starboundplanets.com -- Can I find a beta tester or two?

Hey guys

I am a Jr. level web developer who is building starboundplanets.com, an open sourced coordinate tracking and sharing web application for Starbound.

*UPDATE*: The site is basically ready for users to add and keep track of their planets. I have many more features planned and with your help we can make this site really useful. Now that the patch is in place, we can add planets without worrying about bad coordinate data!

Would someone mind signing up and adding a planet or two to give some feedback?

It would be super helpful to get user feedback while it's still in infancy so I can build it from the ground up the way users want to see it.

Thanks for your help in advance. I will have the next 9 days to constantly improve it, so hit me with your best shot if you have ideas for improvement

 

*Should totally add a proper Starmap to that website*

 

Ok, I added a planet, just like you asked.

 

I want to do atleast a nice vector map of the sectors .. at a bare minimum by next week.

 

Thanks!

 

Has potential.

 

A little suggestion would be to use a different image than the one used for the official starbound/chucklefish forums on the page's tab. Naturally, things like planet sorting, a search feature, and the ability to add a planet to a personal list tied to the user's account (or a guest's session) would be useful future features. In terms of actual planet information, fields like 'gravity level' 'weather type' and fields for the non-surface biomes (such as the layer that's usually either flesh, slime, tar, or plantmatter) might be helpful. More so to an average user than the time/day the planet was added to the tracker. In terms of future sorting, being able to see lists with airless planets eliminated would be quite the nice little feep. Unfortunately, I know jack all about actually making anything more complicated than a sandwich, so... good luck with the suggestions?

 

Bugs I've found so far:
One user can edit another user's planets
Biome and Threat Level can be set to invalid values (Biome can be any string, Threat Level any number)
In the profile editor, the username field is of type "email" when it should be "text"
One too many tr end tags after every planet

 

Thank you, great suggestions! I'll work on some of these tomorrow.

 

Wow thanks for catching these bugs! I'll make sure to get them fixed up tomorrow

 

Good luck with your idea.

 

I clicked on a link and it sent me to a page asking me to sign up before i continue. Thats a quick way to make me leave a site, which i did.

Please dont force sign-ups.

 

Thank you, this is a bug that I noticed thanks to you pointing it out. I hate signing up to sites too trust me

What do you think about signing up to add a planet, do you disagree with that as well?

 

My opinion is that it would be bad to accept input from people that aren't signed up. Sure, trolls can still sign-up just to cause grief, but at least by having a sign-up you're better equipped to combat them?

Also, I seem not to be up-to-speed on the nomenclature of the game. Example: I wrote down "Alpha Krism 3248 IIIb" which happens to be an actual planet I enjoyed because the nights were not cold enough to threaten player warmth.

I don't actually know off-hand what part of that is the "System"/"Cluster" or if it even applies. I had typed the whole thing into System without realizing what system meant. The entry doesn't appear in the last 10 planets, but I have no way to access the system that I created (that I can tell) for editing.

 

When designing the data structure try to implement a way to reverse all changes made by a certain user.
That will give you a lot less headache when dealing with griefers later on
I would suggest saving every planet that a user adds under his own ID and just displaying the latest added (decided through timestamp). This would take some more space in your database, but when deleting/locking an account it would just display the next most recent data.

 

signing up to add content is fine.

It would be nice if you could use a google or facebook login as an option though. I love it when a site does that. To me Its hassle free and feels courteous. This goes for all new social sites, not just yours.


good luck. It seems like you have a good thing going.

 

You should cap threat level so it can never go below 1 or above 10

Also, you could make it so that people can add standard pre-defined tags, such as "Dungeon" or even more specific "Avian Dungeon", "Apex Dungeon", 'Avian Village" etc etc, it will make it very easy for people to find what they are looking for if there would be a sorting option based on popular and pre-defined tags then. Just don't make the tags user-generated, or you'll end up with "avian tomb" "avian dungeon" "avian-dungeon" "avian temple" which will all basically point to the same thing.

My only concern is how you're going to deal with people that used diff seeds for universe generation, or people that played on servers that use a different seed. I think a solution would be to add some kinda of user-verification thing, very similar to "likes/dislikes" but more in the direction of "real/fake", then the community (given it will become large enough) will be able to filter out the fake stuff on its own, without giving you headaches.

Just some ideas

 

Those are great ideas. Once I resolve the bugs that everyone else has pointed out I'll work on a tagging system and voting system.

Thanks for the ideas! I'll make a post in a few days when I get all these features up for round 2 of beta testing.

 

You should allow users to add tags (With a list of standard tags available) to make searching for planets easier. An Airship tag to search for gun merchants or a tech chest tag, an Avian/Glitch/Hyloti etc for worlds with cities of that species... A set of tags for the various dungeons. <Ninja'd>

A weather selection might be nice as well (This way you'd be able to filter planets by weather when planet searches become available)

 

This is definitely on my todo List ... It's a little tricky though, because I want to have a single form with most of the data being selected from drop-downs. The only thing you'd need to type in is System name. I'll atleast temporarily explain what kind of data to put in each field in the meantime while I work on the site-breaking features first.

Thanks a lot for the feedback, it's good to hear that my suspicions of the site being too complicated are valid concerns and need to be addressed.