Update BadgeGen_v4.0.f [closed]

Question

Hi everyone!

We have just updated BadgeGen to version 4.0.f. You can see the changes by reloading your Stat Page (Shift-F5), or wait for a few days.

What's new?

• We have updated the graphics, so you will see changes, though not so heavy as last time.
• We have removed the APE badge and converted it to an AddOn to "The Geocacher" badge
• We have also added AddOns for HQ, Locationless, Block Party, HQ Celebration, and Community Celebration to "The Geocacher" badge.
  As these AddOns are being rewarded for finding special cache types, they will be available for every badge level, and not only for the gem levels, which is the general threshold for AddOns to be displayed.

What's next?

• We will update the wiki pages in the next few days
• The Jasmer icon needs some fresh ideas. If you have one, feel free to contact me/us.
• We will clean up code and files, to remove old script, stuff we disregarded (this you will not notice)
• We will work on the country badges, but it may take a couple of weeks. There are roughly ~250 countries to work on

As always:
If you spot mistakes, let us know. If you critizise stuff you don't like, tell us what we can improve.

Have a nice Leap Day everyone!

PS: I also want to use this opportunity to thank DrDaffy for many, many creative ideas behind the updated artwork.

Comments

I appreciate your dedication.

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WOW!

Yes, I am yelling it because I'm that excited about the fabulous updates and improvements from the previous version.  I love the change in the artwork for the Adventurous and All Around badges.  I would hope that everyone will agree.  

I had a feeling that you would have to adjust the geocaching logo to the currently accepted Groundspeak trademark.  You also dropped the nano container size from the Micro Cacher badge.

Also, the shading additions on the High Altitude badge is really a good idea.  The shading in the regular size container is nice along with the silver badge background.  I would adopt this for gold and bronze as well.  Perhaps the platinum would work if there was a different shading scheme to keep it distinctive over the silver.  Thank you for dropping the A.P.E. badge and making it an add-on.

Very nice improvements and thank you for the work and effort.

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Can I draw your attention to this thread: https://project-gc.com/qa/?qa=23072/badge-the-around-cacher-levels-increase-with-any-consistency

Does this need fixing or can you explain why?

Update:  The admin stated in the actual thread the leveling has been updated.

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Jasmer idea: color the regular and small size containers green to make them more consistent with the other badges.  You might add 12 small stars around the border to indicate the months.  To be honest, I like the basic design the way it is right now depicting a journey to completion.

I've posted an answer that includes these suggestions and added a couple more ideas.

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@TigreToot: Thanks!

I might try out the shading for badge bases instead of gradients.
We put the 360 leveling on the list.
I did not color the Jasmer at the moment, because I feel it needs a more general reworking. :)

PS: I read you're coming to the MEGA in Bonn? I'll also be there, helping at the entrance for disabled, from 12-15 hrs. :)

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I put the Jasmer ideas in an Answer for better clarity and provided 3 new ideas. Thank  you for adding the 360 leveling to the list and considering the shading.

Also, no I won't be able to make it to the Bonn Mega.  It was a hypothetical scenario.  No worries.

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Thanks for your commitment to do the BadgeGen.
Hope to see you at the Mega GC7TKKG Project Geocaching meets Beethoven

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This is great! However, I’m having a bit of a bug. For some reason the BadgeGen tab says I have 160 attributes which is weird because 1) I only have 90, according to the Finds tab, and 2) Last time I checked there aren’t 160 attributes in the game. Has this happened to anyone else? Are the devs aware of this bug? Any info would be appreciated. Thanks!

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Editing my comment: I didn't realize you had placed it as an Answer so disregard.

You might consider posting your attribute bug as a question so it will be seen.  I did this with another issue.  The software folks may find it here but it could also get buried and not seen.

Answer 1

Hi guys. These are getting better with every iteration - great work!

But I seem to have lost my Geotour Add-On for the Attibute Cacher badge?

Comments

I see your GeoTour AddOn, but it is missing on my badge. :D
We are aware, might take a few times rendering.

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GeoTour and other Attribute AddOns, as well as FTF AddOn to Traveling cacher should be back now. At least I see them on my badges.

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Thanks Clappy. I can confirm that I have my Geotour add-on back again :)

Answer 2

Ooooh, the new subtle shading/shadows are really nice! I like the new "lid colored" Traditional & Multi badges. New D/T icon is pretty cool. Busy cacher looks great! You can tell he's holding a GPSr now! The silver level badges look like they have a nice cool gradient on them, I assume bronze, gold, & platinum will get one as well? Or is it there and it's just more subtle? I think that'll help to differentiate Silver and Platinum as they are kind of close in shading. Looks like Add Ons have some more detail now as well? Only one I officially have is GeoTour on my Attribute Cacher badge but it looks like a textured suitcase now which is cool, gives more of an incentive to want the add-ons. All in all very nicely done. I'll be sure to keep an eye on the chances to provide you guys feedback so we can together make the system the best it can be.

Comments

Thanks! :)
The gradients are on all of them (and actually did not change), the border of the medal has been darkened a bit in all cases to give more contrast.
Silver and Platinum are very hard to distinguish, they even looks pretty similar in real life (there's the chemist in me speaking again... :D )
But Platinum is the lighter one, whereas Silver has to be a bit more gray.

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"The new D/T icon" is the 5/5 (Adventurous) icon, somewhat confusingly. The D/T (Matrix) icon is still the same.

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Ah yeah that's what I meant. I was gonna mention in reference to the old D 5 5 T icon but omitted it.

Answer 3

Looks very good.  For me, the Ape, 366 and Community Event addons are difficult to make out. The FTF addon color is not very bright.

Comments

Thanks!

APE AddOn has actually a bug, I'm working on it, it should only be the Ape text.
Edit: The APE AddOn Icon has been fixed.

FTF color can have more contrast, I recognise this, too.
The others should be pretty straightforward, using HQ's original designs.
366 has not changed from the previous versions.
But I note the difficulty in reading.

Answer 4

Jasmer badge change ideas: The basic design is a good starting point: I like the way it looks with journey line or path.

1. Color the regular and small size containers green to make them more consistent with the other badges.  

2. Using very light grey/gray on the journey line starting at the May 2000, then, darken each hyphenated mark until reaching the black arrow.  Also you could change the font size of the hyphens from small to larger as you move forward in time.

3. Add an icon with Jan - Dec similar to the Daily Cacher replacing the small cache container icon.

4. Perhaps there is a way to add a small person icon walking along the journey line.

Comments

Clappy, may I suggest opening a new thread with Jasmer badge change requests and moving this to that thread?  This is going to get buried and completely overlooked.

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https://project-gc.com/qa/?qa=23253

There it is. :)

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Thank you, now I just need my Answer moved to the new thread.

Answer 5

Lots of small changes that make a very good impression! The total impression is a surprisingly large improvent to something that I already liked. Well done!

A couple of points I think could still be improved:

- The FTF addon now looks blurry. I see that's it's a different color but I'm not sure it's a good idea to have multi-color addons. Or if we should, they need to be more distinct.

- The new 5/5 badge design looks confusingly like a matrix badge design. The 81 design is still good for the matrix badge and obvious once you see it, but looking at just the 5/5 badge it's confusing.

- Most of the badge designs use the badge space well, but for a couple of them the design looks like the icon should be scaled up a little within the badge border: micro (well, duh, they're supposed to be small but the graphic itself doesn't have to be), trackables, diverse, webcam and (maybe) favorites.

- I see a smaller font in the loop addon again. The larger was better. Or is this my browser playing tricks on me?

Comments

I like the 5/5 badge design once I understood what the 5 stars mean.  It is a nice idea and it does fix the problem of D55T.  I think it will just be a matter of getting used to it.

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I agree - ditch the colours for the addons, or at least use a strong colour without the lettering outline.

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I will look into the AddOn colors again. I have to use color on HQ and HQ celebration, otherwise they are not distinguishable (by design). But I will see, what I can do.
Having only two AddOns with color looks also strange.

@pinkunicorn:
The font is driving us crazy. Loop font should be bigger, but it is not somehow. Ribbon also changed again, although we used the values we corrected after the last update. Every browser displays it differently, mobile currently renders best (at least on my Android :D)
We will find a solution.

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I realized that after seeing the rest of the new cache type addons. I'll adjust my opinion to being that the FTF font needs a clearer color.

Maybe the somewhat fiddly Locationless icon could be clearer with color as well? Or just move the globe downwards so that only half of it is visible, more like the old HQ icon for it (I'm not sure how the new one looks (if there even is one); I haven't seen it yet).

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the new Locationless icon is the one I used, it is light brown in color: https://www.gc-reviewer.de/wp-content/uploads/locationless.png

I will see, what I can do to make it more visible.

Answer 6

• Two weeks ago, before heading to Sydney: "Sweet! I'm just a few hundred favourite points from a bronze badge!"
• After flying back from Sydney: "Yes! I got the Favourite bronze badge!"
• This morning: "23497 favourite points to get for bronze... :("

If I found all my unfound caches in New Zealand, I still don't think it'll be enough.

Comments

I definitely agree with this query.
I've been caching for not quite 3 years and have over 2300 finds to my name but I'm still only 2/3rds of the way towards getting even a Bronze!

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I'm in the same boat where I'm only 2/3 of the way to bronze but I do have a huge advantage living in Texas.  I've been working on my Jasmer grid and, since I need several of the 2000 and 2001 caches, chances are most will have high favorite points moving me much closer to that bronze badge.  There is a 20th anniversary event in May near the cache called Mingo that is about 450 miles from me.  I intend to go to that and get my May 2000 date filled in.

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I've just run a search for the 1000 most favourited caches in New Zealand. The total number of points is 43571, over 6000 short of the lowest tier.

GC46 currently has 399 points. As a comparison, Europe's First has almost 10 times that amount.

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It's a badge that obviously hard to balance. In Germany/Hamburg Bronze would require ~30 logs of non-archived hides.

But I promise that we will look into the lower end of it again.

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Please do look into the lower end again, as in the time that has elapsed since my previous comment (8 hours) I see that the levels have been tweaked again and have (unbelievably!) been made even harder! I was 2/3rds towards Bronze and now I'm only 1/3rd the way to Bronze. At this rate it would have been easier for me to attain an APE badge than this one!

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@TwigNZ The Favorite Cacher has only been changed once since it was added. This is the change @bruzie is talking about.

-  'Sa' => 250000,
-  'R' => 175000,
-  'P' => 125000,
-  'G' => 80000,
-  'S' => 50000,
-  'B' => 25000,
+  'Sa' => 275000,
+  'R' => 220000,
+  'P' => 150000,
+  'G' => 100000,
+  'S' => 75000,
+  'B' => 50000,

It is already promised that we will look at the lower end again. Maybe we will revert into how it was 24 hours ago.

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To be honest, this badge could really become a rallying point for criticism.  Personally, I am not interested in working on it and, if I finally managed to get the bronze, so be it.

If you don't live in the US or certain places in Europe your chances to level up are extremely low.  Also, favorite points are very subjective, in my humble opinion, depending on quality hides and premium members.  I'm not exactly sure why it was even implemented in the first place.  Don't get me wrong, I am not criticizing just trying to understand.

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It's a matter of taste of course. This is something I have personally enjoyed for years (Project-GC has a similar top list).

Within 1 hour drive from my home there exists ~51,000 FP. Yet I have logged 458,791 FP.

The purpose of the badge (and the equivalent top list) is to give the option to focus on the better Geocaches instead of huge quantities, or D/ts, or old and so on. It's a way to create something for everyone.

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OK, thank you.  Yes, I am an advocate of quality vs. quantity.  Hopefully you can find an equitable solution.  Good luck.

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Magma1447: Yes, it's a hard ask to get the balance right for cachers that are so geographically diverse. I guess I am in awe of your location that you have such a huge amount of great caches (assuming that's why they have so many FP's) so close to you. I live in a great place, but will never have local access to caches with anything like that many FP's.
It is what it is :)

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As another data point: within 100km radius of my home (which would include all caches within 1 hour drive, but several which would take longer than 1 hour), there are 5775 caches (so I'm not in a cache-free area). Of these, 38 have 50 or more favourite points (five of those are archived, so 33 available). Only five have 100 or more.

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@sumbloke My query actually was 100 km radius as well. And Sweden. Filtered out Denmark since it takes some time and money with the bridge.

I summarized the FP on all geocaches. Didnt check the amount, but I would guess 7-8000.

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I have just discovered that the levels have been adjusted again, with the entry level (Bronze) now being 10,000 and the Diamond level now being 500,000.
I personally think this is a positive move, making this Badge more accessible to start and more challenging to get to Diamond.
Thank you PGC

Answer 7

Nice to see another update! The new addons sound really cool, but I don't see any on my profile for the moment (I should have Ape and HQ). On my profile, I see an empty APE-badge now... Also, the GeoTour-attribute disappeared on my Attribute Badge (although it says I have it when I hover over the badge - this is not the case for the APE and HQ-addon). Maybe just a matter of time before these are al shown the right way? (for the Travelling Cacher I also have the Leap Day addon, although I have found caches in just 1 country on Leap Day - that will change this weekend though, I will be at the Mega in Bonn :-))

I like the colours on the addons, but the FTF-addon could be a bit brighter imo.

I'm not sure about the new 5/5-badge, I think in the previous one it was more obvious what it meant (although the new one looks better), but I'm sure I will get used to it :-)

The GeoTour-addon looks more like the 'Tourist Friendly'-attribute than the GeoTour-attribute, although it is obvious what it means.

Another step forward, great work again, thanks a lot!

Comments

Regarding missing addons - Those should be fixed the next time your Profile stats renders. We had some minor bugs at first when updating.
Regarding Ape - We have moved that into being an Addon on The Geocacher, it will also show the next time Profile stats renders (the "data from" updates).

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They are shown now indeed, and they look great, very happy with this update! Can't wait to earn the Locationless addon in 2 days:-)! I lost my Regular gemstone with the latest changes, another challenge for the coming weeks :-)!

Answer 8

This is great! However, I’m having a bit of a bug. For some reason the BadgeGen tab says I have 160 attributes which is weird because 1) I only have 90, according to the Finds tab, and 2) Last time I checked there aren’t 160 attributes in the game. Has this happened to anyone else? Are the devs aware of this bug? Any info would be appreciated. Thanks!

Comments

Once you have collected all attributes, you can loop the badge. There are 103 distinct attributes needed for Diamond (see https://project-gc.com/w/The_Attribute_Cacher), you loop the first time at "206", that is having logged every attribute at least twice.

Edit: I checked your Profile Stats, there seems to be something off, indeed.

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I'm seeing 88 as the number on your Attributes badge. GeoTour and Needs Maintenance are not counted for this badge (neither are Lost and Found or Partnership), so this matches. I think your stats have refreshed since you saw the bug.

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The attributes on the "Finds" tab of my profile are displaying correctly. The issue is in the "BadgeGen" tab. In "Badge Information," it shows me as having 160 attributes when I only have 88, like you said. I understand the looping mechanic now (see clappy's response), though this does not apply to my situation as I have not collected 103 attributes yet. According to his edit, there does indeed seem to be an issue.

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Can you please compare https://project-gc.com/Profile/ProfileStats to https://project-gc.com/ProfileStats/Californium251 ? The latter is the one I looked at and on the BadgeGen tab it says 88 both as the hover text on the badge and in the table. Also, could you please tell us when the date generated is for the first URL?

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They both say 160 for me. Statistics last generated this morning: 3/2/20. I have a screenshot of the table where it says 160 though it doesn't look like I can attach it to this comment.

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I have informed magma4471 of the issue yesterday, he is aware of it and it should be fixed in the next couple of days.

When I look at your profile (link above) I see 53 positive and 37 negative attributes, so you should have a badge count of 88 (90 minus NM, GeoTour). The Badge hover/table shows 160 for me, too.

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I fixed the bug late yesterday.

FYI to everyone - When Profile stats is rendered, the HTML is (data-)cached. But there can exist a few different versions. For example, the person who owns the name always has his own version, while others are likely to have another version. This is because some data depend a bit too much on home location for example.

I don't recall if there is anything else affecting. But a paying membership at Project-GC or Geocaching.com could potentially also cause new versions. This is why different users might see different data for a profile. Generally they will be the same, but since the different versions aren't rendered the same time, newly logged finds might affect, and also code changes of course.

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Thanks so much for fixing it! I really appreciate your dedication and work you put in to this site.

Answer 9

For me design very nice, great job, thanks. The only thing I would change is the number of caches for each level badges (example: diamonds for 180 virtual caches or 12 CITO events are few).

Comments

This is just an opinion but I think they have finalized the levels and based it on all available data.  To be honest, I hope there are no more changes to award levels.

Answer 10

I'm very sad about canceling the 'Project APE' badge :-( It was the last big challenge for me :-( :-( Now I have all the badges without doing anything :-( :-( :-(

Comments

This is a game - nothing of which to be 'very sad'.  Surely you exaggerated.

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@JPAgeo You could start working on the Addons then. A suggestion is to start with the Ape-Addon. :)

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Last missing badge versus one more Addon, it is a big difference.
I have been trying to earn all the badges for several years, and I was determined to travel to the US for that...

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I am also very disappointed in losing the APE badge..  Seems like a slap in the face for those who have been caching from the start and earned it to have it taken away because someone can't get it any more.

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@rufnredy We don't see it as anyone has lost it, we have moved it from one place to another. That's at least our point of view.

Sure, those who had two or more now have the same reward as those with only one. But it's seriously hard to defend having a badge for a cache type with two available caches.

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Everyone has made sacrifices in this update but I think the gains have far out stripped the losses.  This is purely hypothetical since I am not privy to the decision making process, but I should think that HQ would be a major factor in what is acceptable.  It is possible they do not want the A.P.E. badge.

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For us it's "The Multi Cacher"-Badge. It was the only one we actively worked on and now we have Diamond without doing anything.

That, combined with other oddities and ugly concept-graphics, was the reason I didn't like the first v4 version and hoped for improvements.

And now look how much they improved BadeGen in general in the current version v4.0.f. In general the new version is really great and so it should be no problem to get over such a minor thing as a badge is an addon now.

As magma1447 already stated: You could start working on the new addons.

Three days ago there were the chance to earn 34 Leap-Day-addons - we took the chance and tried to get as many of them as we could.

So, no reason to whine, something is gone but much more had come.

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@Cachologen: Thank you for this nice statement. Especially that you now like  the new design (or at least don't dislike it as much). :)

"without doing anything" is not correct. You have achieved the Diamond badge based on your finds. And now you may aim for looping them :)

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Maybe my memory tricks me, but I remember that the graphics were flat in the first place. As this is no problem in general, in this case the gems looked like something. With the shading it's clear what they depict on first sight - at least for my eyes.

Now, as I accept or like the new graphics, I can get used to them and forget the old ones so maybe they will look strange.

"You have achieved the Diamond badge based on your finds. And now you may aim for looping them :)" ... yes you're right in some way ... but looping isn't the same as reaching a new badge-level and ... feelings aren't logical ;-)