Improbable Island Message of the Day (MoTD)

June Monthly Memento, upcoming and ongoing mobile improvements, summertime hooray
Admin CavemanJoe – 2024-06-04 15:25:25 [Permalink]
Hey folks, June's Monthly Memento is the Guilty Gavel! You'd be forgiven for thinking this has something to do with Current Affairs, but it's actually a reference to me leaving the MM to the last minute again, any connection with that other guy is purely coincidental. Anyway, chuck it at a monster once a day to leave it stunned at the very thought of finally facing some fucking consequences for a change.

When I were a wee nipper and we had the six-week summer break it felt like a lifetime. I'd go back to school and pick up my pencil and it'd just flop about uselessly in my hand because I'd forgotten how to write. I was just reflecting on this because it's the last day of school today, and going "Welp, guess the Island is evening-work for the next month and a half," and apparently American kids get ELEVEN HECKING WEEKS OFF SCHOOL, so expect the summer to be less full of massive gameplay improvements like the Drives On The Map project, and more like another period of gradually sanding off the rough bits.

The next big change will be finally making Outposts mobile-friendly. This is actually a big problem, because right now people view the quicknav mobile interface as a thing that's a nice bonus when it's there, and when Outposts go mobile-good, we'll pass the tipping point where folk will expect mobile-friendliness everywhere, and will note its absence from other areas with frustration. Since smartphones got popular I've been giving mobile users a straw with which to suck the droplets of wine at the bottom of a glass full of sawdust. Every time I add a new mobile improvement I get delighted emails about how much you love the new straw, how much better it is at filtering out the plywood chips and bits of rusty nails. When we tip the scales, I'll get emails asking why the fuck is there sawdust in this glass of wine, and honestly that's a pretty reasonable question.

There are two stages to mobile outpost improvements - there's the links from the outpost into the shops (or facilities, bank and council offices and clan halls or even things like prefs and the new day menu or reinforcing the walls or whatever but I'm just gonna say "Shops" here because I'm not typing all that shit out every time), and then there's the links inside the shops that let you buy things or chat with the NPCs or whatever and return to the outpost. There are four ways we could do the mobile-outpost-improvement project:

1. Do all the outpost-to-shop links first and then make the shops mobile-friendly; while this is underway you'll enter an outpost and get a lovely menu that will disappear the moment you enter a shop, and that's shit.
2. Mobile-friendly each shop one at a time; while this is underway you'll enter an outpost and get a lovely mobile-friendly menu that only has half the shops in it, and this is even more shit because the newbies on their phones will miss half the shops.
3. Mobile-friendly all the shops AND do the outpost-to-shops links over the course of the next few months, and then upload/activate the whole lot all in one go. This is again a bit shit because while all this is happening, you lot don't see anything changing. Projects that take months, during which I'm working my arse off but you guys don't see any visible progress, are projects that I try to avoid these days because they're boring for you, they drag on for ages, and they take a toll on my own mental health.
4. Mobile-friendly each shop one at a time, uploading as we go, and then mobile-friendly the whole outpost all at once at the very end. This is the route I've decided to take, because it lets me do a bunch of small gradual improvements followed by one big awesome improvement without as much awkward half-done feeling in between. This is actually even easier than it sounds because I'm adding the outpost-to-shop links while I'm mobile-friendly'ing each shop, but just waiting until later to activate those outpost-to-shop links all at once. This also maximizes the "Ooh, lovely new straw!" factor.

Mobile users might have already noticed that eBoy's sucks a bit less now. Get ready for more of that. From now until August, I'm not doing any big massive changes, and you can look forward to the kind of slow but steady quality-of-life improvements that you'd expect from a fifteen-year-old website that has finally fucking calmed down a bit and has no more interest in the "move fast and break things" philosophy of software development, preferring instead to tread thoughtfully and make nice improvements.

Have (chill) fun!

~CMJ

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