wowsb ship tool: loadouts and the fixes after tester feedback

This is the build after the maths post. I gave the site to a tester and got three pieces of feedback back, and those turned into most of this update. Plus one feature I had wanted for a while: saving equipment builds.

Tester feedback one: the page jumps to the top

When you picked a ship, the page scrolled all the way back to the top. So if you were looking at a ship near the bottom of the list, you lost your place every single time and had to scroll back down.

The cause was one line. One of my functions called a scroll reset every time the panel opened. The panel is an overlay that sits on top of the page, so the reset was never needed in the first place. Removed it and the page now stays exactly where you were.

Tester feedback two: traverse acceleration never changed

Equipping gear that boosts Traverse Acceleration did nothing to the ship's numbers.

This one took a while to understand. My equipment files call the stat Traverse Acceleration. But when I looked at the ship data, only 6 out of 84 ships have a row with that name. The other 78 just call it Acceleration.

So the equipment was looking for a row that did not exist on almost every ship, and quietly gave up. I added a small alias table, so Traverse Acceleration now points at the Acceleration row when the longer name is missing. Same for Deceleration.

Now Enhanced Steering Gear actually moves the number. Shimakaze went from 8.4 to 9.24. Montana went from 27.29 to 30.02.

Tester feedback three: I have to type six slots again

Every time you swap to a different ship you had to enter all six equipment pieces from scratch. The tester pointed out that a lot of ships take the same gear, so saving a build would help.

So I built loadouts.

How loadouts work

• Set up the six slots however you like, then hit Save slots and give it a name, like "AA build" or "Torpedo build".
• Saved builds show up as small chips next to the button. Tap the name to load it, and it fills all six slots at once, levels included.
• Each chip has a small × on the right to delete just that build.
• They stay saved in your browser, so they are still there after a refresh.
• There is also an Unload all button that empties every slot on the ship. It keeps your saved builds, it only clears what is currently fitted.

The chips also know which ships can take what. If a saved build fits the ship you are looking at, the chip is blue and clickable. If it does not fit that ship's class, it goes grey but is still there so you can delete it.

Loadouts in the compare view too

Compare has the same set of buttons, one row per ship. So you can save a build straight from the compare panel, load one onto either side, or unload one side without touching the other.

I also made changing the ship keep your equipment. Before, if you hit Change and searched up a different ship, the six slots came back empty and you had to start again. Now the slots carry across, and anything the new ship cannot take is skipped instead of breaking.

The nation filter was completely dead

Nothing to do with the tester, I found this while checking other things. Filtering by nation returned zero ships every time.

When I expanded the site to all 84 ships, the ship data started using the real game nation codes, things like USN and IJN in capitals. But the filter buttons were still using my old short codes, lowercase things like us and jp. Nothing matched, so the list just went empty.

Fixed the filter to use the same codes as the data. Now USN returns 14 ships, IJN returns 11, and selecting two nations at once works as it should.

The compare button did not work, and it was my fault

This is the one I am least happy about. After adding the loadout buttons to compare, the Compare button stopped opening the panel at all.

The reason: one of my new functions used a short name for the shared code object that does not exist in that file. So the moment the panel tried to draw itself, it hit an error and died halfway. The button was firing fine the whole time, the drawing was crashing.

That is a mistake I should have caught before showing the build to anyone. I found it by catching the real error message instead of guessing, and now compare opens with both columns, all twelve slot boxes and the loadout buttons showing.

While I was in there I also fixed a smaller thing: the Compare button used to be disabled until you picked two ships, which meant clicking it did nothing at all and gave you no clue why. It is always clickable now, and it tells you to pick two ships if you have not.

Other things in this build

• A few item slots had levels II and III missing because of how the source file was spaced. All six slots now have all three levels.
• Two items in slot 2 and slot 3 had their names and stats swapped. The icons stay where they are, only the names and numbers moved.
• Improved gear now shows the improved icon and a small red "Improved" tag, so you can tell it apart from the standard version at a glance.
• Long equipment names used to spill out of the slot box on a phone. They wrap properly now.

A note on the version

I added a small build line in the footer of the site, so you can see which version you are looking at. This one says build v56. If the number is not there, you are on an older copy.

What I would do differently

I shipped a broken Compare button because I added to a file without checking that my new code ran in the same scope as the old code. It took me longer to find it than it should have, because I kept testing my own screen instead of reading the actual error.

The lesson is the same one from last post, just in a different place. Get the real error message first. Guessing is slower than looking.

Try it on wowsb ship tool. Save a build on one ship, open another, and tap the chip. If something still looks wrong, tell me which ship and which item.