Talk:NT Status Map

Pre Map Upgrade Technical Talk

Update Requests

Unsure how to update the map? Just leave a note here with the info that needs to be updated! --Seb_Wiers VeM 04:36, 4 May 2007 (BST)

The Vicari Building in the suburb of Huntley Heights can now be considered to be under zombie control. A mob of over 20 zombies is currently inside. --DirskoSM 05:23, 5 September 2007 (BST)

East boundwood has hardly any zeds but yagoton has some in the south.--Warlord zephyr 16:17, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

If you're interested in updating something on the NT status map, please provide coherent info about NT statuses. You didn't give any in this your sentence. --~~~~ [talk] 18:17, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure he's requestin an update to the suburb danger level. I've seen this map reffered to when only suburb danger levels were being discussed. Given how out of date the NT status info is right now (I lost interest in the work of updating it), that's really all its good for at this point.  Swiers 19:13, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

Well, as an active Rank 3 NecroWatch member i visited about 60 NTs in the last couple of weeks. i usually look at the nic plugs as they are on the location's page along with necrowatch plugs, so when they're really out-of-date i update them. NT status map is however pain-in-the-ass to update, as you need to check info on all nt buildings in a suburb (whereas i might have not visited all/it's not handy to visit all/all are not in my path), and i usually don't care to do it. I have some ideas how NT status map could be enhanced for better use but neither time nor motivation to work on it. --~~~~ [talk] 19:22, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, the nuisance of having to visit all the NT's in the suburb (or at least be aware of their status via something like NIC) is a real problem for me, too. And the NT status pages are a pain in the butt to edit. I might be willing to work on a better implementation, if I knew how to set it up and it was a (major) improvement.  Swiers 21:36, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

Code Problems and Bug Reports

I can't edit the Shearbank NTstatus from the map directly, that replies to Heytown NTstatus -- /// goebi^{TalkHelp/LFS/SR/NT/_MWP} /// 12:10, 5 May 2007 (BST)

Solved -- /// goebi^{TalkHelp/LFS/SR/NT/_MWP} /// 12:20, 5 May 2007 (BST)

I know this doesn't relate DIRECTLY to this page... but... There is a problem with the Cheeke Buildings in Ruddlebank and Eastonwood. They do not appear to be differentiated, and when I edit the main status template for the NT in Ruddlebank, it actually seems to show up in Eastonwood! I know, for example there are 2 Haslock Buildings, and one is actually named Haslock(Chancellwood) and the ditto (Quarlesbank) (I think those are suburbs)... Anyway, I do not know how to fix this, I was hoping someone could help. Thanks! --WanYao 15:09, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

Ok, will do --~~~~ [talk] 18:37, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

Done --~~~~ [talk] 09:30, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

General Talk

Comments

just wanted to say... good idea for a page. The NTs are really important.--Raystanwick 07:50, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

Hi Swiers. Very good idea, and nice job condensing a lot of information into the map. However I find it too condensed - IMO the map is easy to update but difficult to read. The colours of the numbers are difficult to distinguish on objects so small, and it takes considerable practice to remember which position indicates which condition. Furthermore there's no way to date reports on individual NTs, nor do I think there could be without making the map a huge ugly mess. Finally, while depicting locality seems a good idea wherever you can do it, it seems to me less crucial here.

I wonder about simply having a table or list of the Suburbs, with indented lines for each NT. An NT line would indicate cade level, powered status, ransack status, and report date in separate fields. I'm not sure whether an alphabetical or X-Y coordinate sort would be best. This list could be supplemented by a coloured or shaded map with minimal text inside, where the colours/shades would be determined by the proportion of NTs (if any) that are functioning. There's a maximum of what, 6 NTs to a burb? So only up to six grades would be needed. Thoughts? --Ragged Robin 16:48, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

NT Building Status List - I started a "table" page that lists individual suburbs and building; I got through the B's and started on the C's, and there are level 2 headings for all suburbs, in alphabetical order. If you want to continue the work, please do. Otherwise people can add suburbs as they need them.

If you have trouble reading the map because the font is so small, hit "control++" a few times (for mozilla / firefox) or otherwise bump up your browsers text size control. Using a larger font size in the code tends to mess the table up, resulting in uneven cell size and so on, but increasing it with your browser controls doesn't cause much trouble.

The NT data line has a pretty logical structure, and the colors are similar to those used for suburb danger levels (Blue=general info, green=very safe, grey=potentially contested, red=ransacked). Or maybe it just seems easy to remember to me, since I created it? Anyhow, when placed on a map (rather than in a table) it's a handy form to have all the data in when considering, say, what direction you would like to move, or overall strategy for a large group. That's not to say the map is ideal for all purposes- as you say, individual NT status is ignored and undated (unless the only one in their suburb) in favor of a broader picture. As it stands, people have to put forth a bit of extra effort to either visit every NT building in a burb, or metagame to get the info, if they want to update the map- which may be a good thing, I dunno.

As for a differently graded map... well, I already did this one, I'm not doing another. This one provides MORE info than the one you are proposing would, and has the side benefit of acting as a "verification" to the Suburb danger level map, so I don't see the benefit in changing it, but if you want to run with the idea you proposed- do it! I've already spammed the NT status line onto the suburb pages and such, so I'm kinda stuck supporting it until it catches on, or goes down in flames.

--S.Wiers^ctdp_NTmap^x:oo 21:14, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

I want to follow up on several good points here, but in the meantime, when you have a sec maybe you could take a look at the TRPs template talk page and let me know what you think? That template has problems unrelated to the NT status questions, but also it may be a nice way to offload the nitty gritty about NT status to a highly visible location. (Appreciate that you've been doing a lot of work on this by the way - don't mean to try to derail you.) --Ragged Robin 09:12, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

My concern about the size was not that it's hard to read the values, but that it's hard to discern the font colours, and I find this true even if I bump the font size a little. I understand that meaning is also indicated by position, but I'm still not getting the hang of parsing it at a glance. Maybe I'm just dense.

I don't see it as a virtue that the NT map duplicates the colours of the burb map. At best it's redundant, at worst confusing. (Not to mention the fact that I think the burb map's "system" for attributing colours is stupid, though of course I'm not saying that's your fault or problem.) But again, that's just me - I think this was a great accomplishment, and I'm just providing one reader's perspective.

I went ahead and made the TRP table I wanted for New Arkham. I haven't received any feedback on it either way, but it seems massively obvious that it's more useful than the old TRP template. If it caught on, it would be awesome if there were a way to suck those building statuses into a centralized map or table, but frankly I utterly lack the wiki skillz (esp. templates) to try that. But it seems to me that it would capitalize on the incentives that each burb's players have to keep their own local information up to date. --Ragged Robin 17:17, 7 April 2007 (BST)

That's a pretty good info summary for New Arkham. If that TRP format caught on, it might be a good thing. And no, I also can't think of any easy way to assure that updates to one place (say the TRP table you designed) are reflected in another (say on the NT status map, or even a map designed solely for that purpose). The wiki isn't really designed for such things. The est I can think of is to add a manually updated summary line to the TRP table you designed, and create a map that displays those summaries. Which would be at least as much work to make a the NT map was, if not more so, although the updates might be easier to do. It would however require widespread adoption of the new TRP table format to work. If you want to work on that, I'd be happy to provide the technical guidance needed; its basically just a matter of inserting a template on the TRP table. And doing it again and again for each supurb. And having 100 pages for managing the editing of those templates. Simple enough, but very labor intensive. --S.Wiers^ctdp_NTmap^x:oo 23:18, 7 April 2007 (BST)

Dunningwood NTs - it was a tip... -- /// goebi^{TalkHelp/LFS/SR/NT/_MWP} ///18:57, 29 April 2007 (BST)

Er, that's rather cryptic.... What was the tip? If there was a misspelling or something, thanks for getting it. --Seb_Wiers VeM 15:44, 3 May 2007 (BST)

Nice idea and implementation. One thing: 'Date of last update' was a very useful information, and is missing from the new map. You may consider readding it somehow. Bluetigers 03:14, 3 May 2007 (BST)

While useful indeed, it also seemed the most confusing feature, and isn't as informative when you don't know which of multiple NT's was updated, and it would look like crap to jam in a date for each NT. If you need to know the dates, go to the "User:NTstatus/suburb" page (easy with the link I put in) and look at the page history or notes people left. I do hope that, being much easier to update, the new map won;t have such a tendancy to go out of date.

I'm open to a better solution, for sure, but can't think of one myself. Be sure I'll keep it in mind, though. --Seb_Wiers VeM 03:30, 3 May 2007 (BST)

As I suggested somewhere else before, you could put the date of last update after # nt(s), IE: 3nts(4/20)... dig it? --Jellygoop 15:31, 3 May 2007 (BST)

Maybe, but the display is already pretty cluttered. Also, that would leave it unclear as to WHICH of the NT buildings info was updated on that date. The old system required you to update them all, so that wasn't an issue, but it would potentially be confusing where there are multiple NTs, not all of which the person doing the update had observed. But feel free to go to the talk pages for the appropriate templates and try out some new styles. --Seb_Wiers VeM 15:43, 3 May 2007 (BST)

Hmm, after some thought, I came up with a way to do it. It doesn't solve the problem above, but hey "the great is the enemy of the good"- its good enough, even if not great. Check the top line of the map, I'll be starting there with this minor re-design. --Seb_Wiers VeM 18:14, 3 May 2007 (BST)

nic danger reports have datestumps. thus i propose easy way to do things, like i did to User:NTstatus/Barrville. So the stamp on NT Status page will refer the last update, and more detailed info is in nic plugs. what do you think? --Duke Garland^LCD 19:39, 3 May 2007 (BST)

Ur, no. That is not accomplishing what we were talking about; what we are shooting for here is an update time that gets displayed ON THE MAP, so that people do not have to view another set of pages to get an idea of how current the map info is. Also, thenic stuff jammed in on that page looks wrong, and the nic clsifications are not quite the same as the NT Status ones; if you will note, there is a mismatch between what nic says about The Woolsett Building and what the status line says; I expect this would happen rather often. I'm gonna leave it for now, so others can see it, but I think it should be reverted within 24 hours. --Seb_Wiers VeM 20:07, 3 May 2007 (BST)

Hm, i don't think it looks wrong... --Duke Garland^LCD 07:13, 4 May 2007 (BST)

Coulda been the cold medicine and exhaustion talking. It looks OK, though my personal data aesthetic is much more minimalistic / text based- largely because it takes up less screen space and thus is user-friendly to those with crappier old systems, or people using a Wii to web surf, or whatever. I'd rather not do the "User:NTstatus/Suburb" pages that way though, as I do think (aesthetic issues aside) its potentially confusing having two different "safety rating" systems displayed on the same page. I'd rather see a LINK to the appropriate nic section than the actual nic style templates- that would make it easy to cross-refrence, without implying that the two are equivalent. I think the same goes the other direction, also- having the NT status line shown on a nic page was probably a bad idea, but having a link to the info is not. --Seb_Wiers VeM 14:11, 4 May 2007 (BST)

well, if talking about user-friendly - building danger reports are definitely better here. it taked quite a lot of ctrl-tabs when i was making updates in dulston to check GPS of multible buildings, correct if they're mistaken. also this text is quite small, even on separate pages, makes to use zooming in browser. about danger levels - i was surprised to see only barricaded and powered statuses in here - it doesn't really represent how much danger is there, zombies inside or outside. that also shows how they have quite a different purposes (i.e. NTSM is map-oriented to show health of Necrotech in suburbs and nic - combined building danger). of course, with not fitting formats these 2 resourcing cannot merge easily. but still, info on both has a lot in common and there'll always be a situation when 1 resource is uptodate and the other - not. so it is --Duke Garland^LCD 22:25, 4 May 2007 (BST)

(Ugh, so many colons, there MUST be a better way...)

Um, yes? There's clearly some potential synergy, I'm just not sure what the best way to exploit it without causing potential confusion is. Until we hash that out, the better course seems to be to keep them seperate, and just make it fairly easy for folks to find out about / check into both resources, while making it clear they are different in nature, function, and information.

And yeah, the "danger" levels on the NTSM are quite big steps compared to NIC; the NTSM was originally conceived as a zombie strategy tool, a spin off / improvement on a map that the Extinction group originally had on their page. "Safety" was not the issue being analyzed; rather, progress towards destruction was the metric in question! Its not out of the question to add more color codes to the NTSM (it would be quite easy in fact) but finding easily readable ones might be tricky. If you have an idea there, I am all ears.

Personally I'm quite surprised that the nic does not at all diferentiate between powered buildings, and unpowered ones. I suppose that has little bearing on safety (though being able to combat revive brain rotters is nice...) but its pretty important info when you are looking for a place to pick up needles or to find a person who can revive you! --Seb_Wiers VeM 00:05, 5 May 2007 (BST)

Nice job, should be quite helpful for all especially once people start checking. Ever considered making Barricade+No Power blue, and No Info black? Not sure how much work that is, but it's way easier for me to see, and seems to make more sense.--Thegreathal 16:35, 3 May 2007 (BST)

That would be very easy to work (the design allows for very easy color / font/ etc changes) but the problem is that links are also blue, so I wanted to avoid that potential confusion of data (presence of barricades) with links. Its less trouble if "no data" gets confused with a link- in fact, it may be good, as people will fill in the data! --Seb_Wiers VeM 18:14, 3 May 2007 (BST)

Just wanted to say that the breakins in owlseysbank shouldnt even be colored as one building is a rotter revive station and the other is a active hq, that is all--TheEsotericOrderOfYig 09:50, 25 July 2007 (BST)

Those are both matters of use and opinion. If the building is ransacked, it gets marked as ransacked. In fact, NOT marking a rot revive clinic as ransacked would be misleading; they SHOULD be ransacked. Anybody looking to do a rot revive in a random location could in fact head to any ransacked NT building, set up a fueled generator, and do revives. _. ^. _{. swiers} 16:49, 25 July 2007 (BST)

Suggested changes to improve the maintenance of the NT Status Map

First off, the Danger Report pages for the NTs themselves often go weeks—if not months—without being updated. In the case of nobody knowing due to the suburb being wrecked on an ongoing basis, that's not really an issue. But on top of this, I'm finding NTstatus page after page where DangerReports are fairly current, but nobody has bothered to update the NTstatus page. Granted, it's a bit annoying to do, but trying to go through from this end, and update them, is a tedious nightmare. Quite frankly, the entire system could be changed so that nobody needs to update it at all. If we had the ParserFunctions extension installed, it would be even better, but it's not really needed... Since I'm trying to gather enough support to encourage Kevan to install it (see ParserFunctions extension: Arguments for-and-against if you care to weigh in on the subject), I won't suggest making the necessary changes just yet (in case we do get the extension installed, in which case all the changes can be made at once), but if we don't, here's what I'd propose:
First, change all the NT's DangerReport pages so that the template being used is also a variable (with the BuildingStatus template specified as the default), which will any variables specified on those pages to be called on using different templates elsewhere. Then, instead of having people come here to specify "NT Powered", "NT Barricaded", etc., we have them specify that as an additional variable on the NT's DangerReport page itself (named variables that are not used by the BuildingStatus template will not impact it's functioning. Actually, we'd make it even simpler, and make the variable a simple "yes" or "no" answer in regards to the NT being powered, and derive the Powered/Barricaded/Ransacked/Unknown setting from that Yes/No answer, and the buildings Status variable (don't want to make it much more complicated, or even less people will update the DangerReports then do now). Additionally, we'd add two more variables that would be set by magic words (for the month and day of the last revision). Then, using a new template on the NTstatus pages, it would call on the variables in the DangerReport pages to show the edit date (for each NT individually), and set the color, etc.
If we had ParserFunctions installed, we could simply have the most recent update out of a suburbs NT's be listed by itself (as we do now), as well as having the location's coordinates automatically turn blue after 10 days, if no changes had been made to that location's DangerReport in that amount of time (otherwise, to keep the map updated, you'd have to manually update the DangerReport yourself).
Really, I think that the NT Status Map is a great idea, but due to it's being updated even less frequently then even the sporadically updated DangerReport pages, at best, it represents a time-delayed picture of what the status was. Which is kinda sad... Anyway, I'm not going to go haring off on a project this large without a good bit of feedback, and user consensus (and I even feel a bit out of order even to be suggesting changes this significant in the first place), so please make no attempt to spare my feelings if you see any potential problems with my proposal, or any additional refinements that could be made, please go ahead and point them out (but if your comment is in the order of "the map is fine the way it is; it doesn't need to be changed", then I'd think you're being a bit blind to it's actual state). Anyway, I'd really love to see the map being as useful as it was clearly intended to be, so I'd appreciate any constructive criticism to what I've suggested. --Morgan Blair 05:26, 18 May 2008 (BST)

I would say that major changes are almost the only way to get anything done these days. The problem is that all of the player resources were implemented seperately and so there's a lot of redundant duplication of data, that creates contradictions and not everything gets updated when it should. The only way to fix it is to tear everything down and rebuild it with everything properly linked to each other. Personally, I'd like to see the entire DangerReport setup and the BIC redesigned. Heck, even the locations pages could use a going over, it can't decide whether to list anything seperately or as lists of some building type per suburb. But there's nowhere to co-ordinate anything, discussion pages like this are barly reviewed anymore, and there's no central de facto "Coders Group" page where the people who create all these templates and resources could sort things out.

Before my tangent becomes utter rant, I'll return to the matter at hand to say that a change to unify the map and report is certainly useful. My bot-tastic self had been designing something to do the same thing (Checking the status and looking for anything in the comments that would suggest the NT was powered) and then updating the map, but then I ran into the problems with the Reports and so that went on hold. I'd be behind it, as the template for updating the NT map used on most of those pages could be edited easily to reflect the change, and hopefully people are motivated enough to put a simple Yes/No in one extra variable. --  RoosterDragon  15:24, 23 May 2008 (BST)

Map Upgraded

The map has been upgraded! All statuses are now taken automatically from their related report. I'll work on clearing up Category:NT status map as I find the time to. All the pages under User:NTstatus should NOT be deleted. They can be automated in a similar fashion and will still prove useful. The map unfortunatly does not display dates anymore. If somebody can find a way to display timestamps on the map easily, automatically and without error then they should do so! --  RoosterDragon  20:58, 26 June 2008 (BST)

Wow! I'm really impressed. It looks excellent now --~~~~ [talk] 23:05, 26 June 2008 (BST)

Thanks. I've also now updated the User:NTstatus userspace accordingly, suburb pages will also gain from automatic updates. In other news, I cleared up a bunch of stuff in Category:NT status map and moved what survived into Category:NT Status Map (Just being overly pedantic about the name). Everything appears to be in good order.--  RoosterDragon  19:11, 27 June 2008 (BST)

Suburb pages

http://wiki.urbandead.com/index.php/Template:Suburb contains a call to {{User:NTstatus/{{PAGENAME}}}}. Is this still valid / useful?  Swiers 17:54, 4 July 2008 (BST)

Valid. Yes. I updated the userspace to use the automatic system so it displays the same colours as the map. Useful? I think so. It's not hurting anybody at any rate. --  RoosterDragon  17:58, 4 July 2008 (BST)

Broken

Is it jsut me or is this misaligned now? --Ross Less Ness ^{Enter Stranger...} 17:17, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

Its not just you. ~ _{18:06, 11 November 2012 (UTC)}

Who knows how to fix it? The overlay seems to have lost its size ratio. --Ross Less Ness ^{Enter Stranger...} 00:08, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

Fixed. --  AHLGTG THE END IS NIGH! 00:22, 19 November 2012 (UTC)