The Neopets Media Archive is a service that mirrors `images.neopets.com`
over time! Right now we're starting by just loading manifests, and
using them to replace the hacks we used for determining the Alt Style
PNG and SVG URLs; but with time, I want to load *all* customization
media files, to have our own secondary file source that isn't dependent
on Neopets to always be up.
Impress 2020 already caches manifest files, but this strategy is
different in two ways:
1. We're using the filesystem rather than a database column. (That is,
manifest data is kinda duplicated in the system right now!) This is
because I intend to go in a more file-y way long-term anyway, to
load more than just the manifests.
2. Impress 2020 guesses at the manifest URLs by pattern, and reloads
them on a regular basis. Instead, we use the modeling system: when
TNT changes the URL of a manifest by appending a new `?v=` query
string to it, this system will consider it a new URL, and will load
the new copy accordingly.
Fun fact, I actually have been prototyping some of this stuff in a side
project I'd named `impress-media-server`! It's a little Sinatra app
that indeed *does* save all the files needed for customization, and can
generate lightweight lil preview iframes and images pretty easily. I
had initially been planning this as a separate service, but after
thinking over the arch a bit, I think it'll go smoother to just give
the main app all the same access and awareness—and I wrote it all in
Ruby and plain HTML/JS/CSS, so it should be pretty easy to port over
bit-by-bit!
Anyway, only Alt Styles use this for now, but my motivation is to be
able to use more-correct asset URL logic to be able to finally swap
over wardrobe-2020's item search to impress.openneo.net's item search
API endpoint—which will get "Items You Own" searches working again, and
whittle down one of the last big things Impress 2020 can do that the
main app can't. Let's see how it goes!
Preparing to finally move wardrobe-2020's item search to use the main
app's API endpoints instead!
One blocker I forgot about here: Impress 2020 has actual support for
knowing an item's true appearance, like by reading the manifest and
stuff, that we haven't really ported over. I feel like maybe I should
pause and work on the changes to manifest-archiving that I'd been
planning anyway? I'll think about it.
I've moved the support secret into the encrypted credentials file, and
moved the origin into a top-level custom config value in the
environment files, with different defaults per environment but still
the ability to override it. (I don't use this, but it feels polite to
not actually *demand* that people use port 4000, y'know?)
Okay, so I still don't know why rendering is just so slow (though
migrating away from item translations did help!), but I can at least
cache entire closet lists as a basic measure.
That way, the first user to see the latest version of a closet list
will still need just as much time to load it… but *only* the ones that
have changed since last time (rather than always the full page), and
then subsequent users get to reuse it too!
Should help a lot for high-traffic lists, which incidentally are likely
to be the big ones belonging to highly active traders!
One big change we needed to make was to extract the `user-owns` and
`user-wants` classes (which we use for trade matches for *the user
viewing the list right now*) out of the cached HTML, and apply them
after with Javascript instead. I always dislike moving stuff to JS, but
the wins here seem. truly very very good, all things considered!
This one is important, I didn't notice that this is a way of setting
attributes that won't be written to both tables! `name` will only be
written to the translation table (which crashes the save), and the
other fields would only be written to the main table. Fixed! (I don't
like the super-dynamic this code was written before, anyway.)
Missed this at first - now that the `name` field is just a normal field
and is always English, it's now an error to provide the locale to it as
a parameter, like we used to for the translated version of the field!
Like with Species, Color, and Zone, we're moving the translation data
directly onto the model, and just using English. This will simplify
some of our queries a lot (way fewer joins!), and it's what Neopets
does now anyway, and I have a secret hope that removing the complexity
along the codepath for `item.name` might help speed up large item lists
if we're lucky?? 🤞
Anyway, this is the first step, performing the migration to copy the
data onto the `items` table, making sure to keep them in sync for the
2020 app for now!
Tbh I'm not sure `special_color` is actually used anywhere? It used to
be how we decide what to show in the previewer on the item page, but
that's been replaced with the 2020 logic, so idk…
But in any case, I noticed that the description doesn't match the
pattern we have, so here's the fix!
I looked at this and was like. "ok literally what is
`nonstandard_colors` trying to do"
reading it again now, I'm realizing the idea is that it probably runs
two queries: one to get nonstandard colors, then depends on
ActiveRecord to implicitly convert the relation to an array and then to
IDs for the second query? Instead of doing a join??
Idk, it's unused, so trash it!
This used to be the behavior, and the site has plenty of graceful
fallbacks for it, I just forgot this one when doing Rails upgrades!
Note that the impress-2020 stuff is *not* as graceful about this, so
the wardrobe page won't show the pet until the color is in the DB. Ah
well, still an improvement!
Okay right, the wardrobe-2020 app treats `state` as a bit of an
override thing, and `pose` is the main canonical field for how a pet
looks. We were missing a few pieces here:
1. After loading a pet, we weren't including the `pose` field in the
initial query string for the wardrobe URL, but we _were_ including
the `state` field, so the outfit would get set up with a conflicting
pet state ID vs pose.
2. When saving an outfit, we weren't taking the `state` field into
account at all. This could cause the saved outfit to not quite match
how it actually looked in-app, because the default pet state for
that species/color/pose trio could be different; and regardless, the
outfit state would come back with `appearanceId` set to `null`,
which wouldn't match the local outfit state, which would trigger an
infinite loop.
Here, we complete the round-trip of the `state` field, from pet loading
to outfit saving to the outfit data that comes back after saving!
Now that DTI 2020 has been deployed without references to the
translations tables, we can stop keeping them in sync!
Next step is to drop the tables and be done with them altogether! (I
have a backup of the public data for this too, as does this repo!)
Two motivations here:
1. Unconverted pets should no longer exist on Neopets.com (and we
especially don't expect new ones), so this logic helps no one.
2. The Baby Pteri keeps getting overridden to be marked as Unconverted
because it has only one asset, which is incorrect.
A decent heuristic for a bygone era, goodbye!
Yay it works(*)! But two major missing pieces:
- Outfit saving doesn't persist it at all
- Item compatibility is unaffected: items will still appear in search
and in the preview, even when they don't fit anymore.
To help with space, I'm just showing the word "Nostalgic" (or "???" if
it's from a series we don't recognize, this is hardcoded by ID), and
trusting that from context it will be obvious that it's the "Nostalgic
Faerie" case or whatever. (Moreover, in both the button and the select
we're omitting the species name, by similar reasoning!)
Note that this _still_ doesn't actually apply the style to the outfit
whatsoever; this is all just local state as we're continuing to play
with UI concepts. Actually applying it is probably next though! (Though
there's a couple more UI things I want to do, like some affordances to
clarify that a Style is applied and that Expression changes won't work.)
Something in the Rails loader doesn't like that I have both a gem and
a lib folder named `RocketAMF`, I think? It'll often work for the first
pet load request, then on subsequent ones say `Envelope` is not
defined, I'm guessing because it scrapped the gem's module in favor of
mine?
Idk, let's just simplify all this by making our own module. I feel like
this old lib could use an overhaul and simplification anyway, but this
will do for now!
Like in 0dca538, this is preliminary work for being able to drop the
`zone_translations` table! We're copying the field over first, to be
able to migrate DTI 2020 safely before dropping anything.
Non-English languages haven't been supported on Neopets for a while, so
I'd like to remove this extra cross-cutting complexity, especially
since it's now inconsistent with the real site anyway!
The main motivation is that I'd like to do this for items too, because
I have a hunch that all the complexity of `globalize` to read
`item.name` is part of what's making large user lists so slow to
render: lots of little objects getting created down the stack, and
needing to be garbage-collected later.
I'm not sure that's why! But I figure removing this complexity is a
simplicity win anyway, so let's do it!
Note that this doesn't *finish* the migration, it just starts it! The
`Species::Translation` and `Color::Translation` models still exist, and
still have their data, and not all references to them are scrubbed yet.
I especially don't want to delete the backing tables until both DTI and
DTI 2020 are ready for it!
So this change will someday be paired with another change to actually
drop the tables - after backing up the data for future records just in
case, of course!
If your first wanted list was created before your first owned list,
then `false` would come before `true` in the keys of
`current_user_lists`.
I both fixed this to be more consistent at the model level, because who
likes unpredictable behavior? But also downstream at the view I
hardcoded that true should come before false, because that's a UI
concern that I want to be encoded in the view regardless of what's
upstream.
It was a bit tricky to figure out the right API for this, since I'm
looking ahead to the possibility of splitting these across multiple
pages with more detail, like we do in DTI 2020.
What I like about this API is that the caller gets to apply, or not
apply, whatever scopes they want to the underlying hanger set (like
`includes` or `order`), without violating the usual syntax by e.g.
passing it as a parameter to a method.
