Latest revision as of 07:59, 4 January 2020

Changing the way descriptions are displayed

I feel like the description field here is a bit too bulky. What if we condensed it down by making descriptions a "tooltip" of the ability name? Meaning, hovering over the ability name will display the description.

Doing something like that would definitely cut down on the space required to display descriptions, and we could have the descriptions come from individual ability pages, so as not have to repeat the same ability description for each rank.

Any thoughts/ideas/opinions on this? LaughingLeader (talk) 17:34, 23 October 2014 (CDT)

I wouldn't worry about description there should be enough space , see eg. Monk Skills. Using tooltips in a table is going to be impractical imho, you can see for example in List of Lore how it is annoying already if the reader is not concerned with the spoilers (imhop we should probably just remove the hints there, as its not like game breaking spoilers anyway).

The main thing here is I think it would be much better to keep the skill tables in their respective skills page. As you can see it wilm get quite bulky, and more so if the NPC offers multiple types of training and recipes. So the intention so far was to display a simple list simply for reference, and for the wiki search. The user clicks the Skill name to get the detailed list of skills. This solves space issues as the skill articles can use the full width. -- Another reason is that I expect the NPCs page will keep getting longer as lore is added to them. And lastly you have an issue with duplicate info. Although duplicate info can be solved by using transcludes and advanced templating.. I think it's more consistent that we keep all the skills/recipes info in their respective page and a simple list in the other pages.

Now with all that said, I am looking into advanced templating with DPL to do that kind of table. The way this works is that we can create individual pages for all recipes and abilities. Such pages can later be updated by the devs themselves, but we can already create them if we want to. Advanced templating with DPL can pull all these individuals bits together into a table. Creating the templates is a bit of work, but once it's done for other editors it's not very difficult to edit you basically just fill in a template like Template:MAP infobox with the skill/recipe info as parameters. If you want to get anything more than a basic table format, it's going to save a ton of edits as using colours, icons and so on make the tables very difficult to handle. Anyway, I will set something up soon and then it'll make more sense. This gives some interesting possibilities like pulling all recipes in a table from a given NPC, or all recipes tha's related to Food across any NPCs, and so on. --Gorgonzola (talk) 16:30, 24 October 2014 (CDT)

Oh yeah I forgot the important TLDR. So basically, that means we can pull this info in two forms: on NPCs we can pull a simple list however they can be made into links to each individual recipe or ability. On the Skills page we can put the same info much more detailed with Reuse time and so on in a table format. Both pull data with DPL, but each uses a different template (a "concise" one and a "detailed" one). --Gorgonzola (talk) 16:36, 24 October 2014 (CDT)

Aaaand also the reason for templating with DPL is that whenever you add a new skill or recipe, it will automatically update any concerned tables! It sounds complicated but it shouldn't be difficult to edit, mostly just using a "guide" template to fill in the data of each recipe/ability. This will make more sense once I have a few examples going, maybe over the weekend. --Gorgonzola (talk) 16:40, 24 October 2014 (CDT)