Ideas For Expanding VE's Search Tool Into R^3

[Silvuh]

I don't know what the plans are for expanding R^3's search and filtering functionality, but I wanted to share the idea I had ... and any discussion about any ideas can go here.

All the engines load with Genre being the main sort heading. (R^3 does start with a list of every level by ID, but there's still only the genres on the left.) Back when there was a design contest for Blackwebb, I had the idea of loading to a supermenu with different sorting options like the ones of the Velocity Engine's drop-down menu (Name, Difficulty, Rank, etc.) ... As in R^3 now, the engine would load with every level listed by 500s. Clicking on a supercategory would sort the levels by that category, more clicks switching between ascending and descending. (I think the default sorting method should be Difficulty instead of ID, though, for the benefit of newer players. They should be seeing the easiest songs first rather than all the Legacy files.)

Accommodating my original idea to the layout of R^3, the supercategories would be listed on the left, and the subcategories would be listed under the "Search" tab. ("Filters" doesn't seem to do anything right now, and there's only a little on the Search tab, so the functions can probably be more conveniently merged.) Like in the Velocity Engine, each option would have a little toggle box. Every option is on by default, clicking an option would toggle it between on and off, and double clicking it would keep that option on and turn all the others in the category off. (This would make the Velocity Engine's "Hide All/Show Only" option unnecessary, and "Show Only" doesn't work properly, anyway.) Toggle boxes would probably be most important for the genres. (Double-clicking on a genre would be equivalent to using the Genre Wheel.) Also, it would be nice if levels could be in multiple genres, so tokens could be sorted into its style's genre but still disappear when tokens are turned off. (If it is possible to put levels in multiple genres, then an AND/OR toggle would be useful.)

The search box would work with whatever supercategory is currently selected. The search box could be toggled into halves so it could search for a range. This would be used for numerical ranges and alphanumeric ranges (searching by "starts with" rather than "contains") depending on the category. The long "SEARCH" button could be squished to the left to fit "+" and "-" buttons on the right which would add and remove extra text-search filters, allowing multiple ranges to be viewed at a time. Anything that could be searched for by range could be searched for this way rather than with toggle boxes. This would work well for Difficulty and Length, which currently use toggle boxes in VE.

One sorting category that isn't in VE that would be nice to have is "Score", which could be sorted by the level's max raw score subtracted by one's best recorded raw score. "0" would find all AAAs, "25" all blackflags, etc. There could also be boxes for each accuracy to be used like anubis2003's levelrank filter. The Score window would also have a toggle box for "Full Combo"; this box would be set to neutral by default and cycle through "All", "FC Only", "Non-FC".

After changing the settings of one filter, another supercategory could be selected, and so on. The sorting would retain the previously selected category as a subsort of the currently selected category, like how the level ranks page works in Firefox.

The tab window would also have "Reset" and a "Random" buttons. The idea of this was basically just to maximize the functionality of stuff already in VE's search tool, so aside from new ideas like multiple text-search filters, it shouldn't be that much more difficult to code ... I guess? La la la... Let's get some discussion going!

... Aaand here's an image example so my post is more than just an understandable-I-hope wall of text.


welp

[popsicle_3000]

I like the idea of the search stuff. I'm a bit lost as the explanations, but I did like velo's searches.
lets get them in r3

[Silvuh]

Hm, if I know exactly what you didn't find clear, I will try to explain those parts better. Thank you for reading and commenting, though!


La la, so here are a few things I wanted to add. My previous example was a totally superficial, so I made what could be the new "Score" filter with an example (again, this was based off of anubis2003's levelrank filter):



This searches for "Good >= 9 & Miss == 0" (i.e. non-SDG FCs)

I'd put this under a Difficulty search for 62–69 to filter for levels I should be able to improve easily on.

If the score filter was like this, toggle boxes for AAAs, FCs, or Played/Unplayed wouldn't be necessary. AAAs could be searched for by typing in 0 for all non-perfects, non-FCs could be searched for with "Miss >= 1", and unplayed levels could be searched for with "Score == 0".

Now, the other couple of things: my previous example image showed "1:30" and "1:31" in the song list. I didn't mention it in my text, but I think it would be nice to have whatever your currently-selected filter is to show up in the song list either at the top or when the value changes, as shown in the image. (For longer items like step author and music artist names, those might overlap with song titles, so I'm not sure how that would work.)

The last thing is that the lowest sort by default would have to be Name or ID, because those are the only two that can uniquely identify every level on their own. I suggest Name being the lowest sort, because I don't think anyone has memorized the ID of every level. It should be easier to find levels in an alphabetical sort, excluding the very earliest and latest files, but the number of those is few in comparison.

Oh, and I just thought maybe the left could have "Stats" as a filter category. On the right in the search tab, there would be buttons to sort by, like, number of your plays, number of plays total, number of AAAs, and other stuff like that that shows up in the Level Stats. (Filtering for number of plays and combo are the things I'm missing from anubis2003's filter here. I didn't think combo was necessary, and a "number of plays" filter would be good to have somewhere, but it fits in more with Stats than Score.)

[Xiz]

Somewhat adapting off of this, what if there was a way to search by Simfile Author? I would love to be able to search for all AlexDest files, or all Hi19 files...

Also, what about searching by year? "Lets play all 2009 songs! Yay" Might be an interesting feature to see how stepping has progressed on FFR...

Just some thoughts...

[CaptainAhab]

Totally support. I find that being able to sort by things other than genre would be very beneficial to the engine's ease of use.