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Signature Generator - Development Q&A

Re: Signature Generator - Development Q&A

Postby timewizard » Tue Nov 19, 2013 3:36 pm

Spack, I tried it out. Most of it worked fine, but when I checked off the medals section (which did say gold membership required or something like that) the preview did not show any of my medals.
I didn't copy the sig to use here because I figured it wasn't ready to go until you said so.
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Re: Signature Generator - Development Q&A

Postby jlong05 » Tue Nov 19, 2013 3:49 pm

Mine showed medals, not that i will be using that. One thing I did like from before was the XVM colors behind the tanks displays at the bottom. That was awesome, but no longer an option it seems.
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Re: Signature Generator - Development Q&A

Postby Spack » Tue Nov 19, 2013 4:18 pm

TW, try it again, it should work. You should also get a gold star at the top left corner, as will all gold members. Do you think I should make this an option?

jlong, those were rough mockups in Photoshop, I haven't got around to the per tank colouring yet. It's on the list ;) Unfortunately while the new WoT API has placeholders for all the per tank stats required for this, every value is set to zero so it will have to wait until that gets fixed.

UPDATE: Few more changes - players can now enter just their name and search, rather than needing the ID+name from the profile URL; medal default sorting adjusted to match order on the WoT wiki page for achievements.
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Re: Signature Generator - Development Q&A

Postby timewizard » Tue Nov 19, 2013 9:58 pm

Thanks Spack, works now.
Can it be used now in AoS or is it still in testing?
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Re: Signature Generator - Development Q&A

Postby Spack » Wed Nov 20, 2013 5:50 am

It's now live. Fixed a couple of bugs in the generator interface, I think it's now working correctly. You'll need to rebuild your signature to add any of the new options.

I think the next change will be having the settings server-side so that you only need to use the generator to change options and have that immediately reflected in the sig images without having to change the HTML/BBcode for them, which will mean a unified sig for all the sites it's used on (I use mine here on AoS and also on the WoT EU forum). Does anyone need to have multiple images available at once? Would one image across all instances be acceptable? Or do I need to look at an instancing option, so the generator would allow up to say 5 versions and editing of each one being separate?
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Re: Signature Generator - Development Q&A

Postby timewizard » Wed Nov 20, 2013 1:03 pm

Works great Spack! Many thanks.
In my case, I don't believe I'll need multiple images.
But if others need them, is it very difficult to put together?
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Re: Signature Generator - Development Q&A

Postby killmaimburn » Wed Nov 20, 2013 1:12 pm

Bring back the pixel limiter/proportioner??
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Re: Signature Generator - Development Q&A

Postby jlong05 » Wed Nov 20, 2013 1:14 pm

Working for me also it seems. I agree with TW. I don't need alternate images. Can you though put code change to boost my stats?? ;)
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Re: Signature Generator - Development Q&A

Postby Spack » Wed Nov 20, 2013 5:56 pm

killmaimburn wrote:Bring back the pixel limiter/proportioner??
:car24


Don't need to bring it back, it never went away!Limiter is working, the image isn't larger than the limit ;)

Had another look, the only image limiting is on the width to ensure it remains smaller than the centre content width. The javascript thing was with the old old forum, and has never been on this one.
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Re: Signature Generator - Development Q&A

Postby Spack » Thu Dec 19, 2013 10:29 am

Still working on reducing the amount of traffic, as it looks like a number of forums having signature size checks - every time someone views a topic with sigs included, those forums request the images in each signature to check that they are no larger than the predefined size allowed, and do so without any caching checks of any kind. This results in a huge amount of traffic to the generator that uses up bandwidth (for example, in the past 30 days the WoT forums have pulled about 2GB of images, and the one at relicgaming.com has pulled almost 500Mb). At the moment my estimates from the reporting I've put in place show around 4GB per month of data is simply other forums checking the image sizes. The more users have sigs, the more data is pulled by the remote forums, the more my VPS bandwidth use goes up and the more risk there is that it hits the monthly limit and so the hosting price goes up. In order to reduce the impact this has, I've put in a place some tests to see if the request looks like it's from a real browser - if not then a blank image is being sent instead, which reduces the data transfer on a 400x100 signature from around 75,000 bytes to 200 bytes. This should result in a massive reduction in data transfer, but still allow those forums to retrieve the dimensions of the signature. I did try simply blocking the WoT forums yesterday as a test and it switched some signatures to a link for a short period.

The signature size checking used by IP.Board, SMF, and other forum software used by these sites is very sloppy - with no caching, and checking on almost every request by every user. Grr.
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Re: Signature Generator - Development Q&A

Postby berger15 » Thu Dec 19, 2013 11:46 am

Ok, two things - firstly, I think one signature image is enough for me to manage. Multiple images would confuse me further.
Secondly, thanks for your continued work in improving the signature generator. I'm sure you must have other things you could be doing! What we have at the moment is, to me, excellent. Easy to use and simple to understand. So, again, thanks very much. :)
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Re: Signature Generator - Development Q&A

Postby Spack » Thu Dec 19, 2013 3:39 pm

Wait till you see the new web interface I'm building to select the options! The current one is a slightly modified version of the original and is really clunky. The new one should be much easier to use, and offer "most popular" pre-selected configs. Hopefully I'll have it in place ready for the 1st week of January, got a lot going on over the next 2 weeks so not sure if I'll have chance to do it earlier. Doesn't help that I only have the 25th, 26th, and 1st off work - I've got too much on to be able to take any days off!
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Re: Signature Generator - Development Q&A

Postby timewizard » Thu Dec 19, 2013 8:36 pm

So all you want for Christmas is another 5 or 6 days added to the year to help you catch up?

And so far all the work on the sig generator has been fantastic. Looking forward to the new changes.
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Re: Signature Generator - Development Q&A

Postby Spack » Thu Dec 19, 2013 8:57 pm

Nope, I need about 6 months added to catch up :D
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Re: Signature Generator - Development Q&A

Postby Spack » Fri Dec 27, 2013 12:40 pm

CoralCDN (http://www.coralcdn.org) remote caching has been enabled for signature images, which should significantly reduce the bandwidth required to handle signatures. Each request for a sig image not from Coral is redirected to a URL which requests the image from Coral - if the image exists in their cache it is served, if not the cache requests the image and then serves it as well as caching it. It appears to be ignoring the Expires header and setting all sigs to 12 hours lifetime, however I will monitor over the next couple of days how much of an impact this has overall. If the caching provides a signficant reduction in bandwidth use then I will look at switching public signatures to a shorter refresh than the current 7 days. More details to follow.
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