Game Calendar Prototype

[ddavison]

I've done a bit of work on the Game Calendar. This is a work in progress.

Prototype showing all scheduled games that are recruiting new players and not marked as Private:
https://www.fantasygrounds.com/gamecalendar/dashboard.php

You can reach this from the normal game calendar by clicking on the Game Recruiting Calendar link. You can navigate back by clicking on Manage Campaigns.

Thanks go out to Rich L as well for assistance with the development.

I also cleaned up the rulesets for each active campaign that had scheduled games and placed a dropbown selection on the campaign edit screen. If you had a private event, you will still have your old ruleset name listed and the dropdown box will require a selection before any updates are saved.

[kylania]

Looks nice! A few suggestions:

1. Duplicate the < > Month/Day/Week and Ruleset selection UI at the bottom of the page too, so we don't have to scroll back up to select the next month or check other games.

2. Have a straight list of game events in addition to a calendar similar to the current display. I might be looking for a specific Adventure League game or GM I want to play in and having to pick around on a calendar and expand each event to find the specific one is cumbersome.

3. Go ahead and keep the GMT time but default time display to the forum selected time zone or allow a timezone for the calendar to be selected by the player so people see events in their own time zones without having to worry if it's summer in England any more of if the GM is in Arizona or how many hours ahead, or behind, Australia might be.

4. Change the page title to "Game Calendar" or "FG Game Calendar" instead of "Fantasy Grounds Virtual Tabletop Game Calendar" Seeing which tab is the calendar at a glance would be preferable to repeating the full legal name of the product. :)

5. I'm sure this one is coming since this is an initial prototype, but match the style of the FG page or forum pages.

6. Maybe a date/month picker instead of just < > month toggles? I dunno, now I'm just getting nitpicky. heh

[JohnD]

This is a good start. Will try to comment more when not crippled with a semi responsive Kindle Fire. :/

One thing that has to happen is for abandoned games to be archived somehow so they don't clutter the listings with garbage. This is a long running concern, and admittedly a personal irritation, but I believe it to be a valid concern.

[ddavison]

The good news is that this doesn't show all campaigns for each ruleset selected, but instead only shows games scheduled in the future (and from the last 60 days).

[Mask_of_winter]

I like it. Good job Doug!

[JohnD]

The good news is that this doesn't show all campaigns for each ruleset selected, but instead only shows games scheduled in the future (and from the last 60 days).

Excellent approach.

[Nylanfs]

This will make it more complicated. What about having a line that is required that points to a forum thread for the game, and after x number of months of no posts in the thread it automatically takes it off? If the thread isn't active or accepting players then the game shouldn't be showed.

[Wazoodust]

Nice, even tough it's a work in progress, way easier to navigate and find what you're looking for.

[ddavison]

We already have a script that marks all campaigns private after X amount of time with no updates by the GM. I just need to set it up as a chron job instead of manually running it every month or so.

[Wazoodust]

Could you maybe make a selection/dropdown for active campaigns too at some point. I realize that this wouldn't be a priority, but if it could be done easily it would be a nice touch and pretty much completely replace the current calendar

[Orthos]

So much easier than the FG calendar - thanks!

[leozelig]

Looks great!

[Tabarkus]

Wonderful improvements! I am so pleased to see this response to community concerns/issues!

[Ferrin]

Excellent, I like it. Thanks for taking the time on the game calendar!

[ddavison]

Thanks guys. We will look to do some additional, small adjustments over time as well to help fully round out the calendar and campaign management system.

[Nylanfs]

Perhaps have some generic genre ruleset catagories that can be used for odd systems? Like Sci-fi, Space Opera, High Fantasy, Low Fantasy, Noir etc.

[Zacchaeus]

This is stonkingly good work, much cleaner and easier to navigate and pin down what someone might be looking for.

[ianmward]

Really good!
This is just what we needed IMHO.

[ddavison]

Perhaps have some generic genre ruleset catagories that can be used for odd systems? Like Sci-fi, Space Opera, High Fantasy, Low Fantasy, Noir etc.

I will probably wait a bit to see how many games actually fill up into the "Other Games" category before splitting it out too much. You can currently combine the Other Games with a general Keyword search and we might find that it is sufficient. If it starts looking too crowded, then we can definitely add more breakdowns.

[Crymoricus]

While it's definitely an improvement (an an appreciated one), it still strikes me as a kind of band-aid. Nothing wrong with a band-aid, so don't get me wrong. But three things I noticed:

1. The rulesets used for each entry aren't clearly defined. When it comes to creating Calendar entries, there has to be a better system than the one currently in place, period.
2. Dead entries don't seem to be addressed. (Entry creators should be required to renew their entry once per month or be auto-deleted, frankly).
3. Time-zone adjustments aren't made in this version. ("All times are in GMT 0:00 time." needs to be: "Choose your timezone.")
4. Thematically, it looks completely generic and utilitarian. There's nothing about it that says "Fantasy Grounds! Yarrr!!!" Instead, it looks like amateur hour. Heck, it looks like something I tossed together a few years back to simply schedule appointments for showing rental properties. The other three things are more important when it comes to functionality. But this is exactly the kind of thing that says, "We don't understand 'brand' ."

It looks to me that if you are a nit-picky kind of player looking for just the right game for you, you'll still need to basically look at just about every single entry. Don't get me wrong, it's a very handy way to do that compared to how it was. But... it's definitely band-aid stuff.

It's better than it was, and definitely " 'A' for effort," and appreciated, I'm sure. But I see no reason to play games and pretend the whole calendar thing just got "fixed" because of this. I have too much respect for FG to pretend everything is now hunky-dory as far as the calendar is concerned.

Sorry -- I don't want to pee in your Cheerios, but I can't help but think most of the cheers you're receiving here are the stunned reactions of folks who just can't believe the calendar issue is even being addressed.

You guys need to toss some really decent money at someone who knows how to make this work and look GREAT, because when it comes to sales, I get the feeling someone at SmiteWorks doesn't quite believe it's a very big deal. I could be wrong, I suppose... but I think it's likely a very, very big deal.

Oh, PS: Personally, I don't use the Calendar. I have no real stake in it. (psst, I think I'm in the minority).

Edit:


This is a work in progress.

I kind of glossed over that. Sorry. Can't wait to see the final product.

[ddavison]

Right on, Crymoricus. It is very much a work in progress still. All good points though. I did move away from naming the dropdown the same as the ruleset since frankly it doesn't matter to the player what ruleset is used. They don't see this when they connect or have to choose it to connect. It's only important to the DM, so therefore I label it as D&D 3.5E instead of 3.5E, Pathfinder instead of PFRPG, etc. These might be collapsed or expanded over time based on how crowded or unused they are.

Some history: I had a community dev offer to help out a month or so ago when I first started doing a bit of research and planning on what we would need. I grabbed a calendar tool that seemed fairly responsive and flexible and then hashed out some ideas on how we could migrate the current campaign scheduling of games to it. Whatever we choose, we would either need to wipe out the old calendar stuff and have things built fresh on a new system or find some way to integrate it -- hopefully with a single sign-on solution with vbulletin. After bouncing some more ideas back and forth, I decided to spend a good part of a day and a half or two to crank out what is there now and tweaking some of the features and look to better fit the vision for it. The community dev is now researching how to add in some of the additional fields and how to further re-skin a few things. As you are probably aware with a lot of "plug-ins", the documentation isn't always very robust and it leads to hacking stuff together a bit. I could have either held off until it was perfect or shared it early. After soliciting some basic feedback from several of the community devs here, I thought it was wise to go ahead and share the work in progress since it is still a big improvement over the old calendar. It's definitely not done though.

Known issues at this point:
1. Theme
2. Timezone translation
3. Additional fields display and filtering support
4. Adding and rescheduling games with the calendar. The tool has a decent system for this but almost all of it is turned off now due to how it is simply pulling data across from the existing calendar. If we rewrite the code for editing, adding and updating the events, then we can do some other cool things like scheduling recurring games and the like.

[Crymoricus]

Well, I won't pretend I know a thing about PHP calendars anymore. I did actually do something cool with a service about 5 years ago, but I hardly remember a thing about how it worked, except that it was indeed "not very robust". I can't remember very many details, but I do understand in a general "foggy memory of a 45 year-old" sort of way that there were stifling limitations, mostly owing to what the creators of the calendar I was using envisioned their product would be used for. Heck, I'm getting old -- what can I say?

I know this though: Your list of "known issues" are pretty much perfect in my mind. And like I said, it's a definite improvement already. I'm frankly smiling ear-to-ear right now knowing that you clearly didn't take my post as a flat-out insult of all the work you've already put in. Glad to know you didn't take it that way.