User talk:Peralta/Map Project

What happened to the ones that were done on the first line? -- Johnny Twotoes 02:07, 4 September 2012 (BST)

Had to remove a few as I went along so I could check the map. I see you're working on it already.Charles Whipplebotum 02:14, 6 September 2012 (BST)

This is as far as it goes. Damn man, you churned through about 9500 blocks of land in under a month o.O -- Johnny Twotoes 02:17, 6 September 2012 (BST)

Awesome work. And I do mean awesome, as in, inducing awe. Can't say I can recall ever having seen anyone singlehandedly undertake such a large project in so little time on the wiki. —Aichon— 05:02, 6 September 2012 (BST)

Credit where credit is due, the idea was mine and fun and all, but the bulk of the work was done by Charles, who inspired more awe in me than I can recall ever having experienced before. -- Johnny Twotoes 05:10, 6 September 2012 (BST)

It's so close to having all the suburbs on the map! Is there not some way to increase the inclusion limit, or even make a single exception? --Klexur 05:17, 6 September 2012 (BST)

Pretty sure that involves Kevan, and I don't see it happening :( We can use them on suburb pages tho, individually, or in quadrants? -- Johnny Twotoes 05:22, 6 September 2012 (BST)

Have you thought about excluding a building type or two from the map? There are 234 hotels/motels and about the same number of libraries. Perhaps make them brown or reddish-green (I know reddish-green is not a color but you know what I mean). You could eliminate 500 or so template calls. Only other thing I can think of i tto exclude the corner burbs. Nobody cares much for them anyway. ~ _{05:30, 6 September 2012 (UTC)}

Maybe we can distill it down to a TRP status map, but that will probably mean making a new template for each suburb, since we're keeping these for future projects (and it's still kind of nice and 500 template calls won't cut it, since we're missing about 17% of the map right now). Excluding the corners really is against the whole idea, but any other ideas are always welcome. -- Johnny Twotoes 13:52, 6 September 2012 (BST)

Yeah the corners thing was said half jokingly. I tried trimming down some of the original code last night but with no success. I'll take a look at some other things when I have a moment. The whole danger report system relies on lots of moving parts which means more templates are being expanded than you are probably aware of. I'm pretty sure Rooster made them as lean and efficient as possible when he created the system, bu you never know. The fact the User namespace was used rather than Template namespace probably is causing additional isses but its way too late to fix that now. Even if redirect templates are made (i.e. Template:xx,yy) I don't think it will help. If we can get it working, I have one request. Can you make the map 800x800 rather than 1000x1000? I don't like side-scrolling over to view the entire map.~ _{16:02, 6 September 2012 (UTC)}

We've looked into all of that, and since I was the one that wrote the base code that this all operates on and I already tried trimming as much as I could find that's unnecessary, you'll have a hard time condensing it further. The two things eating up space at this point are the names of the DangerReports and the variables contained within them. Since we can't go changing the variables around without gutting the entire DangerReport system, the only thing I can think of that would help would be to have Thegeneralbot move all 10,000 of the DangerReport pages to their corresponding coordinates (e.g. User:DangerReport/xx,yy), rather than their names, then set up the names as redirects to the coordinates. After that, it would be good if it could go through all 100 of these templates and replace the names with their corresponding coordinates. The space savings from doing so would be pretty darn close to making this thing possible, I would think. Otherwise, yeah, if we cut some information by only doing TRPs or the like we could probably have some success. —Aichon— 16:55, 6 September 2012 (BST)

Now that I think of it, having Thegeneralbot edit the message for out of date blocks to be something like, "This block needs to be updated," instead of, "This report has not been updated in over a month. Please update if you can," may make a big difference. At this point now, pretty much any improvements will need to happen in the DangerReport, rather than in the map's code. —Aichon— 17:08, 6 September 2012 (BST)

The map now is 800x800. Purely aesthetical question: could we get rid of the white space in between each suburb? I'd also like to point out that what's breaking the map is not the character limit, but rather the amount of template calls ;) -- Johnny Twotoes 17:36, 6 September 2012 (BST)

There is no character limit, other than what your browser can load. As for the whitespace, sure, give them a nice margin:0px probably. That said, I think it looks better with them, otherwise you wouldn't be able to tell where the suburbs were easily. —Aichon— 17:50, 6 September 2012 (BST)

Be my guest, I tried and messed up (I always hated margins and borders and everything around cells...) -- Johnny Twotoes 18:06, 6 September 2012 (BST)

Regarding variables, would it be possible to add new variables rather than changing existing ones? For example, Johnny's map uses the {{{template}}} variable to pass through specific formatting. Could a new varaible be added named {{{t}}} without screwing anything up? If so, I figure we can cut ~4800 bytes from the map (7*~70)100. Might not be quite enough, but at this point, I think every byte counts. ~ _{18:05, 6 September 2012 (UTC)}

Well, if you were to add a {{{t}}} variable to all 10,000 DangerReports (as opposed to replacing the {{{template}}} variable, at a minimum you would be adding 8 characters to each DangerReport (i.e. ), while you'd only be shaving 7 characters per template call (i.e. template vs. t), so it would actually result in a net increase of 10,000 characters in the size of the inclusions, thus eliminating a suburb or two, I think. If you were to outright replace the {{{template}}} variable with a {{{t}}} variable, you'd save 7 characters in each DangerReport (i.e. 70,000 characters), plus an additional 7 characters in each template call of the DangerReports (i.e. another 70,000). Unfortunately, that would also mean needing to track down every single transclusion of the DangerReports that specifies the {{{template}}} variable and changing them as well. —Aichon— 19:03, 6 September 2012 (BST)

Note: Only the buildings use templates ;) Empty lots haven't been included, so it wouldn't be 10.000 templates, rather something of 5.000 ;) -- Johnny Twotoes 23:26, 6 September 2012 (BST)

True that. Nonetheless, that's just a matter of scale, not of which way the scale weighs. —Aichon— 01:09, 7 September 2012 (BST)

How about moving this project to the User:DangerReport namespace. Then, you'd be able to use templates formatted like {{../The Blackmore Building}} instead of {{User:DangerReport:The Blackmore Building}}. That ought to shave off thousands of bytes from each template call. ~ _{01:17, 7 September 2012 (UTC)}

Ooh, good idea. That would work. —Aichon— 02:34, 7 September 2012 (BST)

I love the creative machine you guys are when motivated :) Vapor, the idea is superbe, but it does mean changing 5.000 temps again... -- Johnny Twotoes 03:30, 7 September 2012 (BST)

Unfortunately it will take some more work but not an unreasonable amount more. You'll need to create User:DangerReport/A and then copy/paste all 100 of your demo pages to the User:DangerReport namespace. Before pasting, take the code into a word processor and do a Find and Replace All function, replacing the words "User:DangerReport" with "..".

This is just an asthetic suggestion, but I'd reccomend a different naming schema than Demo# when creating pages in the DangerReport namespace. Maybe something like User:DangerReport/Suburb1. This would also be a good time to come up with a good name for your map, unless you want to keep calling it Map Project.

Glad to have been a help. Aichon did most of the really helpful stuff and Whipplebotham gets big big kudos for filling out all those map templates. ~ _{04:02, 7 September 2012 (UTC)}

The Twotoes-Whipplebotum Malton Danger Center is the name. That's it :P -- Johnny Twotoes 04:05, 7 September 2012 (BST)

Might I suggest a slightly shorter name? Perhaps User:DangerReport/MaltonDangerCenter. I think the two of you absolutely deserve credit for your creation, but I think it would perhaps be better presented with an introductory section above the map rather than in the title. ~ _{04:25, 7 September 2012 (UTC)}