What is this?
When you reach high levels in MMORPGs, it becomes pretty complicated to figure out what parts of your kit are lacking. Everything seems to do a lot of damage, but without proper statistics tools, you can't know for sure.
Big MMORPGs like World of Warcraft usually have projects like Recount to aid with that problem, but when the community of a game is not big enough, you're left guessing what you should improve next.
This project lets the Project Gorgon community have the luxury of collecting all kinds of combat statistics, so they can further improve their kit.
What it took
At the start of the project, I had zero experience with Go language having just finished the Go tour. I had to learn many things as I went on with the project.
I chose Gio UI as the immediate mode UI library I wanted to use. But it turned out it doesn't have as much built-in things as I wanted. I had to manually implement several different element containers, like Canvas where elements can be placed in relation to any of the nine anchors; HorizontalWrap where elements will be placed horizontally, but wrapped if they reach the horizontal limit; Modals that allows me to display a dialog on top of everything, and so on.
I also implemented pie charts and area graphs myself as the UI library or its extensions didn't seem to have anything that I wanted. It took quite a lot of time to get them to work correctly, but even with all that effort, there are still some rendering issues.
What I learned
This project was a challenge for me to try making something with unfamiliar language and tech. During the project, I learned Go and learned some new things about immediate mode UI that I didn't think about before. I also learned a bunch of things on how area charts work and learned the point simplification algorithms.