It seems to be coming along, albeit slowly. The Elo range matchups will most likely not be in this version after all -- just implementing the weighted appearances proved to be a real challenge, and the site code has gotten bloated enough that I'd rather streamline things and solve problems before I add even more complications like that. Also, I'm not sure how much of a problem it really is to the site's functionality and if it's even a bad thing to have some 'gimme' matches here and there.
That said, I can tentatively say that I think the weighted matchmaking is working. I'll try to implement a number of the others and release 2.0 soon, hopefully before or not long after my fall college term is scheduled to start.
Curious what y'all think would be the best categories to have to rate episodes in. There's three general things that I think people might like to consider, the entertainment value of the episodes, how exciting/intense they are, and the depth/quality moral teaching, as in serious life episodes, but I'm not sure how to turn those into categories. The rating page should ask a question, something like "Which episode is more x than the other". Sorry if this is a jumbled mess, but that's kind of what my thoughts on this are right now. Hopefully some of you can help me to untangle it.
-- Mon Aug 27, 2018 4:01 am --
To help speed up the process of getting 2.0 out the door, I'm going to take the step of borrowing some of Scientific's episode summaries, to fill in the gaps. I still mean to write my own at some point, but I think this'll be a good placeholder for the meantime, allow me to move forward with the work in other respects, and provide some extra motivation over just seeing a bunch of blank spaces where the blurbs should be.
-- Mon Aug 27, 2018 6:56 am --
The 2.0 update is at the stage where I'm willing to call it good for a release. I thought about labeling it a 'public beta', but decided we'd go with the standard scheme, and work any needed bug fixes into the usual number scheme of minor version updates. There are also a number of glitches in the new episode summaries, an artifact of my adventures with text-encoding problems; this should be smoothed out with time as I have the chance to go through them, but any reports you have on such flaws are welcome. If you see an obviously glitchy episode summary, please do drop me a PM telling me about it.
Goals kept:
+ New matching system gives priority to episodes with fewer matches. Details on those tiers are available on request, if this is something y'all are interested in hearing about.
+ All episodes have some kind of description. Ones in regular text are written by me, those in italics are borrowed from Scientific Guy. I hope to write more descriptions over time until they're all mine, but this seems the best way to get this much-needed functionality up fast.
+ Episodes now ranked by Elo and not name on stats page.
+ New "points" grading system to help split the episodes up into tiers.
+ New name for the site, "OACS", standing for "Odyssey Adventure Comparison System".
Goals delayed, put off, or altered:
- Elo-range matchmaking didn't come to fruition this time. I'm not sure whether this is actually a necessary feature, and would like to get some feedback about what y'all think on the subject.
- Album rating page not significantly fixed or adjusted. At some point I hope to fix the bug, but it is a minor enough one that it shouldn't have a sizable impact on the ratings.
Finally, in the spoiler below, a preview of some of the possibilities for the future themes, which I drafted playing around the other day. As with the current one, they are based on Odyssey album covers. I would like to have a distinctive theme for every album.
Link to all of this can be reached by going to the old page and getting redirected,
or by going straight to its new destination at soopergrape.com/OACS/ .