Talk: New skill box format

Sooooooo... It's been 3 weeks, and there's been no feedback on this. Does that mean: a) everyone likes it and just doesn't feel like commenting on it, b) no one really cares, c) no one feels qualified to comment on it, or d) the wiki is finally dead and I should just give up? —Dr Ishmael 20:13, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

As I don't play this game much anymore, I haven't been paying much attention. That's my excuse. A quick look at the page and some skimming of the code leads me to believe this is more than worthwhile, though, but hopefully you'll get more feedback from more active editors (here anyway) and players. Nwash 20:57, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

Uh, I saw this once, thought about it, then got distracted. Now that I've given it a second thought, it looks like it would be a good way to standardize things and give us options for extracting data for skills. My only concern is that this change would be moving us closer to 1...15 instead of the 1...12 that we've tried to adhere to. I'll probably have more thoughts later, but that's my initial (second) thoughts --JonTheMon 21:01, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

The number ranges displayed in skill descriptions can remain 0...12 if desired, that's not really an issue. The big change is that those numbers will no longer have to be typed into the descriptions manually, but will instead be dynamically inserted based on the exact 0...15 data needed for the progression calculation. Thus, we can easily display whichever range we wanted in the descriptions, whether we decide on 0...12 or 0...15 or 0...12...15. —Dr Ishmael 21:19, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

Erh, Ish. When you posted I was like; Dude, epic wall of text. I don't have a real opinion. I wouldn't mind if you would try and improve the wiki, but I wouldn't care if you didn't. That might just be my (and the rest of tha wiki, probs) problem. Go ahead, you have my blessing. Arnout aka The Emperors Angel 21:42, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

Placeholder. 23:12, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

I think this would be a great improvement. I don't think we should worry about the plurals too much because we usually just need the plural. Or do you plan a dynamic display? (Such as: "Hey, I got 12 in this attribute, how strong is me uber leet skill now?"); To the links: I think we should provide such a replacement list. Maybe simply try it this way: find a word in an array and insert [[value of that array| before and ]] after the word. Just an array like array("knocked down" => "Knockdown", "knocked" => "Knockdown", "blinded" => "Blindness") with a case-insensitive preg_replace (that would be the PHP-function - I don't know if there's something similar in the mediawiki framework). Kaede (talk) 23:40, 29 July 2011 (UTC)

The #replace parser function would work fine for that; however, it would require a massive function chain in order to implement all the possible links. (If you look at the Skill box draft code, I'm already using a chain of 6 #replace's simply to insert the variables and handle the concise-desc "dull" text.)

On the other hand, the idea of turning this whole description-parser into an extension of its own does have merit. The core list of words-to-link is pretty well-established, meaning we wouldn't have to make maintenance edits to the .php file where it's defined very often. (If this were a new wiki for a new game, that list would still be growing, and we'd have to edit the file often to add new words; my point is that we can set up the extension and then leave it be.) If we go that route, we would still pass the raw description to Skill_box in the skill template, but within Skill_box we would simply call a single parser function to completely parse, substitute, and link the description. I'll start working on that this weekend and see how it goes. —Dr Ishmael 01:02, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

Wow, that was easier than I thought. Only took two hours to convert the code for formatting the descriptions into a parser function, and with some additional functionality, to boot (for example, it returns an error if description contains %str#% but you don't set str#_min/max).

I think I agree with Kaede about plurals: we should just default to the plural version everywhere, like we do now. At GWW, they do that unless the range includes 1, like "1...3...4 second[s]" (GWW:Dust Cloak; see GWW:Plague Sending for an extreme example), but personally I think that's over-complicating the issue. If anyone has a reason why we should do it that way, though, please speak up.

Incidentally, there are only 14 skills that use a non-simple plural: Plague Sending, Plague Touch, Glyph of Concentration, Peace and Harmony, Contemplation of Purity, Splinter Weapon, Signet of Illusions, Pious Restoration, Divert Hexes, "Can't Touch This!", Glyph of Swiftness, Glyph of Immolation, Plague Sending, Glyph of Immolation (and the PvP versions of Splinter and CTT!).

And I just had a thought about how to handle the words-to-link list: make a wiki configuration page MediaWiki:SkillLinks so admins can add/remove items as necessary. Or, include the core set of entries (condition names, knockdown, adjacent/nearby/earshot, etc. basically most of the things we have linked now) in the code, and just have that page available for adding any oddball ones that come up later. However we do it, this will impose a level of consistency on links in skill descriptions that has never been seen before. —Dr Ishmael 05:00, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

(Reset indent) Alrighty, I think I've got the extension ready. If anyone wants to look at the code, go ahead. I would like a couple people to at least take a quick scan of the stuff-to-link list that I have defined in there to see if I'm missing anything. (I scanned through all 1300+ player skills, and I think I caught everything worthwhile.)

One thing: I'm not happy with the name for the parser function. 'descparse' just isn't "snappy" like most of the other ones we already have. Anyone got any better ideas? —Dr Ishmael 04:09, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

Descparcer => ['getdesc,' 'getsdesc, fetchdesc] <- Ruby debris, gets is short for get string, but you probably knew that already. The name isn't technically 100% accurate, a get and a parce are different, but it serves the same purpose.

I spotted no errors in the skill func. array, despite initially seeing a few, but then realizing there were irrelevant (drunken and disarm among them).

But, why are iron palm, nine tail strike, and fox fangs in the array, they are not functions?

Otherwise, I can see why ACX<censored> corp hired you.

Offtopic: Listening to SoAD and disturbed, I digress! Computational chemistry - oh dear god there has to be some otherworldly math in there. ?Scythe? 04:49, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

Ebon Vanguard Assassin Support is why those skills are in there. —Dr Ishmael 12:29, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

Ahh, good catch! I would have missed that ;) ?Scythe? 14:43, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

Eh, after glancing over existing parser function names from other extensions, I went with #skilldescription. It's a bit long, but it really shouldn't see much use outside of the skill box templates. I'm gonna have Curse install it today so I can start working with it here. —Dr Ishmael 16:56, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

Woohoo! Check out Unbalancing Soul Explosion again with the new parser. I think it looks pretty spiffy. —Dr Ishmael 18:16, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

Looking forward to when we're actually implementing this across the wiki, I've already planned out how to add this new functionality to Skill_box without affecting the existing functionality. (It only affects the descriptions and progression tables, the infobox itself and the auto-categorization will be unaffected.) That way, I can update Skill_box to an intermediate state where both forms of input are valid, gradually update all the skill templates to the new format, then cut out the old functionality. At no point should we have to deal with "junk" output because Skill_box and the templates are completely out of sync.

In fact, I can make those changes to Skill_box right now without affecting anything, besides making our "green numbers" actually green. Unless anyone objects, I'll do that tonight. —Dr Ishmael 21:50, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

You got my vote ish :) Aloha, Mauirixxx 23:26, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

One minor hitch - for descriptions where we had used the {{sic}} template, the word 'formatting' in the wiki-link triggers the entry for Form in the description parser, with ugly results. There may be other oddities that I haven't seen yet, but I'm not going to scan all 1,200+ skill articles again after having done so on the weekend.

I've pushed a bugfix for this that should be deployed in the morning. I also modified how it reads the entries from the on-wiki configuration page (MediaWiki:Skill-description-links) so that they will override the default entries in the PHP file for the same $target (I think that would've caused a PHP error the way I originally coded it), so in the future we can solve an issue like this without editing the back-end code. —Dr Ishmael 02:30, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

Glitch is fixed. I've updated all of the No Attribute Assassin skills and Critical Strikes skills to the new format, so we'd have a small sample of live data to examine. Let me know if you see anything odd or whatever with those skills. —Dr Ishmael 19:10, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

I scanned all of he templates, and coudn't find any mistakes. I like the grey text, although I am not sure weither or not we already had that... Arnout aka The Emperors Angel 20:00, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

I didn't see anything out of the ordinary either. Aloha, Mauirixxx 20:49, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

Cool done, Dr.ish :) Kaede (talk) 22:59, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

Checking

If I hit Critical Strikes in the nice little box you did, and go to the quick reference page, those are the templates as they are now? And these reflect the the numbers on the skill pages? Because I'll check a couple attributes tonight, if that's the case. Arnout aka The Emperors Angel 18:33, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I've modified the base {{Skill box qr}} template (which is what populates the Attribute-QR tables) to use the new description parser. —Dr Ishmael 18:54, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

Any1 knows a good place to check these skills? I have no characters that have every skill in the game, so I resorted to using a priest of balthazar, but they display PvP skills instead of PvE ones. For those I had to use characters who owned various skills. All in all, a lot of useless maptraveling. Any1 have better ideas? I do own every elite skill however... Arnout aka The Emperors Angel 19:41, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

Heroes. —Dr Ishmael 19:57, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

Oddities

{{Gelatinous Corpse Consumption}} tries to create two links out of "Corpse exploitation" (instead of one link to "corpse exploitation" that displays as exploits). 76.199.137.228 09:55, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

That's because it's running the regex replacements on a string that already has a link defined, and it's not designed to detect that (it assumes the input string has no links). If you see that, just edit the description and remove the links, like so. But since you pointed it out, I'll modify that entry to avoid double-linking like that. —Dr Ishmael 13:00, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

The rollout only includes hero skills. What about monster skills and title-based skills? 76.199.137.228 20:30, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

They'll be done eventually, I just didn't think to put them in the tables initially. The actual profession skills are by far the most important, anyway. —Dr Ishmael 21:07, 6 August 2011 (UTC)