The "Patrol" function of new tracker, http://ln.to/lfg/ is now avaible to everyone...

The "Patrol" function of the new tracker, http://ln.to/lfg/ is currently available.

Trying contacting Battlezoby or Cynthih either here, or in personal-message in-game for a username and password.
We're usually AFK, but if you leave the window or whatever open, we should be able to get back to you.
(Reloading before submitting something is suggested, but shouldn't be any worse than not reloading on the old tracker.)

Post bugs and/or concerns here, and/or friend Battlezoby on Steam and/or try to PM battlezoby inside Cardhunter itself as I am often afk, but read my PM's eventually if the game doesn't crash before then.

The new tracker includes all the new maps, including the EastPass maps and Mitternacht maps which are not included on the old one.

Other improvements and changes might appear in the future.

 

nice job!

 

Can you put the countdown timer on the patrol page too?

 

Thanks. I'd like to put up a text version of it that you can refresh manually by reloading,
which is what we've already put up on the main tracker by request. It's at http://text.ln.to/lfg .
But since I like giving people options, I'd also like to make it clickable to change it into the
animated tracker if they want to. (So it would read "11 Hours, 30 Minutes, 26 Seconds"
as hyperlink to the animated timer. But what I can't figure out yet is what to write
there so people know how to animate it and know what the hyperling is for....

Writing "Click for animated timer" seems way too frivilious and tacky and ugly, but an undescribed hyperlink would be too obscure and would be a dis-service to people who
click it hoping for something more interesting.

Anyone have any idea what a text timer, clickable to an animated one on the Patrol
Page should look like to solve the above problem? ("Click here to buy Viagra Cheap"
just came to mind for unknown reasons, but I think that's just because I'm getting
hungry/tired at the moment. Actually, more people play Cardhunter than use the
patrol page, so if we need more "Click here to buy Viagra Cheap" Ads, I'm guessing
the game would be a better place for them than on the tracker page. But I'm open to
counter-arguements.)

 

Actually, I'd prefer an animated text timer. The big numbers are a bit distracting, but I also sometimes leave the page open while working in other tabs.

 

First, as Kalin said, the textual timer should update, too. As this is simple text replacement, this shouldn't be too heavy on the CPU (I guess this was one of the reasons for the textual timer). If you want to make it even less distractive, only update every five seconds or so. Or limit the timer to minutes entirely.

Don't know if this is a general problem, but loading the textual tracker took a very long time when I just tried it (at least ten seconds to even ping the server, it seemed). The animated tracker was faster, but that could be due to local caching.

Regarding the switch from one timer to the next, why not use tool-tips. If you hover the textual timer, you get a tool-tip "click to switch to animated timer" plus your hyperlink. The same could be done for the animated timer to switch to the textual timer. But I really wouldn't mind if under both timer versions there was a link to switch to the other one. Make the text short and everything's fine (e.g. "enable/disable animation" depending on the version you are on).

If you want to add further features to your tracker, I use a browser add-on to inject css-styles to hide all lines with "confirmed absent" adventures. This works flawlessly, but only if you know how that is done, so if the tracker would offer this in form of a checkbox, that would be easier to use for html-noobs. Similarly, you could add checkboxes to hide locked adventures, because some players don't have them and don't care if the LF is there. I haven't done that in my add-on but only because the lines aren't labeled with "locked" (or similar) so that would mean more js-magic (that I totally are capable of, but I just haven't seen the point in manipulating the tracker in this way). Again, offer this to everyone and more will appreciate this (hidden) feature.

 

I like these ideas.

If you add this, don't hide the location it's found at even if it's locked. People ignoring locked adventures still need to know when to stop hunting.

 

Hmm... I like to do almost everything server-side, but I could make a button to collapse the adventures uses server-side software.
But I like the adventures as a convienant table for looking up the adventures and clicking to see the maps.

Thought it was weird that the text is slower for you. But there is some unused Javascript at the top we forgot to get rid of.
Thanks for the heads up. Give us a few days or whatever.

Been pretty busy with other stuff when I'm working, too out of it to want to mess with code when I'm not. But I really like options, so maybe I'll play around with some other format to choose from. I used to interface with a service that could SMS texts. But who needs that when everyone but me has a Smartphone.

 

Yes, you could do that. But you are aware that there is some standard called css that is designed for this exact purpose? Plus you don't have to reload the entire page just to apply some filtering to the displayed list. it's as easy as adding

Code:

table.hideAbsent tr.absent {visibility:collapse;}

to the site and activating it by adding some signaling class (in this example "hideAbsent") to the module list (the html-table in this example) if the checkbox is enabled. Given the amount of css-rules that the browser is applying anyway, moving this logic to the server is simply put: the wrong move because there is absolutely no reason to do so.

 

I take pride in server-side. Never would have gotten any CSS's at all if not for copying Flaxatives site for expendiency. If I did everything server-side, it should be 100% compatible across all browsers, including "lynx" under Unix/Linux, and shouldn't slow down browsers even if it's the 10th or 500th tab open on the 3rd browser. (Whatever state your machine was in before opening it, a non-css server-side LF page shouldn't be likely to make any further difference.)

Beside, timeracer told me he "didn't like dependancies..." that's sort of a tanget, but I like them even less. If possible, I like to have as close 100% control. We already know how to do huge customizations on our webpages while servering it as straight HTML. It's what we know best and what's the least like to break.

But aside from Real-life stuff, been more concerned with what's going on with the developement team. I really want Cardhunter to stay alive, and am concerned that they are spending money on "improvements" without a real plan to recoupe those costs. I'm afraid they'll bring the game from low-cost maintainence to medium-cost-maintianence without the revenue to offset it, the end point being a game that's likely to get shutoff, which, face it, is what the community expects of most games. But under Blue Manchu, I'm pretty sure the upkeep costs were so low it was either profitable, or the loss was so low, Jon wasn't about to let it cause him to shutoff his baby/labor-of-love.

 

If we're talking about changes to the tracker, can you add the confirmed location to the top of the patrol side, like on the public side? I always open the patrol first, and then have to scroll all the way down to see if it's been found yet.

 

Kalin: Thanks. It's on the to-do list.