Devlog #7

I finally made a GUI! This is the second time I’ve made a GUI with Python, and the first time with Tkinter (last time I used Pygame). The UI currently looks pretty rough and I definitely need to find a way to make it look better, if that’s even possible. I would have much prefered if I could’ve just built this as a web app and got this done like 5 hours sooner.

Devlog #6

The last time I ported everything over to the new locations without copying because I wanted to reorganize and make the code better, I completely forgot about demonlist integration. So I spent a while trying to get the demonlist integration to work. I’m writing this like a day later so I don’t really remember what I was struggling with, all I remember is that I forgot to convert the data from server to JSON, and was trying to access data in an incorrect format. And I was just blaming in on the main.py file instead of the fetching file, and yeah I took way too much time solving a problem that didn’t need to exist.

Devlog #5:

Well, I’m back. The reason I haven’t been working on this project is because there’s no where to host the backend without being blocked by Cloudflare- except locally on your own device. So, I’m turning this into a local Python app.

So far, I’ve made a CLI that can access the servers and return the data, and also return an ELO. Due to uh, file migration, I had to rewrite a lot of a code (and totally not because the code was absolute spaghetti before)

#Devlog #4:
I can finally claim to be a full-stack web developer.

New Stuff

• I re-added the frontend for the web application to that users cna actually see the data.
• I added a functional backend that the frontend can actually send requests to and get data back from.

Challenges

I had previously managed to fetched data from RobTop’s servers, but I couldn’t manage to find a way to get the data onto the front end. I also couldn’t make the requests from the front end because CORS would block it. So I had to learn how to code a backend with Python and Flask.

Lowkey I still don’t fully understand how to use Flask though lol.

Devlog #3:
Is anyone actually reading this?

I spent an hour today trying to implement code for a simple leaderboard of ELO. It went well for a while, and then I actually tested the application and got temporarily IP banned from the GD servers. And then it happened again, even when I added a delay to requesting data from the servers. At this point I don’t even know what I can do to add a live-ish leaderboard so I just scrapped the idea altogether. Yay, I love when I waste an entire hour doing something that I have to undo literally moments later.

Devlog #2

I got RobTop’s servers to return data about two minutes after I made my last devlog. Since I couldn’t make a devlog yet, I just decided to add some new features.

So the reason that I didn’t get any data from the server is because I added an extra parameter. When I removed it, the servers returned something like

1:EthanCubes:2:272364184:13:75:17:63:6:0:9:1:10:3:11:12: 51:15: 14:0:15:0:16:31268368:3:729:52:97:46:2675:8:0:4:11#999:0:10

why are there emojis there.

I used GD Colon’s video on making his GD website to decode (gd reference) be abomination and turn it into a dictionary (because python).

I also added a function to calculate the skill rating from the dictionary.

I’m rated 1515.
Smiffy777 is rated over one million.

Devlog #1

I spent 3 hours trying to get Node.js to send a request to RobTop’s servers with no response at all. Then I switched to building a backend with Python and then it took me like 5 minutes to get a response. 80/20 rule, except in the end all the info I got was, in the words of the furry great player GD Colon, “a hot minus-one”. (You can see this at the bottom of the terminal, amidst all the errors). So it’s more like 80/20/0. I felt the need to devlog because well, -1 is still something even if mathematically is it less than nothing.