Coloniæ
Posted by Sobeirannovaocc on 1590985479
Last update 1590960573
As exams are delayed by two months, I just couldn't stand on waiting after they are done before updating Coloniae!
Here are the couple features I added in what I'm going to call the Spring 2020 Update.
As most of you probably already know, in My Colony, online colonies get deleted after 120 days of inactivity. Coloniae is recording all the colonies present on the server every day, and if a colony gets deleted after these 4 months, it no longer appears in the top main search (on top of the screen). But sometimes it might be useful to find information about a past colony, or even the same colony on which you became active again but was deleted due to inactivity. Really, any colony that was on the server at one point during the last 2 years! This is why I made this search tool that queries the whole Coloniae database. The advanced search is also useful to find colonies matching certain criteria thanks to filters. There are more than 30k charters in the database, and data is collected every day since almost two years.
Along with that I thought of a small handy feature - what I call reactivation links. When you open a colony that was deleted from the server due to inactivity, it registers to the game server with a new charter. This new feature lets you link to the older colony on the page of the new "reactivated" colony. You are able to manage these links in your personal panel. For example, I have a colony named Cantons but it got split into 2 charters so in the new I'm linking to the old one. The historical data of the two charters is combined.
Yeah, sounds weird. It turns out that when I changed servers about 1 year ago, I missed a few old colonies in the process. Those were the colonies that went inactive (deleted from the server) right after I made the change. Basically the historical data was carried over - population, gdp, captia, etc. - , but not the "static" data - owner, planet type, map type... -. So here they come, they were 8915 in total, we're now able to view the runis of these old inactive colonies through the numbers as they were before collapsing; they also appear in the player page, so some players will see a bunch of new colonies - and even discover old ones they forgot about! Other than that, it allows for indexing these colonies in the new advanced search described above. We can find out for example that the oldest colony ever fetched on Coloniae is this one from Patchdaddy. Older ones might have existed but that was before Coloniae was born. For the record, Coloniae started collecting colonies data on July 10th, 2018.
This data has been recorded since the start of Coloniae and I have no idea why I didn't do this earlier, but I added a new tab in the colony page that reports all the names the colony had. That's all, and I hope no one regrets their namings. Remember, internet never forgets ;).
Added a few GBT stats here, and made sell-buy contracts definition more rigourous there.
Added a market history tab for all colonies (ADU not required) in the colony page. Same goes for the players in their player page. Data is available up to 5 April 2020 only! Packages traded with the Galactic Emperor through the import/export section are not accounted for in the market activity.
This feature was originally proposed by Ansom here. It answers the million dollar question - why can't I build this? Resources, vehicles, atmosphere stage... This tools gets all the necessary data from the ADU and lets you know what you're missing to finally get your hands on this shiny building.
Fixed an issue where some layout stats would not compute. I encourage everyone to "save to coloniae" again their layouts in order to reload the stats for the index.
Also added jail and transit capacities to the layout stats overview.
This tool was meant to help trading between people, except that it was not very easy to share what you were planning to the other party. There is now an unique link to send to the people you are trading with so they see exactly the terms of the contract and are able to modify it. Just copy the link to clipboard and share it.
This is not seen as always but certainly has an impact. Thanks to a bunch of improvements to server-side database queries as well as the use of insights tools I tried, and to some extent succeeded to reduce loading times. I made development way easier as well!
This probably won't be noticed but now Ape Chat login is tied to Coloniae login, which means that if you are logged in on Coloniae, you are in the Ape Chat at the bottom of the page, and the inverse is also true: if you're not logged in, nothing appears.
Enhanced mobile view as well by reducing large margins and spaces, and removing the background image for small devices. I don't browse Coloniae on mobile very often so let me know if there are still accessibility issues on smaller screens!
The top menu was slightly reworked with a new category that I called integrations - anything that integrates with the game in some way. There is the Bomber bot of course, and since the translation project switched over to an online tool, smartcat, we can see live progress of the translations. I've also created a RSS feed for Coloniae News.
Added a better preview as well as a banner image for all posts, and cleaned the landing page to have a simple view on the newest articles.
The article editor tool is not used by a lot of people but it was messy before and not all features were working properly. Switched to the tinymce editor which is well documented, easy to work with and robust. The editor view is now an accurate preview of the final post.
Changed design on the player and colony pages to have more structured and divided parts (inspired from the great Mania Exchange).
Added a banner for inactive colonies on the player page. Server-deleted means that at that date it was deleted from the server, so the colony was actually abandonned 4 months before.
The ADU now computes the overall stats (on the top right on your colony's ADU page) using the ADU data and not through the My Colony API. This gives more accurate data and is useful for debugging if you have missing/wrong cities in the lot. I've added an explanation about the disparities that may occur between the ADU and the real values that you can check by clicking "These are not right".
The ADU index is now faster to load and allows for browsing the entire catalog of colonies, even long defunct ones.
Removed all mentions to the GBT and replaced with Market/Online Market. It's not fair for the other civilizations!
That's it for today, I hope you enjoy the new features and let me know if something is not running right.
Sobe
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