With the recent update to Jnet causing a bit of a stir, I thought I would take the opportunity to open up a dedicated space for discussion around Jinteki.net’s development, where I and other devs can post ideas or screenshots of things we’re working on, get feedback from users, and field questions and bug reports.
I don’t have much to say to start off, but I thought it’d be good to at least get the ball rolling.
Here are my notes for the newest update, the Nisei Format Validator.
You must choose a format when building a deck, and the validator will display it (all formats can still be seen on hover)
All cards in a selected deck in the deck builder show the correct legality info for the chosen format
You must choose a format for a game, and the games list will display it
When choosing decks in the lobby, they’re marked as legal or illegal for the chosen format
The card browser has a filter for format and in the interest of screen space moves the text version to the right side (not ideal but better than it being pushed off screen)
Current known bugs/issues with this update:
Existing decks must have their format changed at least once, even if they are Standard decks. Otherwise, they will show “invalid”
Invalid decks don’t display their reasons for being invalid
No warning that such a big change would occur
Game lobby “format” label is small and easy to miss
Explanation of different formats isn’t listed anywhere, making discoverability difficult
So-called Snapshot Plus format (Worlds format plus Magnum Opus cards) is missing
Is there any appetite for deckbuilder interoperability?
Sexy question I know, but I’m thinking about how people build decks on one or more of jnet, nrdb, or their phone app, then really need to have the deck in one of the other three.
It’s a bit of a clunky experience right now, but I’d be keen to move towards a more seamless experience between the android app and jnet so that I can build my deck on my phone, and then easily sync to jnet to play.
Just picking up from the other thread as I feel this one is now more suitable for Jnet related comments.
I wanted to thank you for all your hard work updating the application that allows us to all play our favourite game. It’s meant a lot to me over the years.
I think having a space on the forum to discuss Jnet is a great idea. Slack is a great tool but it’s so ephemeral… Blink and you’ve missed it.
Btw I wasn’t implying that the burden of communicating upcoming changes and validating new features should rest on Jnet devs. I was instead suggesting that Nisei take it up in some fashion, at which point I’m sure your role as a liason would be crucial. In my work I would never ask a dev to write release notes or talk to users, unless of course they thought it would be helpful in some way. Best practice is always to have a non-coding product manager handle the squishy stuff so devs can get back to the crunchy stuff.
Sadly, it’s much harder to write app-to-app connections when we don’t have an exposed API. Given the way jnet is structured, we could potentially write one but our dev time is and has been focused elsewhere. The best we have is making the deck input box as permissive as possible so places like NRDB can export to the format we accept. Last year, another dev put in a fair amount of work with making a direct connection to nrdb so jnet could save and load from nrdb, but the last couple steps took more effort than it was deemed worth continuing. I think with Nisei taking the reins on nrdb we’ll probably find the time come 2019!
haha Yeah, that’d be ideal. I doubt I’ll ever make it Nisei’s domain to keep the public up to date on jnet, as they have their own work to do, but I do want to make sure that any time we develop or produce new features they can talk about it on their site as well. I have some plans based on your comments as to how I can keep folks in the loop, so we’ll see how that goes.
Currently, the only folks who receive any money are Minh for hosting. The rest of us are all pure hobbyists and while it’d be great to get paid to do this, all of us have full-time jobs we can’t exactly quit to work on this. Maybe at some point we’ll consider it but that’s not on anyone’s radar, especially given that money has a tendency to complicate collaborative relationships.
I was the other dev who worked on NRDB integration. Had most of it written, but then we changed the server from coffeescript to native clojure and I haven’t gotten back around to getting it updated.
What kind of API do you have on the app or would expect from the server? Maybe we can figure something out.
The app currently doesn’t integrate with any back-end site, but spits out decks in jnet / octgn format data for share/cut/paste etc.
I have an outstanding task to implement oauth2 against nrdb, and that is proving to be more of a time sink than I had hoped (I don’t have java experience of oath2 libraries), so I don’t want to push you to implement something on jnet and then fail to deliver at my end.
I guess the main hurdle is getting data from the app to either site, as transferring between the 2 sites on a pc is a lot less bother. If you don’t have an existing api then a roundtrip via nrdb is still better than where we are now.
Can you open an issue in the Netrunner Github? I’ll keep that aligned with the NRDB development and we can see if there is a way to bring them together.
We could also do something simpler - generate a per-user API key and allow you to post decks to jnet with that key. Syncing data in both directions would likely require something more complicated.
Yeah was about to suggest: now that Noth NRDB and jnet are under NISEI control, it would be really nice with better integration between them.
optimally you got a list of your NRDB decks when looking at decks in jnet.
also aligning login with a single account would be nice
Sorry if I am misunderstanding you, but is this an issue with the Android app? The iOS “Net Deck” app can connect to netrunnerdb and can download/upload decks to Netrunner DB.
Of course, I’m also not sure if NISEI has any connection to Net Deck (or the people who do to see how they did it).
Huh. I always thought it was great how easy it is to copy decks from Netrunnerdb to Jinteki.net using the Export → Jinteki.net format option. Is that really not good enough for you?
I am starting to feel like a cheerleader for this app, but Net Deck on iOS connects directly to jnet and you can upload decks to jnet from the app but it’s only one way (you can’t download decks from jnet, just from netrunnerdb).
