TaleSpire Dev Log 484

Hey all!

It's been somewhat quiet recently from me, and it's high time I changed that.

My primary focus continues to be the new search and tagging system. There's been a lot of progress, so let's unpack what happened.

TaleWeaver

A big remaining point was that although we had a fancy new tag search code internally for a while now, it was quite useless since we didn't have any way to actually set the new tags anywhere. This is now rectified at least in TaleWeaverLite:

Yes, this is still very much dummy data. No, we don't have a secret bird-human-werewolf hybrid cyberpunk hacker mini waiting to be released.

We're still missing a similar integration into our internal version of TaleWeaver, but the code created for TWL was designed to be portable, and integration should be straightforward.

With the tag setting logic in TaleWeaverLite now mostly finished, I've shifted focus to implementing the game UI and logic updates to make all this stuff work.

TaleSpire

Tackling the TaleSpire integration of all this was one of the largest missing pieces, but even that is nearing completion. I cleaned up the internal UI structure to better accommodate the new UI, resulting in a more modular system with better code reuse. This should also reduce the work necessary to add the new UI to other places when needed.

But enough talking, let's look at some screenshots (everything is still subject to change of course):

Here you can see how we can search both for tags and the name of the asset. Name search is merely used for ranking results - showing the most relevant ones first - while tags are used to filter and limit the results to only entries that fit.

All searches in the local library are completely real-time, by the way! As soon as you enter a letter, the search will be updated:

The library search also includes custom minis as well as minis from third-party providers like HeroForge. Of course, this depends on them having tags set; if they don't, then only the name will be searchable.

And the same search UI also works for the community content browser:

Searches in the content browser are not real-time - you'll still need to manually submit the search.

Somewhat unrelated to the new search stuff, but still something I want to touch on: We're still looking into the possibility of something like a "strict" filter mode.

While the content filters we released a bit ago have been used for many new uploads, there have also been many uploads that haven't. To help display only desired content, we're investigating the feasibility of adding extra metadata to uploads to distinguish between content without content flags and content that has been created with a version of TaleWeaver too old to support content flags (but which may have needed content flags).

I think this is all for now, so it's back to code for me!

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