The 2020 Next.js rewrite, now being merged into impress!
Matchu
71215fe599
The layer preloader already takes advantage of, and primes, the HTTP cache. But we still do duplicate work, on every OutfitPreview render, to re-execute movie clip libraries, and create a movie clip to test for animations. The former is nontrivial cost, and the latter is often large cost. This can make even basic outfit changes slow, when there's no change to the movie clip layers and the player is paused! Here, we add an LRU cache for movie clip libraries, and for the question of "is it animated?". This should speed up a number of places where we would reload the movie (including between toggling the item), and various changes that were triggering full movie clip rebuilds unnecessarily. We _aren't_ solving here for the fact that toggling an animated item requires rebuilding the movie clip, which could conceivably be cached—but with some state management trickiness, because ideally it should be a separate clip for each context where it's being shown. Imo not yet worth the effort! (esp because I think users understand that toggling an animated item can be slow, whereas this was affecting _other_ actions way too much) |
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| api | ||
| cypress | ||
| public | ||
| scripts | ||
| src | ||
| .gitignore | ||
| cypress.json | ||
| LICENSE.md | ||
| package.json | ||
| README.md | ||
| tsconfig.json | ||
| vercel.json | ||
| yarn.lock | ||
Dress to Impress 2020
This is a rewrite of the Neopets customization app, Dress to Impress!
It's a React app, built with create-react-app, running on Vercel, JAMstack-style.
The motivating goals of the rewrite are:
- Mobile friendly, to match Neopets's move to mobile.
- Simple modern tech, to be more maintainable over time and decrease hosting costs.
If you want to contribute, please reach out to Matchu! This repository is almost shareable, but the main limitation is that we currently run even our development server against the production database, and those credentials are private. But we can change that if there's interest!
Architecture sketch
First, there's the core app, in this repository.
- React app: Runs on Vercel's CDN. Code in
src/app. - API functions: Run on Vercel's Serverless Functions. Code in
apiandsrc/server.
Then, there's our various data storage components.
- MySQL database: Runs on our Linode VPS, colocated with the old app.
- Amazon S3: Stores PNGs of pet/item appearance layers, converted from the Neopets SWFs. (Once Neopets releases HTML5-compatible assets for all their items, we can hopefully remove this!)
Finally, there's our third-party integrations.
- Auth0: For authentication. Data imported from our old OpenNeo ID auth database.
- Honeycomb: For observability & performance insights on the backend.
- Discord: For logging Support users' actions to a private Discord server.
- Neopets: We load pet data from them! And plenty of assets!
Notable old components not currently included in Impress 2020:
- Elasticsearch: Used for lightning-fast item search queries. So far, we're finding the MySQL queries to be fast enough in practice. Might consider using some kind of fulltext query engine if that doesn't scale with more users!
- Resque: Used to schedule background tasks for modeling and outfit thumbnails.
- Outfit thumbnail generation: Used for outfit thumbnails in the app. I'm wondering if there's a way to get away with not doing this, like just rendering the layers... but I suppose if we want a good social share experience, then we'll probably want this. Maybe we can generate them on the fly as API requests, instead of adding a data storage component?
- Memcache: Used to cache common HTML and JSON snippets. Not yet needing anything similar in Impress 2020!
- The entire old Rails app! No references to it in here, aside from some temporary URL links to features that aren't implemented here yet.