Adapting what the Impress 2020 UI does, but in Ruby instead!
I feel like this is case is really starting to show the power of doing
this stuff in Rails instead of via an API… we can *really* take
advantage of our models and our handy idioms at all points. This is
just so much less *code* than this feature takes in Node + GraphQL +
React.
We were previously planning a more interesting "Add to Cart"
integration with TNT, but it hasn't panned out! For now, we'll just
link to the NC Mall homepage.
Two reasons for this new title:
1. The pitch for "Get these items!" is weaker, now that we're not
getting the power-user integrations we'd planned around.
2. I literally only just thought of it now!
This doesn't do a good job maintaining state across morphs, but hey
it's Working At All in terms of wiring, and that's good!!
Also need to style up the toggle as a cute button instead of a visible
checkbox and the words "Play/pause"!
Add some unobtrusive white background for contrast, show it when the
Turbo frame is loading too, add a spinner cursor, and fix a silliness
of how we put the `position: absolute` stuff into the component-y part
of the hanger spinner instead of this specific use case lol oops!
The most notable thing here is that we keep the movie iframes running!
So if you're trying different pets for an animated item, the animation
keeps going while the new pet layers load alongside it.
This is also nice for like, the species/color picker form, so we're not
taking away input elements from people who depend on e.g. keyboard
focus.
Instead of doing all this listening to Turbo events etc to know when
outfit layers might have changed, making it a custom element and wiring
in the behavior to its actual lifecycle makes it always Just Work!
This is a cute thing that I think sets us up for other stuff down the
line: move more of the outfit appearance logic into the `Outfit` class!
Now, we set up the item page with a temporary instance of `Outfit`,
then ask for its `visible_layers`.
Still missing restricted-zones logic and such, that's next!
Nice, gotta say, this is a pretty neat way of making things feel more
app-y! There's some missing pieces here about like, loading state etc,
but the vibes are pretty good, and the implementation was dead-easy!
Just stripping out the big React component, and having Rails output it!
There's a lot of work rn in extracting the Impress 2020 dependency from
the `wardrobe-2020` React app, and I'm just curious to see if we can
simplify it at all by pulling this stuff *way* back to basics, and
deleting the item page part of `wardrobe-2020` altogether.
In this draft, we regress a lot of functionality: it just shows the
item on a Blue Acara, with no ability to change it! I'm gonna play with
putting more of that back in.
I also haven't actually removed any of the item page React code; I just
stopped calling it. That can be a cleanup for another time, once we're
confident in this experiment!
I think the parens are silly now that this paragraph is just kinda all
bonus clarification info anyway. And I wanted to explain the cost
computation for the potions, and highlight the bundle thing!
If the item names are long, it helps to give them more room to breathe!
Whereas if they're short, it looks silly and makes it harder to scan
the table.
Just an extra bit of help for e.g. Dyeworks items with long names!
The table layout algo can get a bit funky about how it assigns extra
space, I want to encourage things like "Total: 5 items" etc not to
wrap, esp in the Dyeworks case where it's quite long!
There's more and more going on in here! Let's omit the base item name,
increase the table width a bit in this case, and tweak the rest a bit
while we're here.
I uhhh literally didn't know Dyeworks was a gacha system until Kaye
from the Owls team told me lmao
I should maybe uhh read more guides instead of assuming I've osmosed
things correctly oops!
Oh weird, even with `flush: true`, `content_for` will ignore an empty
block and *not* flush out the previous content. This could cause rows
whose subtitles *should* have been empty (e.g. no NC trade value) to
display the previous row's value instead.
Let's make this whole situation a bit more robust by having the
*template* clear out the subtitle right before calling the block. That
way, a previous row's value *can't* get in, no matter what.
I think it helps a bit to have only the label be dotted-underlined, to
hint that I'm offering help about what that *means*, but clear the way
for the value itself to be more visible and less cluttered.
I thought to myself, "I wonder if it's possible to use a sneaky hacky
`content_for` trick to be able to run this code in the template." And
indeed it is!
It's tricky cuz like, I want to render this template, and I want to
provide _multiple_ slots of content to it. So, in this variant, we keep
the block as being primarily for the actions, but also optionally
accept `content_for :subtitle` inside that block, too.
Executing that correctly is a bit tricky! The subtitle comes *before*
the actions. So, we `yield` the actions block immediately, save it to a
variable, and *then* get the subtitle block.
Previously, I added a Dyeworks section that was incorrect: the base
item being available in the NC Mall does *not* mean you can necessarily
dye it with a potion!
In this change, we lean on Owls to tell us more about Dyeworks status,
and only group items in this section that Owls has marked as "Permanent
Dyeworks".
We don't have support for limited-time Dyeworks items yet—I've sent out
a message asking the Owls team for more info on what they do for those
items!
I started writing this up, then sent a preview to a friend, and he was
like "oh cool, but also this is not correct?"
I didn't realize Dyeworks has limited-time support to be *able* to dye
certain items. Hey, glad we're writing this guide for people like me,
then! lol
I wonder if we can lean on Owls for this. It seems like they already
list "Permanent Dyeworks" for some items, I wonder if they say
something special for active limited-edition Dyeworks items!
We could do a whole thing about like, checking singular vs plural, but
I'd rather just keep it simpler; I think it's clear from context that
we're talking about a category, so plural is fine even if it's not
actually more than one.
Okay so, like 30 minutes ago I added fallback behavior for cases where
we can't correctly infer the color from a PB item's name… and then I
pulled it up in the color and found that, oh, right, there are already
3 PB items that *correctly* return `nil` for `Item#pb_color`: Aisha
Collar, Elephante Hat, and Ixi Collar.
This is because they're common items that apply to many colors, like
the basics, but also many other less-special or older color variants.
They are the most likely case where we'll return `nil`.
So, I've updated our fallback UI to, instead of talk vaguely about
missing data, just assume that we're dealing with basic items. In the
rare window of time where a new color is released, and we have PB items
for it but no manual color data yet, this can just incorrectly say
"Basic Colors" and that's fine.
Oh right, it's possible for `Item#pb?` to return true, but
`Item#pb_color` to return `nil`, if the item has the paintbrush item
description but we can't find a color whose name matches the item name.
This would be expected if a new color were added to Neopets, and PB
items for it were modeled by the community, but we hadn't manually
added the color to the database yet.
Previously, the Item Getting Guide would crash in this scenario. Now,
it correctly handles the possibility of a `nil` value for `pb_color`,
and shows some placeholder info.
To test this, I temporarily edited some item names to not contain the
color name anymore (e.g. "P-rate Elephante Shirt and Vest"), then
loaded the guide and made changes until it no longer crashed.
