TaleSpire Dev Log 471

Hi!

It's bulk updating time!

Since my last update on TaleWeaver Lite, I've spent some time cleaning up the publishing code in preparation for making a way to bulk update existing uploads for all you extremely productive creature creators out there.

And after doing said "preparatory code cleanup", I started with the Bulk Updater.

And it's... kinda done? Of course, like with the publisher itself, it's not "done done"; it's more of a "first working version" that still needs testing and some polishing, but the base functionality is there.

Now let's talk about what it can do: Once you've logged in with your mod.io account, it will load all of your uploads^[0] and show them in a list. You'll see their name, whether it's public or hidden, and the currently assigned content flags.

In that list, you'll be able to select the ones you want to update either by manually checking each one or using the selection tools:

Any selected uploads can have their name and visibility status edited, and if selected at the top with "Add new flags", a new set of content flags will be applied to them - once you press "Update Selected", that is.

There are also a few search tools to narrow down the list of shown uploads, making it easier to narrow down to the submissions you want to update.

Now, onto some caveats:

• The bulk updater cannot and most likely will not support updating the asset file itself - this is just updating your uploads' profile and metadata. This will allow people to use all that data while searching for minis in the community content browser, but these flags *may* not apply once downloaded and in the in-game library^[1]. For that you'd still need to update each upload one by one.
• The UI/UX on the bulk updater is not super polished. This is because we don't see it as something that will see much use outside of the transition period when people need to go back to update vast amounts of existing submissions. If you have use cases that benefit from the continued use of a bulk updater even after all your existing uploads have the new data added, please let us know!
• Not all changes that are pushed to mod.io apply instantly, so it can happen that the last few updated items will still look like they contain old data for a bit (the exact timing depends, but I've seen things like name changes taking anywhere from 10-40 seconds after the update to apply).

As usual, any feedback on this is extremely welcome. Does what you see cover what you'd need from such a tool? Is something missing?

After some testing and cleanup on the bulk updater, my next stop will be TaleSpire itself and figuring out a good UI to actually do all of this filtering. See you then!

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

[0]: For now, it will only show creature uploads, but once TaleWeaver supports more types of assets like tiles and props, the relevant categories will be filterable there as well. In my screenshot it also shows Symbiotes and Slabs, but this is just for testing purposes and won't be the case in a release version.

[1]: I say "may" because there could be some things we can try to make this work, but since we've not yet implemented this part of the content flags and tag system, I can't say for sure.