Schot
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Posts posted by Schot
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Thank you all! I'm glad you're finding the link design effective.
I had dabbled with the idea of putting up the old badge like icon links we used to have but after some experimentation I realized it would require an amount of work I wasn't really willing to expend at this point. Gotta conserve my time and energy for a much bigger project. 
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Not an ARPG but... I played the Castlevania: Lords of Shadow demo last night. That was fun.
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Sharing a hobby with Dad is pretty cool. It's often said, I experienced this myself, that the father/son bond is a difficult one to develop. My Dad and I were never close though that's primarily because my parents split when I was two and so I lived a province away from him and only saw him twice a year a total of 3weeks a year. My Dad enjoyed building projects and one particularly large project he worked on was building an entire Oak Kitchen Cabinetry set. And this was a fairly large kitchen. My Father was a teacher and so during the summer he had access to the schools wood working shop. Plus, the wood working teacher was a friend of my Dads. In that summer I got to work with him on that project. It was a great experience. It may have been the first time I got to experience the satisfaction of working hard on a large project and seeing the result.
If I had to guess I would say that a father shines most when at play and at work with his son. I never got to see a playful side to my father but I did get to see his ability to take on daunting tasks and I think that part of him, with such little time interacting, was passed on to me.
I almost want to say that it's imperative that mother, father son and daughter find a way to share a hobby. Not many of us are farmers anymore so it's even more important for parents to find a way to teach children life skills and for children to remind parents about how to play.
Oh yeah... And that rock your father found Gilberticus? Was it petrified wood?
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No worries. Wasn't plannng to bring it to light cause I figured it was one of those moments where we sometimes write in quick point form. Glad you like! Might give it a bit more decoration later on. Maybe stick the money bag icon beside it.
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Hehe. Yeah. "Put a Prominent Link to SacredWiki" sounded a liiiiitle bit off after seeing it a few times. ^^
Yup! We used to have wonderful linking icons in our old skin. Sadly, like the old skin, this skin was hastily made by it's creator. There was lots I had to fix and just ran out of steam trying to correct everything. These last two skins have been the bane of the enjoyment I can get from DarkMatters. And with the soon to arrive IPB 4 forum update, everything will have to change again. I'm reluctant because of that to make significant changes to the present skin. It will be completely gone when we finally get IPB 4.
That said! I added SacredWiki to the top menu. Not prominent but I may do more with it.
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Any user who wants to fill in dialogues on the Wiki can copy the text from this .txt file.
The decoder/encoder itself is still internal but the decoded text shouldn't be a problem since it can't be used for anything besides a reference.
Here is the link to localized texts if you need them:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_TBVBAeWVRnSlZWNUFJNDRxSXc/edit?usp=sharing
They are not THE very last version, as I collected all localizations for previous versions of CM patch, but not for the current one. So these files are patched to v120 or v130 (can't recall which one exactly). On other hand, all vanilla texts are there, and CM texts are still work in progress and subject to change anyway.
I just made use of txt files now and wow. Thank you both very much. This simplifies things immensely.
No more typing long dialogues. Woohoo! -
Thanx Flix! I sure hope we get a chance to use it in Sacred 3.
EDIT: There's just one little thing I didn't manage to work out. To do a single line break it looks like we'll still have to use the <br> tag.
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Well! Congratulations Ash! You must be thrilled to finally be finished with school and entering the "real world". Looks like quite the project you had to draft/produce/report on. Wow. Kudos to your mate for that logo. You should all get that tattoed on your shoulders. Tha Gulo Gang! "See here now, Nyaah!" Doing my best mobster voice thing, haha.
Any plans to celebrate? Or did you already?
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Heya Blake! Gratz and welcome.
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Once again our guardian Knuckles has swooped in to save the day. We've been pinches pennies fairly tightly as of late so this is a very welcome leg up. Thank you Robb! Thanx to you I am enslaved for yet another year. Hurray! Wait, what?!
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Thanx gogo!
It looks wonderful. The template is still very neat and easy to use, but now it uncludes all situations possible in game: generic NPC names, custom captions, quests you are unable to decline - everything. If it's ready to be used in practice, I'll go through some pages I remember and apply these new options.
Cheers Silver. After some last minute changes today I'm now happy with what we have. Feel free to give it a test!
As for the breaks - if you copy from global.res, there is no need to worry about the line breaks. Being a simple HTML, global.res text already has all necessary formatting. It uses double <br> code just as you do in sample dialogs. Though if you prefer using some other way to start a new line, I'll gladly try it.
At long last this problem is finally gone. You can type out the dialogue as you normally would. We have a new extension to manage line spacing within the template now.
Unfortunately, this means I'll have to go back and check on old templates to see if they need correcting. Doh! -
Cheers Silver. The update bits are more or less complete. Just fine tuning to be done. I'm not sure how to resolve the way the wiki is interpreting line breaks within these dialogues. The most reliable way it seems is to use the line break button
. Using that results in a nice clean well spaced line break.Feedback is always welcome!
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#2 is my fave. As for the "ä" I think the wiki will handle it fine. The only possible draw back is if someone were to do a search it using an english a. I don't think the wiki or google will find it if someone were to search for "Light of Earendil".
Thanx for deleting the unneeded Kral pages.
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Guess it won't be too painful after all. The initial work is done. I think I may be able to integrate this into the original template so don't start using this yet.
http://www.sacredwiki.org/index.php/Template:S2a_Dialogue
Should I make all dialogues have an "Ok" button by default?
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Alrighty. Hopefully this will be a painless process, heh. Any suggestions on what to name this new template?
S2a Dialogue?
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Ok ok. I surrender! lol
Good points. I think it's important to note that these points are probably rare exceptions. And on that note we have to at some point decide just how detailed we need to be. Personally I'm a perfectionist and when doing little tasks on my own I like my work to be a replica of what I'm trying to represent about the game via the wiki. I've learned though that this level of detail isn't always practical.
That said. I think rather than editing the existing template, I'll create a new one for these special cases. For Sacred 3 I'll try to design a single all inclusive template.
I'm not sure how I'll be able to set up the buttons yet so that will take some time and creativity... Before I get going, is there anything else that needs to be built in?
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Ah ok. Well... Might be time for you to troubleshoot your OS and try other browsers. Maybe a setting you have on?
Everyone, drop everything you're doing, and start working on S3 wiki nao!
lol, this is kinda what went racing through my head as I was watching the trailer... "OMG I have so much work to do now!"
oooooooh, looks good. I just hope they stay true to the type of game we all like...
Delta!
Me too! Or better yet. I hope they borrow a lot from Sacred 1. When I saw the "blood" mage appear in the trailer, (gonna be THE best character in the game btw. Just sayin!
), I got the feeling that Keen games is borrowing a lot from the old Sacred 1 Battlemage. Which would be awesome! The Battlemage was TONS of fun.The real question...... Will we have awesome mounts:)
Mounts! Oh yes, there must be mounts. If Sacred Citadel is any indicator to that affect then they should be interesting.
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Hmm. The only way I could see it was to quote the post ... Wonder why I couldn't see anything otherwise?
[Added]
Even after quoting the post, I still can't see anything but I can copy the link while in edit mode and paste it into my browser to see the video.
What's going on here!
Should be fine now Spock. Your member group was being blocked for some reason... All good now!
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Thanx Silver. That will be a useful resource for editors of those languages.
As for the Hermit problem I think I would prefer either a same-named NPC list page. We could put small images of corresponding NPC body shots to help readers make the correct association. With regards to the template I think less options is better in this case for the less savvy among editors.
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Ah ok Flix! Haha. I couldn't remember the conversation. Took me too long to get back to this topic. Cheers!
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Well thought out regarding templates. I agree.
As for help later feel free to let me know. I can try to follow along as you replace images that only I can delete. As for what you said about Khral's, I agree. It can be deleted as well as the images. Feel free to. Otherwise let me know and I will.
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So you DID run a batch convert, I thought so.
Schot, the 4 I listed in post #15 look especially bad, you might check those to start with.
Yup! I did. I think I posted that somewhere else in the past 2 weeks somewhere. Thanx for the pic reference!
The only benefit would be to replace png with jpg but in order to maintain contribution credit I would need editors to update their own images.
That is exactly why I resurrected this thread. I'll do it for the sets and quest dialogs would take care of themselves as we apply the new Template. I know there were other contributors who won't do it as they are not currently around, but I can at least clean up after myself. Might as well replace JPGs to GIFs for item stat images - they are smaller and look the same if not better.
>Can you link to jpgs that you suspect looked better in the past please? I have all images backed up from before I ran the batch process. I'm curious about how much change occured.
The one that tipped me, personally, was this one:
http://www.sacredwiki.org/index.php/File:Megalcarwen_bonus.jpg
Not a horrendous image, but quite messy and reported filesize is 89KB.
The one I have on harddrive looks like this:
The filesize is... 88KB! Means, no space saved.
Not that I encourage you to run a restoration with any of my files, as I intend to replace them anyway (GIFs for such images weight about 8-9KB and that IS some improvement).
The ones Flix listed were exceptionally hurt by the conversion - mostly because they were quite bad to begin with and the change made them illegible. In fact, I'm thinking about undertaking a project to make new images for Unique items - for some of those picture replacing them is the only way to make a difference. Not sure how good of idea it is though, but if you won't be able to do a thing about the current quality in may be necessary.
Thanx you two. I pulled up Seyr's Klinge from my backup of images preserved before I ran the batch process and this is how it used to look like:
And how it looks now:
It was indeed in rough shape from the start though the conversion didn't help. Overall though, had we known then what we know now, they never would have been uploaded as jpeg. Granted, things were moving so fast. There was just no way I could control the flow, lol. Ultimately, we decided "flow" was more important than accuracy at the time. A lot has changed now. We know so much more and S3 will be different. ^^
I support your idea to make new images, and to make GIF the standard format for images with stats/text. I can help if you want.
In terms of preserving contribution credit, notice that for the unique items, most images are from the "pre-modern" time or whatever you want to call it, in the early days when a ton of images were added all at once into the Wiki's database. They don't actually HAVE a proper image page with an uploader credit. They're just kind of...there, not searchable and unable to be formatted like the newer images.
NOTE ABOUT FILE SIZE: The Wiki seems to display the old file size, even when it's actually changed. For example, the Megalcarwen's image that used to be 88kb and seems to be still be the same size, is actually 20kb when downloaded to my computer. So there was a file size improvement.
The question is, was it really worth having shabby looking images? Saving 60k, even a thousand times over, is only 60MB.
Thank you for your suggestion, Flix, I'll keep it in mind. As of now, I'll start on my own (by editing my own past contributions) and see how it goes. Thing is, there are a lot of item pages that can use new stat pictures - most of Uniques, all Unlocks and some Legendaries - about 200 (yeah, two hundred, probably more) total. At the first glance it looks like enough work for everyone, especially considering that GIFs are only good looking when they are custom-tailored (if you simply save a screenshot as GIF without editing, its 256 color limitation would show its downside). On the other hand, once I make a couple os stat GIFs, I'll have a solid template for them and the rest would be fast to make (It was this way with set stats, that are heavily edited, but after the first few were very easy to do). So the best way seems to start and see how fast I'd be a getting them done and how fast they would be at getting on my nerves. If I find myself being too slow or get tired of looking at similar pictures for days on end, I'd let you know. Besides, you probably have other ongoing projects or just ideas you want to implement and they should have priority over re-doing something that already exists.I support your idea to make new images, and to make GIF the standard format for images with stats/text. I can help if you want.
>The question is, was it really worth having shabby looking images? Saving 60k, even a thousand times over, is only 60MB.
That's an old question and I remember myself and Schot discussing it for quite some time... to little actual result. Sacred Wiki is very picture-heavy resource, which on one hand demands those picture to be smaller on order to make pages load faster, on the other hand - it is exactly graphic side of the wiki that first catches reader's eye and defines the first impression. And, sadly, if the quality of these pictures is lacking, the first impression is that the contributing team is lacking editing qualities and can't make these things better... which is as far from being true as it can get. What's worse, our subject does nothing to redeem the situation - I mean, Sacred is not WoW or Diablo or DOTA - so people sort of expect that a not-so-hyped-up title of dubious reputation would have nobody but a couple of crazy freaks caring about it. It would have been really cool if wiki was able to change this opinion, like people seeing very well-done site and thinking that a game that has such talented community must have something to it.
Sorry, I digressed. I always wondered if it's worth trying to save space by reducing quantity, not quality. Mind you, I'm not proposing to reduce the amount of images, by maybe reducing the filesize by lowering picture's resolution instead of over-compressing it is a viable solution? I mean, some time ago Schot said that the wiki is meant to be viewed at 1280 width, so do we really need to have full HD pics stored? The quest template is meant to display camera images with no more than 400px width, so I guess that 640x480 or even less is enough for pictures uploaded for this purpose (nice to have it a bit bigger for those who couldn't quite puzzle the picture out on quest page and went to image page for details, but no use making it bigger than preview wiki generates here). What do you think? Can such approach be used for having crisp and clear images without demanding too much space?
The batch process was defintely worth it. Just a few kinks to work out. It was more for resizing the large jpeg quest screenshots and such than for the stat boxes that we saw a big benefit. Many screenshots were 1-2MB and came down to about 300-500kb.
I agree with both your takes on the importance of quality at SacredWiki. It's something I always strive for. I don't always get it "right" the first time but that's the beauty of SacredWiki. There's always room for improvement.
I'm also a fan of less pictures and less than full screen sized images at HD and I think that should be done for Sacred 3. We'll need to work out some standards for sure...Well, I have one more question for you, Schot: What exactly is this switch you turned to restrict the upload of PNG images? I understood it as applying a file-extension and file-size filter on upload, which prohibits big PNG files from being loaded into the wiki. Is it so? Or is it more complex than that? Or you just personally advised us not to do it in the future but applied no technical restrictions? It's just that some time ago you thought about using PNG-8 instead of GIF, and I wonder just how much it is possible. Little PNG icons that are less than 10KB load fine (I already added a couple of Dialogue portraits that weren't in your gallery), but what about bigger things? What kind of restrictions do we have to comply with while uploading PNG images?
On a side note - for item stats PNG-8 and GIF make for almost identical filesize (plus or minus half-KB is not a considerable difference), so I can just stick to GIFs. Still, sometimes (not always, for some reason) PNG-8 turn out slightly smaller, so it's useful to know how much welcome they are.
Well the most relevant answer to your question is probably that this topic should be closed and is no longer valid, lol. However, I've kept it open to allow everyone to voice their opinions in case I needed to change my mind. Which I did. I do like using png for certain things like icons. At the time of this topics creation I had in fact been working on a set of png icons so I needed to re-enable png upload. After some time editors understood the importance of file sizes and this png problem became less of a problem. What I've learned over the years though is that old problems can reappear when new editors join the community. For the most part it requires us to teach the same lessons every so often. I'd love an easier solution to integrate new editors. An Editor's FAQ would be handy. Though I haven't had the time to get into that.
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In conclusion I advise that we only use PNG-24 for icons which, in general, should be no larger than 20kb in file size(I think). PNG-8 or GIF for images that have 256 colours or less such as stat boxes and should be not larger than 40kb in my experience. In determing when to use Gif or PNG-8, my personal "rule of thumb" is if I think I can count how many colours are in the image I want to save then I should use GIF or PNG-8. And then JPEG saved at 75%(or lower?) for screenshots that are no larger in dimensions than 1280 by 1024 and no larger than 300kb in file size.
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Nice. I see you've found yourself cozy project to work on Silver. I like these kinds of projects. Sprucing up the place.
Is it worthwhile to consider a template in place of images for this project? I believe we already have most of the icons required... Just a thought. -
Amazing. Phenominal work Pesmontis! I never expected to see this style enter the world of Sacred. Cheers to you!
Restarted and made a seraphim shopper, no robot dog gear?
in Sacred 2 Console (XBOX and PS3)
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Oooooh yeah. This was the reason why I preferred Temple Guardian shoppers. Other classes didn't weren't able to buy Temple Guardian stuff.