When we decided to start out with /api/assetProxy, we didn't know how much the load would be in practice, so we just went ahead and tried it! Turns out, it was too high, and Vercel shut down our deployment 😅
Now, we've off-loaded this to a Fastly CDN proxy, which should run even faster and more efficiently, without adding pressure to Vercel servers and pushing our usage numbers! And I suspect we're gonna stay comfortably in Fastly's free tier :) but we'll see!
(Though, as always, if Neopets can finally upgrade their own stuff to HTTPS, we'll get to tear down this whole proxy altogether!)
I guess something got more picky about the loading sequencing: the fade in animation was happening faster than the cached image could load. Now, we explicitly wait for the image to load (even though we know it's probably cached) before fading it in.
I noticed that, if you're _reading_ the beta callout it's obviously a feedback link, but it's easy to glaze over "Tell us what you think". Here, I've added the word "feedback" to make it stand out on scanning the page, while adding "Got ideas?" to keep it feeling colloquial.
Oops, our movie layer promises don't have a .cancel() method, so calling it crashed our error handler. Now, when there's an error loading a layer and there are HTML5 layers visible, we'll correctly show the "Could not load preview. Try again?" message.
So I broke the Download button when we switched to impress-2020.openneo.net, and I forgot to update the Amazon S3 config.
But in addition to that, I'm making some code changes here, to make downloads faster: we now use exactly the same URL and crossOrigin configuration between the <img> tag on the page, and the image that the Download button requests, which ensures that it can use the cached copy instead of loading new stuff. (There were two main cases: 1. it always loaded the PNGs instead of the SVG, which doesn't matter for quality if we're rendering a 600x600 bitmap anyway, but is good caching, and 2. send `crossOrigin` on the <img> tag, which isn't necessary there, but is necessary for Download, and having them match means we can use the cached copy.)
Oops, I shipped with the images.neopets.com TODO undone! Also, the white background was intersecting with the close X for the feedback form.
In this change, we move the xwee image into our bundle instead of depending on images.neopets.com, and we edit it to have a transparent background, which looks nicer for dark mode. (And we do a srcset!)
Previously I tried to be clever and pre-optimize by putting all the layers onto one canvas… I think this probably helped by batching their paints, but it made fades less smooth by not taking advantage of native CSS transitions, and it made us dip into JS way more often than necessary.
Here, I take the simpler approach: just layers of <img> and <canvas> tags, with each animated layer on its own canvas, and letting the browser handle transitions and compositing, and separate `setInterval` timers to manage their framerates.
I have a suspicion that batching the paints could help performance more, but honestly, maybe that batching is already happening somehow, because things look pretty great on my big-screen stress test now; and so if it _is_ relevant, I want to wait and see after testing on low-power devices.
Not 100% sure on the copy, but I like that it's a bit clearer about the value prop. I tried to work in customization for SEO, but it feels too clunky in a sentence, might need to put it elsewhere in the copy!
Yeah, mm, turns out I don't think it's actually viable to model from Impress 2020, because we can't reasonably set up the SWFs and PNGs in the ways we need, especially for compatibility with Classic DTI.
We can turn this on again later, once Classic DTI is gone, and all assets are converted to HTML5 -- or if we build some kind of bridge to Classic's asset code, or we write new PNG conversion code.
These changes are most relevant for playing around in the dev server, modeing against an empty database. But they'll also help in real-world modeling scenarios! e.g. modeling a new species/color combo is now a bit nicer, we don't show a blank entry in the color picker
this is the last one to get parity with current modeling, I think?? I'm gonna add one more feature though: removing no-longer-used assets from the item
Oops, when building the Support tool to label pet appearances, I didn't realize that there's also a boolean `labeled` field that needs to be true for labeled appearances. Without it, the old app shows the appearance as "Unlabeled".
I also ran this query to fix the rows we'd incorrectly written:
```
mysql> UPDATE pet_states SET labeled = 1 WHERE mood_id IS NOT NULL;
Query OK, 158 rows affected (0.14 sec)
Rows matched: 19640 Changed: 158 Warnings: 0
```
This is mostly because I want to chain the rels after both items and assets save, and I want to be able to specify that stuff a bit more precisely, rather than the like, layers-of-awaits we were building up.
yeah, I had unified Pet into Outfit, but now I think that was overly clever… 😅
Here, I define a new Pet type, and it has some of the fields of Outfit and the deprecated fields still.
I did this because I want petAppearance to work, for UC testing!
We download the schema from prod, and omit real data, but I didn't notice that we were still pulling the metadata of the auto increment counter for IDs! Now, we scrub that from the schema file we save.
I think it's great that we hide the button when it's not relevant, but that makes it hard to know that it exists. Here, we do some cute tricks to blink up the "Paused" button when it first appears, even if the user doesn't have the controls visible right now
We did this a while back too, but I guess something changed in Apollo: I guess it used to return identical item objects from the cache on its own, and now it returns brand new item objects. So we gotta do the object caching hacks ourselves!
This speeds up add/remove item state updates from 500ms to 100ms on my Mac, because we stop re-rendering all the Item components and their complex Chakra children.
This is especially worth doing now, because animations make long updates much more noticeable! (It interrupts the animation 😅)
Honestly kinda surprised this worked on the first go! I was worried something about the process would make the sorta like, instant-cache expectation not work.
Still thinking it might be considerate to like, keep a LRU cache of MovieClip options, so that we don't double-execute these scripts when adding stuff… we even re-execute the ones already applied lol 😅 and that adds lots of script tags to the body!
But yeah I'm not gonna push on it yet until I see evidence that it actually causes performance issues in practice
This is really very cute, but too many items it turns out are lod despite not actually being animated 🙃 it's helpful for looking for test cases tho, so I'm keeping it, but support only!
I also ended up really liking the icon-badge+tooltip design as a way to summarize lil things, so I'm trying Own/Want short badges in the same style.
reflecting further on the abstraction, I'm noticing that this isn't an Easel abstraction like I envisioned early, and that we're baking some Neopets stuff into it. And I think that's the right call, esp with the tricky MovieClip stuff coming up, where I think more barriers would hurt more than they help. So, a new name!
Did it revert? Or did I just never notice that it only worked on mount, not on new loading states?
Also, fixed a bug where we were injecting the script tag way too much, and triggering loading too much that way too!
still just for static stuff, but it's good to be working!
PosePicker got a bit broken, CSS scaling doesn't work quite right anymore, we might need to just up the internal resolution or something?
notable layout change is that the text content will now try to center itself, and we push the buttons off to the right. we also needed to tweak the layout code a bit to get the buttons to feel centered with the top two lines, bc centering against the full block just feels wrong, they want to be top-y in terms of positioning, but still feel centered-y in terms of visual balance
Honestly I don't think this is the long-term home for the Modeling link, I think it'll become a homepage-only link as we add more modules there. But I wanted to get it out of the way!
This wasn't actually super helpful to read anyway, and I think it was causing us to hit rate limits.
We can maybe add back a limited version to like, add path context of _where_ a span happened in the GQL tree, but like, I feel like that's typically been pretty intuitive so far.
Boom, now we can also run a clean MySQL test db on each test that wants it :)
the test I wrote as a sample is currently marked `it.skip` because it's not passing yet!
This updates the MySQL procedure to get the important special colors, but keeps the GQL behavior the same by only filtering to Blue. Just an incremental step before changing the behavior, to make sure I've gotten it right so far!
Snapshots significantly updated, but, from scanning it, I think that's expected changes from actual modeling progress. Hooray!
Fading the whole preview to a black overlay for the loading state was feeling aggressive, especially since loading delay wasn't working correctly!
In this change, I fix loading delay, and I add a nice subtle "corner" variant for outfit preview spinners :)
Here, we add loading skeletons to lots of individual elements, instead of doing a whole item placeholder skeleton. That helps when coming from pages where we have some data, like name and thumbnail, but things is isNc are still missing.
It looks nice, but also particularly means we can handle the loading for the preview separately, get that started faster and iterate better on it in dev!
Initially the spinner was only used in OutfitPreview, where the background was always pretty dark. Now that we use it in more general contexts, we need a light/dark distinction!
Also went and standardized out the `size` props
Here, we extract a lean WardrobePageLayout component, so that we can bundle it into the main app as a loading state for WardrobePage.
This means that clicking Start from the homepage will, instead of flashing the screen to white while WardrobePage loads, show the correctly-sized black/white page layout instead.
I think the Chakra upgrades made these overrides stop working? added !important so that they happen again!
The regression meant the homepage looked worse, always having the selects fade in :/
I'm using my first ever MySQL Store Procedure for clever cleverness in caching the modeling query!
I realized that checking for the latest contribution timestamp is a pretty reliable way of deciding when modeling data was last updated at all. If that timestamp hasn't changed, we can reuse the results!
I figured that, because query roundtrips are a bottleneck in this environment, I didn't want to make that query separately. So, I built a MySQL procedure to do the check on the database side!
I think I got all up in my head about direct queries for this one, because of a previous implementation I had in mind, and I forgot that I could just query species and color from the cache by reference without breaking out of the API provided to the cache function!
I also learned in here that I _can_ look up things from the root by doing `readField("allSpecies", {__ref: "ROOT_QUERY"})`, which I struggled to figure out my previous time. I couldn't figure out how to read an uncached field with arguments (I couldn't quite figure out how to build a proper FieldNode, and passing the string form seemed to provide `null` to the `species` cache field reader), but it's probably doable!
(the permissioning happens on the backend in the prev change! but yeah we send the auth token in the headers, so the backend knows who you are and whether to show you private data)
(also it is just owned items not in any list!)
Essentially I want the center-y visual balance around the image, and the name and _one_ line of tags. If there are extra tags, I want that to go down on its own, rather than bringing down the image+buttons to center against them.
The single-line-of-tags case is the most common, and I think it makes things feel more consistent for all the items to stick to that basic layout, while trying to keep that layout feeling center-y
I was getting annoyed by how, when you're using search, trying on an item will remove conflicting stuff, and then if you decide you don't like what you tried the old stuff _doesn't come back_
As of this change, it does! When you start a new search, we save the outfit state, and then whenever you change the items we ask "hey can these old ones safely be re-worn again?" and re-wear them if so.
On the search panel, not all items have the remove button, and it's confusing to have the other buttons be in inconsistent positions!
Move the Remove button to the left side of the list, so that everything else is positioned the same regardless
Okay, we handle the new pages correctly! Still some weird bugs when you send requests near each other? Probably wise to migrate to Apollo's new way of doing this
This is just an implementation thing, but I realized we can just insert the Zone data into the initial Apollo cache, instead of doing weird field definitions
I _do_ still want the @client tags in the queries though, to tell them not to make server requests at all
Been bothered by this for a while!
My hope is that this isn't a notable marginal performance hit—we were already walking the table and doing string ops anyway, I can't imagine adding to that is actually that much of a marginal lift, when the main bottleneck was probably reads. And the perf should be identical for simple single-word queries anyway. But we'll see how it feels!
This was a subtle little thing for a while! If you switch species/color, such that an item doesn't fit the pet anymore, we used to just hide it. Now, we show it in a list, so that you can understand what went wrong, and have the option to remove it.
Previously, if you switched species/color such that one of your items was no longer compatible, we _would_ still apply its zone restrictions to the visible layer set.
In this change, we fix that server-side, since I think it makes the most sense for an empty appearance to be truly empty!
This was bothering me, I'm surprised and pleased by how easy it seems it was to fix? :)
The strategy is just, look for groups that are provably redundant, and filter them out.
I hope it's correct! It's definitely cozier. Kyrii Mage items are good tests, they have a lot of interesting zones!
I figured that we'd want simpler UI in the ItemsPanel when possible… but now that we've got it pretty simple and comfy, I think the consistency is better
These are nice! :)
The `hideSimpleZones` option I'm not sure about yet, but I figure that:
1. For a new user just doing simple outfits, I feel like the double data on the items page just looks silly, so I want to streamline for that
2. But I _do_ want to let the user think about zone complexity when things _are_ multi-zone.
I did also consider just hiding the zone badge for the header you're under, but I figured the consistency of having the item and its badges look the same in all the places in the list was more important.
This is in preparation for hiding bio zone restrictions but showing item zone restrictions!
I also refactor the build-cached-data script substantially, to run GraphQL against the server instead of a custom query.
