This is a long blog and it seemed fitting to have a clip of the new clip features for those who prefer not to read my walls of text.

I did a tiny stream showcasing the jump to clip vod history functionality which can be found here.

As some of you may have noticed by now there are now clip listings for servers and streamers. Along with a new item in the ever growing menu on the top left.

Really observant people may have noticed that the page has been changing a bit here and there which is why I haven't posted about it so far. I was unhappy with a few things but I feel it is now more or less in a good enough place to showcase it. Most of the ui / web frontend is in a fairly good place as is clip discovery.

So now we have clips associated with servers, lists of the clips which are sortable with range options and they link to the servers history page at the time the clip is from. The history page you are linked to is locked to the clip time, hovering will show that moment from the vod you are looking at and opening any of the vods will open them at that time unless you disable show only relevant or use shift to free roam.

There have been many changes since the feature was first launched a month ago so if you saw a bug or something that you didn't like consider checking out the features again, hopefully you won't run into any further problems.

Initially the clip discovery code just polled grand theft auto by day / week / month every half an hour but this didn't collect enough clips. I then remembered that you could filter based on clip language, so I added that and it helped discovery rates a bit. I would occasionally find a clip on reddit however that my app hadn't grabbed so the app will also checks every streamers clips that have played on a tracked GTA RP server in the last 24 hours and it does this every hour. The GTA clip polling checks the top 1000 clips (twitches limit) by day / week / month and flipping by trending or not every 10 minutes.

This coincided with a feature I have been wanting to implement to allow users to bookmark moments that they could go back to. Say if you are watching something interesting but then have to stop you could press a button and add it to your bookmarks. Whenever you next wanted to go back to it it would be saved in a list locally and you could bring it up and go to the history page at that moment. The bookmarking feature isn't here yet but one day maybe.

To facilitate the new use of the clips the history page has been updated with a bit more polish and some new features. There now includes a way to filter to a specific time and only list streamers that were online then. The controls are a bit clunky so I won't list the exact details. They won't be relevant to most peoples uses and if you click about you can figure it out. Once I refine them and add some more features I will document them more thorougly. I also kind of want a way to be able to highlight a range but not figured out a way to do it elegantly given the limitations of the timeline graph API i use.

The site was born from me wanting to see RP events from multiple POVs and living in the EU that has often meant watching vods. I have often been watching a VOD or even a clip and wanted to see another streamers perspective. I would go to the other streamers twitch pages if I knew who they were and then find the vod if there was one and try and figure out then to find the event in it.

That frustration and monotony is why I always wished I had this feature and now we do. I hope some of you enjoy it as much as I will. I started a month or so ago messing around with a jump to clip feature for the history page. I ran into a couple of minor issues that I resolved but in doing so it meant the most efficient way to handle it was to batch lookup clips from twitch to seed the database. Because of this I realised well I have a fairly up to date database of clips from specific servers, may as well have a page to view them too.

Been noticing a couple of bugs kicking about, been trying to fix them when I find them but I don't use the site as much as you might think. None of the ones I have found lately have been reported so if you spot anything please use the feedback form to let me know. This can be found under the help menu and there is no need to register or provide an email, unless you want to hear back from me that is. Someone did let me know that the 'not on x server' updating was broken and I fixed that a couple of weeks ago, but thanks to whoever it was that got in touch. Oh and the way the streamer activity graphs were generated broke when viewing all data from november to now so I have disabled the all data range until I optimise that code.

I had someone contact me about wanting to help out with character and streamer data. This is something I have been wanting to do for awhile as currently every character is entered by me via the command line backing application. A web based feature so other people could help out is probably the best way to handle it. I will post a blog if / when I ever make the feature to find people who would be interested in helping that way. It would also be a step towards also providing non english GTA RP on the site too which is something I am interested in but speaking only english it would be hard for me to do so by myself.

Also I know I said I would be posting blogs about the settings menu and such a while ago, truthfully I have several times started blogs to post but I just never end up finishing them or feel like they aren't worth publishing. Will try to use the blog feature more perhaps in the future.

I have had some requests to track some other servers and I have said in the past I would make a poll to see what peoples interest is. Multiple choices are allowed, so click here to vote for any you would like to see added in future. I would prefer servers with pretty active streamer bases but that isn't the only criteria I will consider when making the final call.

Hope you are all enjoying the new no pixel update as much as I am. Been enjoying some fam recently too. Right now it feels like there is a lot of good content for GTA RP out there. Feels kinda fresh again and this site only exists because of the servers, their staff and their players. So thanks to them and show them your support.

And yeah, now you know why I called myself the Scottish Rambler.

Enjoy! Report bugs, let me know about anything you would like added or just say hi/thanks via the feedback form.