[WIP] PA Community Hub

Sure, although doesn't that mean the population is going to be split between the IRC chat and the XMPP chat?

That's something that has been worrying me since @cola_colin decided to do this, but it's happening anyway so at this point the best thing that can be done is to just make it easier to have both open. I just really don't want to need to keep PA open to stay connected to the global chat all the time.

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Men I have an extrange issue, it says that i couldn´t find the planetary annihilation directory and ask me to run the game. I did so and didn´t work.
I´m using the steam version of the game to let you know but right now i´m stuck, any help would be helpfull. Thanks
this is what appears:
Could not find PA installation directory, Please run Planetary annihilation, the restart PA Hub

I found a bug (several, actually) the other day to do with detecting the PA install location. They have mostly been fixed in the next version:

• Detection failed if the specific x64 /x86 exe's were launched
• It grabbed the latest log file - this fails if it's the server log file, rather than the client one.

All I can suggest in the meantime is to delete any log files starting with "server" prior to opening PA Hub. The log files are typically found in C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Uber Entertainment\Planetary Annihilation\log

Update - 31/01/2015
Filters! I've completely re-written the filtering system, so it's far more extensible and easy to use. This includes:

• Categories are now supported by all content (rather than being a mod content type specific thing)
• Can use AND / OR within category groups (this means you can now select multiple content types to show at once, rather than only one or all)
• Filters can have arbitrary rules - they are based on a function that returns true or false for each content item.
• Added text Filter. It currently searches Name, Description and Author fields.
• Added Show only - Installed / Not Installed / Needs Update / Newly Updated filters to the find content tab.

As mentioned in the last update, this has a corresponding update to the UI, as well:

Filters hidden:


Filters shown:


Edit:
Also added:

• Show Icons display option
• Show Details display option (turning this off hides the description & pre-requisite fields)
• (Local content) Filter by needs update, enabled & disabled.
• Categories in content tiles
• Requirements are now shown in orange (not met) or green (met). The requirement condition is hidden if it's any version (*)

Edit 2:
It's been a PA Hub development marathon today!

• Stats tab added to the Game plugin - Includes player count per tier & rank distribution:
  
  
• The ladder now shows actual rank:
  
  
• The game plugin now unloads correctly.
• After uninstalling content, the online content entry no longer remains greyed out.

You should reverse the order of your stacked bar chart and league tabs.

Immediate thoughts on first use:

1. Steps 2 and 3 for plugins need to be reversed. You shouldn't explain about how the folder is created after you've had a step requiring its existence.
2. Logins aren't remembered. If this isn't an annoyance for you then your password isn't good enough.
3. Window doesn't remember previous size which makes customising number of items relatively pointless.
4. Would be nice to have the option to automatically change the number of highlights to match the window size
5. News page needs some fixed width, akin to that used by the forum.
   1. To be honest every page should be fixed width. A wide screen is not a good size for a line of text.
6. Mod names are overlaid on their icons, many of which are not designed to have white text overlaid on them
7. Mods are displayed as icons with no indication as to what the mod does. As a means to peruse content it is not useful.
8. People should be able to hide dependencies so only the master mod is shown.
9. Numerous mods with duplicate names and versions.
10. Upon entering the Content hub the Filter tab is highlighted despite being shrunk by default. Dropdown tabs should be highlighted when dropped only.
    1. And is it really a good idea to change tab behaviour hub to hub?
11. Default filtering is hugely over complicated.
    1. UI and Server mods are one click too deep
    2. There are a number of categories all mods could be sorted into by default that should be mapped to existing tags and then encouraged going forward. I mean, particles vs. effects? No one cares. It's graphics.
    3. You should probably just ditch the entire existing tag system, which is an enormous mess, declare some tags and anything not tagged in a PA Hub way goes into unclassified or untagged or something.
12. PA Hubs isn't detecting my game and thus I don't see the Game or Launch options. I have a Steam installation.
13. PA Hub gives no indication that it hasn't detected my game, so unless you know Game and Launch should exist you have no way of knowing there's an error.
14. IRC should fill in my logged in name by default
15. Hubs don't remember which tab I had selected.
16. Chat needs to be its own hub with visual indications of activity and PMs.
17. Default hyperlink colour on the news page is too dark and does not contrast well.
18. Why is com.pa a tag on news? What the heck does that mean? How about... patch? Update?
19. Map store plugin update has the tag map store. Every plugin update should have a plugin update tag, surely? Can the system handle multiple tags? If not it needs to be able to.
20. Local Content should be Installed Content.
21. PA Hubs needs to be able to import my PAMM setup.

Some really good feedback! Please note that a lot of work has been done since the currently available version for download, so some of the issues you experienced have already been fixed or no longer applicable. Answers inline:

Fixed (updated the image in the previous update post).

Edit:
Did a big cleanup of the 3rd post: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/wip-pa-community-hub.63174/#post-982791
It's now much better broken down into things to do and things already done (but not released yet).

11.1 - I have to click on Filter to get the drop down to select from UI or Server. These are easily the most commonly used options, I'm sure metrics would show this. They shouldn't be hidden in this way.

11.2 Then take it out of the hands of modders. There's no reason it needs to be in their hands, and if PA Hub becomes the standard so does its way of working. There were at least three different tags for system editor. The tag system as it stands is worthless.

11.3 No need, just have PA Hub ignore all but a series of tags you specify, then tell modders to get their **** together.

Once you expand a tab, it remembers it's state from then on. See 10.1, however, as the tabs have actually been removed.

What happens when someone makes a mod that doesn't fit the existing tags? What happens when new kinds of content altogether come in? I have to think long term, and broadly - not just about mods. I'm all for making it easier to have things standardised (which is why I suggested mereth could add a category entry form on the mod submission site), enforcing certain formats (like whether to use spaces, dashes or underscores between words), and for fixing things when it's obvious (like the different types of system editor tags), but I'm not willing to hard-code limits to what tags can be used, because:

• It will require constant updating of the program to support new mods and tags
• Any new kinds of content other than mods will need their own tags anyway
• It's not a future-proof solution.

So what am I willing to do as a first step is the following. After this, we can revisit and see if there is still an issue.

• Define a standard for whether to use spaces, dashes or underscores. I can make PA Hub adjust the tags as they are loaded to enforce this. This will fix the duplicates.
• Request Mereth add some kind of tag cloud to the mod submission page, to encourage re-use of existing tags
• Automatically add certain tags at load-time, such as what scene the mods are loaded into, or map-related data.
• Add an option to hide unique tags - those that only apply to one content item.

Also keep in mind that in the redesigned UI, tag handling is much easier - the filter box area is smaller, and so are the tag names so they take up less space. And once the above changes are done, there will be even less tags than currently, too.

Unclassified.

The number of things we can mod is easily classifiable.

The problem is the current system holds no value. It doesn't scale and it doesn't work.

Re: Messy categories. It's hard to clean this up, and be specific, without a few people doing curation. I'm against curation, not just because it can be strict if done improperly, but time is short and continued curation is unlikely (I've tried a few times to curate things, it's hard to maintain). What I would suggest if you really want to try cleaning tags is a sort of low maintenance curation:

• People add categories to their mods as they always have
• PA Hub reads the categories, then adds a more generic category if it knows about certain keywords. For example all ui mods tagged with 'projectiles', 'colours', 'particles' etc can be tagged with an additional tag 'effects', or whatever
• The filter displays tags in order of popularity

Even if that is true - without being overly generic - the Content Hub has no intrinsic knowledge of "mods". They are just another content type, as defined by the Mod Content store. There are also maps, plugins and any other number of arbitrary content types that could be added in future. Manually updating the list of allowed tags is not a workable solution.

With regards to the second dot point: Some automatic tagging is possible, but the situation described falls just as much under the manual update issue. This sort of thing is better done by talking to either modders and asking them to consolidate some tags (which should be reviewed first, to establish which is the preferred), then either asking the modders to re-upload or changing the modinfo file on the server end. Reviews like this from time to time are fine - but not coded within PA Hub itself, it needs to be done outside of it to allow the tag system to support new content.

With the third point, I'm not sure number of matches to a tag is actually a useful thing to sort by. In what instance would you want to know what the most popular tag is, as opposed to being easily able to find a tag when sorted alphabetically? If there's a reason, I can add an option to specify how to sort the tags.

Update - 01/02/2015

• UI: Dashes and underscore in tag names are now replaced with spaces
• UI: Categories are now sorted alphabetically
• Feature: Added a "Hide Unique Tags" option
• Bugfix: Removing content now removes categories from the filter list if it was the only content that it applied to.
• Bugfix: Content without a specified date no longer shows "Undefined".
• UI: Local Content renamed to Installed Content
• UI: Install button is now shown as grey when content is already installed

Oh can you query more then the top 10 now ?

Also you see now what I have to put up with daily
This guy is a monster

I don't think so. I guess he just adds the players in the leaguge before, so if there are 50 uber players and you are #1 in plat you are rank 51

This. Just keeping count of the players per league.

Update 02/02/2015

Content tile redesign
Only done this for installed content at the moment, haven't copied it across to online content yet.


With icon & show details off:

• Removed the following information, and instead display it on hover:
  • Enable/Disable button
  • Forum button
  • Install / Update button
  • Uninstall button
  • Version
  • Date
  • Downloads.
• The Install button on online content now reads Update when one is available for the locally installed version
  
• Available version is shown for installed content if update is available
  
• The Build information no longer appears. Instead, if a build is specified for mods, it is automatically added as a dependency. Which is how I know @Innomen has a typo in his mod, which needs build 78843
  
  (This is online, so still has the old tile design)
  Note: This is where the PA meta-content item comes into play, as when you switch steams in PA Hub, the version number of the meta content changes to the build of that stream.

Other changes

• Removed some deprecated code
  
• Renamed "Find Content" to "Online Content"
  
• Bugfix: Disabling the map store no longer causes mod functionality to fail

I'm not a fan of that though. No one is excited to be #51, where as #1 in plat means something. You also want to know how close someone is to breaking into the next league without having to figure out their rank vs. total leage population.