Talk:Scenteral Intelligence Map

Development and Editing

I kinda liked the black image better. And the large update links at the bottom make it kinda hard to navigate those, why not do something similar with tooltips instead then float an Edit link that is possibly something like a + or a ^, or even a * overlapping the green one in the Scent Maps and gives off it's location when hovered over.--Karek^maps?! 09:53, 22 April 2008 (BST)

the old image was potentially confusing , because the edges of the sample image might be interpreted as black SIM areas. The lighter sample image makes it easier to see areas that don;t contain any data yet. Eventually they will all be gone.
As for the update links, I'm not sure what you mean... the locations are pretty obvious from the page names, the point was just to provide a link to a map. Maybe I should just have 2 separate tables?  Swiers 15:55, 22 April 2008 (BST)

I mean make text over the images that is the link to edit each individual image, so you don't need two seperate tables, it would all be the one. I was suggesting using a * in the center block of the image(because the image itself already has one).--Karek^maps?! 19:50, 22 April 2008 (BST)

Ah. I looked at doing that by making the images links to the update pages via the {{SIMpic}} template. The coding was a bit much for me. If you can do it, be my quest!  Swiers 00:15, 23 April 2008 (BST)

The legend table is black text on black background for me. It's probably because I use the Cologne Blue skin -- boxy ^{talk • i} 10:06 22 April 2008 (BST)

Actually I think that's a browser thing probably, he used background: and color: and they can behave a bit strange sometimes. To clarify, Background: is probably being ignored and Color: is being interpreted as the background color while the font remains default black.--Karek^maps?! 10:11, 22 April 2008 (BST)

Checking on Cologne Blue, that was indeed, at least partly, the case. Need to specify font-color or encapsulate the target font area in a <div/span> or <font> tag. I'm not getting the background problem though.--Karek^maps?! 10:14, 22 April 2008 (BST)

I suck at such things. Do whats needed to fix it if you like.  Swiers 15:55, 22 April 2008 (BST)

Whats wrong with the square centering at 82,49? It appears to be embossed looking...--xoxo 14:01, 22 May 2008 (BST)

The image isn't cropped all the way. I wouldn't worry about it though, it'll either expire or be updated in due course. --  RoosterDragon 

Scent Death Analysis

Obviously, with the entire map being made of Scenth Death images, I was interested in seeing if it could be used to spit out some actual values for zombies and bodies. I tried just that but the results were confusing. I've posted my information at Talk:Zombie Skills/Scent Death since I think it fits better there, please go add to the discussion if you can. --  RoosterDragon  14:43, 21 June 2008 (BST)

Screen shots come out with stretched scent maps

Hey Swiers, I've been updating the Sim, but I'm noticing since the map takes uploaded files and resizes them, the borders, specifically the top and bottom rows of my scent maps are very small. See 16,16 image for a recent example.

I've noticed that this is probably because when I use scent death, the image that comes out is slightly stretched height wise, so when I try and crop it from a screen shot, the scent map has top and bottom rows that are slightly cut off so that the image will be a square. I've tried switching from firefox to internet explorer (since it has no plugins whatsoever) and I've tried using different screen resolutions (which I realized probably don't have anything to do with how the image is rendered). But I have no clue on how to fix this. Any ideas? --BrainsTasty 07:24, 24 June 2008 (BST)

The image in-game does come out not-quite square, so you have to manipulate it a bit. You have been chopping a square area out of the middle, so that the top and bottom half-rows get removed. What you can do is to use whatever image editor to squash the whole image so that it is now square, but all the proportions of all the blocks are the same. (In MSPaint, there's a menu option Image>Stretch/Skew. Swiers explains how to use GIMP to do it here, step 3.) Garum 10:25, 24 June 2008 (BST)

Thanks Garum. I'm now updating the sim without squishing the top and bottom rows of my scent maps. See 5,16 & 16,5 for examples. It helps when your cropping (using MS Paint) to crop the image to an even number of pixels on both sides, then you can just use a calculator to estimate the percentage to shrink the height by to match the image's width (width/height as the percentage to stretch). --BrainsTasty 17:51, 25 June 2008 (BST)

I used MSPaint for a while, and I selected the rectangle by hand and scaled it to 94% - it was always roughly right and I then chopped off a pixel or 2 if I had to. I switched to GIMP for the autocrop feature, and it's great now I've got used to it, but it is pretty complex. Cheers, Garum 18:28, 25 June 2008 (BST)

Ugly Bits

Why have they appeared?--xoxo 07:07, 3 July 2008 (BST)

You need to be more specific. Which bits are ugly, and where did they appear? A screenshot with notation to point them out would help.  Swiers 08:36, 3 July 2008 (BST)

You sure he doesn't mean the gray that marks unupdated squares?--Karek^maps?! 09:12, 3 July 2008 (BST)

I'm sure those are exactly the bits he means.--xoxo 13:15, 3 July 2008 (BST)

Ah. Those have always been there; they just all used to bee collected into tidy 11x11 block heaps heaps as an "expired image". Now that the map is actually hosted at http://sim.urbandead.info in a database (which is itself much much easier to update) there's no need to limit updates to coming from just the 81 "sim spots", so the UN-updated areas are also not so restricted. Its more chaotic & random, but I wouldn't say "ugly".  Swiers 17:54, 3 July 2008 (BST)

Bot updates

how regular are they?--xoxo 04:09, 16 July 2008 (BST)

From what I gater, Rooster triggers the bot to run manually, so its as regular as "when he remebers". Its really easy to do by hand though; just go to Image:SIM Core Map.png, where you have the option to upload a new version of the image. Go to http://sim.urbandead.info/images/SIM_core_image.png and save that image to your desktop (or where ever) and then upload it is a new version of Image:SIM Core Map.png. You may have to clear you cache before you see the results from doing this.  Swiers 04:46, 16 July 2008 (BST)

That image page you mentioned gives me a 404. Can you provide the full link?--xoxo 05:29, 16 July 2008 (BST)

Fixed.  Swiers 05:38, 16 July 2008 (BST)

Quick question about quality

Can someone explain why the map image displays very differently when viewed with different browsers? I use Firefox primarily, and because of some minor annoyance (odd blue and purple borders) when viewing the omnimap, which utilizes the same image, I switched to IE to check if it was a bug. At that point I realized that the quality of the IE view of the image was loads better. So I came here to ask since this map is the primary user of the image. An example of what is see when viewing the maps in the two browsers. - User:Whitehouse 07:29, 20 July 2008 (BST)

http://www.toolness.com/wp/?p=39 has the details. FF3 has a grafics package that resizes (and otherwise renders) its graphics "better" than old browsers do, using anti-aliasing and the same sort of re-sampling a good image editing program would when altering image sizes. Which is great when down-sizing them, or expanding photographs, but it SUCKS when blowing a 100x100 pixel image (http://www.sim.urbandead.com/imaes/SIM_core_image.png) up t 600x600 (as used on SIM)or 1500x1500 (as on http://sim.urbandead.com).
Short version, FF3 does not play well with SIM; all other browsers do. There's other sites if messes up to; any site that uses the same up-sizes trick for I did is screwed up. Hopefully Mozilla will add style setting you can put on images to force "old school" rendering.  Swiers 08:23, 20 July 2008 (BST)