Add the ability to track any qualities, not just favours

[AnteIndustrial]

I like your favour tracker feature, and I want to extend that to track anything. This can be useful in carousels (in Port Carnelian, tracking Striped Delights, Silver Horseheads, Imperial Legitimacy, and Time Passing in Office), and in longer term grinds (tracking Estimable Trophies when going for Defender of Public Safety).

I've made this change myself, and I've been using it for a few months, it's been really helpful for me. I'll add it as a pull request. I'm not very familiar with github and contributing to open source software, so hopefully this is the way you'd like me to do this.

I'll list all the shortcomings I can think of with my current solution, so you can say if you want me to fix it, if you can fix it, or if it's fine and not worth fixing. I've been using it myself for months, though, so I think it's good enough to be useful.

• You can't start tracking anything you currently have 0 of. The only ways around this would be for small mercies to maintain a list of every item and quality in the game (yuck), or have the user type it in. Typing it in might work, but the user would need to know the quality's category (eg Silver Horseheads are 'Story', Antique Mysteries are 'Elder').
• The user input boxes are ugly. I'm no good at making UIs look nice.
• It would be nice to be able to reorder the values without having to remove them all and readd them in the new order.
• It can't track CP. I use it to track Making Waves, but knowing I'm at 16 and my target is 17 is less useful than knowing I'm at 16 and 10 CP. I don't see anywhere that CP is visible to Small Mercies, so I don't know if there's any way to improve on this.

[AnteIndustrial]

Sorry, I thought I could link a pull request to an issue, but I don't see how to do that. The pull request is here: https://github.com/lensvol/fl-small-mercies/pull/26

[lensvol]

Awesome! I knew that procrastinating enough on that feature would force someone to start implementing it 🤣 On a more serious note, I will take a look at your PR as soon as possible and will provide feedback.

Concerning the points that you've raised:

• Having a hardcoded list of every quality is not as yucky as it may seem, as beggars can't be choosers. We can certainly use Fallen London Wiki API to extract and compile said list, especially since its admins are quite open to helping fan projects. But let's file it under the "nice to have" category for now. "Good enough" at the current moment would be something like a placeholder with a "question" image, which would anyway be replaced the moment we get information about that quality from the backend. Knowing a specific category is not really that useful, as collisions between quality names are very rare (maybe even non-existent?).
• Do not concern yourself with the UI intricacies, this we can easily polish later. For the moment my main concern with your approach is that it clashes with the already-established convention that all configuration happens on the "Settings" page. Seeing as the name remains the primary way to describe some quality, I believe that we can replace those input boxes with a single text area on the said screen. Each line would describe a single quality, allowing the user to easily rearrange them and/or share them with their friends as a single block of text.
• While there is indeed no way to obtain a specific number of CP points for a current quality level, we can use progressAsPercentage attribute which is served by the backend as a stand-in, if only for displaying the appropriate progress bar state. The current version does not support accessing that value, but adding support for it is trivial (maybe I will do it myself so you can rebase the code and use it).

I will leave further comments on the PR itself, but I am grateful already for the work that you've done!

[lensvol]

One other concern that I have is that it does not play well with the current Favour Tracker, in the sense that it replaces it completely with no option to switch to it. Either this feature should be its replacement (with a Favours being a default pre-set of tracked qualities), or a way to switch between different tracker panes should be established.

[AnteIndustrial]

Does it not work with Favours for you? I haven't seen a problem, what happens when you try?

[fynngodau]

Hey everyone,

I really like the idea, in fact I already worked on something similar where the qualities are shown below the main text body but above the storylets / branches. My intention was to hardcode a few wheel-tracking qualities and add more later on this way. I'll share screenshots once I'm back from vacation. Excited to see you working on this!

[lensvol]

@AnteIndustrial You misunderstood, I was talking about how this feature will conflict with the existing Favour Tracker. It is not removed in your PR, so I assumed that was intentional. In its current form, both features will add their tracker panels in the same space and it does not make sense since your tracker technically supersedes mine.

I would suggest you remove the existing FavourTrackerMixin and set the Favour list as the default one. In this way people will still get the experience they are used to, but with an option to customize it.

[fynngodau]

Here's screenshots of my proposal:

You can find the branch with my proposed changes in https://github.com/fynngodau/fl-small-mercies/tree/top-qualities.

As you can see in https://github.com/fynngodau/fl-small-mercies/blob/3edc85b52fb7ec05ae384cc3ed4d086e6021e75e/src/fixers/top_qualities.ts#L52, I hardcoded the wheel-tracking qualities for some wheels. They can either have a progress bar if there's some reasonable maximum value (for instance, maximum payout), or simply indicate the number. They can also either be shown only when the quality is larger than 0 and hidden otherwise; for instance, "Disappearing..." is not shown in the scandal reduction wheel in the cabinet noir if quality is zero.

For some of the qualities it works quite nicely. I also wanted to show the development progress of the stations as you can see in the "Ealing Gardens Commercial Development" line, but in my opinion this does not work so well.

What I find annoying is when I show a linear bar from start to finish that shows overall progress, but progression of the quality is inherently non-linear because of the rising amounts of CP required to achieve the next level. I have so far neither implemented showing the CP instead, nor a way to linearize the progress by showing CP / CP required for max (the latter would be my preferred solution).

[lensvol]

@fynngodau While I like the idea itself, moving trackers on top of branches eats up a lot of useful space IMO. Moving them into the right sidebar like the Favours will make more sense, as they fulfill the same function.

Would you mind if I implement this feature in the form mentioned above? With full attribution to you as the author of the idea, of course.

[AnteIndustrial]

That is cool, and it's the sort of thing I was thinking of doing. However, it seems like the devs may be adding that sort of thing to the game officially. They've added a tracker for zeefaring, lab research, Naga advertising, and a couple of other areas.

[lensvol]

@AnteIndustrial I think that is not actually the same and may have advantages over the native solution:

• Devs seem to be intent on working with what they have, namely the left sidebar which is already quite overloaded (especially for the endgame players). Displaying those qualities more prominently on the right should offer more ease for an at-a-glance appraisal of your current situation.
• Not all qualities relevant to the situation are being displayed due to the aforementioned cramped circumstances. E.g. at the Zee it would be also nice to have "Troubled Waters" and your current Pursuit status displayed (when you have Corsair colors).

Time will tell if they will extend first-class support for things such as Moulin expeditions and Hearts' Game, but adding support for them here would be easy enough once the initial framework is laid in place.

@AnteIndustrial I will probably create the necessary scaffolding for a more streamlined usage of the right sidebar in the coming days, so you are free to play with it. Or I can take this over and credit you as the author of the initial version. Your call :)

[AnteIndustrial]

Typescript, UI, and Chrome extensions are all outside my usual comfort zone, so if you want to take over that's fine with me. I've been having some headaches moving the setup into the settings menu.

[fynngodau]

@lensvol I agree that the official implementation on the left sidebar increases the clutter there. It's not a place to keep an eye on constantly due to the many qualities that tend to stay the same most of the time. Let me share some more thoughts regarding the right sidebar:

• I personally have the snippets enabled, so the qualities on the right sidebar are very much on the bottom and I wouldn't be able to keep an eye on them. For this reason, I don't use them much. We could consider moving the right sidebar qualities above the snippet.
• My idea for reducing space usage with the layout I proposed would be to place multiple fitting qualities next to each other, like so:

  Elaboration    |     Backstory
  Nuance | Witness | Credentials

  However I do get that this still uses up space, and especially on mobile it would mean that one has to scroll up and down even more.

• The right sidebar is, however, not available on mobile.
• My personal reason why I chose the spot at the top was that I also intended to add some more "texture" to the different in-game locations so that it feels more unique to be in a certain place.

…but if it's not viable to have it at the top, we can of course put all this on the sidebar as well. Naturally, you are free to use the above suggestions and the code I linked (it contains some extensions to matchers.ts that may be of interest to you, as well), though I would be happy to hear your thoughts and further collaborate with you as well.

[AnteIndustrial]

Or I can take this over and credit you as the author of the initial version. Your call :)

So, I said you could take over... but I've been working on a different change, and it required me to go into settings, and after mucking around with that for a day or two I felt confident enough to move this lot into settings too. I've updated my pull request with that commit. I should be clear: it's a bit messy, and there's a good chunk of code duplication, because now misc_tracker.ts and settings.ts have to do similar things, but it's just slightly different enough that I couldn't easily remove all duplication. Also, if I removed duplication and just had one, eg, private createTracker(title: string): HTMLElement, I'm not sure whether that should go in misc_tracker or settings, and I thought I'd leave that decision up to you.

I dunno, let me know what you think about the current state. I think it's all working, I tried to break it a few ways, but it seems functionally good, it's just messy and duplicated.

[lensvol]

@AnteIndustrial Cool! I've been away on vacation without my laptop for a week, so no work got lost on my end. :)

I will take a look a bit later and see how it looks.