KerbalX.com - Craft & Mission Sharing

[adsii1970]

I just saw them and think they look good. I would like to offer an idea that may help with sorting. Since it already detects the version of KSP the craft file is built around, can KerbalX sort this as well? If it already does this... pardon my stupidity...

[katateochi]

8 minutes ago, adsii1970 said:

I just saw them and think they look good. I would like to offer an idea that may help with sorting. Since it already detects the version of KSP the craft file is built around, can KerbalX sort this as well? If it already does this... pardon my stupidity...

You can currently filter by KSP version, but you can't sort by it.  Why...why had I not thought of that!? It's a little trickier to implement than the other sort options because version numbers are not really numbers and aren't enumerable in the same way (which wouldn't be a problem to do in Ruby, but I need to do it in SQL, so it's done by the database which is faster, but I'm not as skilled with SQL!).  Probably the easiest way is to convert the version number into an enumerable value when the craft is uploaded and store that as an attribute which I can then sort by easily in SQL without needing to do any SQL logic.  Yeah, that would work and be fast.  Ok, suggestion added to list. 

 

[adsii1970]

1 minute ago, katateochi said:

You can currently filter by KSP version, but you can't sort by it.  Why...why had I not thought of that!? It's a little trickier to implement than the other sort options because version numbers are not really numbers and aren't enumerable in the same way (which wouldn't be a problem to do in Ruby, but I need to do it in SQL, so it's done by the database which is faster, but I'm not as skilled with SQL!).  Probably the easiest way is to convert the version number into an enumerable value when the craft is uploaded and store that as an attribute which I can then sort by easily in SQL without needing to do any SQL logic.  Yeah, that would work and be fast.  Ok, suggestion added to list. 

 

Why not add a field to what you already have, and as a user enters their craft information, have it where, much like the action groups, it can be entered as a user defined field that is searchable?

[katateochi]

16 minutes ago, adsii1970 said:

Why not add a field to what you already have, and as a user enters their craft information, have it where, much like the action groups, it can be entered as a user defined field that is searchable?

Craft already have a version attribute (field) that gets set from the file at upload, and that's fine for selecting craft with a particular version ie Craft.where(:version => "1.0.5"), but it's not a number, it's a string, so doing a direct match on it works fine, but ordering by it might not always work as intended. As it is KSP version numbers currently sort correctly, but if Squad does something unexpected with them, like sticking a letter in there as well, then that could stop working. I know how to sort version numbers that contain alphas in ruby, not sure how to deal with that in SQL. But I can have a global variable that contains known versions sorted (using ruby) and as craft are uploaded they just get an index value of their version's position in that global list and then I can sort by that.  There probably is a neater way to do it purely in SQL, but I need to take the string version number and split it into it's components and then handle alpha and numeric sorting separately, and I don't know how to do that in SQL.

[swjr-swis]

4 hours ago, katateochi said:

Anyway, let me know what you think about the new sort and filter options.

They appear to work well.

I did notice one thing: although it's possible to sort on views... the nr of views of each craft is not actually displayed anywhere. That is, on other people's craft (I know I can see the nrs on my own craft, on the dashboard). Which, for at least some of those interested enough to want to sort on that particular thing, might be something they'd want to compare craft on? "Sure, the Shuttle is nr 1 in views, but how well did it do compared to the next best one?" (or, to my own best craft, etc). I say views, but there's more sorting parameters that are not shown as an actual number.

I'm fine with this, but I guess it's an idea for a feature.. to show the actual nrs that the craft were sorted on.

Btw, I was surprised to find out that the simultaneously most viewed, most downloaded, *and* most upvoted craft (and as a result, most popular as well)... only has 33 upvotes. 33, after near to 7000 downloads. You were not kidding about people not really upvoting much. Suddenly I am looking at the paltry 5 upvotes for my best craft in a whole new light.

[katateochi]

37 minutes ago, swjr-swis said:

the nr of views of each craft is not actually displayed anywhere.

I shall see if I can cram that in somewhere, but I don't want to clutter things up too much.  btw, on your own craft you can add /stats to the end of the url and see some info about it, but currently you can't see that page for other people's craft, I was thinking about making that page visible to to everyone for all craft. What do you think?

37 minutes ago, swjr-swis said:

You were not kidding about people not really upvoting much. Suddenly I am looking at the paltry 5 upvotes for my best craft in a whole new light.

yeah, the lack of upvoting has surprised me. 5 upvotes is actually pretty good, my top 3 craft by points have 7, 6 and 6 points and two of them are the very first craft on the site.  People are upvoting more these days, but it's still very low.  Not sure what I can do to encourage people to upvote more! 
 

 

[swjr-swis]

17 minutes ago, katateochi said:

I shall see if I can cram that in somewhere, but I don't want to clutter things up too much.

Well, like I said some posts ago, it's not information I'm particularly interested in, I'm fine with things as they are. It probably would end up cluttering things. Just, since you asked us to test, I did, and that's what I noticed.

 

20 minutes ago, katateochi said:

btw, on your own craft you can add /stats to the end of the url and see some info about it, but currently you can't see that page for other people's craft, I was thinking about making that page visible to to everyone for all craft. What do you think?

That would be a way of solving this, offering the information to those interested enough to click for it, but not cluttering the main craft list. I'd be fine with that.

 

22 minutes ago, katateochi said:

Not sure what I can do to encourage people to upvote more!

Well, the feature is there, and it's pretty visible. I would suggest that if it's not seeing much use, and there haven't been complaints about lack of votes (we would be seeing that here, right?), it's fine to leave it the way it is.

[adsii1970]

16 minutes ago, katateochi said:

I shall see if I can cram that in somewhere, but I don't want to clutter things up too much.  btw, on your own craft you can add /stats to the end of the url and see some info about it, but currently you can't see that page for other people's craft, I was thinking about making that page visible to to everyone for all craft. What do you think?

yeah, the lack of upvoting has surprised me. 5 upvotes is actually pretty good, my top 3 craft by points have 7, 6 and 6 points and two of them are the very first craft on the site.  People are upvoting more these days, but it's still very low.  Not sure what I can do to encourage people to upvote more! 
 

 

To be completely honest, one of the reasons I chose to use KerbalX was its simplicity in design. I see nothing wrong with the stats or listings the way they are now. If you have a favorite craft designer, you can already follow them. If you search using a keyword/tag search, the results usually have the most recent uploads followed by the most popular uploads...

With this in mind, I ask why do we need to have to have each user rated? I know that we do have the ability to give and receive upvotes, but to me, I hate to see it come into some sort of popularity contest - then the thrill of uploading craft won't be the same for me.

[Castille7]

1 hour ago, adsii1970 said:

To be completely honest, one of the reasons I chose to use KerbalX was its simplicity in design. I see nothing wrong with the stats or listings the way they are now. If you have a favorite craft designer, you can already follow them. If you search using a keyword/tag search, the results usually have the most recent uploads followed by the most popular uploads...

With this in mind, I ask why do we need to have to have each user rated? I know that we do have the ability to give and receive upvotes, but to me, I hate to see it come into some sort of popularity contest - then the thrill of uploading craft won't be the same for me.

I totally agree adsii1970, I was interested in the idea of seeing a best of the month craft or the better of the craft being posted on Kerbalx, not for a popularity contest but to see some of the better craft in a sort order of some kind. I think the link that is set as Popular works great as it is.   

[He_162]

You should add a report option for craft with names that are absurd, or are just shaped silly ways (like dicks, etc)

 

For example: https://kerbalx.com/Gyracci/USS-Suck-my-Nutt

[katateochi]

10 minutes ago, He_162 said:

You should add a report option for craft

A reporting option is high on my list of things to do! But consider that one reported. Thanks for letting me know.

[swjr-swis]

5 hours ago, He_162 said:

craft with names that are absurd, or are just shaped silly ways

Sounds like half of my craft would get reported then (for varying degrees of absurd and silly).

[katateochi]

6 hours ago, swjr-swis said:

Sounds like half of my craft would get reported then (for varying degrees of absurd and silly).

Absurd and silly is fine, great even! It's just things which are likely to cause offence that I don't want on the site.  The terms which are shown at signup include not posting NSFW media content and offensive text. 

 

[EVA_Reentry]

Not opening (ERR 500) on Win7 google chrome--why?

[katateochi]

11 hours ago, EVA_Reentry/Strangelove II said:

Not opening (ERR 500) on Win7 google chrome--why?

There doesn't appear to be any issues with the site at present.  Arey you still getting the error? If so I'd suggest clearing browser cache and seeing if that helps, maybe try to access it with a different browser and see if you still have the problem. 

[adsii1970]

11 hours ago, EVA_Reentry/Strangelove II said:

Not opening (ERR 500) on Win7 google chrome--why?

Because you are using Google Chrome...

Seriously, Google/Chrome is not compatible with all websites and web hosting platforms. I've learned this with my online classes. Try either Microsoft Edge or Mozilla Firefox in the event that @katateochi's suggestion doesn't work.

[katateochi]

27 minutes ago, adsii1970 said:

Because you are using Google Chrome...

I do most of my development using both Chromium and Firefox, so GoogleChrome will work as intended.  65% of KerbalX users use Chrome, then it's down to 14% for FF and dropping by half again each time for the other major browsers. 
I always aim to build as agnostically as possible and KX doesn't have a single line of code that's specific to one browser of another (some serious progress in browser land from the days of having large chunks do handle different browsers accordingly, these days it's all about screen size differences!) 

 

And on that topic! Kinda excited; I've been working on a big overhaul to KX to make it a responsive layout, and actually quite pleased with how it's going so far.  I'm not changing how the site looks or works, but it will make much better use of available screen space and will work nicely on mobile devices.  Still got quite a bit to do and still have the biggest challenge to overcome; the actual craft pages. Due to how they are designed to be totally customizable they are very dependent on a grid structure for both width and height, and that poses some problems.  I have a couple ideas to play with still.  
I'll post some screenshots of what the new layout will look like on difference devices and once it's more complete I'll be running it on the staging server to get some feedback/testing before I roll it out to production.  

[adsii1970]

@katateochi: I was also thinking. Since Microsoft has made it clear there is no longer support for Windows 7 after January 13, 2015, it could be possible that his particular version of Google Chrome, the last upgrade compatible with Windows 7, may not be compatible with what you (or others) are doing. It seems there is such a knee-jerk reaction to blame those who design websites when many of the issues are that some people either will not because of choice or hardware restrictions, will not update their software.

After reading your response and the initial issue reported by @EVA_Reentry/Strangelove II, I am willing to bet it is the older version of Chrome, which cannot upgrade to the latest version of the web browser dependencies on the Windows 10 operating system and its incompatibility with Windows 7.

[EVA_Reentry]

Ok, I'll try it

[katateochi]

Without wanting to derail too much, but Jan 2015 only marks the end of "mainstream" support for win7, which means no new features, but win7 will continue to get security updates and hotfixes until 2020. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/lifecycle 
This is exactly what happened with win XP which ended mainstream support back in 2009 (IIRC), but continued to be used as a main OS for many years after (and actually got its extended support period, err extended).  As far as I'm aware Chrome has continued to support win XP until this month! So it's going to be a long while before the hand of death looms over win7 as far as Chrome goes.
I still run Win7 (mostly just for gaming) on my rig (and probably will continue to for a while, even after upgrading it which I plan to do soon, at least until I fully understand the privacy issues with win10), and I don't have any issues with it.  There are some mutterings going around that machines using new gen CPU's (skylake and the like) won't have the same level of support for win7 and that MS is trying to use hardware to force everyone onto win10, but I'm not 100% sure of the details on that.  

So as far as I know, Chrome + Win7 is still a happy place to be and will carry on being so for at least a few more years.  Just make sure Chrome is up to date!

 

[adsii1970]

@EVA_Reentry/Strangelove II: Check to make sure you have all the remaining Windows 7 service packs and, for giggles and grins, uninstall Google Chrome, shut off your PC, then reboot it. After reboot, do a disc cleanup and defrag the hard drive (this will assure that all the old Google Chrome files are truly deleted). Then do a fresh install of Google and allow it to set your default settings for it... I bet it might solve some of your issues and perhaps increase your Internet surfing performance.

[katateochi]

Hey Guys, I continued with the work on updating the interface this weekend.  Not done yet, but getting closer. 

At first glance little has changed and that is what I'm aiming for - maintaining the same functionality and interface, while gaining responsiveness.

There's a new header image that can scale and fit to both the tall and short header style, and I've removed the border colors from craft thumbnails which I think looks cleaner than before.

But now things will gradually change as you reduce the width of the browser;

Browser at < 1100px wide - drops the launch clamps at either side to make use of full page width

Browser at < 800px wide - adjusts the search interface position to give room for the more filters menu on the right

Browser at < 670px wide - mobile mode - drops the search interface, changes thumbnail layout to single column of wide images

On several pages the user bar which always remains at the top has extra links in it, now when the screen width gets too small to show those links they get moved into the drop down menu (which also changes style to fit on smaller screens).  The header bar always used to jitter on mobile displays when scrolling, I think I've fixed that.

When viewed on a mobile the site is much clearer and more usable

view on a 320px wide mobile - search filters are replaced with filters button that opens an overlay	mobile search filter options as an overlay	mobile landscape orientation

Going in the other direction, for use on larger screens, you can choose how many craft per row to display (1, 2, 3, 4 or 6)

4 per row	6 per row	2 per row and with option to show wide images

You can set how many craft per row and style of thumbnail at any screen size except for the small (mobile) mode, but I'm also going to make that an auto option so it will jump to 4 per row on large displays.  There will also be the option to not show the launch clamps at the side and use the full screen width at any resolution. 

The craft pages themselves are not fully done yet and they've presented the biggest challenge in this rework.  Because the craft page allows you to position elements wherever you like it is very dependent on being a set width (940px) and while it would be possible to scale images up and down, scaling text containers is more problematic.  So what I've gone for in the end is the simplest solution.   If your browser width is greater than 940px then the page content remains at 940px wide but just moves to sit in the center of the page.  Below 940px each element simply goes full width and auto scales its height, the order of the custom content is preserved. 

Standard layout with custom positions, but with a side border	medium layout (under 940px wide)	On a mobile this makes the craft pages much more readable.

To make better use of the screen space, what I'm planning to do for large displays is move the craft page content over to the left and then use the additional space to bring up the comments, download/ckan/print links and other content from the bottom of the page into a side-bar type display on the right. Not done that bit yet though. 

Anyway, that's sort of where I'm at with this rework.  Sorting out the fiddly bits round the edges ie auto adjusting font size of long user names in the header and other things like that still need cleaning up a bit.  But it's getting there!
Let me know if you have any thoughts or interface related suggestions that you'd like to see as part of this update.

 

 

[swjr-swis]

I haven't done any mobile browsing of the site (I'm one of those that still think phones are for calling, damn whippersnappers), but I can see how the changes you've made would help it become more readable on the smaller & taller screens. Good job!

You also managed to keep the visual style as much as possible as it was; it's still KerbalX, and I kinda like it.

 

The only suggestion I can think of would be side-by-side views, for wide displays (or landscape use on phones):

• main browse/search on the left, craft page of a selected craft on the right
• user profile left, hangars and/or craft on the right (could be two separate things - user/hangars and user/craft)
• hangar (personal or from someone else) on the left and a selected craft from that hangar on the right

Sans the launchclamps (as pretty as they are), even a 1920px screen width would allow for such views. Would need to have a toggle though, not everyone might like it.

It's not something I'd miss or complain about if it was never implemented, so in bug tracker lingo, consider this one as an 'unworthy' feature request.

[Castille7]

Thumbs up here! really nice improvements, your work is diffidently appreciated and losing the border colors from the thumbnails? so much better!. Looking better with the tweaks as time goes on and again your hard work is appreciated! 

[katateochi]

Site update
After several delays as I kept finding bits that were being awkward, the new interface is now up!!
Been quite an adventure in CSS (well SASS, which is nicer to work with than raw CSS). 

Main things are being mobile friendly and making better use of large displays.  You can also choose how many craft per row are shown on the main page or let it auto adjust to browser width.  In the very top right there is a little >> button, on medium & wide displays that will toggle full page mode (gets rid of the launch clamps and uses the full width).  If you are logged in the site will remember your setting for that and also if you've set a custom craft-per-row. 

I have slightly broken the next/prev links and they are also slower to work than before (400-500ms requests).  
But the main search is now much faster.

Check out the mods index page (https://kerbalx.com/mods) it has a totally unintented but kinda cool effect when you change browser width.  I'd made some javascript before which ensured the right number of columns and that when more results were loaded it didn't leave gaps in the cols. That plus the new responsive widths has resulted in something a little unexpected! I'm calling it a feature. 

Craft pages when the inner page is between 960px and 1200px show the craft page centered.  Above 1200px it puts the page content over to the right and brings up the additional craft and comments section from below into a right hand column.  When less than 960px wide the content of the page is scaled down and each element from the page is drawn one above the other in a list style.  Makes craft pages nicely readable on mobiles (although I may need to drop the font size a bit).  

There are a couple pages that have not been updated yet, but they're non-important pages (like the craft stats page).  

Let me know if you spot anything that looks odd!

 

@swjr-swis I like your suggestion of side by side views, might be a bit tricky to make work, but I'll ponder it.