Chazza's DC Tools (Lineage Builder & FART)

[FortyTwo]

The original post was about Lineage Builder, but I've since added FART and combined the two into one thread. Feel free to comment about either in this thread. Suggestions and bugs are welcome.

 

Lineage Builder

Lineage builder is an open-source third-party tool allowing users to preview dragon lineages. You can access it here.

 

Features

• Looks nearly the same as DC! This tool aims to replicate how a lineage is displayed on DC right down to the very last pixel.  
• "Fully granular" control over dragons - you can clone and paste entire ancestors, switch parent genders, remove/add ancestors and descendants.
• Automatic code and name generation! You can switch between the code and name, and edit them however you wish.
• Code and name validation - All codes and names are validated to ensure they are legal on DC (but will not be checked for availability.) A game changer for you lyrical lineage builders out there.
• Share a publicly viewable link to built lineages. These lineages will remain available for 2 months since they were last viewed. Example! You can even import them into the editor.
• Export and import lineages - Save a copy of your lineage and import it for later. Really useful for those massive lineages.
• Partial support for time-based sprites and spriter alts (where permission has been granted)
• A super cool breed dropdown when you click a dragon. Trust me, it's seriously super cool.
• Generation counter. Yep, it's there.
• Skin switcher - Switch between the different DragCave skins on the fly such as the default or portal 2 skins, to preview how your lineage appears on different skins.
• Ghost breeds - Are you an artist? Insert your own lineage tiles and preview them as if they were on DC.
• Checker generator - A handy tool for generating checker lineages faster than you can blink.
• Mass-selection tools - Change multiple breed tiles at once.
• Mobile-friendly.
• Odeen approves of it, which should say it all really.

 

A detailed how to can be found here.

 

FART (Fast Auto-Refreshing Tool)

Fast Auto Refreshing Tool, aka FART (yes, really!). Fart is an open-source auto-refreshing tool. You can get a sniff of the action here.

 

 

Features

• AR multiple dragons at varying rates through instances per refresh in a simple control-panel style format.
• Control refresh speed.
• A small icon of the dragon you're ARing in the page tab. If you've got multiple dragons it even cycles through them.
• Mobile-friendly.
• State persistence - even if you're clumsy (like @MissK.) and refresh, FART won't lose your settings. 😎
• Calculate views per minute (this is a bit fuzzy, it depends on your connection, device and dragons).
• Smart removal - Leave FART on in the background and it'll remove dragons as soon as they've hatched or grown up.
• Set up now and save a link to share or come back to it later. Excellent for NDs when you want to be prepared in advance.
• TOD countdown - Tell FART when the dragon's timer changes and FART will give you a TOD countdown.

Edited July 23, 2022 by FortyTwo
UwU what's this

[0x08]

Big fan of this builder. It's been very useful as of late.

 

This bit of CSS should help with the blurriness:

.imgbox img {
  image-rendering: auto;
  image-rendering: crisp-edges;
  image-rendering: pixelated;
}

[FortyTwo]

1 hour ago, 0x08 said:

Big fan of this builder. It's been very useful as of late.

 

This bit of CSS should help with the blurriness:

.imgbox img {
  image-rendering: auto;
  image-rendering: crisp-edges;
  image-rendering: pixelated;
}

Yeah, I actually looked into this during testing. Problem is every browser renders it differently. Some don't support all of these properties, each browser has its own method of rendering. At least in Edge, it was awful.

Edited November 12, 2021 by FortyTwo

[0x08]

Oh ew 😧 I didn't know Edge did that... Nevermind my suggestion then.

[FortyTwo]

V0.4.0:

Big changes:

• There's now a snazzy little feature to simulate dragcave's skinning. The current skins implemented are the default skin and portal 2. I intend to add the others when I have time. Find it in the footer.
• That wall of text on the editing page has been moved to its own page.

What else? Some minor bug fixes:

• Background doesn't break anymore when editing width-breaking lineages.
• The click box for the buttons under the dragons are now all the same size.
• Labels were a bit wonky, some names would word-wrap onto the next line, appearing dissimilar to the same lineage on DragCave.

[FortyTwo]

V0.4.1:

Just some minor things.

• Names are now considered illegal if they start or end with whitespace.
• Changes to importing/exporting feature:
  • Exports must now contain no placeholders and names must be legal. Unlike with saving a lineage online, exports are not limited by number of dragons or generation.
  • Fixed a couple of issues where exports could be tampered with and glitch the builder.
  • How to page updated to reflect the above changes.
  • Online saving is unchanged.
• Minor changes to the code, mainly how dialogs are handled in the editor.

[Mochi]

I love this sooo much! The design is so nice! I've always wanted the ability to swap genders, save & import lineages, and to copy & paste. 

The only thing I have issue is remembering what every button means. I've messed up quite a few times because I've forgotten what each button does even with the 'how-to use' page open in a separate tab. I'm not sure if you're taking suggestions or wanting feedback? But it would be helpful to have a key pasted on the page itself that explains what each button means. Maybe like how you can hide & show the interface? 
Overall though I love this so much and it's definitely going to be my new go-to for lineage building

[SomeRandomCorviknight]

This is super useful, i used it to plan a lineage. Something useful would a button that randomizes all codes again +  a button that randomizes all names again.

[FortyTwo]

6 hours ago, Mochi said:

I love this sooo much! The design is so nice! I've always wanted the ability to swap genders, save & import lineages, and to copy & paste. 

The only thing I have issue is remembering what every button means. I've messed up quite a few times because I've forgotten what each button does even with the 'how-to use' page open in a separate tab. I'm not sure if you're taking suggestions or wanting feedback? But it would be helpful to have a key pasted on the page itself that explains what each button means. Maybe like how you can hide & show the interface? 
Overall though I love this so much and it's definitely going to be my new go-to for lineage building

Thank you! Yeah this is something that I've thought about. It's just how to go about it. I think a small section above the builder with a key labelling each icon would be enough. If people want more information they can refer to the how to.

 

6 hours ago, SomeRandomCorviknight said:

This is super useful, i used it to plan a lineage. Something useful would a button that randomizes all codes again +  a button that randomizes all names again.

Good idea  

[MissK.]

Can confirm that the super cool breed dropdown is, indeed, super cool. Especially for adding holidays (I can never remember the numbers anymore) and other breeds I forget the names of, it's very nice to have the visuals. 

 

The buttons seem pretty intuitive to me, but to make things more clear, would it be an idea to have popups with their function when you hover over them? Probably not a very mobile-friendly solution but perhaps there's another way to deal with it there.

 

Edit: Also it still needs a catchy name, just saying. uwu

Edited November 24, 2021 by MissK.

[FortyTwo]

V1.0.0

• Versioning changed to reflect this is public now.
• 2 new skins added: mobile dark and portal 2 light.
• Background for default skin now matches DC's.
• Behind the scenes changes to the menu links.
• Styling updates: Buttons on editor look nicer and all 'interactive elements' e.g. the dragon images now display a hand pointer.
• Local images are now handled differently. Instead of loading a separate image for each sprite, they're all downloaded as one massive image and manipulated. This means a slightly longer loading time initially, but after that it's faster. Saves my poor server anyway.
• The super cool breed dropdown is now even cooler. The styling is improved, but the biggest change appears when your search query is narrowed to 5 or less results, at which point it'll display the dragons as a list with names.

You may need to clear your cache by pressing refresh to see the changes.

[purplehaze]

No Snow dragon? I can't find him in your list.

[FortyTwo]

40 minutes ago, purplehaze said:

No Snow dragon? I can't find him in your list.

He had definitely gone missing! Not sure how I missed that. I've patched him in manually but you'll need to do a hard refresh.

[LevelsOfViolence]

Very nice project, being able to type in breed names instead of having to search for them in the list is extremely convenient.

Are there any plans to add tombstone to the lineage builder? It would come in handy for building deadlines that don't include zombies.

 

Also, I might be mistaken but Rosebud (2011 Valentine), Arsani (2013 Valentine), Heartstealing (2015 Valentine), Soulstone (2017 Valentine), Sakuhana (2019 Valentine), Amarignis (2021 Valentine), Garland (2017 Holiday), and Starsinger (2018 Holiday) seem to be missing as well.

[FortyTwo]

@LevelsOfViolence Yeah, I can add tombstones. I just didn't know if enough people would use them.

 

Those breeds aren't missing. Lineage Builder will resolve the breed list to show only the breeds of that gender, further filtered by those breed names that match the search query. For example Garlands are female only, so they'll only appear in the list when you're modifying a female dragon (the bottom tile, basically). Aether wyverns are available in both genders even though they have no dimorphism, so they'll appear in both lists. I'm going to guess that's what's happening.

Edited December 6, 2021 by FortyTwo

[LevelsOfViolence]

38 minutes ago, FortyTwo said:

they'll only appear in the list when you're modifying a female dragon

Right, that makes sense - I blanked on the preset gender being male. Changing it does show all the female breeds.

[Mochi]

Planning for holidays and noticed I can't add bred Male Mistletoes as an option. I can only add females.

[FortyTwo]

@Mochi Good catch. Patched.

 

A sneak peek of something I've been working on for the next version.

[Mochi]

1 hour ago, FortyTwo said:

@Mochi Good catch. Patched.

 

That was so fast! Thanks!

[purplehaze]

3 hours ago, FortyTwo said:

A sneak peek of something I've been working on for the next version.

Nice!

[0x08]

6 hours ago, FortyTwo said:

A sneak peek of something I've been working on for the next version.

👁️ Interesting.

[FortyTwo]

Opinions wanted: The actions when building are lineage are critical to this tool, and the current set up has two problems:

• They take up a lot of space, which is difficult to get around because there's not a lot of space to use overall.
• They're confusing to remember.

 

This is my new idea.

 

The idea is that actions on the right of the tile (switching parent genders, removing genders, adding parents) are "right operating" actions as they operate on the parent dragons.

On the left are "left operating" actions, these are adding descendants and breaking the lineage back to a node in the tree.

Underneath the tile are actions that apply to that particular dragon, such as switching name/code and switching the gender. Also to note that the cloning functions are here too, I'm partial to the idea of changing the functionality of that to copy the node itself + parents instead of just parents.

[purplehaze]

To be honest, I tried the cloning action once and was confused because it didn't do what I expected so I gave up on it and never used it again. I suspect it is really helpful if you know where to use it and exactly what it does. (And yes, I can be particularly slow and dense at times!)

[FortyTwo]

@purplehaze Out of curiosity what did you expect it to do? Just wondering if something could do with improving.

[purplehaze]

I honestly don't remember. I was just playing with a lineage idea and clicked on that to see if it would do whatever I was wanting to do and it didn't.

I'll have to go back and play again and see what I thought I wanted it to do and what it does do.