BadgeGen Update v4.1.2

Question

Hi everyone,

BadgeGen has been updated to version 4.1.2, with it comes the official release of the new Country Badges.

What's new?

• BadgeGen Bronze and Platinum have been given a slight color tweak
• The non-awarded, but viewable badges in the Badge Table have a distinct background
• Country Badges with flags and names are available for all currently 250 distinct geographic regions on geocaching . com
• A country with caches found that has too less data to generate a percentage of regions found gets a "wooden" background.
• The following AddOns are currently available on all Country Badge levels from the ruby-level upwards:
  FTF - having at least found one FTF in the country
  Leap Day - having found at least one cache in the country on Feb 29
  81 Matrix - having completed the D/T matrix with caches found only in this country
  366 calendar - having a full found calendar with caches found only in this country
  All counties - having found a cache in all of the country's counties (green checkmark sign)

We plan for more AddOns in the future, the current goal was to finally release the Country Badges first.
Again, very special thanks to DrDaffy, who had the initial idea of the flag designs.

If you spot any issues with the new badges, please leave your comment here.

Thanks for being patient, stay healthy,

clappy

Comments

It's likely that we'll release a few minor bug fixes on the 15th.
* Addons will be available below Ruby for country badges (actually a feature).
* Some fixes in the count of regions/states for some countries.
* Tooltip-fixes.

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The current release doesn't count the  "Wooden" badges in the summary below the images. That's fixed in our development environment, but not yet released.

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Badgegen addon badgelet idea - replace the 366 addon with 1-99 for 1 to 99+ times through the calendar. Keep the calendar back image and red font to differentiate them from Diamond loop counts

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For countries?

Right now we are not doing loopable addons, since we are keeping the positions flexible.
The original idea of interactive badges and addons did not work as expected due to several browser limitations (displaying opacity, displaying fonts, etc.). So everything had to be "hard-coded". Every text, number, badge, and addon is a seperate graphics part. For the loops I did all 100 numbers to be sure they are positioned properly. The Addons are in the file six times to be able to have them at any position. A loopable AddOn would mean 600 more layers for the numbers. That would bloat the file, the country file is already very big due to the 250 countries.

But maybe in the future we find a way to simplify things.

Answer 1

Fabulous work on the country badges and certainly worthy of 5 stars!  I looked up a friend's profile to see all the country badges and I was speechless at how nice it looks.  She has the leap day, 81 matrix and FTF add ons.  

Everything appears to be working well.  What is even more amazing is it was all volunteer.  Thank you for all the wonderful effort to put all this together for the geocaching community.

Comments

Thanks! Happy to hear, and happy to see everything works (so far :D )

Answer 2

Perfect work! Also from me 5 of 5 stars. I absolutely like the new look compared to the old badge system. And that you added new badges, e.g. the long time missing GIGA- and LAB-badges.

The badge what I'm missing is the Night Owl, awarded for finding 4 or more night-time caches. This was part of the former GSAK BadgeGen-macro. It would be nice, if you would add it.

Regards
Achim2205

Comments

Thank you very much!

Regarding the Night Owl: That badge has never been part of PGC's BadgeGen implementation and it probably never will. There is no way to automatically categorize Night Caches via the API. Geocaching itself has no category for it. The only way would be a manually updated list (as it is in the GSAK), and that is not feasible.

Answer 3

For all you work you should get your own Platinum Badge.

Thanks for the volunteer work for our hobby.

It was already good - now it is platinum good. I will like the get more Badges and statistics to get more Badges.

Great - Thanks. Beib gesund

Comments

Thanks!
Cool thing is, I could design my own badge. :D Although I would go for the Diamond one of course. ;)
In fact, I did something like this for my Bonn MEGA name plate. I put my kiwi avatar inside of the diamond badge. :)

Answer 4

I agree with the others here, fabulous work, congrats to the team again! Some new challenges with the country-badge addons as well, nice! The wooden background is a good solution for the countries with not enough data on the regions.

Edit: Will the Country Badges come back on the Badge-banner that can be placed on our profile? They seem to be gone now.

Answer 5

Absolute great work. The badges are looking wonderful.

A assume the green check addon represents the finding of all counties in a state/country. Is this correct?

Comments

"All counties - having found a cache in all of the country's counties (green checkmark sign)" (from the question above)

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Correct. I am personally not a fan of that checkbox as an icon. If anyone has a better idea that works for such small icon, feel free to present it. :)

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I am also very open to a good and representative idea for the county icon.
But for the release, I opted to have something at least.

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Perhaps as an alternative to a tick, you could have a percentage of counties found, turning gold when it reaches 100%. This may be too complicated to implement though.

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I should add that I've no objection to the tick as it stands.

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It would really be too complicated to implement. With the font issue on the various browsers and OS over the internet, I would have to prepare 100 layers of text for each checkmark position resulting in 600 single layers. The Country Badge file is already quite big and bloated. :D

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Just to play devil's advocate: if you were doing percentages, it would always be there and you could fix it in the top-left position. Then you only need 101 extra layers...

Or even just 30 extra layers if you separated the digits (10x single digit numbers, 10x second digit, 9x first digit, 1x "100%").

Not that I'm pushing for it, just playing devil's advocate.

Answer 6

I have logged the 2020 Locationless Cache on  LeapDay, and now I have the 'LeapDay'-addon for the USA. I think this is because the 'location' of the Locationless is Washington? Maybe it is better to correct this if possible?

Comments

Generally Geocaches of type Locationless aren't included in the calculations for Country badges. We had missed that for the Addons.

It has been corrected in our Development environment, and the fix will hopefully go live later this week.

Thank you for pointing it out.

Answer 7

Thanks, clappy, for the excellent work! Looks very nice.

Just one remark, might be a feature, might be a bug:

In a situation where no "states" nor "counties" are defined for a country there used to be a kind of colourless country badge saying that there is not enough information to show the level. (Sorry, can’t remember the exact text.) At least the badge was there. Now, this has simply gone. (In my case this is Sark.) Is this intentional or an oversight?

Comments

Looked up your profile, it is indeed missing.
Those badges should have a wooden badge now.

I'll look into it, why Sark is missing.

EDIT: We found the bug. Sark has no unique ISO code (bc it "belongs" to Guernsey GG), so the parser left the Badge blank. It will be updated manually.
Sark is the only region in GC's list without an ISO code.

Answer 8

Wow, the national badges look great! Now the badge page is perfect, congratulations!

Unfortunately, with the last update, all the desing (both in tha national badges and the the classic ones) look not perfectly defined anymore. Some of the lines are blurry and "broken". Is it something that someone else is experiencing? it might be my old computer, but before the design was perfect...

Comments

could you please send me a screenshot of what is wrong?
It renders fine so far on my end.

You can use the message center/email function on geocaching (username: clappy)