User talk:The Rooster

Home Talk Bots Contribs Sandpit . . .

Use the '+' tab at the top in order to create a new talk section at the bottom. If I've come to you, let's keep the conversation there, if you're coming to me, I'll be replying here. The archive can be found here. The NT/Fort/Mall Status Map ...is lovely. Great work! ~ extropymine Talk | NW | 4Corners 22:33, 13 March 2009 (UTC) You think so? I can get a decent overview from the NT Status Map myself, but there's too many colours here and I find I have to concentrate on portions of the map to make heads or tails of it. How well are you able to cope? --  RoosterDragon  22:37, 13 March 2009 (UTC) Well, I stare at the NT Map a lot, so honestly it doesn't bug me anymore. However, I can see from a newbie POV that it might seem crowded or confusing. So... hmm. Personally, I never found the "flow" of colors in the dangermap to be particularly good. I like green (safe) to yellow (attack) to orange (siege) to red (ruined) as a degree of danger, but purple isn't an intuitive "hostile" color, and it's supposed to be "in zombie hands," which is pretty damned hostile. In all honesty, having been making rounds with NecroWatch the last month, from my POV "under siege" is a useless status, since it implies a sense of immediacy that the Wiki doesn't do a good job with. Either something is under attack or its not; am I going to go there faster because someone rated it as "under siege"? I feel the same way about blue for "rebuilding"; I don't know what it's supposed to mean. People (including myself) just seem to use it to say "no zombies, but not powered and EHB either," and so it's a pretty vague status. I guess what I'm saying is that I would support changes to simplify the status color scheme, if someone suggested it. I'd get rid of "under siege" entirely, and I would probably combine "ruined" and "in zombie hands" into one status (since really, what's the functional difference to someone using this map?). Sorry, I'm rambling a little. Other things that might help "break up" the combined status map might be thin borders around the forts and malls, to help subtly distinguish them and make the map a little easier on the eye. ~ extropymine Talk | NW | 4Corners 22:59, 13 March 2009 (UTC) Rambling is awesome, people actually say enough that you can guage their opinion properly, and it makes for interesting discourse! The system has been around longer than me, and I've had to work around it. The MPM page has this sort of sliding colour scheme (with purple = in zombie hands) and so I adopted that. It's less intuitive as hostile, maybe, but flows on from red in the colour spectrum so it could be worse than say a random beige colour or something. I had no idea what to do with rebuilding TBH, it's a weird fucking status and so I just borrowed the blue colour from the fact it's little image has a blue background. As an aside, rot revive is brown since these NTs are usually ruined, so brown is similar to the ruined red colour, since the building can be sucky as a safehouse but isn't unsafe persay. As far as under siege goes, I'm not entirely against it, it's so rare that any building actually holds out long enough to attract a zombie horde big enough that I find it interesting to see orange pop up occasionally. As an indicator of status, well yeah, it's not that useful I guess. I do support the distinction of ruined/in zombie hands though. Ruined means you can walk in and fix the thing up right off, in zombie hands means you're gonna need some guns and patience first. Mapwise, you could combine them I guess, though I'd feel like I wasn't making the most of all the possible statuses. Ransacked/ruined is combined, though (It's a pointless difference anyway, no buildings stay ransacked for longer than the ten seconds it takes just to go for the ruin) I was considering putting a 1px black border round the forts, with a gap on the gatehouse square, just for the heck of it (and maybe back it up with some waffle about not being able to enter through those sides). I don't think much more is needed to differentiate the three buildings though, NTs all being 1x1, malls 2x2 and forts 3x3, that's a great differentiator-in-a-can right there. If you ever do suggest redefining some of the statuses, give me a shout, I have some rambling about changing the little images so the background colours make more sense on a sliding scale of danger. Maybe a good idea to bring to the CP once that's been revamped. --  RoosterDragon  23:54, 13 March 2009 (UTC) I'll let it squoosh around in my brainpan a bit more. I like the idea of indicating the gatehouses on forts quite a bit. As long as something goes up to replace the horrible (and I mean horrible) Mall map page, I will be happy in the short-term ;) ~ extropymine Talk | NW | 4Corners 02:24, 14 March 2009 (UTC) Why do Williamsville and Miltown lack a border as part of their danger color scheme? ~ extropymine Talk | NW | 4Corners 08:59, 15 March 2009 (UTC) Looks fine to me, maybe somebody was messing the reports around earlier? --  RoosterDragon  11:50, 15 March 2009 (UTC) Still looks funny to me... here's a screen grab. Look at Lockettside, Williamsville and Miltown: See how Lockettside, Williamsville and Miltown don't have colored borders? ~ extropymine Talk | NW | 4Corners 08:29, 18 March 2009 (UTC) I've encountered this myself on occasion. It's a spacing issue in the Danger Report page - see here for an example of one I fixed a while back. --Bob Boberton TF / DW 03:42, 22 March 2009 (UTC) StatusMap Colour Tweaks Anyway, as I have been thinking about it, it seems to me like the danger level should progress like this... Safe Under Attack Under Siege In Zombie Hands Since "In Zombie Hands" is more dangerous than "Ruined" in actual play. For the other statuses (stati?), I'd mostly keep them as they are, with one minor change... Ruined Unknown Rebuilding Rot Revive I made "Ruined" a very dark grey (I'd also thought about white with a thin black border), to evoke more of a ruined feel to it. Anyway, what do you think? I worry any change might be a struggle to get any of this past the community, but maybe I'm wrong. ~ extropymine Talk | NW | 4Corners 08:29, 18 March 2009 (UTC) I think I traced the problem with the borders, those reports had a space between the template and the noinclude, which doesn't seem to be a problem for IE but seemingly FF doesn't like it. I fixed two of them, see if you're still getting the error with that one, if so, just edit the report and remove the space. I noticed from your pic that the gridlines are actually 1px too high. I set them to be -1px so they worked for me, I might have to try setting them to 0px like they should be and seeing if I can find a way to get both browsers to align it the same. The colours used on the StatusMap are not a worry community wise, I seriously just made them up on the spot when I created the whole system, and I'm more or less still the only editor of the system. If you change the key, you'd probably get no complaints, if anybody even noticed. Anyway, I can see sense in the top four for a sliding scale. Unknown should certainly be the gray it is now. The other three are a toss up. Ruined is a sort of 'kinda' dangerous and rebuilding is a 'kinda' safe. Maybe that should be reflected somehow? And rot revive is still weird. Usually they are ruined, but usually not that unsafe, sometimes they are even caded and decaded as needed, therefore being safe 99% of the time. Maybe a pink colour for ruined (not the eye-burning kind, more of a pale red) and a pale green for rebuilding? The pink/pale red would complement the red or gray of VD and GT burbs, respectively, that those buildings tend to be in, while pale green goes with green and yellow of safe and moderate. Guess rot revive could stay brown. Brown is an odd colour, so it suits the odd rot revives. Something about having ruined as dark gray just doesn't cut it for me. Do keep pinging the ideas back and forth, and hopefully we'll up with something sensible by the end. --  RoosterDragon  16:47, 18 March 2009 (UTC) That space between the template and the noinclude was spot-on. I changed that last one and it looks fine in FireFox now. ~ extropymine Talk | NW | 4Corners 16:59, 18 March 2009 (UTC) Colour Tweaks Continued Okay, so you're thinking something like this? "Danger" Statuses Safe Under Attack Under Siege In Zombie Hands "Transitional" Statuses Ruined Unknown Rebuilding Rot Revive ~ extropymine Talk | NW | 4Corners 05:39, 19 March 2009 (UTC) More or less yeah. You think it's reasonable? --  RoosterDragon  18:03, 19 March 2009 (UTC) Seems good to me, but maybe a test run to see if the pastel colors of the "transition" statuses fade too much into the suburb danger colors. ~ extropymine Talk | NW | 4Corners 05:20, 20 March 2009 (UTC) Yeah I won't use those exact colours. Whatever I can get to show up and maintain the same brightness/saturation for consistancy within the danger and transitionals. --  RoosterDragon  20:31, 20 March 2009 (UTC) The other thing worth doing (probably) is looking at the danger status images. I don't know whose "property" they are (if anyone's), but for example... It'd be neat to change the background color from yellow/orange to green, to match. Is that worth pursuing? ~ extropymine Talk | NW | 4Corners 21:25, 20 March 2009 (UTC) Yeah, I had a similar thought in my little rambling section of my sandpit. That would probably need community support since they're so umbiquitious. Hagnat made them originally, but they aren't 'owned' persay. I was figuring raising the issue at the CP once that revamp is done. --  RoosterDragon  21:31, 20 March 2009 (UTC) Well, I've got your back, if and when you do. ~ extropymine Talk | NW | 4Corners 21:42, 20 March 2009 (UTC) Hey, I have another little pipe-dream about the Status Map. When you mouseover a building, you get "The BLAH Building is safe". Is there any way at all to make that fuctionality draw off the timestamp of the danger report that gives it that color? For instance, I just updated the Hippesley Building‎ as rebuilding and signed my update with a timestamp. Is there any way to make stat status map show The Hippesley Building is rebuilding ( ~ extropymine Talk | NW | 4Corners 22:15, 20 March 2009 (UTC)) when you mouseover, or something similar? Or is that not possible? ~ extropymine Talk | NW | 4Corners 22:22, 20 March 2009 (UTC) Probably not within the constraints of wiki-markup. I originally wanted to show the timestamps, but you need to include the whole userline in the tooltip, which means you see all the markup and it didn't work that well. If there is a way, it's well beyond my skills. --  RoosterDragon  22:25, 20 March 2009 (UTC) Your skillz pay the billz, so don't sweat it. Unless there was a way to draw the code in a form like the recent updates page, where it filters out signatures and such, I can see it breaking the tooltip. ~ extropymine Talk | NW | 4Corners 22:32, 20 March 2009 (UTC) I changed the colours on the maps (yay for my supurb planning ahead, only 1 edit per status!) Unfortunately the background to the safe and V.D 'burb statuses are pretty much the same pastel we were aiming at, so I've darkened them to be somewhere inbetween the usual safe/in zombie hands colour and the background burb colour. It doesn't seem too bad, but I dunno, could go either way on it. --  RoosterDragon  23:22, 20 March 2009 (UTC) My initial reaction: it looks great, and flows much better. I only have a couple things with it. Under Siege needs to maybe "pop" more as a color (one shade more red?), and I think Under Attack could go one shade more orange. Both blend in a little too much. I think Rebuilding looks great, but somehow the color for Ruined doesn't say "ruined" to me. But by golly, this is progress! ~ extropymine Talk | NW | 4Corners 23:51, 20 March 2009 (UTC) Yeah the ruined doesn't come across great, but I rather like rebuilding. I redid under siege and it stand out much better, but the yellow of under attack refuses to come out nicely, it didn't before and it doesn't want to now. I tried a few and it just sucks on orange backgrounds if you notch it too far towards orange or darker, and sucks on yellow like now. --  RoosterDragon  00:12, 21 March 2009 (UTC) Siege looks great now, and yeah... I'm not sure what you can do with Under Attack. It's either blending in to Moderate or Dangerous. So, hmmph. ~ extropymine Talk | NW | 4Corners 00:26, 21 March 2009 (UTC) Concerning ruined, maybe some cross between red-orange? It ties with in zombie hands and under siege(IE: Soon to be in zombie hands :)) I'm just tossing ideas about here. --  RoosterDragon  01:12, 21 March 2009 (UTC) Ruined still needs fixing, it really looks horrid. --  RoosterDragon  14:57, 28 March 2009 (UTC) I tweaked it to a darker shade of the red-brown colour and I think it actually works quiet well now. Hits on the original tie in with ruined without looking downright awful, might not need a new colour after all, what do you think? --  RoosterDragon  22:27, 28 March 2009 (UTC) It's a bit hard to distinguish from the red of "In zombie hands." Why not be consistent with the Mall Status and have "In zombie hands" be dark green, "Rebuilding" be blue, and then used the freed red color for "Ruined?" --Bob Boberton TF / DW 22:42, 28 March 2009 (UTC) Because that system has no logic behind the statuses, just some pretty colours. The Omnimap uses that system, and I always have to think about what each means since it's so backward. Some tie in with the suburb danger is also good. Red burb with red buildings for in zombie hands, as opposed to green buildings sitting on a red landscape. --  RoosterDragon  22:49, 28 March 2009 (UTC) Just as a test, what does the map look like if we use the grey for ruined, and a white with 1px black border for unknown? ~ extropymine Talk | NW | 4Corners 07:46, 29 March 2009 (BST) New Timed NT Map I'm not sure how I feel about it. Let me stare for a couple days. But FYI, have you seen Alka's timestamp map he's made (it's on the NW talk if you haven't seen it). ~ extropymine Talk | NW | 4Corners 00:00, 29 March 2009 (UTC) I have, but unadulterated levels of awesome have prevented my immediate comment. --  RoosterDragon  00:02, 29 March 2009 (UTC) I know! I'm going to take this moment here and bask in the fact that I invited him to NW. Go me. Anyway, by pillaging Alka's map code, I bet we can make the the NT Status Map tooltip on rollover say "The BLAH Building is safe, reported X days ago." ~ extropymine Talk | NW | 4Corners 07:41, 29 March 2009 (BST) Recruitment and ad size Hi. :) You've just got me slightly confused over two of the points of your proposed plan (currently up for voting): If you are using a fixed table width, your advert is limited to 600*800px. --For example, using style="width:600px" in your table gives a fixed 600px wide advert on all screens. If in doubt, use this code. Why 600*800px? That is more height than the lowest resolution, 800*600px, can display. That would result in ads being 200px out of screen. 600*600px limit would result in it still being in screen as that accounts for the sidebar and gives the correct height. If you are using a variable or scaling table width, your advert may be no longer than 800px when viewed on a 800*600 resolution. --For example, using style="width:100%" in your table gives an advert that uses 100% of the available space, which varies depending on the person viewing the advert. Not sure of the use of the term 'longer'. Do you mean width or height? In either case it cannot be 800px while on a 800*600px resolution as (as mentioned above) it would result in the ads being outside of the screen. It might not be necessary to state a max value for px, easier to just state; 'you may not use a variable higher than 100% for both height and width'. If you could make clear if I am misunderstanding that would be helpful, I'm pretty much for the changes, I just want to be sure what exactly is being said. - User:Whitehouse 22:56, 13 March 2009 (UTC) The 800px height limit is designed not to ensure that ads are viewable to the 800*600 folks without needing to scroll. That would be horribly restrictive as we'd need something along the lines of a 600*400 max which is restrictive. The 800px height limit is just to prevent people having stupidly long ads, and on proper resolutions scrolling will be minimal, a group should take into consideration the scrolling issues and the formatting etc anyway, it's their ad so they are responsible for its appearance. The overall limits are to prevent ads interfering with the page as a whole. The ambiguous 'longer' means height. Can easily replace it with 'higher' to be totally obvious. Again, this is needed to ensure non-mad advert length. A person can skirt the measures by setting width 100%, the browser will happily scale to full width and be left to its own devices in deciding the height needed so an advert that is overly long would still go over a screen, or 800px, or anything you might set as a limit. Forcing them to set both means the advert A) Has to fill the screen, even it this leaves space everywhere. B) Defeats the object of setting the absolute limits in the first place. Variable settings are used but sometimes people don't consider squashing the ad to a small res to test it at which point it starts breaking stuff because there's not enough room. Absolute settings means that WYSIWYG for any res, so it's harder to go wrong and also easier to enforce. I'll correct the 'longer' thing. Otherwise if you feel it's still a bad proposal then by all means shoot it down, hopefully more people would get involved in refining it properly next go, damned discussion barely went anywhere on the size limits... --  RoosterDragon  23:34, 13 March 2009 (UTC) Legends of Darkness My Dark Mistress, Psychotic Pantomime, has informed me you have been most helpful in your suggestions (catergorize LoD, bots). However, I am more wiki savvy then here (I steal code and learn how to use if for my purposes). I am most interested in your suggestions, but not solid enough on my own coding to implement them myself. Hit up my talk page or LoD talk page where you have been posting if you are interested in helping us. Peace, Donald Crane, Panty's right hand man. If you're referring about the category, all you have to do is go to that page and edit it so it has some content, job done. Since it's your category I was going to let your group do it. As to the suggestions, I'm not sure what suggestions you're on about, all I wanted to do was let you know your category was a redlink... --  RoosterDragon  19:48, 17 March 2009 (UTC) NecroWatch Scanning Map Template Rooster, Alka Selzer has taken the time and trouble to turn the Recon Map into an actual template! I'm not sure whether it should remain in his user space or if it should be moved into the general template category, though. Can you chime in on the discussion on the NW talk page and let us know what the best course is? Thanks! ~ extropymine Talk | NW | 4Corners 15:51, 19 March 2009 (UTC) If it's done, it should probably be moved to the template namespace since it can be used by everybody. --  RoosterDragon  18:05, 19 March 2009 (UTC) Have you... upgraded to IE8 yet, its out of Beta now? --D.E.ATalk 14:15, 20 March 2009 (UTC) Thanks for the message, I have upgraded now. --  RoosterDragon  19:37, 20 March 2009 (UTC) No problem. :) It was only after I tried that nifty little 'Compatability View' feature that I noticed the difference in the main page setup. Just glad that it was an IE7 error and not an overall IE error, otherwise we'd still be staring at the main page attached to the top of the screen. --D.E.ATalk 19:57, 20 March 2009 (UTC) Yeah, the IE team seems to be finally getting their act together after the horror that was IE6. I must retest acid 3 sometime and see how it's doing on that front. --  RoosterDragon  20:01, 20 March 2009 (UTC) so... trying to improve my major contributions to the wiki, are we ? Of course, that was bound to happen with me leaving this place. Anyway, some input: you have coding skillz, but you seem to lack some design and usability skillz... moving the 'update' links from the suburb template to just below their info (the update the dangerstatus link just below the dangermap, for example) simply make the template look awful... having the links at the bottom of the template not only improved its readability, but improves its graphical design. I am completly against your renaming of the danger levels, specially 'ghost town' to 'adandoned', which reads awful and has no connotation to the game... and the reaons to change moderate to moderately is dull... you are the first and only to complain about it in more than two years. And why did you removed the rounded borders from the danger levels colors table ? Since are onto it, why dont you ask all dangerreport pages to be moved from user:DangerReport to template:DangerReport ? --People's Commissar Hagnat [talk] [wcdz] 03:58, 22 March 2009 (UTC) I would like to say that I find the term "abandoned" to be insulting and an unnecessary change. --Bob Boberton TF / DW 04:07, 22 March 2009 (UTC) 'Abandoned' can be changed back to 'a ghost town' is that is preferred. After all but nonexistant discussion on Talk:Suburb and nobody raising any major objections I just went for that term as opposed to the other. The changes to Template:Suburb were from 2 months ago. The EMR section had been added by somebody but was a bit messy at the time. So I attempted to smooth that out and figured that the extra gap could fit in a section for the phone masts, making the links for it below somewhat redundant. The NT section was already redundant from some while back, and with the EMR and mast section having moved, just leaving the danger level on it's own seemed odd. Removing the rounded borders on the map key seemed sensible, the map uses a rectangular box with a 2px border, so the key should as well. That as opposed to a circular swatch with no border (as it was when I ran across it) which again is another change from a while back. The light green particularly was a problem without it's border as it matched the background quiet well. Moving the danger reports is out of the question, this would take creation of 1000's of pages which might be possible, but it would also need the renaming of the many links to those templates which would need, at a rough guess, upwards of 10000 references altered. I am not opposed to criticism as often I don't come up with the best solutions to things, but I am opposed to you coming here and insinuating I am some kind of moron. I will happily discuss the reasoning behind edits I make and the advantages or disadvantages to using another method but you need not suggest that I am destroying "your work" because you weren't here. Your edits are subject to being improved upon, same as mine, same as anybody else's. It's a wiki, that's the point. --  RoosterDragon  13:27, 22 March 2009 (UTC) Creating new templates will only replace 100 pages, and require the edit of only some few templates (unless i am wrong about how i created the suburb template). Sorry if it looked like i was accusing you of something, but i was not. Actually, i welcome any improvement that can be made to the system, since it was created two years ago with just a little of wiki-knoweledge. --People's Commissar Hagnat [talk] [wcdz] 00:33, 23 March 2009 (UTC) In that case, my apologies for the over-reaction. Anyway, I originally thought you were referring the the whole of User:DangerReport which includes some 1000 or so building reports too. The suburb's only would be easily possible, I cannot imagine there would be too much to fix. --  RoosterDragon  17:25, 23 March 2009 (UTC) I have changed "Abandoned" to "A Ghost Town". --  RoosterDragon  14:57, 28 March 2009 (UTC) EMRs Well, in fact, I know about the EMR Bot. I just choose to report it by hands to suburbs that I do care about. So it's not that much work really. Besides, I take the chance to archive news for those suburbs while I'm at it. I may switch to the Bot when I'm bored, though. -- Kittithaj 14:08, 22 March 2009 (UTC) Preview problem with the new changes I updated the danger status on Tollyton and noticed it didn't show a change on Preview, yet when I saved it, it did change. Just for grins - and to make sure I'm not blind - I tried changing a different suburb from "very dangerous" to "safe" and saw the same thing; preview doesn't reflect the change. No, I didn't leave it at safe when I was done :) Using FF2 if that makes any difference. -- Grogh 19:38, 22 March 2009 (UTC) It would work like that. The preview takes the current page's data, so until you save, you're still viewing the "outdated" version. I'll add a note about that on the template. Thanks for the head's up. --  RoosterDragon  17:19, 23 March 2009 (UTC) I was waiting for someone to upgrade the reports, namely ridding us of the "special" templates. I never even got around to asking for a "special bot", also explains this being broken. I'm still wondering why neither me, nor Karek beat you to implementing that Mall auto logo. :P ■■ 11:01, 28 March 2009 (UTC) Well somebody had to eventually. :) --  RoosterDragon  14:57, 28 March 2009 (UTC)