DragCave Lineage Builder

DragCave lineage builder is an open-source third-party utility for the online game dragcave.net. It enables users to preview dragon lineages, a core function of the game.

Written in TypeScript with a Vue.js 2 3 frontend and a Node.js backend.

Features

• Looks nearly the same as DC! This tool aims to replicate how a lineage is displayed on DC right down to the very last pixel. ;)
• "Fully granular" control over dragons - you can clone and paste entire ancestors, switch parent genders, remove/add ancestors and descendants.
• Automatic code and name generation!
• Code and name validation - All codes and names are validated to ensure they are legal on DC (but will not be checked for availability.) A game changer for you lyrical lineage builders out there.
• Share publicly viewable links to built lineages.
• Export and import lineages - Save a copy of your lineage and import it for later. Really useful for those massive lineages.
• Partial support for time-based sprites and spriter alts (where permission has been granted)
• A super cool breed selector when you click a dragon. Trust me, it's seriously super cool.
• Generation counter. Yep, it's there.
• Skin switcher - Switch between the different DragCave skins on the fly to preview how your lineage appears on different skins.
• Ghost breeds - Upload custom tiles and use them in your lineage previews.
• Checker generator - A handy tool for generating checker lineages faster than you can blink.
• Mass-selection tools - Change multiple dragons at once.

Running the project

The project is dockerised, so all you need is docker, docker-compose and a clone of the repository.

# clone repo
git clone https://github.com/edenchazard/dc-lineage-builder.git

cd dc-lineage-builder

# set up development settings
cp .env.example .env

# edit with your favourite text editor
# and change the settings. you will need to
# insert your DragCave API key.
nano .env

Development

From the project root directory, use the command:

docker compose -f docker-compose.dev.yml up app -d
docker compose exec app sh -c "npm run dev"

You can access the project at http://localhost:5173/dc/lineage-builder/.

Testing

To run the tests, you should be in the testapp container.

docker compose -f docker-compose.dev.yml up testapp -d
docker compose exec testapp sh -c "npm run test:unit"

Tests are run via Vitest, and will automatically re-run whenever a file is changed.

Production

1. Change MOUNT_PATH in docker-compose.yml to the deployment url. e.g. If you want it to be available at example.org/lineage-builder, you'd use "/lineage-builder".
2. From the project root directory, use the command:

docker compose up -d

Migrations

Lineage Builder doesn't use an ORM as it wouldn't be particularly useful.

As tsx isn't used in production, the way to invoke database commands differs slightly. In dev, you'll need to use:

tsx ./app/backend/commands/databaseFresh.ts # set up table
tsx ./app/backend/commands/databaseSeed.ts # seed data

In production:

node ./backend/commands/databaseFresh.js # set up table
node ./backend/commands/databaseSeed.js # seed data

Breed processing

These utilities are for automating our breed list, css and json files, as well as putting them in the correct locations. Under the hood, puppeteer is used for image downloading.

Images are cached to avoid refetching them unnecessarily.

The file "breed-ignore" is to be used for ignoring particular images. Codes in this list will not be handled by the process script and must be handled manually (mainly through the download script). This is mostly useful for time-based sprites, where the lineage portrait can change based on the time of day.

process breeds

This script is to be run whenever breed data has been changed.

docker compose -f docker-compose.dev.yml run --rm breeds npm run process

download

This script will fetch the lineage portraits at the time of running it. If these images are already in the cache, they will be replaced. Specify multiple codes as a list:

docker compose -f docker-compose.dev.yml run --rm breeds npm run download code1 code2 code3