FAForever
Lacking feature parity for new patchnotes website
Description of the Issue
The new patchnotes website has some missing features compared to the old one which make it worse to use. For example comparing https://faforever.github.io/fa/changelog/3810 and https://patchnotes.faforever.com/pages/balance/2024/3810.html:
- [ ] No dark theme
- [ ] No table of contents to click to navigate around
- [ ] No icons for particular changes
Looking at https://patchnotes.faforever.com/:
- [ ] No themed background with game screenshots
Possible changes
- Theme button in the bottom right to swap between themes.
- When opening a changelog for a version, the dropdown on the left (which is currently broken) could expand to show the sections (balance, other, feature, etc) of the changelog.
- Since a typical dropdown would have "Changelog page -> every single game version -> sections of version being viewed", which takes up a huge amount of space, it could be compressed into "Changelog (version#) -> sections of version being viewed". The "(version#)" text would be grey and only appear while viewing a version page.
- Maybe unit icons could be grabbed from the generated github wiki, with unit ids or enhancement icon IDs as references in the snippet. The goal is to give an easily accessible (from the PR author's perspective) way to add an appropriate icon for significant changes into a snippet.
Additional Context
The old patchnotes website repo is here: https://github.com/FAForever/patchnotes
Maybe unit icons could be grabbed from the generated github wiki, with unit ids or enhancement icon IDs as references in the snippet.
In my point of view, unit icons should be done in two steps:
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(1) Introduce a workflow that extracts the unit icons from the repository. Extracting means here that we take all the relevant DDS files and we convert them to a web-friendly format such as PNG. We then make them available as an artifact.
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(2) Run the workflow of (1) and download the artifact in the build workflow and embed it into the output.
We can add the source to the .gitignore file so that you can also have the files locally in your system for developing, without introducing hundreds of new files to the GitHub repository.
was sad to see all the new improvements I made to patchnotes.faforever.com become obsolete.
and to be honest, the way it was set up on the patchnote site is that it a lot of customer CSS to have the navigational stuff so I'm not sure if the doc site will be able to do as much as my customer changes do.