Little things is a major SCG update designed around the idea of quality of life fixes. The inspiration came from an idea I had a few months ago while playing on our MVM server. A player had accidentally used their canteen before the round had even started, and I felt so bad for them in particular that I had spent that evening coming up with a plugin that could prevent accidental canteen usage.
When I described it to others, it was praised as a quality of life thing. Normally when I work on things, it's usually some big feature or a bug fix or something. I never really thought about little things, so that was the goal this time around.
There's two parts to this, the SCG website, and our TF2 servers.
###Starting to support alternative fonts
The Jewelbox is now starting to support alternative fonts! Presently, I have enabled the option to switch your font to the Open Dyslexic font which has been designed to be easier to read for some folk. You can learn more about that here
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###Team Fortress 2 settings
Let's get this out of the way!
I have introduced a new settings page that allows you to adjust settings for the TF2 servers!
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This page works even if you haven't been on the servers yet, as long as you have your Steam ID associated with your profile. If you are a donator, you should also be able to adjust your donator settings here as well!
###Personal stats
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There is now a page for your personal stats, though right now the only thing that we track is your personal victories in MVM. It is used as a checklist to determine what missions you have and have not yet completed!
###Home page
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When you log in to the Jewelbox, you are now taken to your home page. It acts as a small portal to some of the features of the website, as well as a list of suggestions to help get you started!
###Achievements
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The website also offers new achievements! This is a new feature, and there aren't a lot of them yet. The long term goal is to provide some goals for people to work on while being apart of SCG.
###So what's the plan from here?
These features above were designed with the goal of providing more for the community as it is, but also built in a way to scale to any and all future plans. They may not seem super exciting, but at the very least, this is all personal practice for me in my own skills as a designer so...there's that!
###Other updates
The following are a list of fixes and otherwise for the SCG site itself.
-The Member directory now has a proper search function
-Assorted graphic changes to the Jewelbox
-You can now @ people in posting pages
-New notifications system, however at the time isn't completely implemented
-Profile activity feed is now up and working
-Auto saving for discussions are now totally implemented!
##Team Fortress 2
###All talk for spies
All talk has always been a small problem for spies, a spy talking while cloaked still leaves a speech bubble...until now. Thanks to a plugin developed by Fraeven and myself, spies no longer retain their speech bubbles when they cloak and talk.
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###Typing bubble for all
From the same plugin, we've also implemented a bubble for those who are typing. This bubble first appears after your first chat message, and lingers around for a moment until it leaves on its own or you start to move around. We've also implemented a feature where you can open up chat, press space and enter, and have your bubble appear without having to send the first initial message.
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###Donator menu rework
The donator menu now allows you to access and adjust everything all at once. You can set your kill effects, toggle your rainbow text, and more all from one menu.
###Clientprefs rework
Clientprefs are like cookies for you on the servers. They store things like your kill effect setting, your usage of ghosts in rainbow, so on and so forth. These settings have always been on a per server basis, but now they use one central database you can adjust anywhere. Saving a setting for one server carries it over to every other. You can also adjust some of them using the TF2 settings page listed above!
##So what's next?
This was a fun series of projects to work on! But there's always more to do! Aside from the help I get occasionally from Fraeven, this is mostly a solo project! I do a lot of maintenance and upkeep, and because of this, I'm often a little confused or overwhelmed on what I have done, need to do, or have yet to plan out.
My organization is a little questionable, but I am learning more every day! My next few projects won't be so exciting, there's a lot of code cleanup I want to do which isn't the most fun thing to talk about. But the next bigger project will be work on our Saxton Hale server, so stay tuned!
If you'd like to help support me and SCG, please consider checking out our contributions page! and feel free to help report any problems, bugs and suggestions here or anywhere else! Oh, and the full patchnotes for the TF2 update are here below!