TaleSpire Dev Log 473

Another month has passed, and I've got news!

I've been working away at the tag and filtering infrastructure, so let's get you up to speed:

Bulk Updater
Last time I talked about the bulk updater tool in TaleWeaverLite, I mentioned that it "can't update the asset file itself" and "this likely won't ever be a thing". I guess I was wrong, because the bulk updater can do this now. Originally I wanted to omit this because it increases the complexity quite a bit: In addition to just uploading the new metadata, it has to download the existing mod file, unpack it, load it, upgrade the file format version, enter the new data and then pack it back up and upload it again - and considering the bulk updater was meant to be a quick project it didn't feel worth the added effort since we could still support the complete feature set without the file changing.

But what made us change our opinion on that if that's the case? Well, two things:

1. To support local search of tags without updating the asset file through the bulk updater, we'd need to add some extra logic on downloading a mini that imports the mod.io metadata into the asset file. Not impossible, but an extra step.
2. When updating a mini with the bulk updater, it would add the metadata for tags, but if you then went back and updated the mini file "normally" and uploaded it again, you'd risk losing your previously added metadata. This could happen if you forget to manually re-add the tags to the file, since the actual .tsMod file would have no idea of the tags added through the bulk updater (since those used to live on just the mod.io profile).

So, all in all, we realized that for it to be a good experience, the bulk updater would also need to be able to update the actual asset files. Luckily, it was much less extra work than I initially feared, so that worked out quite nicely.

Now, for a summary of what the bulk updater can do:

• List all minis you uploaded to mod.io
• Search and filter through them
• Allow you to make a selection of minis you want to change (from the already uploaded ones)
• Add metadata to your selection (tags & content flags)
• Change name, attached homepage URL and visibility (visible/hidden) on submissions

TaleSpire Search
Now, all of the work on TaleWeaverLite is quite useless if TaleSpire itself can't do anything with the new tagging data. So this is what I was tackling recently:

Let's recap what was missing previously:

• TaleSpire needs UI to allow enabling and disabling filters
• Our mod.io search code needs to support tags
• Parts of the TaleSpire search logic need to be revamped to support passing around the enabled filters and converting them to the appropriate tags for mod.io

After a few UI prototypes, we're now converging on one setup - it's not quite done, so the following screenshot is still subject to change, but we're getting there:



The UI is already hooked up with our search logic, meaning the filters set in the UI get passed along to the mod.io search code, and said mod.io search also already supports the filtering - so what's the hold-up?

Well, when I say "the mod.io search code supports the filtering", I am glossing over a few details that don't quite work how we need them to yet. We also still need to do some cleanup on the TaleWeaverLite side of things, now that we have a clearer picture of how the entire user experience flow in TaleSpire is looking like.
Crucially, though, while TaleSpire now has all the smarts necessary to use the new tags and filters, it does not yet understand the new creature format that goes along with them. Because of that, you can now successfully filter results from mod.io, but... You can't use the minis!

With all that said, we are getting dangerously close to an end-to-end working implementation of the basic content filters - and a lot of the "full" tag infrastructure is already in place as well. I can't wait to get this out to you; it has been an incredibly long time coming.

Maturity Filters
I do want to talk about the mature content filters shown in the screenshot (and previously in other TaleWeaverLite screenshots).

They will likely not ship in the first release of the filtering system since we still have to investigate how to enable these with proper age verification. We understand that people want to be able to add mature content if they want to, but our goal is to keep TaleSpire accessible to everyone from all ages, so just putting a "yes, let me see all the mature stuffs plz" button right in the UI won't work. There will need to be some age verification system, and we haven't yet decided which route to take for that. Additionally, there are still some issues regarding filtering mature content, which we're currently in touch with mod.io about.

That's all from me, I'll go back to code now!

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