In #232, cluster animations were added, but they weren't serialized as part of the cluster design, which meant that sharing them wouldn't copy over the animation. This fixes that.
This also removes "(experimental)" from the animation widget label.
Currently it's possible to generate random clusters (formerly known as creatures), but unlike mandalas, there's no way to _edit_ one if you decide that there's something about it that you'd like to change. This means, for instance, that if a randomly-generated cluster looks nice but needs a hat, or if it has arms you don't like, or if you find something cool in the gallery but want to remix it a bit, you will be able to make those changes.
It also isn't currently possible to randomly generate a cluster with lots of complexity; the data structure to represent a cluster is defined recursively, however, so this editing UI--however horrible this initial version is--allows for the construction of clusters of arbitrary complexity.
Note that the UX for this is currently terrible, but we can improve on it in future PRs.
This fixes#222. Note that it only renames it in the UI, not in the code or the TOML metadata, as that would require a ton of changes, and possibly break old links.
This adds thumbnails to the gallery (#26). Mandalas are not currently animated (I'm worried that doing this for lots of mandalas would severely impact performance). It also adds a loading throbber for the gallery page.
If a gallery item can't be deserialized, a sad face is shown in place of a thumbnail, with a more detailed explanation on mouseover.
Currently the implementation is not as clean as I'd like. I'll clean it up in a separate PR, as it will involve factoring out logic from the creature and mandala pages (similar in concept to #189 / #190), which would add lots of noise to this diff.
This implements an _extremely_ basic Firebase-powered gallery (#26). At present it's just a list of links to creatures/manadalas that open in new tabs, without preview thumbnails. Or the ability to submit new entries. These features will be forthcoming in future PRs.
As with #215, this decouples the view logic from Firebase so we can use something else in the future if we want.
This adds GitHub login via Firebase, as a foundation for adding a gallery (#26). Currently it just adds a login/logout button to the Debug page.
At an architectural level, this adds an `AuthContext` React context, whose interface is generic enough that it's not coupled to Firebase or GitHub. In fact, the default context is a "null context" whose operations are all no-ops.
This adds a new `useRememberedState()` React hook that effectively allows us to have user interface elements that "remember" their most recent value, even if the UI itself was unmounted at some point. (It only works for the lifetime of the page, however, so it doesn't remember values across page reloads; this is intentional, as I didn't want to have to worry about serialization or schema migration.)
The hook is now used in the randomizer widget and for some of the creature page widgets, to ensure that their settings are preserved more often than not.
The creature state stored in #210, while quite compact, is also very fragile, because any minor change in our creature generation algorithm or even vocabulary will completely throw off existing serializations.
This attempts to serialize the actual _creature_ created by the generator rather than its random number seed, which will be a larger serialization but also one that is more resilient to future changes in the algorithm and/or vocabulary. It should also pave the way for tweaking generated creatures.
Note that the previous `v1` schema implemented in #210 is no longer supported--i.e., links that use it will now be broken. Hopefully this is OK because it hasn't been around for very long, but it was just way too much work to migrate that schema to the new `v2` format.
This is an attempt to help with #61 by storing the creature state in the querystring.
However, a crucial issue with this implementation as it stands is that it stores the random number seed used to generate the creature. This is great for representing the state in a compact form, but it's also likely to break easily as the vocabulary and randomization algorithm changes.
So, in the future, we might want to represent the creature state by enumerating the actual structure of the creature, which is likely to be a bit more future-proof. (It also makes it possible for us to add features in the future that allow users to tweak the randomly-generated creature.)
But for now at least, this will allow users to use the back and forward buttons in their browser to navigate between creatures, so that if they click randomize and skip past something that looked cool, it's easy to go back and visit it.
Fixes#191.
Currently the implementation is fairly naive, in that a really large value for `creature_frequency_multiplier` will not be handled terribly efficiently, but we can optimize later if needed.
This splits up our `styles.css` file into multiple CSS files that sit alongside the TSX files that use their classes. All "generic" CSS that isn't used by any one particular component, such as our `thingy` class, is currently being put into `page.css`.
The CSS files are imported via `import` statements in their associated TSX files. As such, this fixes#164.
This also starts formatting our CSS using Prettier.
It also moves some of our `<head>` tags back into `index.html`, reverting a tiny bit of #205, to ensure that some of the metadata can be recognized by browsers, and start loading asynchronously, independently of the page's JavaScript (I see no reason why any of those elements need to change dynamically based on the app's state, so there don't seem to be any downsides to this).
This adds a new attachment point type called `wildcard` (colored `#000000` in the SVGs) which, as the name suggests, can contain _any_ kind of symbol.
Fixes#187.
This minimally fixes#143 by adding optional hills to the waves page (they default to being disabled but can be enabled via a checkbox). It also adds haze to the waves, so that they are blended with the color of the sky as they recede into the distance.
This adds a toggle to disable gradients, fixing #140.
On the Mandala page, this changes how our permalinks are structured, but does so in a backwards-compatible way, thanks to [Avro schema evolution][1]. Now the `s` querystring argument is prefixed with a schema version, the latest being `v2`. If this prefix is missing, it's assumed to be the very first schema version, `v1`, and interpreted accordingly.
[1]: https://martin.kleppmann.com/2012/12/05/schema-evolution-in-avro-protocol-buffers-thrift.html
Fixes#128.
A number of hook-related warnings were brought up, which this PR also fixes. Note that from now on, if there are any warnings raised by the eslint, CI will fail.
This fixes#93 by making the exported mandala filenames include the names of the symbols used in them. So for example, a mandala with circles made up of the `crown_ornate` symbol and the `heart_break` symbol will now have an exported GIF filename of `mandala-crown_ornate-heart_break.gif`.
This addresses #61 by making mandalas permalinked.
The URL to a mandala will change whenever the user stops fiddling with it for 250 ms. This means that the user can always reload the page to get a reasonably recent version of what they were creating, and they can use the browser's "back" and "next" buttons to effectively undo/redo recent changes. They can also copy the URL to share it with others.
## About the serialization format
Originally, I stored the state of the user's mandala in the URL using JSON. This had a number of drawbacks, though:
* **It was really long.** A mandala serialization was almost 1k characters, which was a very big URL, and one that some sharing platforms might even reject.
* **It wasn't type-checked in any way.** Unless I added some kind of JSON schema validation (which I didn't), the serialization was simply deserialized and assumed to be in the proper format. This could result in confusing exceptions during render time, rather than decisively exploding at deserialization time.
To resolve these limitations, and because I thought it would be fun, I decided to store the mandala state using a serialization format called [Apache Avro][]. I first read about this in Kleppmann's [Designing Data-Intensive Applications][kleppmann] and was intrigued by both its compactness (a serialized mandala is around 80-120 characters) and schema evolution properties.
It might be going a bit overboard, but again, I thought it would be fun and I wanted to play around with Avro. Also, I tried architecting things in such a way that all the Avro code is in its own file, and can easily be removed (or swapped out for another serialization format) if we decide it's dumb.
[Apache Avro]: http://avro.apache.org/
[kleppmann]: https://dataintensive.net/
## Other changes
This PR also makes a few other changes:
* Tests can now import files with JSX in them (I don't think this was required for the final state of this PR, but I figured I'd leave it in there for its almost inevitable use in the future).
* The value labels for number sliders now have a fixed width, which eliminates a weird "jitter" effect that sometimes occurred when using them.
This adds a "rotate_clockwise" property to the TOML metadata, which allows the default direction of rotation to be changed on a per-symbol basis.
Co-authored-by: Corinna Cohn <corinna.cohn@gmail.com>
This adds an "Export GIF" button _if and only if_ animation is enabled on the Mandala page.
The GIF has the same dimensions as the canvas at the time that the button was clicked.
Currently the animation is locked to 15 FPS, which I think might be the maximum rate that some platforms limit it to, but I'm not sure. We can always adjust it in the future.
This replaces the "randomize colors" and "randomize" buttons on the creature and mandala pages with a single randomizer widget that allows the user to choose whether they want to randomize the colors, symbols, or both.
By default, both colors and symbols are randomized.
Note that this is really only a temporary solution, though: ideally we'll want to provide a more powerful UI that allows users to mark _any_ parameter for randomization, e.g. via "pinning" values or somesuch.
This adds a "random color sampling" section to the right side of the debug page.
I'm hoping this will make it easier for @mittimithai to work on his random color code, since it shows a bunch of random colors (100 right now) side-by-side, rather than requiring the developer to constantly click "randomize colors" on mandala/creature to get an idea of what the color spectrum looks like, 3 colors at a time.
This adds a slider that allows the duration of the mandala animation to be changed (for #71).
In so doing, it also decouples the animation speed from the display's refresh rate.
This improves the layout of all our pages to look more like the mandala page.
Additionally, some form widgets now have better layout, and the header takes up less vertical space.
At an implementation level, the component hierarchy of pages has been inverted to make this kind of layout easier. Now fully laid-out pages are contained within `<Page>` components that are at the top of the component hierarchy, and which are defined by each specific page (mandala, creature, vocabulary, etc).
I had to do a few architectural things to avoid circular imports, though; most notably, this involved the creation of a new React context called a `PageContext`.
It uses CSS grid, which should be pretty well-supported amongst recent browsers.
This fixes#67 by making the background color selection/randomization code more DRY via the addition of a new `SvgCompositionContext` and a `CompositionContextWidget`.
It also documents the `SvgSymbolContext` type, and moves the "randomize colors" button closer to the actual colors.
The random colors are currently terrible! Maneesh will help us make them better. :)
Also, there is some annoying code duplication going on here between the creature and mandala pages, but I really wanted to add the button to both and also want to eat dinner soon, so I am filing #67 and saving the refactoring for later.
The key phrase here is **less terrible**, as opposed to **good**.
Right now if the mandala gets too big for the page, it will just overflow and the remainder won't be visible (not even via scrolling). This is intentional, though, as per @ninapaley's suggestion:
> I'm hoping you can change the way the image keeps resizing its canvas, and keeps justifying left.
> Maybe have an oversize canvas with the ring pinned to the center, and all the adjustment sliders
> on the right? Then they won't disappear if the canvas is too big. Also! I have an idea for an
> animated cycle that would require the symbols to eventually outgrow the canvas area and disappear.
I'm not super happy with this CSS, it doesn't feel terribly maintainable. Ah well, maybe we can improve it later.
Atul Varma