More happened in version 1.4.0 than you might see at first glance. First I sat down and rounded off a few spots in the background that I was not so happy with. The nice side effect of that rounding is that here and there things might feel a little faster. And as it goes, you stumble from one corner into the next, because ... ah, there is still something to do over there.

I had exactly that on the weekend while riding my bike. A short loop? Sure! Down to the lake and a little beer. But there was this nice corner, and another one, and another one. I never made it to the lake, rode right past it, and had a nice, brisk, long ride instead. I was so in the flow. That happens while programming too.

Next to the performance work, the error handling got better in a few places, the kind that is supposed to support you while you type. Especially in the settings I still had a few hiccups from a lot of copy-and-paste (table + form + database = new settings). I did throw a few more points onto my list that I stumbled over, but at some point you have to make a cut, tidy up the tests, and ship the whole thing before you lose yourself in the small stuff.

Anyway ...

Added

  • A right-click on a World Graph node now opens its details directly.
  • The details of a World Graph node now show a preview of the selected entry, just like global search and the Compendium do.
  • The World Graph now also shows the symbols of your content, so you do not have to tell them apart by color alone.
  • Markdown content now has clear internal references to your content, which makes it easier for the Keeper to work with it. Existing texts with internal references were updated to the new format. And do not worry: if you do not create links and images with the Markdown tools, but simply add links to absolute pages yourself, internal references are still marked as such.
  • The Markdown editor now shows in its footer which content is cross-referenced in the text, so you always keep an overview of which internal content you have linked.

Changed

  • A World Entity's fact display was limited to confirmed facts so far. Those stay preferred, but if there are fewer than five confirmed facts, we fill up with the rest. The "Show all" link of course still works and now also has an indicator of how many facts there are in total.
  • The World Graph UI was reworked and should now also work better on a mobile screen.
  • The UI for capturing World Events and a World Entity's facts should look a bit tidier overall now.
  • The select boxes for content from your Compendium no longer require a three-character entry before anything shows up. Instead we show the ten most recently updated entries until the search kicks in. That should make entering many things one after another a little easier.
  • When zooming with the mouse wheel, the selected World Graph entity now stays in focus instead of following the mouse pointer.
  • The rename from "Chronicle Keeper" to Atlavium has been carried out, see also welcome aboard.

Fixed

  • In select boxes the colors and icons of Compendium content were sometimes not shown correctly. I have unified that now, so it hopefully does not come back. Mea culpa, in case I add new icons again someday and once more forget the mapping from name to icon.

The big database cleanup

Version 1.0.0 was an enormously large release, because I rebuilt a good part of the content management and stopped thinking of modules on their own, thinking of them a bit more together instead. Out of that grew the Compendium as you know it today. Earlier, pretty much everything was its own module with its own lists and so on. That did make the application tidier, but I had not touched the database, so as not to affect the versions 0.5-alpha through 0.8-beta during the time both ran in parallel.

That has come to an end now. In a cloak-and-dagger operation on Sunday afternoon I cleaned up all the databases, secured by backups of course, and permanently deleted every connection to the old versions. Creating a new Realm is a bit faster and cleaner again because of it, since some things used to be created only to be deleted again later. All databases now sit on a foundation younger than a year and a half again, with a whole lot of individually applied changes on top to bring the old base up to the current state.

That was also the reason for releases 1.3.1 through 1.3.3, which each carried the cleanup work and the check scripts. With the version now released I have deleted all of that again, since everything apparently went well.

With that, the last loose ends before opening registration are cut off. What a job! I had deliberately saved entering the content from my own last game session, so that afterwards I had to properly rummage around in Atlavium, just to make extra sure that nothing had gone wrong.

Did you find another problem after all? Feel free to let me know.