Administratum: The Big Game Editor Update (May 22, 2022)

You've asked politely for it. You've demanded it. You've written requests for it on small slips of paper that you slid under my front door and hired a skywriter to carve your feature requests into the clouds above my very head.

Message received, feature implemented, and here it is - you can now edit games!

But more than that, this is the first of our Game Management updates, bringing with it a host of improvements in viewing, editing, managing your games. Including the ability for campaign owners to edit games reported by members! Let's dive in, shall we.

New: Game Management

Right away you'll see changes to the Games tab in your Order of Battle. Gone are the days of makeshift HTML tables, and instead you've now got a handy Game widget that shows more information about your games in rather nifty UI. Plus, I built it to be responsive, which is dev-speak for "it doesn't look like straight trash on mobile".

Administratum game widget — I encourage you to name your games - it rules

If you want to compare and contrast is with the old UI, it's still kicking around on the Games tabs in your Campaign and Units. And if you're a Patron, hop on our Discord server and give me your feedback about this design. There's plenty of time to make changes before rolling it out to Campaigns and Units.

But that's not all, this update also comes with lies! I lied about there being no more HTML tables, as you can swap over to a new and improved table view of your Roster's games at any time!

Administratum game table — Delicious, delicious tabular data

The new Game widgets and tables will be altered before they land on Campaigns and Unit pages. The Campaign one with more information about the player who recorded the game and their roster, and the Unit one with more information about how that particular unit performed in the game. And as mentioned earlier, if you have any feedback, we are always online in Discord. Always.

New: Game View

Clicking on the Game widget (or improved Game table) now sends you to the new Game View page. From here, you can view and edit your games! And if the game is part of a campaign, then the campaign owner can edit it as well!

Administratum game view — See that "Solo Game" at the top there? Wonder what that means ...

From this page you can see all the summary information of the game, as well as the breakdown for each participating unit. Relive those past moments of glory or learn from the pain of defeat.

New: Game Editing

Here's the heart of the update - editing games. To appreciate why this has been so long in the making, first realize that I broke up editing games into three separate workflows: score, campaign, and summary. Each of which has different impacts on the game and your Order of Battle. And let's dig into just one of them: altering the final score of a game.

Administratum game edit — Flip a win to a loss with this one simple trick!

When you change a win to a loss, or vice versa, Administratum will automatically attempt to rewind any rewards your Order of Battle is no longer eligible for, as well as apply any newly earned rewards. In both cases, you'll get a notification about exactly what will happen to your roster. If you've already spent the reward, then Administratum will let you know that something is up and that you'll need to manually fix your roster.

That short description only covers a small fraction of stuff going on behind the curtain when you edit the final score of a game, but you get the point. Things be complicated, and Administratum is trying to make it less painful. And speaking of painful, who is ready for a giant brick of text - the patch notes!

The Patch Notes

Game Management
- New widget-based game view that is awesome
- New table-based game view if that's more your style
- Note that the two game views above have only been applied to the Roster page, and not the Campaign or Unit pages. This is intentional to offer people a preview of the feature before it's rolled out site-wide. Let me know what you think when compared with the old UI
- Toggle between the widget and table game views
- Click a game to view all the information recorded about it
- Game Edit - This is available to the user who recorded the game and, if the game is associated with a campaign, then the owners of that campaign can edit the game as well
- Game Edit - Score - Alter a game's final score and/or Victor Bonus. Administratum will automatically remove or apply any Victor Bonuses where able. If the bonus has already been spent, and so can't be removed, a warning prompt will let you know to manually adjust your roster accordingly
- Game Edit - Add to Campaign - If the game is not part of a campaign, then the roster's owner will be able to add the game to a campaign. Note that campaign owners cannot add games to their campaign that have been recorded by other members to their campaign, the owner of the roster must do this
- Game Edit - Remove from Campaign - If the game is part of a campaign, then both the roster owner as well as the campaign owner can remove the game from that campaign. This doesn't alter the game in any other way. Note that if the campaign owner removes it from their campaign, then they will no longer being able to edit that game
- Game Edit - Edit Summary - You can alter the summary of the game, including game name, mission, played on date, and more
- Roster View Page - Games tab - Added link to new Game view page
- Campaign View Page - Games tab - Added link to new Game view page
Faster page loads
- Greatly reduced how much data is sent when loading games. This was frequently the slowest part of opening a Roster or Campaign, which should now open faster
- Data indexing improvements that give a small, but consistent performance improvement on every network request site-wide
Battle Report - Small performance improvement when making changes in the Summary step on a new Battle Report
Unit name typography shrunk, especially on smaller browsers. This affects many places where the unit's name is rendered
Gregload - Increasing the time until Gregload appears from 1 second to 1.5 seconds
Roster Add-On - Wars of Faith - Updated to handle editing games, including recalculating belief points and letting you alter the bonus belief points
Fixed - Server error that happened 1 time like a week ago when someone was recording a game. I don't even know what you did, you jerk, but you can't do it anymore

That's all folks! Or at least that's all that I can remember plus what's indicated in our changelogs. Is there more that I just forgot? Probably. Who can keep track of everything they work on these days? Sometimes I'll start a feature and I don't even know where it's going. I just hope I find it along the way.

And if you want to read about my slow descent into coding madness, check out my dev blog for this update: Code Mines: Why is it Hard to Change the Past in Administratum?

Tags: 40k | Crusade | administratum