TaleSpire Dev Log 464

Hey!

Today, I got some updates on Input and Tags for you:

Input

We've long gotten reports asking us to allow rebinding of more buttons, most often about the mouse wheel button for camera rotation (who knew this many people had broken middle mouse buttons?). As much as that sounds like a "quick and simple thing" to add, it actually wasn't. Why? Well, the very beginnings of TaleSpire predate Unity's new input system by a few years, so any feature from back then has been implemented using the old input system - and the editable keybindings use the new system.

To make these action bindings customizable, we need to migrate them to the new input system and deal with any of the usual growing pains of updating old code, which is what I've done in the last little bit.

We'll likely release this without any additional changes to keybinds to catch any bugs or regressions missed in testing (this touches a lot of code!). Once that looks good, we'll investigate adding the remaining actions into the keybinding menu to finally close the chapter on "my middle mouse button is broken" bug reports.

Tags

It's been a long time since we last talked about tags. As some of you might remember, one of our blocking tasks on the long-awaited tag update was our localization system, which has been merged in its first iteration^[0]. This means I returned to the remaining tasks for getting the first iterations of our tag updates out to you all. One of those tasks is integrating all this with your custom content:

Searching for custom minis on mod.io has long been... not a great experience. While it works for a quick "I need something vaguely like X", it's impossible to find more specific items or, even more importantly, filter out unwanted content. This situation is due to us only searching based on name.

Fortunately, mod.io supports adding arbitrary key-value pair^[1] metadata to an upload, and even more fortunately, their search allows filtering based on matches on those key-value pairs.

Unfortunately, the kvp metadata cannot be added when uploading via the web interface. Instead, it requires a tool to upload content to mod.io. "A tool", in this case, being TaleWeaver - which means we need to add support for uploading your content to mod.io directly from within TaleWeaver, which can then attach tag data to the upload^[2].

And that's what I've started to work on: Uploading to mod.io from within TaleWeaver Lite.

The first step is to log in to mod.io in TaleWeaver. As you can see in the video above, there's already a working prototype for that. Once logged in, the actual upload UI appears - which is pretty much only "boring" data entry. It is a way of entering everything the website upload allows - but inside TaleWeaver.

A lot still needs to be done in the background, like actually uploading content and attaching tags to assets, but it's coming along.

I'll keep you posted on the progress!

Disclaimer: This DevLog is from the perspective of one developer. So it doesn't reflect everything going on with the team

[0]: While not yet enabled, it's finished-enough to no longer be a blocking task for tags.

[1]: A key-value pair (kvp) is a common concept in computing and describes a data point (value) that is identified by an (often unique) key. For example, "game: TaleSpire" would be a kvp with "game" as the key and "TaleSpire" as the value. Similarly, "tag: Lizardfolk" would also be a kvp. Based on that last example, it should be obvious how this can be used for tagging.

[2]: We need to finish the tag-adding UI in TaleWeaver since we've only done some prototypes as Symbiotes and a manual exporter.