Hi everyone! I wanted to make a post to give you some information on what is going on with the wardrobes on the site, as well as some information on why we've had to move in this kind of strange direction over the past few days.

Wardrobe V1 The V1 Wardrobe (which isn't even the first wardrobe on the site!) was written by almost at the start of human avatars becoming one of the more popular features on the site. It introduced layering, the ability to color your hair, and a bunch of other really cool stuff. It was also written with the intention of rewriting the entire site to match that codebase. Unfortunately got poached by google soon after that and we had to delay (and then cancel) those plans. Because of that, it's located inside of an iFrame (remember when it's layout didn't match the site layout at all?) and isn't really great.

The wardrobe uses XML for all of it's information, including all of the layouts on the pages. Unfortunately browsers (chrome and firefox specifically) have decided to go with more modern (ES6) methods of templating and are removing a lot of the functions that we use to "create" the V1 wardrobe, which means it will actually just stop working at some point soon!

Wardrobe V2 aka the beta wardrobe The beta wardrobe has been our "main" wardrobe for the past year or so. It started being worked on because of the crumbling and hard to edit V1, where it was almost impossible to add new features. That meant things like "skins" and "sharing" had to be put on top of the V2 wardrobe. The coding was all put on top of the libraries from V1, which meant that it was trying to do a lot of things the old way, and a new way, and it got bogged down in those decisions.

The past few days we've removed the V2 from the site because it didn't make sense to have three versions of the wardrobe on the site at a time. The V3 works as well as V2 (and is far less strenuous on our servers) and means that we can get people focusing on the thing that we're working on now.

Wardrobe V3 aka the wardrobe It was a really hard decision but it was something that had to be done. Work on V2 had to be scrapped, and work on a new version had to be started. That meant a lot of hard work in v2 had to be put behind, and work had to be put 100% into this new version. I chose React as the framework, which is actively maintained by Facebook, and used in all of their products. That means someone smarter than me is making the hard choices on how to actually display data in a reactive way (and I'm not afraid to admit it!).

The major benefits of this method are:

1. I'm rewriting our wardrobe API entirely from the ground up. This actually wasn't part of my plan, and has extended a lot of the timeline on the V3 by a lot, but it's resulted in a much faster wardrobe that will continue to be fast going forward. I went back to the whiteboard and looked at how we were getting item data (in v1/2 we were getting the same item data more than 10 times on a page load, crazy!) and can do things like save item data to the local storage in your browser, which has only really become a thing in the past year.
2. React is really, really cool and built just for interactive projects like this. You'll notice that switching between panes is incredibly fast and fluid, things like changing features on your avatar (the base, skin, gender, etc) is incredibly fluid and almost works like magic.
3. Writing the majority of the front end in javascript has resulted in a smaller overall codebase that is easier to add new features on top of.

Some downsides to releasing it now:

1. It's obviously not on the main Subeta layout. There will be some news on this soon, hopefully, and I'm very excited about it :)
2. Some things don't work completely. Sharing and saving avatars is currently broken. Removing items from the wardrobe is still only really viable in V1 of the wardrobe, and is a priority to get in the V3 wardrobe.

Going Forward We've got a lot of work to do here. The wardrobe is one of the most important parts of the site, and something that we are focusing all of our energy to getting right this time. The goal is stability (which is hard when you're pushing a feature out before it's time!) and speed, instead of just adding feature and feature on top of everything.

Removing the V2 wardrobe was a hard choice because it means people who've gotten used to it have to adjust to another thing, but maintaining two APIs just didn't work.

I want to stress that we have plans for the visuals on the wardrobe, and I think that everyone will be really excited. It's going to look great, and feel great, we just have to lock down some things before we can start showing that off.

Bug FAQ Q: My wardrobe has a black background! A: Go to the hair tab of the V3 wardrobe, and click on 'remove hair'. This will resolve your problem :)!

Q: How do I get rid of my base features? (eyes/nose/mouth) A: These are now on their own layer, and for the moment can be moved behind the base. We'll be added the 'eye/nose/mouth-less' options back soon, but until then just layer them to the back :)

Q: Some of my items aren't showing up! A: Did you add those items in the last 24 hours? Right now there is some heavy caching going on in the wardrobe to keep it speedy, but I'm making gains on getting it down to 5-10 minutes, or when you add new items to just reset your cache entirely. If it has been more than 24 hours, please ping me and let me know what item!

Now! Use this thread to give feedback, let me know what kind of bugs you're experiencing, and I'll try to respond or add your problems to the FAQ above. This is moving quickly, so hopefully you'll see improvements day to day!

Also make sure to check out the info tab in the v3 wardrobe!

Thanks for keeping us in the loop, Keith, it's really appreciated! Good luck!

I actually had a good experience with v3. My few suggestions would be helpful if the layers were in alpha order. With a huge wardrobe I would love to see 200 per page. I would LOVE to see drawers back because I find face and hair items to be plentiful and broke them into drawers.

Keep up the good work. We appreciate it.

Thanks for the updates, Keith! You know, I'm so grateful the admins of this site keep its users in the know. You could just lob stuff at us, out of nowhere, pretty much telling us to just "deal with it", but you don't. You make sure we know everything that happens, and why, and what it means for us. You care about your userbase, and it shows. (:

Thank you Keith! I've been seeing a lot of confusion over this lately, and am so glad you took the time to explain everything.

Whenever I search for a specific item I have to save, exit wardrobe and re-enter wardrobe, to clear the search.

Thanks for explaining this so well o-o Hang in there and I hope coding goes smoothly ^-^

I've added a lot of new items to my wardrobe today, but they don't show up in V3, will they show up eventually or will i need to put them on in V1?

None of my newly added CW's or items are showing up.

Also, can we get more than 20 items per page please? I wish there could be like 250, at least that was a relatively good amount per page.

I still can't get the V3 to work for me well at all - I especially hate that black background thin that shows up with every HA.

Thank you for all of the hard work to get V3 working decently well before closing down V2. Looking forward to the additional changes and features that will be coming soon! :)

Is the new wardrobe going to work in Safari or will it only be compatible with Chrome and Firefox? The V3 looks really awkward in Safari, there is a lot of scrolling down involved.

I bought the newer braids from the alegarten shop earlier this morning and none of them are showing up in my V3 wardrobe. I put them in hours ago.

Thanks for the explanation Keith! V1 has always been my favorite so I'm bummed it's going away but can't get attached to something we can't help anymore. I'm looking forward to seeing what v3 can do!

I like how removing items/moving items in to custom drawers works on V1, is something like that going to be incorporated into 3? Removing items will happen as you just said of course! But moving around items into different drawers is what I'm more curious about as I have a /lot/ of items and custom drawers is what helps me stay organized about what I have. :3

Beside being just a little slow at times like "search thru all items on subeta" and lacking drawers (even having relatively few wearables I have no idea what I have unless I can check drawers) it's pretty good. I was able to change and save new HA with no problems today.

It's always appreciated when you keep us in the loop! I am personally really looking forward to V3 and so far like it. =) Great job!

i just checked, and only about half of the things i added are showing up, the only things that are giving me trouble are alegarten items though

mhmhmmm... i totally understand that things have to change and go forward etc, but cosmetically, would it not have been possible to copy over the same format at the very least? the wardrobe really is a massive part of the site and people invest a looooooot of $$$$$$$, time and energy into it. with that in mind... would it not have been prudent to at least keep v2 in place until v3 was perfect? or to somehow tweak v2 (as little as possible so it'd still work at least?) so people had an option?

are we going to get the color options for v3 like we had in v2? I loved seeing the top 5 colors of the item, and then clicking it to find items of similar colors. That was really the only reason I used v2, and was super upset that v3 didn't have it yet.