General Discussion

Maidhc O Casain · Nov 18, 2011

Already voted YES for sticky-ing DWI and MP; second the props for IW and SK!

(I tried to change the ownership of the 'Welcome' thread I stickied to Living PF Juge, but got a message saying I'm not allowed to do that).

jkason · Nov 18, 2011

Definite props to both for all the hard work!

SK, the table I'm thinking of is here:

Character Status - L4W Wiki

The Role, Approved, and Notes fields don't seem like something we need (possibly also 'Status,' since I'm not sure there's enough retired / dead PCs that we need to sort them out), but the others are pretty much everything we'd be looking for.

It looks like that table pulls from values of pages using the L4W Character Template. That templates a much more elaborate one, visually, than I think we've been going for with the LPF sheets.

Basically, I was trying to figure out how to make the field defines they have there, but make it essentially look like the Basic Info box we have at the top of the current wiki sheets, adding in fields for player and location. I got about as far as identifying the background color, then got hopelessly lost trying to parse the page source / figure out the Templates Wiki instructions to get what I was after.

If it's an easy puzzle for you, it seems like it would take care of a lot of character tracking automatically on the wiki and save some time in the long run.

If it's a major pain, I'm not sure it's worth the backbending.

Satin Knights · Nov 19, 2011

Good news is "Yep, I can do that."
Bad news is "It is just a glorified hand coded table."

Looking at the code with edit, it is just a wiki style table, with the only redeeming factor being that columns can be sorted. I checked the "7 Rabbit" character and confirmed that the info on the character sheet is not being imported to the table. The table is at third level, and the character is fifth.

So, for the moment, my glorified hand coded tables and divs are just as good.

What we need is a category processor that reads templates. But, I cannot find any of that. On the Approved Characters category, there is something that is doing a for(1,8) get file, get first image, print first image or 50 chars of text, endfor. But I cannot find where it is. Once I find that and clone, I could create new categories that would do the equivalent of the Roll Call page for the DWI by a person just adding the DWI category to their character. Could actually do that now, but only the first eight characters in would get their pics used. The rest would be just an alphabetical list.

jackslate45 · Nov 19, 2011

SK: does the wiki have a database you could use for that table? Ideally, you would have a table for each character, and have it update when new characters get added, ones quiet etc etc.

or would re-fitting everything into a database be more work than I am thinking?

Satin Knights · Nov 19, 2011

So far as I have seen, wiki's have databases as the backend storage for the data, but do not have any access to the database functions for the wiki user or script programmer. The scripts are very, very simple text substitutions, if then statements, and a very few math expressions. And since the text substitutions can be both recursive and interpreted, they are comparatively slow to any real language. If you cannot do something with cut|grep|awk|sed, you are not likely to accomplish it within a wiki. They are designed to be very simplistic and static once the editing is finished.

And the coding is just plain ugly. The eidolon template is about as complicate as I would want to get. A spare space or new line in that one, and it does things you don't expect it to do.

Obligatory: Just my opinion

Besides, free form for our character sheets allows more full and complete sheets. If you take a look at Arianna, she just doesn't fit if I tried to squeeze her into normal fields a character sheet would have that are chunked from a database. Too much is weird. And auto calculating, nope.

Maidhc O Casain · Nov 19, 2011

I was a big proponent of the current "free form" sheet, primarily because of my experiences with LEB and the complaints I heard about their sheets. Once you get used to them, those sheets are . . . well . . . still a bear for a lot of people. Updating a character takes a considerable amount of time, and accidentally changing any of the coding syntax results in something really ugly. Plus, when you open up those character templates to edit your character it can be really intimidating.

I muddled through over on LEB, but editing my character was always a chore and it seemed like there was always someone asking the judges for help fixing the format on their sheets.

While the end result of our sheet is not nearly as decorative, it's much simpler for the average user to maintain.

Systole · Nov 19, 2011

I don't think we need a hard coded sheet, but if someone could design a block of code that listed out classes and maybe current availability, it would be a good thing.

Satin Knights · Nov 19, 2011

That was what I was taking a quick look at doing. There doesn't seem to be a way to grab X information from all the pages that are sitting in a category, that is public for scripters to use. The category pages are doing a little bit of what I want, but don't show me any source code that I could expand upon. They also stop at reading eight files in the category.

Damage Inc. · Nov 21, 2011

First things first...hello and congrats on the upgrade.

So I'm having some issues regarding the wiki. For some reason the wiki won't allow me to add catagories to my character sheet. I've been trying to place the character in question into the Unfinished Characters catagory as he's not ready for approval and I'm still deciding on who'll be my first character for play. Any help with this issue would be greatly appreciated.

*EDIT: WOW, can't believe I forgot his name Jarak Crownblood.

perrinmiller · Nov 21, 2011

When you are editing, go to "Visual" view instead of "Source". Then when you click and type in the little box that says "Add a category" you can get a drop-down to select the ones you want.