Time for another January update post for everyone. I have been working on a number of experiments in the background preparing for cloud save and the various things that go along with it. I still don't have an ETA on cloud save, accounts, or anything else and I'm still working out what storage quotas will be for the various membership tiers here on SS. I will also be renaming the various tiers to more accurately describe the financial impact they provide toward the project once I have some real pricing numbers on what everything costs.

As for today's site update. I have cleaned up some improper code practices in the variant selection system and simplified the overall code involved. I also figured out how to use LocalStorage, so the nag popup will only show once every three days unless you use incognito/private browsing. I will see if there's a way I can implement a simple "sign in with SS" to disable the nag popup but given the current infrastructure I'm not sure if that's even possible. 

Finally, I don't currently have anything close enough to done that I can push it as an anniversary update next week, so I probably won't be making an anniversary post this year.

Two years. I don't really know why but it feels like only yesterday I was designing the first version of the DoLMods site and launching it to the world. The reception back then was amazing, but I never would have guessed the site would make it this far. With over 3.7 thousand visitors a day, the site is way more of a success than I ever could have imagined.

Version 1 started out where I had to manually update each mod by hand every time a new update was released. This entailed knowing when an update came out, and being available to actually update the page. This led to a number of delays in updating mods. So I began a project to automatically update mods. My first idea was to simply use Jenkins or Maven to configure a custom build system, This however didn't exactly work like I hoped. So I moved on to trying something else. I built an entirely custom CI/CD system in bash to build and upload mods within five to ten minutes of an update being released. Once I had that, I decided it would be nice to pair it with an updated interface. The V2 interface took me about four hours to build and test before deploying it with the brand new automatic updates system. V3 was a much larger project. The goal was to move away from a statically designed page built using Bootstrap Studio and instead move to a site design that could be updated to add a new mod in minutes instead of hours. This was achieved using Astro which allows me to tie the entire site into a single json file. There's still some work to do on the interface to make it the best it can be, but for now, we've made an amazing upgrade. 

So, what are the next steps? I'll be working on cleaning up the V3 UI using community input and suggestions while I prepare to begin building the V3 infrastructure including a new and improved Automatic Update Engine and some form of APK system, whether that be individual apk builds, or a dolmods apk which will automatically update mods when online and make them playable offline.

Here are full screenshots of each iteration of the site. V1 and V2 are screenshots from the end of that version's lifecycle. V3 has only just begun.