Hey all
I just wanted to do some release notes for this build. I know several of you are waiting on enhancements and I've been pretty quiet recently. I wanted to get this enhancement out the door. It's been quite a mission to get done and the code has been getting in the way of other stuff.
So, the Guild Activity Tracker itself. You'll find a new preference on your Guild Manage page near the top. After you enable it you'll have to navigate to any page to make it start collecting data. It works in the background so you may notice an additional network request. I've tried very hard to keep the processing to an absolute minimum. There is a "Show" button, again on the Guild Manage page, that brings up the dialog that shows the data.
As you may have noticed I am trying to get FSH functionality to be a bit more interactive, using modal dialogs wherever possible to avoid unnecessary page refreshes. There is still a little bit of work to do on this but I think it is coming along nicely.
So, the why. Why did I build this? Well it's mainly for guild leadership. In this day and age of massive stam banks the 7 days in the Guild Advisor are wholly inadequate. There used to be a website that tracked this stuff, I don't know what happened to it. Doing it as a website would have been a significant challenge and the ongoing maintenance burden would have been a total PITA. So now everyone has the capability in FSH. It doesn't replace the Advisor, it is mainly focused on activity, stamina and GXP. The idea is that over time it will build a better picture of your members' activity. I had been copying and pasting the data from the Guild Manage screen for a long time before this.
So, the tech. As you know this is the most interesting part for me and the main reason I do it. The background data collection is using the new App API. This makes it more efficient on the client so hopefully you won't notice the hit. Given the idea of long term data collection on the client I have tried to reduce the amount of data collected where possible using data warehousing techniques (my day job). There is still a little bit of tweaking to do here, very active players have 1 record per day at the moment which is more than you really need. I've been learning a lot about CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) in recent months. The last few enhancements have been utilising that heavily. The Composed Potions Inventory, reworked Quick Wear and now this. Historically FSH has used the jQuery UI libraries that are already part of the game. There are problems with this. The version the game uses is very old, primarily to support a wide range of very old browsers. The code is highly inefficient. As FSH is only targeted at the most modern browsers I can use modern techniques to provide a more efficient and responsive experience. The Guild Tracker dialog is still styled to look like any other dialog in game however the underlying technology is completely different. It is totally based on CSS and has no javascript running whatsoever. Not only does this make the effect more efficient in your browser but it also makes it easier to maintain for me. I am anticipating rolling it out to other areas of FSH in future. You may or may not notice a new spinner effect when you open the panels. More likely to see it when you have collected a decent amount of data. I got it at about a month and a half. This is also completely CSS based. The beauty of that is that it runs independent of javascript and is offloaded to your GPU.
Anyway, hope you like it. And yes, I forgot to do the mouse pointers on the tabs. Next release 
