SpellDamage meets BlogEngine.net

Finally, I’ve integrated BlogEngine.net with SpellDamage. This gives me the capability of treating the homepage of spelldamage as my blog and get all those cool blog services like pings, social buttons, etc…

It wasn’t really all that hard, blogengine.net is setup quite nicely for integration. Although I did have some problems with jQuery which has caused me to hold back some features that I would have liked to release now (post comments, tabbed sidebar widgets, etc). I’ll be working to resolve those issues and get them up.

I’m not quite happy with the front page design. It’s too big, so I’ll be working on streamlining it some more… and adding some more polish to various UI parts. I’m also not really happy with the sidebar, partially due to the jQuery troubles and partially because I had to scrap some graphics I had planned for it. That will definitely be changing in the somewhat near future.

One big change is how I reworked the site navigation. It’s now grouped by functionality. The navigation bar has the following links: Home Browse Calculate Compare Leaderboards & Contact. When you hover your mouse over Browse, Calculate, or Leadersboard a small popup will appear allowing you to choose between Mage, Warlock, or Priest. Hopefully this navigation is intuitive, as now you choose what you want to do, and with which class. If you have any problems, let me know.

A loss I had to take in the nuts are the articles I’ve already written. I’ve got them all backed up to Word docs, but the entire article system I had before is gone. Now, those cached backlinks and pages in Google are wasted… I’ll have to work on getting them back again. Oh well… the loss is worth it I think.

I’ll be writing some articles, and making some videos about my journey of merging SpellDamage and BlogEngine.net.

Character Comparisons on SpellDamage!

I released an awesome new feature for SpellDamage today. It’s a Mage Warlock Priest comparison tool, which will visually show you how the characters stack up to each other.

Made a video about it, check it:

The tool took 2 days to make. Nailed down the code the first day, polished it and prettied it up the second. If you find any problems, let me know!

Minor Upgrades: 06/03

Today I made a minor upgrade to spelldamage. It’s primarily a code maintenance release, but the upside is that you should see the error page less often (if you even saw it at all). According to my logs, quite a few of my visitors were being directed to the error page for various reasons.

Hopefully this release makes spelldamage so stable you never see the error page. But if you do, please let me know.

Thanks!

Upgrades: DPS/DPM Accuracy Improvements

I released more upgrades to SpellDamage today. I rewrote the portion of the calculator that was responsible for DPS/DPM results.  I plugged in some better formulas and bam! it’s instantly more accurate.

Checkout the Mage DPS Calculator. Let me know if you run into any problems.

I also redesigned the homepage. Instead of focusing on news, it’s more statistical. Want to see who has the most bonus fire damage? You can. How you do you compare?

More in the works, stay tuned.

Very big changes coming to SpellDamage

In case you missed this post, “SpellDamage to Focus on Cloth Casters“, go read it. Basically, it says that Druids aren’t coming soon anymore. Sorry Druids, Shaman, and Paladins. Perhaps someday I’ll get to you.

So, the big changes. Yes, I’m reworking spelldamage again. I don’t want to write articles, and I don’t want the homepage to focus so intently on articles. So, I’ve rewritten the homepage (and a large portion of everything else too). Read this post, “Big rework coming soon“. It goes over a bit of what coming.

SpellDamage:Discovery is Live, and Druids are Next

Quick update here, SpellDamage:Discovery is live… check it out www.spelldamage.com. Watch this video to see the new features in action.

All you Druid players out there will be happy to know that Druids are the next class to be implemented in SpellDamage… in the next release. Check the under development page to keep informed.

Facebook, really

I don’t really update here much anymore, for the latest, make sure you checkout the spelldamage facebook group. Let’s get some discussions going, I’ll work to make spelldamage what you want it to be.

Thanks.

SpellDamage on Facebook

I’ve opened a Facebook group for SpellDamage. Please, login to Facebook and get into the group. Let’s talk about what you want from SpellDamage. From now on, I’m going to be using Facebook for feedback and discussion.

Thanks to all SpellDamage supporters, let’s get together on Facebook at talk about the future!

See ya!

jQuery to the Rescue: Elegant AJAX Calls

Ok, so I had this problem while working on SpellDamage: Discovery. See, porting the site to the ASP.NET MVC framework has it’s many bonuses… but sometimes the red ain’t cherry.

In this case, I was trying to push calculation results to the index view, under the index action. Worked great, at first. Here is how SpellDamage is meant to work. I’ll use the mage calculator as the example. You load up www.spelldamage.com/Mage and you’ll see a blank mage calculator. Enter some data and click calculate to run some theorycrafting. That’s simple enough, and the index action handled that fine. But… (there’s always a but right?)

What about when you did a character lookup? The url for that looks something like this: www.spelldamage.com/Mage/US/Vindication/Shadowmoon/Just Us League/Echii (Echii is my twink mage on shadowmoon, remember?). Now the show action needs to “show” my mages character info, along with the calculations. No problem, that was easy too… now, here comes the problem. What about rerunning calculations? I don’t want the results page for a specific character to be some static results page. I want users to be able to mess around with their numbers, run some what-if scenarios, you know… theorycraft.

Well, doing that through standard form post backs would cause an action overload which is simply not good practice. Splitting it out into it’s own action would cause reusability problems. So what did I do? I build a standalone action, essentially taking the place of the standard “update” action. That action would output an XHTML table of the results, based on the variables that were POSTed to it.

Ok, so the action was done. Now, using jQuery I make some very simple ajax calls using .post(). jQuery’s AJAX is so simple I thought it was too good to be true. In fact, it wasn’t… it’s just what the doctor ordered. The problem has been resolved, and in fact, the overall calculation process has improved immensely.

It worked out so well, that once SpellDamage: Discovery is released, I’ll be working in earnest  on the advanced calculator so you all can calculate your spell rotations more accurately!

Stay tuned for more about SpellDamage: Discovery, you simply have no idea what’s in the next release, you’ll be astounded, trust me.

Code Name: Discovery!

For the first time ever, I’ve decided to name the next upgrade to SpellDamage. The next version of SpellDamage (version 2.5) is code named Discovery. There’s a very significant reason that it’s named that way. In the coming weeks I’ll be releasing some sneak peeks into the new version.

Let me just say that the next release will blow you away! I’m not kidding here folks, the port to the ASP.NET MVC framework is coming along MUCH better than I expected… In fact, halfway through porting the Mage calculator, I stopped… stunned! At a sudden realization that with just a few tweaks, SpellDamage.com could become a serious contender as one of the most useful WoW fansites.

Here’s a little tidbit of what’s in the works right now. Now think big… no, bigger! I’m cutting the Top feature. “Wait, that’s not big!”, you say? Well, your right… it’s what it’s being replaced with that is HUGE! It’s so huge that I’ve named the feature “Discover” (which has such an impact on SpellDamage, that I’ve named the next upgrade “Discovery”!).

I’m going to leave it at that for now, let you try to imagine what Discovery could possible mean for a site like SpellDamage.com. But, for now, go to the spell damage calculator of your choice, play with it, get used to it… but get ready for it to change drastically (ok, not the calculator itself, although that’s in the works too)!

Thanks for reading!