GW2 Spark Update 2 - Online Functionality!
First test with passing information to/from the server is successful. I'm just using a dummy .json file on the server and pretending to be a second user for this.
A lot of the API endpoints weren't hard to set up since I utilize endpoints to deliver patreon content into my own game (so it's never bundled in the public build), so this wasn't too bad to get working.
I'm still ironing out a few quirks with it, and need to cache a few things to make it more performant. I just wanted to make it work first before I tweak it further.
If you set your status to Invisible, you immediately are removed from the online list and won't appear to anyone anymore. This is done in the module settings page. I might add a quick access menu for this.
If you block someone on the module settings (or hit block on their profile to add it in automatically), they will no longer be able to see you online or any of your profiles anymore. You also will not see any of their profiles either.
You retain a cached list of recently viewed profiles on your machine. This means if someone is offline, you can still view their profile without waiting for them to come back online. You can favourite them as well to permanently keep them in a list.
If you view a profile in the favourite/recently viewed list, it will attempt to retrieve a copy of the profile off the server if they are online, or just use the cached copy if not.
This also is the case if you are blocked. You will never know that the user is online, and it will always serve you the last cached version of the profile you saw. You'll never see any further updates if someone blocked you, as if they never come online again. I think this is the best compromise for user privacy around blocking others. Otherwise, if someone keeps track of who they favorited and sees one disappear, they'd know you blocked them. I'd rather avoid that situation.
The server itself has a block account function. If someone is being malicious, harassing others, or making profiles promoting bigotry, hate, discrimination, etc. I can ban them permanently from accessing the RP Profile service on that GW2 account entirely. All API calls use your GW2 account ID as your identity, pulled directly from the game.
If you swap to the character selection screen, you disappear from the online list since you're probably AFK or swapping characters.
Other stuff I'm looking at:
An area for users to leave notes on profiles they have bookmarked to remind themselves of past interactions or things to keep in mind, etc. Would be entirely offline, never passed to the server. Just syncs up to specific profiles when you open them if they match the account + character + profile ID (since characters can have multiple profiles).
Private Profile Section
This would be a section that you can specify access to for various friends to see or if you want to share information with someone but not another. Likely just another big description box you can put whatever you want in that won't be seen except by people you specify.
Or, y'know, for people who wanna put whatever spicy RP details here and not broadcast it to the public so you can make sure you are sharing anything 18+ with consenting adults.
Like with other RP addons on other websites, I suspect people will just post all of that on their public profile regardless though, so it's kind of futile.
Lower on the priority list right now to add.
Multi-Message Chat Helper
I was thinking of adding an in-game window that can let you write out a big RP message and have it automatically post it in chat for you one by one in chunks that fit the chat limit, with whatever separators you want to style it with.
It's probably just some simple string manipulation, and I'd probably enforce some limit on it so someone can't maliciously spam chats with it. If it seems like it'll be abused, it might just be a simple way to copy/paste what you need so you have to do it manually.
I've seen a tool that sort of does this already but it's outside the game. Something in-game might be a bit easier than alt-tabbing, especially for those on a single monitor.
This is a low priority addition, not something I'm gonna focus on unless there's a huge demand since it's probably a fucking pain based on GW2 chat limits and anti-spam stuff.
I'd eventually like to add some kind of dice roll feature where you can set up a group with others who are using the tool, and if you roll a dice (can specify whatever, like 1d20, 3d10, 4d20, etc.), it rolls and submits the result to all connected people.
I think for this I'd need to implement something with websockets though, so if I do make this, it'd come much later when I'm done with the main module functionality.
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