NoLimits Central V2 Announcement
Hi all, today I'd like to share the next version of NoLimits Central.
It's been quite a while since any update of the sort was done to the site, and as time passed, it became a sort of static community website. Still, people get on and browse the Exchange, post on the Forum, and share their parks, so I thought it was more than deserving of a rebuild. In truth I never meant for the site to go so long without updates, and always had ideas on what to add, but for a myriad of different reasons, those changes never came to fruition.
So a few years ago I began work on a proper rebuild. It's the result of dozens of concepts, new features, data migrations, and endless amounts of polish, so I'm excited to share it!
The Exchange
Most of the work for the rebuild went into the Exchange, as it's the most visited area of NLC. While rebuilding it, there were a lot of different directions I explored, but I'm happy with where it landed.
Steam Workshop Integration
NLC now integrates with the Steam Workshop for NL2, and automatically imports Workshop parks daily. This includes their rating, downloads, and the uploader's username. Further, NLC also indexes the metadata of these parks, so they may be filtered by coaster style. Workshop parks still link back to the original workshop page, and must still be downloaded on Steam. Users can also securely link their Steam account to NLC, and doing so will make their Workshop creations appear under their NLC account.
To prevent duplicate parks, NLC will automatically detect parks that have already been uploaded to the Exchange, or synced from Steam, so users can use whichever upload method they prefer.
Searching
Search and filtering are now directly embedded in the Exchange, and are no longer separate pages. Search updates the results automatically, and supports filtering by multiple coaster styles at once. Tags are included and synced from Steam, but you may also add your own tags to NLC parks. Additionally, shortcuts like "/" to search and arrow keys to navigate are supported. I tried to make search and filtering as simple and clean as possible, so that users may search the entire catalog of NL2 with ease.
There are tons of other things that have changed with the Exchange. The rating system has been updated to be a 5 star system instead of the current 10 point one. In addition, posting a rating no longer has strict requirements, you can post a rating and not leave a review, leave a review without a rating, or both. Parks uploaded to NLC can now be updated after they've been uploaded, and even versioned, and you can see past versions of a park through the park page.
The Forum
The Forum has also been updated with new quality of life features. Like the Exchange, the Forum now embeds its search directly into the page, and supports the same keyboard shortcuts. You can now also search in topics via a search bar at the top of the page, allowing you to quickly filter a topic down. The editor is finally a true WYSIWYG editor, and styling improvements have been made to how comments are rendered.
Other Features
NLC now has a variety of themes to choose from! There are five light themes and five dark themes, as well as the original classic theme.
In addition to these updates, the site has essentially been modernized. The messaging UI has been overhauled to feel modern, there are more notification types for features like ratings, new park uploads, and park updates. Additionally, there is now 2FA support, email verification, improved spam filtering, easter eggs, and so on.
I didn't want to show any of this until the entire rebuild was nearly finished, but any feedback will shape when it goes live. Please share any feedback, questions, or comments you have in the topic below.
https://nolimitscentral.com/forum/topic/5228
I'll read and take into account every one of them.
Thanks,
~ ride