NAVIGATOR BROWSING

Navigator Browsing

First page of the Navigator section: the tabbed browser, the one search packet everything rides on, categories, favorites, history, and saved searches. NAVIGATOR-ROOM-ADS covers promotions; NAVIGATOR-CREATION-AND-COMPAT covers room creation and the deliberately empty corners.

The four tabs

When a client opens the navigator, Pixels sends the top-level context metadata, exactly four tabs, matching what the Nitro UI renders:

// metadataContexts returns top-level Nitro navigator contexts.
return []outmetadata.Context{
	{Code: "official_view", SavedSearches: …},
	{Code: "hotel_view",    SavedSearches: …},
	{Code: "roomads_view",  SavedSearches: …},
	{Code: "myworld_view",  SavedSearches: …},
}

Tab	What it serves
official_view	Staff-curated rooms, in thumbnail mode
hotel_view	Popular rooms by live occupancy, or free-text results when the player typed a query
roomads_view	Rooms with an active promotion (see NAVIGATOR-ROOM-ADS)
myworld_view	Personal sub-lists: your rooms, your favorites

One search packet to rule them all

Every search afterwards is a single generic packet, NAVIGATOR_SEARCH, carrying a code (which tab or sub-list) and a data string (the typed query, if any). The client never hardcodes category codes; it echoes back codes the server previously sent, either a tab code from the metadata above or a sub-list code from a previous result. Server-side, one dispatch point in internal/realm/navigator/browse/search routes codes to result builders:

case "favorites":       favoriteLists(…)
case "history":         historyLists(ctx, playerID, false)
case "frequent":        historyLists(ctx, playerID, true)
case "official_view":   officialLists(…)
case "hotel_view":      hotelLists(ctx, query)
default:                queryLists(ctx, code, query) // free-text fallback

Result lists carry a display mode (list versus thumbnail grid), an action flag (whether "see more" is offered), and room cards. Cards are enriched in one bounded batch with social-group badges for rooms owned by groups, a deliberate single query, not one lookup per card.

Official rooms are simply rooms with the StaffPicked flag set. Staff toggle it from the room info panel in-client, and operators can do the same through POST/DELETE /api/admin/navigator/official/:roomId. There's no separate curation table to maintain.

Popular rooms rank by live occupancy read from the room runtime registry (see ROOMS-RUNTIME). The count is the number of units actually standing in each room right now, not a cached statistic.

Favorites, history, saved searches

• Favorites are durable per-player rows with a capped count, toggled by the star button. They surface twice: as a myworld_view sub-list and as state on every room card.
• History tracks recently visited and frequently visited rooms per player, fed by room entry events rather than by the navigator itself. Entering a room is what writes history; opening the navigator only reads it.
• Saved searches are the bookmarks under the search bar, stored per player and echoed back inside the tab metadata, each bound to the tab it was saved from.

Categories

Rooms carry a flat category chosen at creation or in room settings. The navigator exposes the category list and per-category user counts through dedicated request packets, and per-player category preferences (which sections are collapsed) persist across sessions. Categories are data: they live in navigator-owned tables and seeds, so adding one is an insert, not a deploy.