I'm back, but this time I come with goodies!
I've been posting these as they happen on the Discord server, but I'll keep posting the recent changes here too for those who prefer to stay off of it.
Game player
There's been a lot of minor changes to help improve the core feature of this site.
Sidebar
Since its release, galaxy has had an expandable sidebar next to games that lets you chat with other users, the catch being that it was limited to just chat.
Now, it also doubles triples as a much nicer cloud saving UI and options to let you modify game appearance and customize your experience on galaxy. Here's some of the highlights of that, in no particular order:
- Zoom games without zooming the webpage
- Auto-expand games when you open them
- Don't load games automatically
- Invert the colors of a game (in case there's no dark / light mode)
- Hide the header while expanded
Mobile experience
- The action buttons underneath games now show only the 2 most important actions when expanded (shrink & open sidebar)
- Fixed a (very annoying) bug where small comment sections only took up 1/2 of the horizontal space
- Fixed it being impossible to shrink games on some mobile browsers
The even smaller changes
- The site's markdown renderer now interprets a newline as a new line, instead of a continuation of the previous line. Before, you had to have two linebreaks in a row to get text on a new line.
- The way that the site handles API requests has been completely re-worked. This should reduce the odds of any funny business and make it about 3x easier to add new API routes (huge thanks to wackbyte for this!)
- Game pages should now load very slightly faster
- Fixed a bug where parts of the header weren't visible on Webkit-based browsers (Safari)
- Added spoiler tags, activated by putting two exclamation marks on either side of a message
- Added the ability to preview a markdown message before publishing/submitting/etc. (huge thanks to wackbyte for this!)
Game editor
Massive UI changes have been made to improve the look and feel of the game edit pages. Most people won't be able to see how cool it looks, but the way I programmed the page will make it possible for me to port the coolness over to other big menus in the future (notably the user preferences page)
On top of that, developers can now push "silent updates", which let them post a changelog without "bumping" the game and notifying followers.
Feedback
What do you want next?
I have a bunch of ideas for neat stuff, but I also would like to gauge the community's interest. If there's a certain feature or bug fix you'd like to see, let me know in this forum thread or on the issue tracker (https://gitlab.com/yhvr/galaxy-astro/-/)!
