How to Make a Feature Request

[Skilly146]

Intro

The purpose of this post is to explain what information you should include in your feature requests as well as how to format them. Throughout this post I will use the "feature" of adding explosion effects to any star that combat occurs at as an example.

Layout

The following is the general layout that any feature request should follow

1. Title (Required)

Your title should be short and get straight to the point of what you are requesting. In the case of explosion effects the important parts are what aspect it affects (In this case stars/carriers and combat) and what you are wanting to add (explosion effect, most likely a still image). To make a good title with that you would write something like

Add explosion combat effect on stars

This title includes what part of the game you want to be changed, what causes it, and what you want to actually happen.

2. What (Required)

This is where you elaborate on what you started with the title. All you need to do here is go into more detail about how you want the feature to work and when it is active. While the title tells the reader that you want to add explosion effects after combat, it doesn't tell them what exactly would active it, what kind of effects (still image added on top or animated effects?), or how long it would last. In our example a good What section would be:

I would like to add a still image explosion effect to any stars that had combat on them in the previous tick. Any time that a star has combat happen on it recently I would like the extension to add something like this

This effect would be about the same size as the white dot at the center of all stars so that it doesn't cover up the shape around the star used to identify the owner.

The most important part is making sure that you include enough detail that someone could add your feature without any additional information. Obviously there is some leeway since readers can always ask questions in the comments but it's fastest to avoid needing clarification.

3. Why (Required)

While it may not seem necessary at first, a Why section is very important in a feature request because it helps us to judge how helpful a feature would be (and by extension work on the most helpful extensions first). A Why section is also helpful to explain why your feature is even necessary in the first place as well as some additional uses for it. For example our example feature has an additional use beyond just being cool because it makes it easier to quickly check recent fights on stars since they are highlighted. In your Why section you want to be sure to include why you think this feature is something we should add as well as some additional uses for it if you can think of any. In our example feature a good Why would be:

I think we should add this feature because not only does it make the game feel much more dramatic, but it also makes it easier to quickly check any stars that had fighting on them recently. The explosion effect makes recently fought on stars much more distinct than regular stars which means you can quickly review recent fights without checking events.

Make sure not to include any additional ideas in the Why section, or any other section. You need to include all of your requests in the What section. For example, while writing this you might think it would be a good idea to include a quick way to jump to the event log for whatever combat happened on the exploded star. If you think of something like that later on in your post go back to the What section and add it, don't add it where you are now

How (Optional, but strongly recommended if you can)

In this section your goal is to do as much of our work as possible. If you have the coding knowledge it is preferred that you write some pseudocode to outline how you think this feature could be implemented, but if not even just explaining with words is helpful. For our example the steps would be:

1. Check if any stars in the previous tick had combats on them by checking the event log for combat
2. Add the explosion.png file on top of any of the stars found in step one
3. remove the explosion.png after a given amount of time (most likely one tick)

If you are able to write that out in pseudocode your How section would look something like this:

The way this feature would work is by reading all of the combat reports under the 'events' tab from the last tick and if it finds any the plugin adds an explosion.png on top of the star in the report. In psuedocode the process would be:

for event in neptunes_pride_event_log:
    if event.tick == current_game_tick - 1:
        if event.type == combat_report:
            target_star = event.star
            target_star.add_image(explosion.png)

A possible optimization would be if we could sort the events by tick highest to lowest to show the most recent ones first and then quit out of the loop as soon as you finish reading all of the reports from last tick. This code would also automatically stop showing the explosion the next tick since it has to actively add the image anytime the user reloads, meaning as soon as the current tick is over that combat was 2 ticks ago and not 1

Without the pseudocode it would look like this:

The way this feature would work is by reading all of the combat reports under the 'events' tab from the last tick and if it finds any the plugin adds an explosion.png on top of the star in the report. Basically, the plugin would first get a list of all the reports from the previous tick. Then it checks if any of those reports were a combat report and if they were then it will add the explosion.png file on top of the star. One way you could make this faster is by sorting the events by tick highest to lowest to show the most recent ones first, and then stop reading reports after you finish the newest ones.

Similar/helpful Tools or resources (Optional, only include if you know any)

All you have to do in this section is include helpful/similar tools or resources to what you are requesting. This is where any good explosion pictures you found would go, or in the case other other features maybe a piece of code that does a similar thing already. All it really needs to be is a list of links with a short description. For example:

• Explosion image: Good image for the explosion effects that I found

Markdown Guide

Markdown is the formatting language that GitHub uses. It allows you to format pages with the flexibility of html code using just basic easy to remember characters. This is a basic guide on how to use markdown, which would be useful to know for your feature request post. The most important syntax (characters) to know is #, which allows you to make headings; -, which allows you to make bulleted lists; *, which when put on either side of a word or sentence will italicize them; **, which when put on either side of a word or sentence will bold them; and [](), which creates a hyperlink. For hyperlinks you put the words you want t be displayed in the [] while the actual link goes in the ( ). If you add an ! before the [] you can put an image link in the () and the image will be displayed

Feedback

These guidelines are in no way set in stone, so if you have any suggestions feel free to comment on this post and I'll add them in. Also please comment about any sections that are unclear or any typos you find