GEMP has long had a somewhat dated appearance, and with today’s update we have made the first major strides towards modernizing the look and feel. Alongside the cosmetic differences are a number of small Quality of Life improvements, as well as some major back-end organization that will be the foundation of future improvements.
Let’s take a look at each of the changes in detail.
Full Cross-Browser Dark Mode
GEMP has always been a primarily dark-mode application, but there have always been glaring exceptions here and there that really made it hard to sit back and enjoy the view. In particular, input boxes and scroll bars were inconsistent across browsers, with Firefox having a better time of it while Chrome just made lots of random things too bright.
Now, all scrollbars have been specifically styled in a cross-browser manner, and all text boxes have been fixed. The only places bright colors show up is where they should, to draw your attention.
Chat Improvements
Lots of improvements have been made to make the basic chat something that’s a lot more pleasant to work with, especially in comparison to Discord and other fully-featured chat programs.
First, support for Markdown has been added. Some features have been disabled to prevent some of the more obvious trolling vectors, such as named links and images. Besides that however, you should now be able to *italicize* and **bold** text to your heart’s content.
> And you can even quote people, too.
Plain links by themselves are permitted, and will automatically be linked for you.
Next, multi-line support includes the text entry field, which will now expand to show up to 4 lines of text. You can manually include a newline by pressing shift + enter.
Finally, two different kinds of mentions are possible, both with and without using the @ symbol to call someone out. If someone’s name is mentioned the @ symbol, the message will be highlighted in red, and if the @ is omitted the message will be highlighted slightly in yellow.
This is especially pertinent in-game, as actions you perform will now be highlighted differently from your opponent. In fact, besides the multi-line entry form, all of these chat improvements have automatically been included in-game, as the game re-uses the same chat control as the hall.
Table Descriptions and Invite-Only Tables
Tables can now have a user-entered description (up to 100 characters) which can help advertise what it is you’re doing with that table. This should help avoid drama around some people refusing to play against GLR, or auto-conceding against certain deck strategies, and so forth.
Be sure to read the table description for tables you join!
This same feature has been combined with a new “Invite-only” option for tables. If the box is checked, then the description is taken to be the name of a specific player, who becomes the only person able to connect to your table.
As shown in the screenshot above, if you are not the player invited, no ‘Join Table’ button is available to you. In contrast, if you have been invited to a table, the table will highlight in orange.
Improved Chat Lock Behavior
Here’s something we actually removed: the “lock chat” button. This frequently-mystifying button controlled the behavior of the chat scroll: if it was “on” (default), then new messages would force your chat window to scroll all the way to the bottom. Turning it “off” would let you scroll freely without constantly getting pulled back down.
This behavior is retained, but instead of needing to juggle a button, it is now inherent based on the state of the scroll bar: if you are scrolled all the way to the bottom, it will stay “locked”. If however you scroll up to catch some other message, it will act as if it was “unlocked”.
New Action Bar
Frequently-used pages are now part of an action bar at the top of the hall screen. In reality, these are just links–but rather than a wall of text, a line of buttons with icons is a little easier to scan when looking for something in particular.
This is also where the Deck Builder and Merchant links have moved to, and Merchant has been struck through to communicate its status as a half-feature. Someday if we get around to reworking the pretend “owned cards” feature, we’ll restore its icon accordingly.
(For anyone wondering where their gold count went, it was moved to the new Account tab.)
Rearranged Tabs
Let’s face it–13 tabs was just too many. There was lots of good information in them, but they were a cluttered mess and frequently overlooked.
All of the same information (as well as some new stuff) has been reorganized into the 5 tabs you can see above. There will likely be a few more added in the future as new functionality is added, but as much as possible the number will be restrained to make it all easier to scan.
The Help tab contains the old Instructions, Code of Conduct, Format Rules, and League Rules tabs. The Instructions info has had links added to the existing resources on the PC website, as well as embedding two videos to watch.
(At some point we will probably need to come up with a better video tutorial series on how to use GEMP, tho at this rate it should probably wait until the visuals settle down!)
The Events tab contains the old Leagues and Tournaments tabs, and their content is more or less unchanged.
Server Info contains the old Server Stats, Change Log, and Contribute tabs, with a new About tab that goes over some of GEMP’s history. The Contribute tab has been overhauled, and the Server Stats tab has been changed to automatically push the date back one month and click the button once for you, instead of requiring that every. single. time.
Finally, My Account contains the old Game History, My Stats, and Playtesting tabs, and is also where the gold total has been moved to.
As the name implies, this is going to be fleshed out in the future to contain more settings relevant to new features, so keep an eye on this one.
CSS Overhaul
Last but certainly not least, as the result of all these changes (and in some cases to enable them), the hall has as much as possible been rewired to use proper HTML/CSS/JS divisions of responsibility. This means that visual alterations will be easier, and in many cases will not require server restarts to deploy.
We made some attempts to simplify the design language of the app, by abolishing the background grid and restricting the color scheme to greys + orange/red, with blue as a standard highlighting. This is certainly an area we’re bumbling our way through, but hopefully we found our way there in the end.
In the future, we hope to apply similar complete overhauls to the Deck Builder and Game UIs, which will then leave us free to add things such as full reactive mobile UI support, or customizable visual themes, and other such features that are out of reach so long as any part of the site is under the old paradigm.
Whew, that just about covers it. If you come across any issues with the new UI, please don’t hesitate to report them on the PC Discord. Be sure to mention which browser you are using, and what device (PC or phone model).
And as always, we’d love to hear your feedback!
The White Council 