User talk:Aichon

Aichon:Talk

ˈīˌkän :Talk

Announcement: I'm no longer active. My talk page is still your best bet to get in touch. —Aich on— 04:39, 15 December 2018 (UTC)

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New Idea

Hi,

For the past half hour or so, I've been brainstorming about linking the danger reports to the status of suburbs on the suburb map, but for the life of me, I can't figure it out.

The basic idea I had was to assign each status a certain value, which would be processed and result in a conclusion, for instance:

Rot Revive = +5 Safe = +3 Under attack = 0 Under Siege = -1 Ruined = -3 Pinata = -4 Unknown = -5

If the sum of all values is above X, the suburb is considered Safe, if it's between Y and X, it's considered Moderately Dangerous, etc.

Would such a thing be possible? :)

PB&J 17:29, 17 May 2016 (UTC)

You'd need a way to calibrate for proportion of buildings v open blocks, which can vary quite a lot from suburb to suburb, and would miss e.g. large groups of zombies that happen to be standing in open blocks, a situation I've recently encountered in East Becktown. And "unknown" statuses aren't indicative of zombie/survivor levels in-game, just that an area is underrepresented on the wiki. I've tried to make a system to "diagnose" suburbs this way based on EMR (see here, point 8). Bob Moncrief ^EBD•W! 18:05, 17 May 2016 (UTC)

Ignoring Bob's (entirely valid and worthy of consideration) points for the moment and simply answering your question, if we had one of the math extensions installed on the wiki, yup, it'd be basically just one line of code. But I'm afraid we don't, so were it anyone else asking me, I'd just say, "nope, not possible", but because it's you and I know you're willing to go to excruciating lengths to make cool things happen...yes, I think it actually is possible, but it'd be mighty tedious.

Just thinking off the top of my head (i.e. never done this before) doing that sort of math would mean crafting a sorta-recursive algorithm by creating a template for each of the possible values in the total range, so for your example, you'd need 1000 templates to cover every possible value from -500 to +500. Each of those templates would be hand-coded to understand which other values are reachable from it (e.g. Template208 would know it could jump to templates 213, 211, 208 (itself), 207, 205, 204, and 203, depending on what value it was given). A short example of how it would work would be something like:

You include Template0 and give it values A, B, and C as parameters to add together.
Template0 tells TemplateA to add parameters B and C
TemplateA tells TemplateA+B to add parameter C
TemplateA+B tells TemplateA+B+C to add nothing
TemplateA+B+C provides back A+B+C as the final answer
TemplateDangerLevel takes that final number and converts it into a status

So, just to provide some dry-coded pseudo-code (i.e. this is some rough logic that is not guaranteed to work or be anywhere close to correct) for how something like this might work for calculating the total of the first three blocks in a suburb (let's say our example blocks have values +3, 0, and -5):

You'd start things off by giving Template0 your individual block values and then passing the result into TemplateDangerLevel: {{TemplateDangerLevel|{{Template0|Block1Value|Block2Value|Block3Value|...|Block100Value}}}}
TemplateDangerLevel would have something like: {{switch|{{{1}}}|case: -500=very dangerous|case: -499=very dangerous| ... |case: 499=safe|case: 500=safe}}
Template0 would be like: {{if|{{{1|}}}|{{Template{{switch|{{{1}}}|case: 5=5|case: 3=3|case: 0=0|case: -1=-1|case: -3=-3|case: -4=-4|case: -5=-5}}|{{{2}}}|{{{3}}}| ... |{{{100}}}}}|0}}
Because Block1 had a value of 3, the above code would concatenate "Template" with "3" to then use Template3, which looks like: {{if|{{{1|}}}|{{Template{{switch|{{{1}}}|case: 5=8|case: 3=6|case: 0=3|case: -1=2|case: -3=0|case: -4=-1|case: -5=-2}}|{{{2}}}|{{{3}}}| ... |{{{100}}}}}|3}}
Because Block2 was 0, Template3 would call itself again, which would result in Template-2 being used (because 3 - 5 = -2): {{if|{{{1|}}}|{{Template{{switch|{{{1}}}|case: 5=3|case: 3=1|case: 0=-2|case: -1=-3|case: -3=-5|case: -4=-6|case: -5=-7}}|{{{2}}}|{{{3}}}| ... |{{{100}}}}}|-2}}
Because all of the parameters passed into Template-2 were empty, it would fail on the "if" statement and simply provide back "-2", which would be the final answer, which would then go into TemplateDangerLevel.

So, yes, it should be possible, but it'd be a real hassle, the wiki may break from it (I wouldn't know without testing it), and if someone decided to change the system later, it'd involve redoing all of those templates by hand. Not fun. But possible! —Aich on— 18:28, 17 May 2016 (UTC)

OK, I'll look through the entire idea tomorrow morning (pretty late here), but to comment on the last part: who is still going to change the system at this point? I mean, there are barely enough people active to keep the current system alive, one of the reasons the DC was designed 4 (!) years ago.

The whole point is to automate as much as possible. PB&J 19:59, 17 May 2016 (UTC)

Surely this would be easier with no ghost town criteria? --Rosslessness^{Want to complete a dangerous mission?} 19:30, 19 May 2016 (UTC)

Howdy

If its not too personal, how are the SOC doing? Where are you cruising about these days?--Rosslessness^{Want to complete a dangerous mission?} 19:31, 19 May 2016 (UTC)

We're doing about as well as can be expected, I think, given the state of the game. We're still on the stats page, so that should give you a rough idea of how our numbers are doing. Probably about half of our members hang out around our Darvall Heights home, working in that area full-time, while the other half go on whatever mission we're up to. Right now, we're in the southwest of Malton doing some work outside of our usual area, though we're probably at the point where we're going to head out soon, since we fully repaired the area, reset all of the repair costs, and are mostly just barricade strafing behind the handful of zombies doing stuff in the area (with the notable exception of one building). —Aich on— 19:36, 19 May 2016 (UTC)

Fixing my Sig

Hello my good sir! Would you help in fixing my sig please,it appears there's something wrong with it..I had hoped my sig would appear as {{User:Paynetrain/sig}} when you;re editing a page in which i have signed,but instead it appears as --- [[User:Paynetrain|P]][[User:Paynetrain|a]][[User:Paynetrain|y]][[User:Paynetrain|n]][[User:Paynetrain|e]][[User talk:Paynetrain|T]][[User talk:Paynetrain|r]][[User talk:Paynetrain|a]][[User talk:Paynetrain|i]][[User talk:Paynetrain|n]]'''([[FU]])''' --- and i know how much of an annoyance it can be when other wikizens are editing.I have tried fixing it,but for the life of me i can't do it....I changed my signature in preferences to {{User:Paynetrain/sig}} but when i save it comes as {{SUBST:User:Paynetrain/sig}}.can you help me fix this? While you're at it can you also fix any other mistakes I've made on my sig?i have a feeling its not supposed to be this long.lol P.S i already asked Bob about this,but hes kinda offline now...--P a y n e T r a i n^(FU) 17:13, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

Try changing your signature in preferences to {{SUBST:Nosubst|Paynetrain/Sig}}. For reasons I can't remember off the top of my head, you NEED to subst the signature, but doing so causes it to behave as you've seen, so we use Nosubst to undo that problem. And I'll try to find some time to look at your sig's code, but I'm at work and can't spare any time at this moment, so I can't make any promises. —Aich on— 17:19, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

Managed to find some time. You can find it at User:Aichon/Sandbox/Demo15. More or less, instead of having individual links and styles per letter, I grouped them up so that we could apply the links/styles to groups, meaning that we didn't have to repeat them once per letter. The only visible difference is that when you mouseover the letters in your name, there are now two links instead of ten. Otherwise, so far as I can see, it's entirely identical while being about 1/3 the code of the original. And we can slim it down even more if the "T" were to match the styling of the rest of "rain", but I'm not too worried about that. —Aich on— 17:39, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

MediaWiki’s been set (by default, via software update) not to allow templated sigs, so it’ll auto-subst any template included in the signature. People weren't too impressed by this, so manually substing the {{Nosubst}} wrapper is the workaround that was found & we (still) have— clunky, but easier than bothering Big Kahuna to change the wiki config.
Also, you’re far more willing to suffer fools gladly than I; I would probably just have told ’em to do their homework, considering the entire process is detailed under the Wiki Help linked on every page.

Hell, if you keep just giving ’em fish… _{or fire…} ᚱᛁᚹᛖᚾᚨᚾᛏ 19:45, 29 June 2016 (UTC)

Oh,awesome!! thanks man,I've been mulling over this for a while now....and Peralta just showed me the SUBST thing...Been going around asking people about this.lol...Thankyou for fixing my sig too! I owe you one man :) --PayneTrain^(FU) 17:52, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

Cycler

Stelar and me are having some trouble with this page. It's supposed to call on a East Becktown Defenders/QuoteXX page, with XX defined by the CURRENTHOUR, but it doesn't seem to take any inputs? Any help would be welcome. PB&J 14:33, 8 July 2016 (UTC)

Just tweaked it. See if that works for you. You were missing the | that separated the template's name from the parameter you were passing into it. —Aich on— 14:39, 8 July 2016 (UTC)

No further progress. The removal of that pipe was a desperate attempt :P PB&J 14:40, 8 July 2016 (UTC)

Oh, so is the problem that it's not actually cycling every hour? If so, the problem is likely that the page is cached by the wiki, which is something you can't really do much about. Previewing it will cause it to update in your preview...but not for everyone else. If you do a "silent save" (i.e. save the page with no edit made), it'll force the wiki's cache to reset, which should force it to update to the latest hour for everyone, but if you just refresh the page normally, it won't do much of anything, I'm afraid. The only other way around it is to load the page with a cache reset parameter in the URL. You can see an example of one in this edit to the BB4 page (look for the "action=purge" stuff), back when I had a countdown posted to the start of the BB4 event and wanted to provide people with a way to refresh the countdown. —Aich on— 14:46, 8 July 2016 (UTC)

The problem is that it's not taking any input. The text appearing on Template:EBDQuoteCycler is the default text for when there's no input. I know about the caching, I test everything in preview mode, saves the Recent Changes page a bit of work. PB&J 14:49, 8 July 2016 (UTC)

User talk:Aichon

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