Time to update guides and wiki

[Xandor Tik'Roth]

In a process like this at work (I do QA stuff), I would say that we should fix whatever is screwed up right now and work on patching new stuff in later. Making the wiki pretty and functional now seems like it would be our highest priority.

[TheSlayer]

In a process like this at work (I do QA stuff), I would say that we should fix whatever is screwed up right now and work on patching new stuff in later. Making the wiki pretty and functional now seems like it would be our highest priority.

Edit: I'm going to start over and be less long winded.

You can't "fix whatever is screwed up now" in this situation. There's nothing functional about our system. In fact, we don't have a system. What you're suggesting only applies to a system that is generally functional.

So, your statement is inapplicable. However, I do get it: Wouldn't it be better to have something that looks good now than try to build from the ground up?
The answer is that it will take far, far longer to manually update dozens (or hundreds) of pages than it will to write a simple code for directly converting the information. And the maintenance of such a wiki will always be a headache. And in the end, we'll still have to redo it. Basically one competent coder can write what we need in less time than it takes to dive the code and manually update 10 pages.

And even if we do it all manually, which will take weeks, we will still have an incompetent wiki that is unreliable and full of unverified information. And it will not be pretty. So "making it pretty now" would be best accomplished by the points I suggested above, which would take about a week to implement after initial coding if 6 people worked on it 2 hours a day.

[TheSlayer]

Think "shortcut through the Old Forest" in Fellowship of the Ring (the book). Trying to take a shortcut here has literally no upsides. If you had 20+ competent, reliable people working on completely manual updates, you'd still need templates, cross-checking, and the same system of organization for the pages that I already laid out, regardless of whether you have code to reduce workload and verify information.

So, skip the code if you want to, or you don't find it viable. But it still needs to be organized as I laid it out. That is, in the absence of a better system. As we have basically no system at all now, we need to adopt one. Suggest one, I'm not the only one with useful ideas and critical thinking...

[jotwebe]

The best is the enemy of the good, of course.

In other news:

Done: Alchemist, Archer, Archmage, Berserker, Bulwark, Cursed, Marauder, Paradox Mage, Rogue, Summoner, Temporal Warden
Stubs: Anorithil, Arcane Blade, Brawler, Corruptor, Doomed, Mindslayer, Necro, Oozemancer, Reaver, SB, Solipsist, Sun Pally, SW, Wyrmic

[Xandor Tik'Roth]

Fair point. So the question stands: Who's the brave fool... er, soul that's going to do the coding for this? I'd do it myself, but I can't tell one end of code from the other.

And to address your point, Slayer, the line of work I'm in usually dictates a manual method. Imagine manually updating the help files for an entire website, each page having a dedicated help page describing the functions in that page. Or SOP's (Standard Operating Procedures) for no fewer than 4 departments, 2 of which I never worked in. Sure, there were people at work that could do the coding and make things "simpler," but they were far too busy with more important things, like making sure the system didn't crash down around our heads.

This is why I suggested a manual style here. It's worked for me because the automatic "easy" way took months to do. But you're right. I've looked at the wiki and shuddered to think of how much work it would be to get it into fighting trim...

[Tharsonius]

about that artifact section, i looked into editing some but the premade form contains infos only retrievable from the code ( like rarity and other stuff)

how about changing this system and just uploading screenshots? wed get the most important stats and i guess the section would fill up quickly since its no big deal to do while playing. problem is the scrolling issue of some artifacts ofc

[Castler]

Fair point. So the question stands: Who's the brave fool... er, soul that's going to do the coding for this? I'd do it myself, but I can't tell one end of code from the other.

What exactly are you wanting coded? Talents, artifacts, classes, all of the above? I had started some code to process ToME's data files and create some HTML spoilers from them. I didn't get very far with it, and I've been focused on my module lately, but if there's a particular area that needs attention, I can take a look at my code again.

[jotwebe]

Classes aren't too much trouble to do manually. There's only about 20 of them after all. Talents would be great, here http://te4.org/wiki/Cursed_(category_type)#Darkness is an entry that's complete.

As you can see the damage values are still "X", but unless we figure out some standard values - which will also be problematic when something has non-standard scaling - any numbers we put in there is going to be inaccurate. Unless something happens to scale linearly, but few do anymore.

Someone seems to have automatically made entries consisting of the talent name and the description, producing something along these http://te4.org/wiki/Cursed_(category_type)#Predator lines. Which of course is much better than nothing.

So the manual work so far has been changing stuff from the second type to the first. It'd be great if it could be done automatically, at least the stuff that's amenable to it.

Haven't worked on artifacts, but screenshots I'd be wary off because
a) many people are bad at editing them - no cropping, jpegs instead of png
b) if we do make properly formated screenshots, it probably won't be much less work than text
c) pictures can't be searched

[Tharsonius]

i got the updated stats for bindings of eternal night set:

not sure why the power cost is 28 for the old version, on my character it displays 47/80 which has no charm mastery - maybe it got changed or the other guy had charm mastery

new stats are reduce damage all +30 and +0,1 cunning / stealth. as well as better base stats i think

old text:

'''Bindings of Eternal Night''' (mummy armor) and '''Crown of Eternal Night''' (hat)
:Adds activated talent Abyssal Shroud at 2.0 (costing 28 out of 80 power) to the armor.
:Adds +10 Cunning, 40 darkness damage when wearer hits in melee, changes damage: +20% darkness, spell saves +15, mental saves +15, confusion immunity +30%, knockback immunity +30%, light radius -1, and adds activated ability Retch, at 2.0 (costing 28 power out of 80) to the hat.


new text:
'''Bindings of Eternal Night''' (mummy armor) and '''Crown of Eternal Night''' (hat)
:Adds activated talent Abyssal Shroud at 2.0 (costing 47 out of 80 power) to the armor.
:Adds +10 Cunning, 40 darkness damage when wearer hits in melee, reduces damage by fixed amount: +20all, changes damage: +20% darkness, Talent mastery: Cunning / Stealth +0.10, spell saves +15, mental saves +15, confusion immunity +30%, knockback immunity +30%, light radius -1, and adds activated ability Retch, at 2.0 (costing 47 out of 80 power) to the hat.

feel free to copy paste it

€dit @ jotwebe pictures can be searched when theyre still in a link behind text. i know the solution isnt optimal but unless someone writes a script for it, im pretty sure we wont get far in the artifact section manually. also i think the current form for artifacts is just bad. items have a lot of stats and while ingame theyre presented in a way where u get all infos with 1 view, the wiki format takes a while to get used to and theres always many empty fields

€dit2: i got the stats on the new chronomancer set:

'''Temporal Augmentation Robe - designed in style''' and '''Un-Fezan's Cap'''
:adds 10% casting speed, Reduces paradox failures (equivalent to willpower) +40, +40% confusion resistance

set seems to be buggy, and might have another effect which doesnt work because of the bug atm? dont know i reported it in bugs -but theres blue text saying: a time vortex briefly appears in front of you - without having any effects

[Xandor Tik'Roth]

So how is this working out? Should we appoint someone to head this endeavor up? Or are things running pretty smoothly as-is?

[Castler]

I can't comment on the rest of the wiki, but I've made some good progress on a script to update the talents. With Christmas celebrations and travel and seeing family and whatnot, it'll probably be another week or so before I have much to show.

What's the best way to present this info?

Minimal:

Conjures up a bolt of fire, setting the target ablaze and doing X fire damage over 3 turns.

Showing the raw formulas: (I'm not sure if I can do this with a script; it would require manual editing. I don't find the raw formulas to be very intuitive without looking up the math, etc.)

Conjures up a bolt of fire, setting the target ablaze and doing combatTalentSpellDamage(25, 290) fire damage over 3 turns.

Showing some values at each talent level for a 1.20 talent mastery for a theoretical level 50 character with, say, 100 in the relevant stats and 100 in the relevant power: (What would be good values to use here?)

Conjures up a bolt of fire, setting the target ablaze and doing 100, 200, 300, 400, 500 fire damage over 3 turns.

Show a range from a level 1 character to a level 50 character? Some other possibility?

[Xandor Tik'Roth]

So can I get an update on this? Not immediately, what with it being the holidays and all, but soon. I really like the direction this has taken. I recently checked out the entry on the Higher race. A+ work.

[greycat]

The 6 trillion templates under TalentReq are... not what I would have done, to be sure. I'm not sure if I want to take the trouble to learn enough to rip them all out and replace them with a single template that does arithmetic instead of using a different template for every single require = X line in the code.

That said, all of the Technique templates are currently missing. As in, nobody wrote them. So all the Technique talents either have hard-coded Level=(...) and Stat=(...) in them, or they're completely missing the requirement field, which shows up as {{{require}}} in the template output.

So, that's a work in progress.

[Castler]

There are some race strategy tips from phantomglider and SageAcrin over at http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=37262. They're a bit out of date (for example, Shalore have been buffed to make better mages), but they're a good starting point if someone wants to work on the race section.

I'm still working on scripting an update for the talents. I'm most of the way there, it's just hard to find time to do all of the coding I want. Is there still interest in having the talents scripted? (I noticed that people have been working on manually updating talents. I'm fine either way, really - delving into ToME's code has been a good learning experience, even if the talent-to-wiki script ends up not being used.)

If we go this route, I'll have several hundred talent pages to update once I'm done. Is there some wiki admin interface for updating a bunch of pages at once? Or should I see about scripting that part too?

I thought about doing something like this to show the effects of individual talent points: http://jsfiddle.net/E5dA4/1/

Any comments? Useful, or too complicated? I don't know if the wiki will support this HTML or not; does it support the HTML acronym tag, or is there any similar tooltip feature available?

[jotwebe]

Showing the raw formulas: (I'm not sure if I can do this with a script; it would require manual editing. I don't find the raw formulas to be very intuitive without looking up the math, etc.)

Conjures up a bolt of fire, setting the target ablaze and doing combatTalentSpellDamage(25, 290) fire damage over 3 turns.

Showing some values at each talent level for a 1.20 talent mastery for a theoretical level 50 character with, say, 100 in the relevant stats and 100 in the relevant power: (What would be good values to use here?)

Conjures up a bolt of fire, setting the target ablaze and doing 100, 200, 300, 400, 500 fire damage over 3 turns.

Show a range from a level 1 character to a level 50 character? Some other possibility?

So showing example values is actually easier than the raw formulas? That's strange.

Anyway, seeing as how you can get formulas with code-diving and low-level values by testing, it'd make sense to have high-level values in the wiki.

I thought about doing something like this to show the effects of individual talent points: http://jsfiddle.net/E5dA4/1/

Any comments? Useful, or too complicated? I don't know if the wiki will support this HTML or not; does it support the HTML acronym tag, or is there any similar tooltip feature available?

That's pretty neat, imho. Don't know enough on whether the wiki can handle it - just make a test page and try it out?