User talk:Katzeus

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Helping out with the wiki

Hey there Katzeus. Armagon at Chucklefish said I should reach out to you regarding work on the wiki. I hope it's no problem but I've already performed several edits:

• Redirects for all units to their faction-specific names (e.g. Golem/Revenent/Gloom Giant/Oni --> Giant)
• Updated information on unit pages
  • Sight range updated in 2.1
  • Effective and Vulnerable lists updated in 2.0
• Added a page for Sparrow Bombs
  • Edited templates to enable the Hover icon
  • Added Sparrow bomb sprites
• Added trivia on various pages
• Added Garrison to the Damage Matrix
• Added additional details to Damage Matrix page
• Other small details to a variety of pages

I do hope none of these are a problem.

However, I wished to do some other updates too. Namely I wanted to patch up some of the infrastructure for the Damage Matrix tables and the Effective and Vulnerable UnitIcon lists (which for each unit exists in 3 seperate pages), and perhaps other templates that allow centralisation of data such as costs, sight ranges, movement, etc. because these are referenced throughout the wiki and have inconsistencies. However, this would demand re-structuring a lot of the pages, and adding new templates, so I didn't want to proceed to perform this fully without being confident this wasn't inappropriate to do.

Additionally, I wanted to upgrade the UnitIcon template to allow tiers. In-game these icons are given various colours based on intensity, but currently the CSS only defines 1 tier for each. This CSS is protected, so I obviously can't just go modifying that. Also, confusingly the CSS marks them as identities, not a class, which is not the best idea since IDs are meant to be used only on a single element, not a set of elements.

I promise I will attempt only to improve what is already there, and avoid removal or re-designing of page content, but for the purposes of updating I wished to make certain it is appropriate for me to make these large changes. I realise my presense is a bit out-of-the-blue here, but I'm a bit of a "get into something heavily or not at all" kind of person, so I've dived in pretty fast. Still, if you're up for it I'd be happy to explain some of the changes I plan to make :)

Emo Tarquin (talk) 18:59, 25 May 2020 (UTC)

Hello - thanks so much for the interest in helping out with the wiki!

All those edits look great, no problems I can see! I agree there's lots of room for improvement with the effectiveness table layout. Since the page is so complicated and sort of high impact I think maybe the best would be to try some redesigns on your user page or maybe discuss specifics on the appropriate talk pages so there's the opportunity for others to offer feedback. Esp since the per-page matrixes take a lot of time/effort to update it might be good to hammer changes out before pushing to the articles.

The css is protected, but not because I don't think it could be improved (it def can be). If you could share specifics about what edits you suggest, I'm happy to look at any suggested improvements. Please let me know if you hit any other snags or have any other questions about any site issues not discussed here too - and please feel free to share any other ideas or suggestions for improvement! -- Katzeus (talk) 13:31, 26 May 2020 (UTC)

Currently, for the Effective/Vulnerable sets, I plan a very simple template to move the data to one spot. It's far from perfect (i.e. isn't importing data from a central data file), but since I don't see these changing any time soon, and you weirdly enough cannot calculate these directly from the Damage Matrix (despite how they appear based on the numbers, there are major inconsistencies). You can see my current work on this in Template:UnitIconSet. From there, all instances across many pages would be using this template instead. Any errors or changes would be made to the template, thus maintaining consistency.

On that note, because in-game these actually come in three tiers, I've designed it with those 3. Essentially:

• Very effective - green
• effective - aqua
• slightly effective - blue
• Very vulnerable - red
• vulnerable - orange
• slightly vulnerable - yellow

These are what I wanted to have added to the CSS. Instead of #effective and #vulnerable, have .effective_1, .effective_2, .effective_3, .vulnerable_1, .vulnerable_2, and .vulnerable_3 (note being classes not IDs too). The exact colours I haven't worked out yet. Sadly I use Switch so I need others to get me the uncompressed images to find exact colours and sprites. This change would also of course introduce a minor change to Template:UnitIcon with adding rules for eff1, eff2, eff3, vul1, vul2, vul3 to the above CSS classes, and implementing them as classes, not IDs.

Damage Matrix tables are a messy one. The grand plan would be to have a centralised CSV or database file all tables could call data from. However that would need more complex set-up. I might put this task off for a while, while I work on the easier things. I do not advise editing all the tables by hand, I tried it on Dog alone and found it painfully time-consuming to do even one without human error.

I have various other ideas planned which I'll briefly list below:

• Rank tables for maps showing S, A, B, C, and D turn thresholds.
• Add conditional for "No. of Players" row in Template:Infobox Map to allow the campaign maps to not constantly list they're single-player.
• Add Vine, Shadow Sister, and Crystal unit pages, and on various links set these (alongside Sparrow Bomb) as "Special" units.
• Add screenshots for 2.0 content like Volcano biome.
• Add the S-rank video guides by xTimeKey to campaign levels under Strategy (open to suggestions on if this might be negatively impactful for a wiki to have a solution guide strapped to it)
• Improve UnitIcon boxes to be rounded squares with gradient borders to simulate the in-game styling.
• Replace unit icon symbols with copies of the ones found in-game (currently only a few match the in-game equivalents)

I've not considered testing in my user page. That's a good idea, I'll use that from now on. As for talking changes, I'm not sure we'll see many people chat, the majority of the community is found in Discords and on Reddit, and the wiki shows not many edits have been made for a month. Still, I'll make sure to leave details of my plans on the talk pages.

As a last note, Gimble from the Groove of War competitive community is planning to develop a wiki for their tournament events, competitive maps, etc. According to him, Tiy from Chucklefish was already positive on the idea of having them implement it into the official wiki, and Gimble is up for it too instead of making a seperate one. I do not yet know his exact plans for the GoW wiki but he says he will have some documentation for me by the end of the week which will cover what he needs and how he plans to design it.

If I can come back with specifications on exact CSS edits I require, would it be possible for you to edit them in for me? Feel free to add in a temporary version of the aforementioned eff/vul classes, although I will of course be needing further edits so don't fret just yet on those. And if I may check, does this wiki have support for external data sources like CSVs or database files that I could develop a Damage Matrix from? I'm not exactly sure how I'd check all of its available functions. Thanks for your time!

Edit: It just occured to me after random milling about--I could just make the UnitIcon template specify inline styles for the colours, not call CSS classes at all. That would certainly save you the effort! Apologies for that one. I'll check to see if in-line styling works instead!

Emo Tarquin (talk) 15:19, 26 May 2020 (UTC) Last updated: 17:20, 26 May 2020 (UTC)

Hey there hope it's not too much trouble but I wanted your guidance on something. So my general plan is to implement a centralised location for the damage matrix data, and convert all tables on the wiki (and maybe some other in-line references) to be referred directly from that. I could approach this in a few ways, such as making a template which contains all of the data and a function like {{DmgMat|Dog|Rifle}} returns the damage Dog deals to Rifleman, or {{DmgMat|Dog|Attack}} returns an entire table row for all Attack values from the Dog. This has a clear benefit of being very easy to implement... but it also means making a kinda messy template as a data source which seems sub-optimal and might be more awkward for people to edit.

I believe there should be alternative methods for accessing data, but I'm unsure how. Do you have other suggestions how else I might go about this?

As an aside, Gimble from Groove of War will have that documentation ready soon. I'll share it with you when I can to make sure it will all be possible :)

Emo Tarquin (talk) 23:19, 2 June 2020 (UTC)

Groove of War Wiki

Hey there Katzeus

Not sure if you've been keeping up with my follow-up replies in the prior topic (I'm unsure if you get notified of those, sorry).

Me and GimbleB, a moderator from the Groove of War competitive community, have been discussing arranging a dedicated Groove of War wiki hosted here on the Wargroove wiki. This would have a place on the front-page as a community event, with its own pages for maps, events, etc. to provide lots of info about the competitive events. Having spoken to Armagon from Chucklefish, he said that so long as you approve of it, he sees no reason to not allow it, so I wished to get final confirmation you are okay with this large-scale addition.

If you are curious, below are two design drafts GimbleB provided to me. I made recommendations to redesign the "Major Tournament Maps" table to be a tab-based set of lists instead, but you can see most of the design is relatively compatible with elements already found on the wiki (especially the map infobox which can be easily expanded).

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/714655264724353054/717573254696403015/GoW_Wiki_Map_Page.png

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/714655264724353054/718171598611284006/GoW_Wiki_Maps_List_Page.png

I will personally be attending to building much of the templates, and the Groove of War community will provide the contributions for a lot of the data to fill in the pages.

Does this plan sound appropriate to you?

Emo Tarquin (talk) 19:09, 4 June 2020 (UTC)'

Hey Emo Tarquin - this sounds like a very cool idea, and something which would be immeasurably helpful to the GoW community. I think this would function better as a separate site though, not a namespace/sub-wiki of this one.

My reasoning is this - because this wiki is hosted/owned by Chucklefish we're responsible for maintaining it's content. We can do this within the bounds of the game easily - where we confirm details and supporting documentation as it pertains factually to the game. What this new site sounds like is more pure community, less factual and more for sharing custom content and facilitating matchmaking. There's a set of rules I'm sure the GoW team will put in place to manage/moderate the content - but if it's hosted on our site we'd be obligated to manage these rules which seems inappropriate. Basically once it's on the wiki, or a CF owned site it's 'officially managed' and it's not something we want to insert ourselves into. I think the GoW community doesn't need that kind of management/oversight, but we'd feel obligated to provide it here.

I suggest you make a 'sister site' - basically separate, but we can promote/direct players there from here. I have ZERO issue helping direct people there from here & adding to the sidebar/main page/etc, and also helping you spread the word to the community, but I think having the entire site within the wiki wouldn't be the right setup. -- Katzeus (talk) 09:49, 5 June 2020 (UTC)