Lanzer's Work Diary

[Lanzer]

• 02/13/2023 Slight delay for Runway UI beacuse our art team lead had a personal emergency and the event work went to our artist working on Runway.  Work should resume tomorrow.  Fixed a nasty Friendslist bug where sorting friends for the first time after the data migration in Jan would cause the order to go out of whack.  Took a while to figure this out.
  
• 02/14/2023 Back to working on Runway.  Polishing up voting page, that's mostly done.  Now to move to the entry page.  The rest of the pages should technically be faster as they have less components
  
• 02/15/2023 Work on Runway continued.  Alita had a check up today, she had been wearing a helmet because the back of her head was too flat due to sleeping in the bassinet in her first few months.  She showed some improvements but she still need to wear that helmet for another month. ;(
  
• 02/16/2023 I felt like it would be nicer to give a bit of storytelling to the first set of images, so ended up digging through some old photos and notes from 2002. I didn't realize that, even though I had a camera, I never took pictures of just the home we lived in, how we decorated our work space and how we lived. That was kind of a shame. That reminds me to better capture what's around me today, in case it's storytime for Alita years later.
  
• 02/17/2023 Work on the anniversary event continued, didn't expect going through old photos and scrap notes would take this much time.  Expanded forum functionality to lock thread order by thread creation time, so that the gallery picture orders will stay the same as replies are made to them.
  

[Lanzer]

• 02/19/2023 Working on the Runway Entry screen.
  
• 02/20/2023 Forgot to handle the extra situations like captcha, found some bug that broke the page when captcha failed.  Hopefully the new system will work smoother.
  
• 02/21/2023 Now waiting for UI design on the rest of the Runway pages.  Doing a bit more polishing, changed the loading animation, page resizing dimensions for responsiveness.
  
• 02/22/2023 Switching focus on the search engine again.  Gonna need to write a new set of migration scripts, but figuring out the data formatting is a pain.
  
• 02/23/2023 Finally figured out the permission system for the zOMG servers, so Alarmskeeter is finally back online, but then the license file didn't seem to have installed correctly.  Hopefully it'll actually be back online this weekend.
  

[Lanzer]

• 02/27/2023 Fixed the bug where purchasing GCash items through shopping cart doesn't disable ads. Terrible bug. Transactional data also weren't logged properly which took some time to fix. Had another issue with friendslist where deleted entries kept returning if the friendslist&ignorelist are emptied.
  
• 02/28/2023 Totally forgot I started work on the item recovery tool for marketplace to automatically scan and recover items last week. Need to spend a bit more time to finish it.
  
• 03/01/2023 More work on the search engine.  Still setting up parameters.  Tempted to expand the functionality broader towards avatar items in saved avatars.  Though need more planning for that.
  
• 03/02/2023 Fixed friend list count under gsearch.  A Gaian had finally reached our memory limit during item arranging with an inventory of 200k items.  We're raising the serve memory limit now but will need to go back to work on the item arranger code to lower memory usage.
  
• 03/03/2023 Store inventory system needed an overhaul as scheduled items where added or removed in the stores in time.  The old system was made before API was a thing, and is overly complexed and inefficient at what it does.  Though it'll take way too much time to overhaul the whole thing with little benefit to Gaians.  Ended up re-writing parts of it and having a more robust update system.  Hopefully it'll deal with the update lag.
  

[Lanzer]

• 03/06/2023 Fixed Gaia Bulletin breaking if ignored post found, added star balance on shop confirm page.
  
• 03/07/2023 Added character counter for sig editor.  Assets for Runway museum is here so it's time to get back to working on Runway.  But first, I want to finish building this admin panel so that the mod team can help add pictures to the Gaia Artbook, that way I can spend more time looking for images instead of posting them
  
• 03/08/2023 Took a whole day to finish the artbook admin, but it's going to add some features that allows us to have better galleries moving forward.
  
• 03/09/2023 Ended up doing a bit of a feature creep.  Instead of just having an artbook admin panel where mods are still required to manually post to add images to the artbook, the added functions will automatially queue images and post them automatically everyday.
  
• 03/10/2023 Wrapping up work on the artbook admin panel.  Working on the Runway museum right after.
  

[Lanzer]

• 03/13/2023 Another fix for the marketplace bug where store description doesn't match your own.  Fixed wishlist item deletion and the "delete owned items" function, raised limit from 1500 to 2000.
  
• 03/14/2023 Fixed wishlist arranger beta not saving changes.  Runway museum page done, waiting for assets for museum listing page.  Going to change some navigation logic to make it easier to go between contests.
  
• 03/15/2023 Fixed incorrect messaging when inactive user block is activated, looking into ways to recover accounts easier if user no longer have access to email.
  
• 03/16/2023 Added an error screen and logging for Marketplace userstore id and info mismatch.  Hope to fix this one very soon.
  
• 03/17/2023 Started work on Runway museum listing page.  Runway profile page doesn't have its design yet but I'll put the skeleton UI in place so Runway should be ready for public testing next week.
  
• 03/18/2023 Extended subscription expire date by one day so that serivces don't get interrupted during the renewal process.
  

[Lanzer]

• 03/20/2023 Forgot about one of the new Runway features that applies to many of the pages, had to do a quick update to make sure the new feature is working.  Museum pages are all done.  Just need to add the reporting function then the open beta will be ready.
  
• 03/21/2023 Wrapping up work on the reporting side of things for Runway, some UI stuff and others are just remembering all the moving pieces for adding new reporting entries in our system.
  
• 03/22/2023 Runway Profile page involves more stats and a new database to calculate them.  Had to run some migration to port all the history to the stats table.  Also make sure the daily winner script now feeds data to the stats table.
  
• 03/23/2023 Beta for Runway is released to SCAS testers.  All the data for the profile page is ready, just need to finish the UI for the Runway profile page, but that shouldn't hold back the release of the Runway Update.
  
• 03/24/2023 Laine and Alita both caught a cold last week, and today is the worst day for Laine, so I'm taking off today to take care of Alita so Laine can rest.  Apparently they've passed their cold to me so I'll be a bit sick in a few days.
  

[Lanzer]

• 03/27/2023 My turn to catch the cold from Laine and Alita.  Though I'm a bit more lucky where the symptoms aren't as bad.  Taking it easy and pciking off bugs reported by SCAS testers.
  
• 03/28/2023 Implementing a more detailed stats info as SCAS members want to see torphy standings from 1 through 10.  Fixed bug related to profile linking.
  
• 03/29/2023 Moderators had some good feedback regarding to the Runway report system.  Turns out the implementation for a new report category is much more involved that I throught.  Had to fix the category settings, templates, info to show or hide, and a lot of display paramters for sent reports.
  
• 03/30/2023 Runway ready to be rolled out, waiting for release by midnight, and doing some final formatting touches before release.
  
• 03/31/2023 Fixed permission issue with profile pages, and implementing some style changes requested by the feedback thread.
  

[Lanzer]

• 04/03/2023 Implementing the first wave of improvements from feedback, including museum contest name search, and submission through saved outfit from closet.  Fixed avatar flip feature where text are properly displayed.
  
• 04/04/2023 Added item verification check for outfit submission.
  
• 04/05/2023 Fixed a bug in the outfit item verification check.  Also fixed the cancel item bug in Marketplace for store owners trying to cancel items on pages 2 and up.  This bug requires a store owner to have more than 100 items listed.  No wonder that bug wasn't found until later.
  
• 04/06/2023 Cleaning up some database formatting for Runway.  Wrapping up some research for new event.
  
• 04/07/2023 Fixed runway daily prize time logic to avoid any inconsistencies and daylight savings issues.  More CSS style changes.
  

[Lanzer]

• 04/10/2023 Found out that the daily reward was broken once again. Instead of patching that daily reward code again I ended up re-writing the whole thing so it should be problem free moving forward.  During troubleshooting I found that there were conditions where the reward code was called twice when the modal was launched, which was the culprit of why sometimes people were seeing the “already granted” message, and sometimes double the reward would be sent.  So after a big re-write all these stuff are fixed.
  
• 04/11/2023 Added owned and wihslist status to vendsearch results.  Added some of the last Runway updates.  Avatar highlights are back, it's better cached, and the player's own entry on the voting page has its vote count back.  vote count for your own entry will refresh along with avatar highlight section.  I think that's most of the line items from the feedback thread.  Need to work on other features now.
  
• 04/12/2023 fixed missing avg buy price on confirmation window.  Getting back to work on the admin panel for the Gaia Artbook.
  
• 04/13/2023 Adding achievements before I forget. Turns out I still need to write event listeners for the achievemnts, a few more hours of work.
  
• 04/14/2023 Fixed free contest day verification. Got some birthday prepration coming up for Alita's first birthday.  Exciting time indeed!
  

[Lanzer]

• 04/17/2023 Runway achievement support continued, adding a few more achievements, and introduced the annual top winner level.  Achievement system is unnecessarily complicated, there's a lot more work than I anticipated.
  
• 04/18/2023 Mod support - added more info on runway report page and tool and quicker deactivation.  Runway cancel on GCASH entries will now refund GC properly.
  
• 04/19/2023 Helped adjust tool for mod application.  Fixed small bug with yesterday's runway report addon.  New Runway achievement still not working.  Hope to find some old documentation on how to get it to work.
  
• 04/20/2023 Test forum was granting gold due ot a bug, quick fix.  Putting time to wrap up the artbook admin while I figure out the runway achievements.
  
• 04/21/2023 Finished auto post system for artbook admin.  Time to go through the rest of the artwork archive, and will need some staff to help add subject and queue images to post.
  

[Lanzer]

• 04/24/2023 Wrapping up achievement for Runway, fixed GCASH free entry checker.  Now that artbook admin is done, it's time to find more art to share from our archive.
  
• 04/25/2023 Did some checking on our back up dirve to see how many images were found.  There were 400,000.  Obviously most of the images weren't Gaia artwork suitable for the artbook, but it's too much to manually to look through for artbook materials.  Now working on a script to sort and categorize all the images based on filename and other properties. 
  
• 04/26/2023 Ended up looking through 50,000 file paths to determine the categories and naming conventions for the script. 
  
• 04/27/2023 Output from initial sorting was less than satisfactory.  Need to refine the sorting algorithms so we get some decent filtered output we can use for the rest of the artbook.
  
• 04/28/2023 Fixed store drop down on avibuilder.  Needed to take some time off to prep for a 3 month visit for Alita's grandparents.
  

[Lanzer]

• 05/02/2023 Fixed the lost item recovery tool for Marketplace store owners with a large store >100 items.  Revised image sorting script.
  
• 05/03/2023 Reverse marketplace transactions will now be part of marketplace stats and influence maretplace graphs.  Fixed broken image when saving outfit.
  
• 05/04/2023 Something absolutely terrible happened. One minute after I finalized the script and hit the enter button, I got up and tipped the hard drive off my table. The hard drive instantly crashed and could no longer be read. Lucky for me, the backup hard drive came in a pair of mirrored drive. I managed to copy most of the images to a new SSD, and now we have another secondary backup.
  
• 05/05/2023 Revisiting Runway Achievement granting. Turns out the way the achievement system didn't support the type of achievement structure I want, even though it was pretty straight forward.  Had to make some changes to the core system and write some custom runway hooks for achievement.
  
• 05/06/2023 Another issue is that since the new Runway does not run on the classic UI framework, newly granted achievements won't show up in a pop up automatically. Opting to add achievement info on the profile page.
  

[Lanzer]

• 05/08/2023 Bouncing back and forth between runway achievements and sorting artbook images.  The amount of images even after sorted is astounding.  We should have some images lined up for update very soon.
  
• 05/09/2023 Adding frontend for Runway Achievements.  Fixed item restore tool reporting lost items when none exists.
  
• 05/10/2023 Finished with all the achievement UI frontend, waiting for art team to finalize on some color choices then it can go live
  
• 05/11/2023 Quick fix for some item editor issues where choice items need to have their old graphics be migrated to the new directory paths.
  
• 05/12/2023 Putting in some time to work on the front page of our new item feature. 
  

[Lanzer]

• 05/15/2023 Work on new item feature continued
  
• 05/16/2023 Wrapping up the new item feature,  Marvin to finish implementation as he worked on the backend. 
  
• 05/17/2023 One criticism about Runway was how entries are completely randomly in appearance, with some avatars showing up multiple times before some avatars shows up once.  While that is the nature of true random distribution, for example, if you roll a dice 6 times, you're not gonna get 1,2,3,4,5,6 before numbers start oerlapping, but at the same time, I do agree that being able to see all the entries in as little time as possible would make a better experience.  So as a last update, the Runway display algorithm now will ensure that voters get to view all the contestants at least once as early as possible.
  
• 05/18/2023 The new display algorithm is easy to implement, but hard to optimize for speed.  Ended up putting in two different layers of caching to ensure decent performance
  
• 05/19/2023 Fixed marketplace restore tool once again.  Added limit to restore to prevent timeout. Last changes and polish to landing page for new item feature
  

[Lanzer]

• 05/22/2023 Got some bad news in the morning about our database that went offline due to maintenance.  Usually the backup server would kick in and everything would work fine, but what we didn't know was that the backup server was out of sync for a while.  This caused our Lake Kindred data to be totally out of date.  Had to deal with fixing the syncing issue, but more importantly, it's time to think about migration to a newer and more robust system.
  
• 05/23/2023 Spent majority of my time going through Lake Kindred's backend code so that I can tell what's going on with the reported issues.
  
• 05/24/2023 Some LK accounts ended up having old experience values, probably a mix up of old data with cached values.  Have to run a script to automatically recover those accounts.  Fixed engraving function while working on inventory related codes.
  
• 05/25/2023 Recover of both LK owner accounts as well as pet XP issues should all been Fixed.  What a terrible waste of time from one database issue.  I'm going to divert attention in migrating our more mission critical databases to Amazon RDS so these types of issues will never happen again.
  
• 05/26/2023 Setting up new database services, majority of the work is going through the really large database and determining what we don't need to migrate to the new system.