client/browser side. I plan to add more customizations here.
That's about it for now. But there are going to be more news soon, stay tuned, cause this project is going forward sooner or later.
|
|
|
Post by ViciousLothario on Jun 14, 2023 4:00:08 GMT -5
Entry #32: More menu work
Hello everyone who follows the thread and the development.
Today I had the opportunity to lay the real foundations of the game and create the menu. This is going to suffer changes over the course of time and I'm really open to suggestions here. Let me leave a peek of my work so far.
This is the sidebar menu to the the left, you can notice that you can easily navigate and some of the link names there are quite intuitive others are not and it's subject to change, specially on the game world one.
But about Your company, in this example is WWF. What happens when you expand?
You can see the negotiation list with the badge to the right. I can apply those badges pretty much anywhere and can also style the menu because I needed to copy the original Menu widget and make some changes of my own to the code.
I think the good part about this menu, is that no matter which screen you currently at, you can always navigate to where you want to go. I think the expanded menus shouldn't just open on click, but also on hover.
Feedback is highly appreciated on this part, because it's a big part of user experience and how people feel about it, it's not really a matter of my personal taste. So I'm very receptive to hear some thoughts/opinions.
Now I have to leave to work, because my boss is already spamming my phone... See you soon guys, I'm so glad this is moving steadily, you can't even imagine.
|
|
|
Post by ViciousLothario on Jun 16, 2023 3:46:39 GMT -5
Entry #33: Working on the roster screen
I'm currently developing the roster screen and we have some neat options. We have the gridView as per usual, although I will later give the opportunity to change layouts for those who don't like the grid view with expand row, already have some other layouts planned, but as I always said, it's better for me to work with the grid for now, since I'm used to it and allows me to develop faster.
I ran into an issue today in the morning where I didn't realize I was replacing a variable with a object because of a find one query, now I understand why my boss dislikes and doesn't allow me to re-use variable names.
Anyway, it was a challenge, because now I need to work on the search model so we can filter our roster nicely. I'm using WWF as a test to benchmark perfomance and I believe they have the biggest roster in the game so it's good to test with it. It returns me 102 records, which is a lot. The grid comes in handy...
I defined a method for search roster and despite doing all the logic on the controller I guess I will move that logic to search model so it's easier for me to set up filters and fields. We're going to join several tables to present the information to the user about a certain wrestler, it's great really. I also want to give the ability to change gimmick on the fly or prepare a turn with a mouse click on the main page.
Also... We can export the grid and our filtered results to excel, csv and pdf format. I like that because I know EWR players are spreadsheet lovers. And can then work with the data the way they want to. Such an easy thing as an export that never existed in EWR would save EWR players countless hours.
Apart from Raiden Ishimori stealing my sanity with his FPWW shows, increasing my desire to simulate in FPWW like it was my first time, we're moving and getting somewhere boys. Pretty soon, alpha will be released. For those who want to test the game when it's alpha, just pm me.
|
|
|
Post by ViciousLothario on Jun 16, 2023 15:52:39 GMT -5
Entry #34: After trying to pull my own hair out, some work is done
Yeah today I had a bit of a rough time with the dataprovider for some stupid reason and some incompatibilities with YII2 and PHP 8.1. It was stressfull... This is still WIP, but here you can see something already.
Some of the attributes are going to be difficult to filter, for an example I show overall pop in this grid, was thinking my code was wrong in someway but apparently I have a problem with assets and jquery/javascript, have no clue what was going on. And then bam, removed the export menu, and it worked. I was mesmerized. Then spotted some errors on conversion once again, but they weren't really errors, it was everything from the Yii assets, I hate Yii assets, I said that the grid was going to be easier to work with, but at this point I'm feeling towards a jquery datatable... Or just come up with some bootstrap design and do a lot of javascript work, because Yii is frustrating me with stuff it shouldn't, specially regarding relations and the tables prefix I managed to input, Yii is like... You can't do that bro. Yes I can, because I'm the Bro, Bro!
Spent 4\5 hours with this bullshit. A bit frustrating really, but Yeah... it's out of the way, we will work through
At least now we have a ROSTER! And I'm half happy about it. Tommorow in the morning will go to the beach, relax with family, it has been a long week.
|
|
|
Post by Mongo the Destroyer on Jun 16, 2023 16:57:55 GMT -5
So am I to presume that if I click on the blue section headings it reorganizes the list based on that? Like if I click "tech" then Curt Hennig goes to the top?
|
|
|
Post by ViciousLothario on Jun 17, 2023 3:05:08 GMT -5
So am I to presume that if I click on the blue section headings it reorganizes the list based on that? Like if I click "tech" then Curt Hennig goes to the top? Indeed my friend.
And I'm working on filters too at the same time. I would like to read the user input and do something like on tech field >70 and it will show everyone above 70 on that attribute. Just found and edited a cool extension to work with array data, because I have so many merges, it's easier than using activerecord. Or dynamic active records.
|
|