Automatically importing in-game items/ship/etc into the wiki

General discussion about anything related to Transcendence.
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Sai
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This is an example of a compact table layout that I had in mind for the wiki. The main problem about it would be to convert its design into a reliable mediawiki format. Other than that, it lists everything it should and I think it looks rather okay and eye pleasing.

Of course, using a two column wide table like on the current wiki would be much simpler.
Feel free to give feedback on this.
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The armor listed on it is fake. :P
The armor listed on it is fake. :P
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snafu
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Sai wrote:Feel free to give feedback on this.
Looks good in the png; easy to read, clear info

I'm hoping that transforming the Wiki doesn't make it (the Wiki) any more resource-hungry. See for comparison the Wiki pages for a couple of games by the same company: http://dotd.wikia.com/ and http://zoywiki.com/LotS/. Neither are administered or maintained by the game company; they're both volunteer work

The former has everything presented very prettily, but takes ages to load (even changing pages). The latter is clean, much faster & presents the basic info that ppl are likely to /need/ (not /want/ ;)) fairly clearly IMO
Dom 8-)
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There's not much point in showing other currencies. All items have a value in credits and all currencies have a fixed ratio to credits. 5 credits = 1 rin.
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Sai
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NMS wrote:There's not much point in showing other currencies. All items have a value in credits and all currencies have a fixed ratio to credits. 5 credits = 1 rin.
Didn't know that.
JohnBWatson wrote:From where would we obtain the "Used by" information?
I guess the "Used by" would be gathered from a ship's starting configuration or ship/station wreckages.
Or even the item's description. Well, we'll get into detail about it later.
snafu wrote:I'm hoping that transforming the Wiki doesn't make it (the Wiki) any more resource-hungry. See for comparison the Wiki pages for a couple of games by the same company: http://dotd.wikia.com/ and http://zoywiki.com/LotS/. Neither are administered or maintained by the game company; they're both volunteer work

The former has everything presented very prettily, but takes ages to load (even changing pages). The latter is clean, much faster & presents the basic info that ppl are likely to /need/ (not /want/ ;)) fairly clearly IMO
A Wikia taking ages to load? When do you live, the stone age?
In my opinion, our wiki shouldn't look like it came about twenty years ago, I'd rather be going with a more modern, fancier and prettier approach, but hey, that's just me. Good to hear your opinion, tho.

And this isn't either a big company or a big game we're dealing with. All the resources we need to make a wiki are easily accessible and we have a genuine source of information regarding everything that there is about it. When's the last time you heard people regularly talking to the CEO of Activision about the game's development? #GeorgeForPresident
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Sai
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Also, one more thing. A thing so important it needs a seperate post... Not really.

I'd very much like to start working on and hopefully finish the wiki on what we have right now before George starts rolling out Part II. Then we'll probably have a whole ton of new content to extract, parse and add and I'd very much like to avoid that.

So, Ttech, wake the fudge up and smell the ashes. I need that Test Wiki up or I'll go on creating one with Wikia myself.
(I'm bad at waiting, I know. And I know I'm being a real pain here pestering you about it.)
:P
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Atarlost
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Sai wrote:A Wikia taking ages to load? When do you live, the stone age?
In my opinion, our wiki shouldn't look like it came about twenty years ago, I'd rather be going with a more modern, fancier and prettier approach, but hey, that's just me. Good to hear your opinion, tho.
This is needlessly rude.

There are people in this community who don't have cheap, fast broadband. It's not actually common outside the States. There are people with bandwidth caps.

Accessibility is more important than "modern" aesthetics to pretty much everyone outside the U.S. and a few major metropolitan areas in Europe. And to anyone in the U.S. with class.
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Sai
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Atarlost wrote:This is needlessly rude.
I'm sorry, I didn't want it to sound that much rude at all... Can't you take a joke?

Aside from that, I just don't see how it's that hard to load a single page from wikia. Sure, maybe those image-intensive pages could pose a noticeable problem, but even in that case I don't find load times of such pages with my 512 KBps broadband long and tedious at all. In fact, the load times are pretty much okay. And if you happen to have an even slower connection (which would totally be surprising, since mine is the lowest of the low) by all means correct me if I'm wrong regarding the average internet speed that all of you have.

I don't know in which part of Europe you live (or North America, from where most of you originate), but from what I heard, my country has pretty low standards when it comes to speeds that our ISP-s provide and I still can manage without a problem.

EDIT: I did some research and the average download speeds in the US and Europe are pretty darn fast, unless you live in Mexico or South-East Europe, respectively. Still, correct me if I'm wrong and you are still using Dial-Up modems with 56 kbps.

But, since I'll take this as a vote, and this is a democracy and free speech that we're dealing here, nonetheless, that makes 2 votes for Accessibility and 1 vote for Aesthetics.
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Always best to err on the side of politeness. The internet is a strange place. On the one hand you've got people who mess around a lot, then there's people like me who mess around a lot except when we're serious (and switch track really quickly), and then you've got extreme literalists, and also we're talking about an eldritch abomination that's made out of hands* so there's plenty more where those three came from to cover everyone in between and outside of that. It's hard to gauge intent on the internet unless it's outright stated. Nothing wrong with making a wisecrack or two, but you have to watch your wording.

Also, average internet speeds, while a useful metric, are not everything. It's always nice to still be able to access a page when your ISP is being stupid and your "high speed" connection has dropped to ~70KB/s**. Or if you can't afford an 'average' connection in the first place, or the local ISP(s) don't offer them. Averages also get skewed...you can have a lot of people on low-speed, and then a few lucky sods getting 100+MB/s who bump it up. Optimising for bad connections is an unfortunate necessity until the day when the world no longer needs it, at which point we can have a little party and reminisce about how bad Internet Explorer 6 was and how a megabyte used to be really big.

Layout is probably the important thing for me. The old wiki, as well as being a mess to navigate and use, isn't exactly pretty. There'll always be a trade-off involved between loading time and appearance, but frankly....for an initial implementation things should be fairly bare-bones. It's always possible to improve the wiki theme and skins later. Get things in the right place with the right content first, then worry about the finer details of how it looks. That isn't to say it should be 'ugly'. But the whole point of a wiki upgrade is to make it so people can access the information more easily. Some of the best game wikis out there (eg. the Dwarf Fortress wiki, which is so well written and set out that the developer of the game uses it to look stuff up) are actually fairly minimal in terms of fancy stuff. It's just down to good layout and good structuring.

Which isn't to say I wouldn't like to see it look nice as well. It's just secondary to me.

In terms of a 'vote'...eh, I don't particularly care as long as it 1: loads and 2: navigates properly. At least at launch. Looking good is a nice extra but it can wait if it has to.





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snafu
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Shrike wrote:Layout is probably the important thing for me. [...] for an initial implementation things should be fairly bare-bones. It's always possible to improve the wiki theme and skins later. Get things in the right place with the right content first, then worry about the finer details of how it looks. That isn't to say it should be 'ugly'. But the whole point of a wiki upgrade is to make it so people can access the information more easily. Some of the best game wikis out there (eg. the Dwarf Fortress wiki, which is so well written and set out that the developer of the game uses it to look stuff up) are actually fairly minimal in terms of fancy stuff. It's just down to good layout and good structuring.

Which isn't to say I wouldn't like to see it look nice as well. It's just secondary to me.
Thumbs up for this :) Many game Wikis I've seen seem to focus on looking pretty, ignoring that their primary purpose is to provide information that's easy to find & read. This results in 1-2s page load times (or longer), which is very frustrating when you're quickly flipping through pages/links looking for some specific information that the search feature refuses to divulge
Dom 8-)
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Shrike wrote:Layout is probably the important thing for me.
snafu wrote:Many game Wikis I've seen seem to focus on looking pretty, ignoring that their primary purpose is to provide information that's easy to find & read.
 I am absolutely in favor of this approach. It doesn’t matter how pretty a website is if you can’t find the information you’re looking for. For a wiki in particular, ease of navigation and completeness of information need to be the highest priorities. I’ll readily admit that I may be biased toward functionality over appearance in general, though. Anyone who’s ever seen my car will attest to that. <.< >.> <.<;
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From the regular forum members, I'm probably the one with commonly the worst bandwidth of all. It is not uncommon for me to be at location where the bandwidth restricted to a mere 64kb/sec. For me, wikia is sometimes ok, sometimes its slow (depending on the subdomain/theme). The site for Star Citizen is a burthen (and classifies my 1024x800 screen as a phone!) but things like wikipedia and EVE online's EVElopedia are fine.

I think the last link shows that you can have a reasonably looking wiki without burning through too many bytes.

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Ttech
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Alright, I feel I need to reply to this a bit.
There's a lot of things we can do the fix the wiki, but really we need a way to properly parse and generate the data - most of the wiki can be replaced by dynamically generated content which would free us up for work on the rest of the content. Now for the design, tables are good, but we should probably avoid them unless we stick with wiki markup. Bootstrap and other templates can be pretty low on bandwidth and people forget the site map. Before we start trying to redesign everything - how are we going to generate the content? If someone wants to modernize with bootstrap or similar I can happily upload a template. But all these focus on less code and content to make load of content faster.
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I have a measly 37kb/sec bandwidth, but the forums are one of the fastest loading web pages I have encountered (the image at the top excluded; using Hermes Grey board style). Using a solid-color-scheme-painted-on-the-spot-for-each-individual-section-type-thingy would keep load time way down while still making things look stylish.

Tables look nice, but I would personally prefer a list form of headings/sub-headings/etc. It would make it much easier for me to tear the info limb from limb without letting it get its filthy claws into my internet connection and slowing it down even further.
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Sai
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Well, sweet Mother Teresa on a hood of a Mercedes-Benz... I didn't know you guys have it so rough out there.

I do sincerely apologise if you found my jokes and sarcasm inappropriate, but I just... I can't even...
I can't even comprehend the low speeds you are having.

As if this whole forum is stuck in this big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey... Stuff, from ten years ago.
(Yes, I know, I'm joking again, but the more replies I kept reading, the less ridiculous that idea started to sound...)

To think that you have it worse and you still manage... Dunno what to say. As I said. I can't even.
Nevertheless, I do get your point of view and I'd be happy to go with whatever you suggest and feel to be the best solution for everyone. Kudos on that, keep it up. :D
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