User talk:Psymia

Welcome

Hi, welcome to Descent-Community Wiki 1.2! Thanks for your edit to the Forgotten Souls page.

Please leave a message on my talk page if I can help with anything! Ursulaboi (talk) 08:31, April 16, 2015 (UTC)

Hey there. I've noticed you did a great job with edits. Great job! I've done my very first edit on Lyssa, because her bio was missing entirely. Would you mind taking a look to see if everything is fine?

InfinityBlack14 (talk) 03:27, May 14, 2016 (UTC)

Kyle....Err ... InfinityBlack14

InfinityBlack14 (talk) 03:27, May 14, 2016 (UTC)

Heya.
Thanks for adding content to this wiki :)

May i ask where you got Lyssa's bio from? Is this descriptive text in the expansion or in the conversion kit?

Flavour text is usually done in cursive, but i'm not sure if this counts as descriptive text or as flavour text.

Thanks.

Psymia (talk) 10:33, May 14, 2016 (UTC)

Hey there!

I noticed that the OL was missing a lot of categories. I own almost all of descent, but lack the knowledge to add

it in here. :/ I grabbed Lyssa's bio from the H+M Bio sheet in my collection. This, unfortunately is the worst way to contact me. I will send you a msg via bgg as it's a frequent page i go to most and saw your original post regarding the wiki.

InfinityBlack14 (talk) 14:46, June 27, 2016 (UTC)

Hey Psymia. I've had confirmation about the watchman class from my resources, but nothing online. It was released early at gencon, but has a release date of sept. 1st.

InfinityBlack14 (talk) 14:41, August 23, 2016 (UTC)

Infobox card

Nice work on Template:Infobox_card. Just scanned through the source, and it looks like you've put a lot of work into it. I have much to learn about wikimedia before I will have reached that level of mastery :)

Frenzied coder (talk) 17:22, May 21, 2016 (UTC)

Thank you :)

I started writing templates on the final fantasy 11 wiki (e.g. http://ffxi.gamerescape.com/wiki/Template:TrialPathElementalMagic ). It took me a hell of time to write these.

The problems are less with mediawiki and more getting the css right.

If you want to write your own templates it helps a lot to have a developement wiki (mine is at https://devwiki.skylabs.ch/index.php?title=InfoBox ) and bring the template into shape before deploying it live.

Psymia (talk) 19:05, May 21, 2016 (UTC)

I'm looking at how to change the Infobox card template, and I'm getting stuck on escaping | symbols. For instance, I don't know how to put {| into a template parameter. Reading this seemed to imply that the easiest way to get complex conditional nested template parameters to work is to simply avoid using wikitable syntax and just use html markup for tables. That would certainly avoid having to escape wiki chars.

What do you think about the idea of converting the table syntax in Infobox card to using html syntax? It would be tricky, a lot of work, and would need pretty careful testing, but assuming all that happened, how would you feel about having the table be in html instead of wiki markup?

Frenzied coder (talk) 23:40, June 11, 2016 (UTC)

Photo Quality

I just added some photos to Descent: Journeys in the Dark (Second Edition) for the shop items. The image quality kinda sucks compared to everything else on this wiki. Should I do more of these photos, or not bother? I feel a little self conscious for bringing down standard of image quality on this wiki, but I'm torn, because I am uploading content that's missing. (I don't have a scanner, just a camera on my phone.)

Frenzied coder (talk) 18:41, May 21, 2016 (UTC)

Hmmm. I don't think the photos are needed. The scans of the cards were there before. User:Ursulaboi removed them because of copyright.

Since then I've gotten permission by FFG to use them. Ursulaboi has given me the rights to undelete these files.

However i haven't really started undeleted them. Only tried it on Chainmail so far.

The thing is that i have to check all the files if they are below 72dpi.

Also the files are pretty big so i'm converting them to a different color space and optimise them a bit more for web usage.

In fact i will probably replace all the .jpg files in the long run with .png files. jpg doesn't support transparency, and it looks a bit shitty if you have white corners on the card scan. (compare Otherwordly with Upper Hand to see the difference).

I will restore the files when I'm converting the various pages to the infobox card template.

I have finished converting all the skills and am currently converting the relics.

After that i will probably continue with the items, and then the overlord cards.

If you'd like to help converting pages that would be welcome :)

Psymia (talk) 19:16, May 21, 2016 (UTC)

Sounds like you know what you're doing. Let me propose an idea to you: A table of data for all the shop cards that shows their price/slot/type/dice/everything in one place. This could be done with a literal table, or the lazier way to do it would be to combine all the card images into one big image that's roughly organized somehow. That was one of the goals of my photo of the entire shop, was to give me an idea of the average price of cards, the number of weapon upgrades available for each class, the max dice on a weapon, how many copies of each card were there, etc. Having a separate page for each card is great and fine, but there is also value to combining and condensing the information too.

So do you have a better idea than my photos? (I don't particularly like my photos; I won't be offended if there's a better idea.) For example, one obvious compromise is to combine a bunch of scan images together. Might be kinda lame, but it's probably better than status quo.

You know what would be really awesome, and I'm pretty sure this isn't possible, but it would be cool to automatically generate a table out of the stuff in the infoboxes. Last time I looked into doing that, it was way out of scope for what a wiki was designed to do.

I'd love to help out any way I can. I don't know how to undelete something. It looks like maybe only admins can do that. How else can I help?

Frenzied coder (talk) 19:49, May 21, 2016 (UTC)

You can do this with https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki --> https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Inline_queries I'm not sure what wikias stance is regarding installing this extension. Would have to ask.

Yeah the alternative would be to manually create a sortable table containing all the info. (Example: http://ffxi.gamerescape.com/wiki/Sword , scroll down to the "Swords by Level" table).

I'm not really fond if this idea since it creates multiple places with the same info. On the other hand, the input data is pretty stable and won't change ever.

Well if you just convert the pages and set the |image = to the filename which was there before i can add the files afterwards.

See Crossbow for an example.

Psymia (talk) 20:05, May 21, 2016 (UTC)

Alright, I updated Sling to use the infobox template and i removed all the manually listed categories. It looks like there's no way to specify a weapon as range vs melee. Is that a missing feature from the card infobox?

Frenzied coder (talk) 20:27, May 21, 2016 (UTC)

There is. Simply specify "|range= Melee" or "|range= Ranged". If you use an invalid range it will tell you :)

To see how to use the template for different kinds of cards take a look at the documentation of the template: Template:Infobox_card. Scroll down to "Usage for shop gear"

Psymia (talk) 20:30, May 21, 2016 (UTC)

Cool! I also added "Ranged" to Crossbow :)

Frenzied coder (talk) 20:34, May 21, 2016 (UTC)

Is there a reason "Act I - " is in the image names? Isn't "Chainmail.png" unambiguous enough? If so, we can make all the shop items have |image = {{PAGENAME}}.png.

Frenzied coder (talk) 21:38, May 21, 2016 (UTC)

No idea. I guess the user who created all the files just had his naming schema and used it.

I'd like to keep this name because there are other places on the wiki which still reference on these old names. We'd have to hunt them down and fix all manually.

If the file has the same name as the page, the template figures this out itself and will use the file directly. In such a case you can leave the |image argument out. An example of this can be seen here: Mending Talisman

Psymia (talk) 21:43, May 21, 2016 (UTC)

Redirect to Span

You probably noticed the redirect pages I made for the quests in the Heirs of Blood campaign, such as Siege of Skytower. The redirect page scrolls to a bold title in the middle of a table. This is a strategy I use extensively in the Smash Up Wiki, for example the link: Bear Hug. But it's pretty unconventional, and it seems like the strategy on this wiki would be to make an actual page per quest. (I'm thinking about pages here such as Ravage, which in my opinion are too small to justify their existence.)

Do you have an opinion on how this should be done?

Frenzied coder (talk) 14:21, June 8, 2016 (UTC)

I don't really have an opinion regarding this.

I think in the case of ravage and other abilities it makes sense to have it's own page. We can have a Q&A section for each.

My next project after finishing all the cards (a long way off), is to make pages for the different quests.

I planned to have a page for each quest to be able to add the Q&A / Errata secion.

An example is the quest "Civil War" which is missing instructions in the quest booklet, and this information can be found in the errata: Source

I don't know how i would solve this with the approach of having redirects.

What might work is partial page transclusion.

Have a page for each quest and then transclude the content of this quest-page (without the q&a/errata) to the page showing the overview of the campaign.

Basically keep the overview page you already have, but it's automatically generated from multiple smaller pages.

But i'm still far from working on something like this, so feel free to do what you think is best :)

Psymia (talk) 14:53, June 8, 2016 (UTC)

Selective template transclusion is fascinating; it seems like it should be able to solve a lot of information duplication problems on wikis. So far I'm stuck on one issue: Is there a way for a template to produce the text <onlyinclude>. Assuming there is, we could augment Template:Infobox card to produce these kinds of hooks for different sections, or possibly have a ready-to-go formatted synopsis for use in other pages. So instead of Knight pasting the Oath of Honor text and cost, the Knight page's list of skill cards could be as simple as listing each skill in the form {{:Oath of Honor}}.

You mentioned you had a sandbox wiki with a .ch address. Is it possible for me to use that, or is it easy to get my own? I think I agree that experimenting with this wiki live is a bad idea.

EDIT: Looks like http://communitytest.wikia.com/ might be where I could try stuff out. Also, looks like the LST wiki extension does what I'm talking about a lot more elegantly than using <onlyinclude> hacks, but it looks like it's not enabled anywhere.

EDIT: Looks like i'm talking about metatemplating, which sucks. You have to use subst: to get it to work, which is a pretty stupid feature. It defeats the purpose of using a template. I'm mad. This software sucks. What we need is something like Makefile's eval function, which lets you restart the parser on a string generated by another instance of the string processor. Apparently in wikimedia, you have to run the string processor, save the output over top of the input, and then literally start all over running the parser on a brand new input source. Why would anyone design something so destructive? Imagine if a C++ compiler deleted your source code when you compiled your software. That's how I feel right now.

Here's what I got so far: http://communitytest.wikia.com/wiki/Knight . Notice how the Oath of Honor macro/page has double content in the source. That's the result of using subst:. Ridiculous.

Frenzied coder (talk) 18:16, June 9, 2016 (UTC)

Yeah the #lst would solve these problems... if it were not broken in conjunction with templates. See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Labeled_Section_Transclusion#Limitations

IMO the only real solution to these problems is the semantic mediawiki https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki

However wikia does not support SMW anymore and does not allow any new wikis to have this extension enabled.

The hack you link above seems more promising but i'm not sure how it performs if applied on a larger scale.

{{#tag}} should be able to add the includeonly tags via template. See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Magic_words#Miscellaneous

I can give you access to my http://devwiki.skylabs.ch wiki. Send me an email to spam@may.nu and i will give you an adminuser.

Psymia (talk) 21:36, June 9, 2016 (UTC)

Alright, I think my roommate had an idea that led to something workable. Check it out: card template, card, list of cards. The technique is to pass in a parameter to the card template that says whether to format for a page or for inclusion, and the parameter is <includeonly>|included=1</includeonly>. So the card page is responsible for determining if it's being included or not (which seems to be the only way to make this work), but it just tells the lower template the answer, so the lower template can do the right thing.

This isn't as perfect as the card template handling everything, but that's apparently not possible. So the compromise is to require every card page to pass in the parameter <includeonly>|included=1</includeonly>. This requires editing every card, but I think it's pretty reasonable. (and of course, it could be "yes" instead of "1".)

EDIT: my email address is thejoshwolfe@gmail.com

Frenzied coder (talk) 19:20, June 10, 2016 (UTC)

I'm not sure i understand.

What problem exactly are you trying to solve?

The example you link, only differentiates between being transcluded and not being transcluded.

--> Two "versions" of the same page. But it doesn't allow to actually access different interesting stuff on the page.

Just to generate the skill card list dynamically this seems like an awful lot of work for not much improvement.

Psymia (talk) 07:33, June 13, 2016 (UTC)

Ok, check now. The slightly better idea is to forward a {{{section}}} parameter down to the infobox template so that the infobox can return individual parts of the card if desired. Now you could format data into tables by selecting individual fields for the cells of the table, or whatever. I'm not sure when I would use that, but you can see how it's generally useful. (maybe not the most compelling argument.)

The primary advantage of doing all this is to avoid duplicating text in lists and on card pages. Notice how Conjurer has all the text consolidated in the list of cards, but Shadow Walker does not. Furthermore, some of the duplicated text is inconsistent. (I don't remember where, but I noticed a typo in the class list of cards that wasn't in the card page.) Imagine in the Knight page, instead of writing [[Oath of Honor]], just write {{:Oath of Honor}}, and you get the full text of the card in the list of cards. That seems very valuable to me.

Also, regarding the tables comment I made in the above thread, see how it was much easier to use an html table in the infobox template I was playing around with rather than a wikitext table, because the whole thing was inside a #switch statement, and "|"s would have been significant. I feel that html tables are generally better suited for use in complicated conditional template logic.

Frenzied coder (talk) 08:34, June 13, 2016 (UTC)