Today I am happy to announce a release of a new https://stalcraftclan.com release. This one is a big one - in fact so big so I dubbed it v2.0.0 internally - and that means a lot, as years of experience in library development taught me to increase a major version REALLY sparingly. And numbers speak for it too - before this update, there were 537 commits on master branch. Now there are whopping 829.
This update has been in works in the background for a longer while now. I wanted to release it around the time when clans come to non-RU Stalcraft... but turns out it'll be still a while.
Also, StalcraftClan.com now has 30k monthly visitors and sends emissions to over 300 Discord servers, so gotta celebrate! Thank you guys for all the support!
But anyway, what's new?
Page for each Clan
Each clan now gets its own dedicated page. This means you can link your clan around easily!
As an additional part, I implemented some significant sitemap generation. For the less techy people - this means that google will get notified about each clan, and within a few days (the duration is up to Google alone, sadly), the clans should become discoverable by just googling. How neat!
Logging In
You can now login to StalcraftClan with your Stalcraft account. After logging in, you'll have an easy access to all your clans and characters via the menu.
Login system is also a foundation for other features... some are still upcoming, but some are already in, such as...
Clan Editing
While most significant clan information is still coming from Stalcraft itself, when I started working on StalcraftClan back in mid December, I wanted to make the website actually useful by providing more. If you've submitted for an unverified clan, you know I was allowing to set some additional info.
If you're a clan leader, once you login you can edit this info yourself on the website. This includes (and will hopefully expand in future) whether you're actively recruiting, the in-game and discord contacts, official clan website, discord invite link or languages.
Note: this currently applies to official clans only. I do hope to add similar functionality to the unverified clans, but there are some technicalities I need to work out first. Until then, you can still manually request unofficial clan listing on StalcraftClan Discord!
Languages
I just mentioned languages - they got significantly reworked under the hood to allow editing. But as a side benefit, it also means that you can search clans by language - something I wanted to do a long time ago, actually.
Player Comparing
Having a website gives a lot of possibilities and screen-estate, so what better to use it for than... stats comparing?
Yes, you can now compare stats of any 2 Stalcraft characters. Simply open a character page and go to stats table - on top there's a button that will reveal a search box. Type in character name, and you'll see stats of both characters at once.
And neater yet - StalcraftClan will automatically display stats in green on red, depending on which player is better!
Emission Performance Improvements
With 300 Discords subscribed to emission notifications, their became increasingly noticeable - for EU, sometimes it was taking over 50 seconds!
Seeing this, I implemented some changes to hopefully speed it up by a rather nice margin. If everything works out well, you should be seeing emission notifications arrive in your Discords sooner than they did before!
Quick update - sending EU emission notifications now takes 2 seconds according to my logs. Seems it works, and I am so happy so I had to share this.
Menu Revamp
As the website keeps growing, having all buttons on top is no longer viable. Phone screens already had 3 dots to open a dropdown, but admittedly, it wasn't really that nice anyway.
Because of this, I reworked the menu to be a much larger (and nicer) drawer instead. When you open it, you'll get an easier access to most things worth seeing on the website.
As a small bonus - on phone screens it'll auto-hide, but on PC it'll stay open until you close it, so you can keep it open if you prefer!
Stalcraft Formatting Tool
Stalcraft formatting is important on StalcraftClan - and so I decided to write a guide to it: https://stalcraftclan.com/guides/stalcraft-formatting
It also has a try-it-out thingy, so you can test formatting on the page in real-time!
Bug fixes and more
Yep, as always.But of course, this is a large update - bugs are inevitable. If you spot one, definitely report it!
Now I can have a break and play some games.