Angel's Legacy: Seeking Help!
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@Chime said in Angel's Legacy: Seeking Help!:
@ixokai said in Angel's Legacy: Seeking Help!:
Man I hate you and everything you stand for. (Okay no I don't, really, but I do :))
Mediawiki's includes and tables and templates are a god-send for creative-wiki'ing and if you reduce my character's wiki to just some markdown text on a thing I'd just not bother contributing, as a player.
I'm still looking at alternative wiki technologies, as yes-- I understand the work-flow of game wiki use very well.
Markdown actually has tables already-- but they work best as tables, rather than a layout crutch. Arguably, that's a very very good thing.
So:
- Templates: These are a nice feature. MediaWiki templates are shitty. We can do better.
Never seen a wiki system do better, and I've looked, but not recently, admittedly. MediaWiki Templates are incredibly powerful. I don't care one way or the other about the syntax, its the functionality that is key.
- Tables: We have tables for tabular data. Tables for page-layout are wrong and should not work; we can use CSS'd div/span for that and it helps promote a cleaner, saner, more uniform look.
I don't want to code html and css in my hobby, I'm annoyed enough I have to do it in my day job. I'm not entirely sure I agree with the idea of 'uniform' being a good thing. Having a nice default uniform look is good, but I really enjoy some of the creative stuff players have made out of their wikis.
- Includes: These are purely a special case of templates, so we can ignore it if we have a working template system.
I disagree. Templates are, if anything, a special case of inclusion. With inclusion, for example, I can divide a page into several sub-components for easier editing and management, and then include them together into a final main page.
I really like doing that, especially when my wiki gets complicated.
More importantly, I can do this all on a per-page basis, instead of it being a site-wide thing.
Are you trying to do anything not addressed by that? I believe strongly in giving people the creative tools they need to further MUSHing as a modern, collaborative literary form.
I'm not really trying to do anything, I'm usually fairly idle as a wiki-er. But I really like some of the work others do. And like sharing and borrowing that and sometimes adding those bits to my page, sometimes improving them and changing them. Mediawiki is a very powerful platform. Its hard to go against it feature for feature and come away not looking weak.
Especially if you're now putting a burden on all the players of learning a new platform and how to bend it to their will. You have to show a lot of positive to make that seem worth-while.
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@ixokai said in Angel's Legacy: Seeking Help!:
Having a nice default uniform look is good, but I really enjoy some of the creative stuff players have made out of their wikis.
I don't. Half the time when someone gets 'creative' I can't even see half their page because it won't fit on my screen. A wiki is supposed to be a resource but few players alter their templates with other people viewing it in mind.
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@TNP
That or they just don't know how to do the CSS and such, and so you have stuff that overlaps other stuff and other issues of coding. -
@TNP said in Angel's Legacy: Seeking Help!:
@ixokai said in Angel's Legacy: Seeking Help!:
Having a nice default uniform look is good, but I really enjoy some of the creative stuff players have made out of their wikis.
I don't. Half the time when someone gets 'creative' I can't even see half their page because it won't fit on my screen. A wiki is supposed to be a resource but few players alter their templates with other people viewing it in mind.
The thing is, if it is "merely" a resource, I don't think people will put much effort into it.
If it feels like work, I won't do it. I'll just throw up a picture and then ignore it forever after.
If, instead, the wiki is an alternate, parallel creative outlet, then between RP, while waiting for approval, during idle time, I might go play on the wiki and make my page more interesting.
Yes, some people go too far and make stuff inaccessible. That's when Staff steps in and says don't do that.
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@packrat: what constitutes Western Europe? Like. I'm a stupid American with no geography background.
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@Cobaltasaurus
Western Europe would be say, Portugal, Spain, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, maybe Austria, likely also Denmark, Norway and Sweden along with smaller nations such as Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands, etc. About as many people as are in the entire USA and with roughly equivelent economic clout which makes the lack of an archangel an odd thing, likely significant to the setting somehow.
Edit: Following the links, they are including Germany in central Europe, which is a definite possibility. Still a weirdly huge chunk of territory (population/wealth) wise to not be covered by anyone. Also rather interesting if Angel-verse history is at all matching real world history, surely Britain during the period of Pax Brittanica would have warranted an archangel wanting to have charge?
That said in the first 3 books we see an Archangel incapacitated by somebody throwing knives into their eyes, I do not see anything which suggests a dozen sufficiently willing to risk death soldiers with high powered firearms and hatchets (for post incapacitation dismembering) could not bring down an Archangel in the right circumstances. Did Alt-Napoleon drive angels out of western Europe or something? Who knows.
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@ixokai said in Angel's Legacy: Seeking Help!:
Never seen a wiki system do better, and I've looked, but not recently, admittedly. MediaWiki Templates are incredibly powerful. I don't care one way or the other about the syntax, its the functionality that is key.
They are. But typical mush players are unable to:
- Make new templates
- Effectively use templates
- Even manage to construct a table without leaving the decaying detritus of hundreds of un-closed tags to foul up the wiki
- Construct a pleasing view
Yes, really. They can't. I agree, there is a fair percent of power users who do quite well. Good on you if you are on of them. Most people do not need or want that though.
I don't want to code html and css in my hobby, I'm annoyed enough I have to do it in my day job. I'm not entirely sure I agree with the idea of 'uniform' being a good thing. Having a nice default uniform look is good, but I really enjoy some of the creative stuff players have made out of their wikis.
MarkDown is a lot easier than html and a lot easier than MediaWiki.
Are you able to post to this forum? Congrats, you're using MarkDown.
I believe in there being a firm separation between content and presentation. Presentation is the responsibility of the game owner (@Cobaltasaurus and anyone she designates) and content is the responsibility of all the players, collectively.
Content here means words. If you must use a picture to define your character, you're doing it wrong. If you must use 120pt blinking bright magenta on lime green Comic Sans to express your character, a lot of us would rather you didn't.
I agree, some customizability is a good idea, but layout details don't need tables or any of that nonsense.
I disagree. Templates are, if anything, a special case of inclusion. With inclusion, for example, I can divide a page into several sub-components for easier editing and management, and then include them together into a final main page.
I think you aren't understanding. That's okay; I know what you want to do, and I agree that templates-and-inclusion is an important feature. I disagree with your terminology, but at the end of the day that doesn't matter.
I really like doing that, especially when my wiki gets complicated.
Maybe we should be structuring these things differently. Not making an assertion-- just suggesting we need to dream bigger.
More importantly, I can do this all on a per-page basis, instead of it being a site-wide thing.
For some games and types of pages that is appropriate. For some it isn't. I agree that that level of per-page configurability is a useful tool, but I'm quite disgusted with how most game wikis end up. I'm not the content manager, though.
I'm not really trying to do anything, I'm usually fairly idle as a wiki-er. But I really like some of the work others do. And like sharing and borrowing that and sometimes adding those bits to my page, sometimes improving them and changing them. Mediawiki is a very powerful platform. Its hard to go against it feature for feature and come away not looking weak.
@Cobaltasaurus is quite welcome to grab a free wiki site from where-ever, if that is what is decided is best.
I'm not hosting any new PHP apps. If you don't like that, open your own hosting business. Mediawiki is a sick, bloated beast and I want it gone. Ultimately, all of your concerns are entirely irrelevant to that.
Especially if you're now putting a burden on all the players of learning a new platform and how to bend it to their will.
People will learn or move or stop playing. Considering most players never learned MediaWiki, I see this as a very low bar to pass.
What is needed:
- Basic MarkDown text structure and styling
- Linking between pages
- Construction of 'templates' (which are parametric text-inclusions; includes are just templates with no args)
- Basic control over CSS within a page and group of pages
Helpful abstractions that we probably want:
- Categories and dynamically generated tables of categorical data
- Tagged page-relation types (maybe; e.g. page character A is memberOf page organization B)
- Image linking.
- In-wiki access control
What is very much not needed:
- A PHP app
- MediaWiki syntax
- DPL syntax
- Tables for layout
- Thousands of gaudy image-covered character pages with no real content
You have to show a lot of positive to make that seem worth-while.
No, I don't. I'm done with media wiki. Host it elsewhere.
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@Chime said in Angel's Legacy: Seeking Help!:
I don't want to code html and css in my hobby, I'm annoyed enough I have to do it in my day job. I'm not entirely sure I agree with the idea of 'uniform' being a good thing. Having a nice default uniform look is good, but I really enjoy some of the creative stuff players have made out of their wikis.
MarkDown is a lot easier than html and a lot easier than MediaWiki.
Are you able to post to this forum? Congrats, you're using MarkDown.
Hi. I know what Markdown is.
I believe in there being a firm separation between content and presentation. Presentation is the responsibility of the game owner (@Cobaltasaurus and anyone she designates) and content is the responsibility of all the players, collectively.
Content here means words. If you must use a picture to define your character, you're doing it wrong. If you must use 120pt blinking bright magenta on lime green Comic Sans to express your character, a lot of us would rather you didn't.
Sorry. If this is your philosophy on a wiki, I have no interest in it at all. I hope any content that gets put on it is done in an automated fashion and pulls out of the mush because I'm not interested in contributing.
You have to show a lot of positive to make that seem worth-while.
No, I don't. I'm done with media wiki. Host it elsewhere.
Oh, that's your right.
@Cobaltasaurus I know a guy who hosts several games and is quite happy to host mediawiki and mush and... whatever else. Super reliable and helpful. Want his email address?
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@ixokai Thank you for so eloquently reminding me why I've largely left this community; we're looking to create different things entirely. I wish you (and probably @Cobaltasaurus) the best with that.
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@ixokai @Chime: Can we take a step back for a moment?
I consider both of you friends have known both of you for a while now. I respect both of your opinions. @ixokai is right in that MediaWiki is a powerful tool with a lot of things people can do to customize it. However, I agree with @Chime that it gets used poorly. I've seen more than enough wikis with the pages partially destroyed because of bad code on them (as in only part of the page even loads, and the rest gets eaten). Or has left over things going on that could be fixed with a little bit better code.
Way before @Coin did it on Eldritch (and yes I'm a little bit salty that Eldritch gets hailed as the first MU* to do this), I had set standards on Darkwater for how wikis could look. Hell I even made it so Reno has a standard for how the wikipages were supposed to look (though this got tossed to the wayside somewhere along the way)-- having gotten disgusted with the mismash from HM. Even if I go with MediaWiki, pages will have standards and will be required to look like they match the rest of the wiki. I like the creativity of some pages. But I also prefer a clean wiki that doesn't give me whiplash when going from one page to the next.
I am more than willing and happy to look at non-MediaWiki wikis. I'm also happy to go with MediaWiki.
To be open and honest, however. I do not like being tossed back and forth, the way things have gone down. I feel like you're both going: "It's my way or I'll abandon you Cobalt!" Or worse: "I know Cobalt will do things my way."
I'm a person with her own thoughts and opinions.
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@Cobaltasaurus
Eldritch was never the first place to do it. Neither was Darkwater, to be honest. I played on, uhm, Devilshire? And Devilshire didn't have stringent rules, but deviating too hard got you a hardcore frownyfase.
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@Coin said in Angel's Legacy: Seeking Help!:
@Cobaltasaurus
Eldritch was never the first place to do it. Neither was Darkwater, to be honest. I played on, uhm, Devilshire? And Devilshire didn't have stringent rules, but deviating too hard got you a hardcore frownyfase.
I'm not saying Darkwater was the first. Star Trek: Gamma One, also did it. They actually had REALLY strict rules. Only certain people were allowed to add new content do it. Character pages had set items that could go on (no songs, no contacts, etc). Only logs allowed for the longest time were episode logs. Etc.
I'm just a saltybutt.
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@Packrat said in Angel's Legacy: Seeking Help!:
That said in the first 3 books we see an Archangel incapacitated by somebody throwing knives into their eyes, I do not see anything which suggests a dozen sufficiently willing to risk death soldiers with high powered firearms and hatchets (for post incapacitation dismembering) could not bring down an Archangel in the right circumstances. Did Alt-Napoleon drive angels out of western Europe or something? Who knows.
Note, that I believe Michaela is considered the weakest of the Archangel's as well. I don't think that say Raphael or Neha would be incapacitated so easily. Michaela is also not a warrior. She's a manipulator and a betrayer. I still hesitate to set anything in outside of the US because I don't know those cultures or that slang. If we put it somewhere outside of the US, I'd want a native of that area to put in some work on the wiki/in-game-news files, with info on the local culture, and slang, and stuff.
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Whoa whoa whoa.
@Cobaltasaurus said in Angel's Legacy: Seeking Help!:
To be open and honest, however. I do not like being tossed back and forth, the way things have gone down. I feel like you're both going: "It's my way or I'll abandon you Cobalt!" Or worse: "I know Cobalt will do things my way."
Neither of those were intended at all.
I was speaking as a player. As a player, I am not interested in contributing to the type of thing @Chime seems to want to do. I'm not against her doing it, and if you like it, I'm not against you doing it. I don't care about the wiki very much: I wanna play a fucking Angel.
i can haz angel? u can haz ixokai.
That is a truism.
The kind of wiki @Chime seems to want, I just am not interested in. So, as a player, I would do whatever was absolutely required of me and ignore it otherwise, and then go play my character.
That's all I was saying.
I'm a person with her own thoughts and opinions.
Didn't even kinda think to suggest otherwise, however, I am also a person with my own thoughts and opinions, and all I expressed were exactly those things.
That said:
@ixokai said in Angel's Legacy: Seeking Help!:
Didn't even kinda think to suggest otherwise, however, I am also a person with my own thoughts and opinions, and all I expressed were exactly those things.
However one thing I did NOT like was the appearance of a site-admin pressuring on what you wanna do, so I offered an alternative. That's all. Take it, leave it. Your decision, I'm not invested either way.
(I don't begrudge a site admin deciding what he/she wants to host, but in today's climate, that shouldn't be a factor in your decision of what you want to run). There's plenty of options, some extremely good and free, so there's no obligation to go with any particular opinionated site admin if you decide otherwise. My 'hey I know someone else' was: if you decide otherwise, I know a guy. Not, 'pick me or we will fite'
@Cobaltasaurus said in Angel's Legacy: Seeking Help!:
Way before @Coin did it on Eldritch (and yes I'm a little bit salty that Eldritch gets hailed as the first MU* to do this), I had set standards on Darkwater for how wikis could look. Hell I even made it so Reno has a standard for how the wikipages were supposed to look (though this got tossed to the wayside somewhere along the way)-- having gotten disgusted with the mismash from HM. Even if I go with MediaWiki, pages will have standards and will be required to look like they match the rest of the wiki. I like the creativity of some pages. But I also prefer a clean wiki that doesn't give me whiplash when going from one page to the next.
See I got no problem with standards. Even on Eldritch, which had some of the hardest rules of conformity, (maybe unfairly said so), I made some significant changes on my character pages, including personal templates (includes, or whatever, I'm not gonna argue terminology here) and my page fit the theme and yet was distinct and original.
Its not an either/or: chaos or conformity. But it does take a willingness of staff to step in and say: no, you have gone too far.
@Chime said in Angel's Legacy: Seeking Help!:
@ixokai Thank you for so eloquently reminding me why I've largely left this community; we're looking to create different things entirely. I wish you (and probably @Cobaltasaurus) the best with that.
I don't know what to do with this remark. It feels like you're taking me not agreeing with what you want to do personally and that somehow I have given offense, and if so, I apologize. I was simply saying what interested me about wikis on mushes.
On mushes, I consider the wiki a multimedia creative alternate-path of expressing my character. Your vision seemed incompatible. Therefore, I'm just not interested in doing yours. That doesn't make yours wrong. It means I just don't want to do it. That's all.
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@ixokai on my tablet without my keyboard i apologize for bad typing:
Im sorry if i came across harsh or grouchy. i was a little flabbergasted and kinda felt the need to be like "woah, hangon a moment."
i told chime im willing to look at nonPHP wikis but also willing to go with mediawiki if thst turns out best. shell look at what she is willing to host and i will decide from there. if things are too different and hard to use i will find someone to host medizwiki3
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I feel that everyone is missing the important part of the wiki, it needs to have a template so that people can colour in their pretty pretty feathered wings. Here we go:
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Also a we need to outline what Angels are? Do they reproduce? (With themselves with angels, with mortals? (half angels?), or do they do something different? Or drop out of ether if another kicks the bucket?
I also assume: That this gamesi s going to make choices aboout the 'games Canon' being different' from the books?
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Not really, no, @Songtress. The books aren't like say the Anita Blake novels. The worldbuilding is pretty rock solid. Nothing needs to be outline on what Angels are or aren't. Angels are biological humanoid creatures. The older the get the less they need to eat, but if they don't gain energy (through food, sexual contact, etc) they will "fade" away. It's ... never really covered whether or not they poop. But, uh. I don't really care, either way.
We already know that Angels reproduce with other Angels. I don't think that Angels can reproduce with humans (though if they can I think that's where Hunterborn come from. OR Hunterborn come from very young vampires who can still reproduce). Basically it is said that Angels very, very, very rarely engage in sexual activity with humans. I have a feeling that Archangel's Heart, coming out late this year will tell us a little about where Hunterborn come from.
a) Humans are weak.
b) Angels are often arrogant, and other angels are prettier.
c) Humans are fragile compared to humans.
d) Angels live a long time, humans do not.Angels will sometimes have relations with vampires (and often do if they don't have angelic lovers), because vampirism makes you pretty(ier). However, vampires after a certain age (I don't remember what age specifically) can no longer reproduce. I need to reread Archangel's Blade, it comes up at the end of the book.
We do know, however, that Angels have a far, far, far lower birthrate than humans. They are generally less fertile than human beings are. Its something like a single Angel could be born in a century.
This is a theme note too:
Since Angel births are so rare children are protected immensely. It is one of two ancient laws that is considered absolute: Children are not to be hurt (some Angels feel that only Angelic children count, but almost all "not evil" Angels will never harm a child. Harming a human child is considered pushing into irredeemable territory. Harming an Angelic child gets you killed. Period.) The other ancient law is that sleeping angels (they go into a magical coma, kinda like vampiric torpor from VtR/VtM) are not to be harmed. Especially ancients.
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Ok. That's good to know @Cobaltasaurus . Cause OMG... Anita Blake levels of (SUPER SPECIAL EXCEPTION #387938289347293-- is old).
Alright cool. I just wanted to check. Cause I haven't read the series, but I also know that ALOT of books like that ,slide right in 'Anita Blake Territory' but I am glad this doesn't.
It does sound like an interesting series makes an ote on Amazon