Thanks :) Hectate seems to be doing lots of things around entities too, and I probably wouldn't have done anything today if there wasn't a big yellow banner on the entity list saying it's an area we are focussing on.

monster_shalrath is the entity page. I think someone (negke?) suggested that we should keep the mapping and playing info separate, and I agree. I haven't touched the Monster pages. I think negke said he was looking into improving various images though.

By the way, if anyone has more suggestions for extra information on entities, it would be great to hear (or just add it yourself ;) ) 

I didn't suggest it, only wondered which was better approach, since they are currently separate. Come to think about it, though, it seems like a better idea to have a single page for those entries that allow it. For example, the items and monsters, possibly even all entities.

The reason is a player is interested in how an item looks and what it does. A mapper is interested in how in its technical aspects. Both kinds of information can easily be on the same page: basic stuff first, advanced stuff below. Just like Wikipedia does it. There's no point in keep most pages separate just to have some additional technical info on one.

The existing pages for items require a rewrite, anyway, so this would be an opportunity. 

Learn to use the Preview function. Also on the Wiki. 

Well, I don't mind putting everything on one page as long as it's all neatly formatted and the section relevant to regular players is not cluttered by mapper stuff.

Note sure how to provide a nice clean separation of the two, but I guess to a mapper, both parts of the information are relevant.

Personally, I would have the regular gameplay related stuff at the top, with monster stats, an image, trivia, etc. and then a section at the underneath with the entity name, technical details and suggestions for how it could be used in a map. Detailed tutorials should probably be on other pages though, linked from the monster or entity page, and also the tutorials page.

Not really in the mood to make a test page though, so if you have any ideas, just get working on them. If you do, I think it's best to make an example from an entity which doesn't have information up right now. Everything's a bit of a mess and we have a bunch of pages with different formats, but I think that's fine until we settle on one style. The information is the important thing - formatting can be changed fairly easily. 

When I did the item_sigil, func_episodegate and func_bossgate page creation\edits I put the basic description of what it did in the original game on top, a typical .fgd entry in the middle and then a short description of how it did it in the original game on the bottom. I thought that this closest fit a typical Wikipedia entry.

There were no other entity pages at the time to go by as this was on day one of the Quakewiki being editable. 

oh well... the old articles are not that good anyway. 

I kind of agree. Some of them made some assumptions on the baseline level of knowledge of the reader. Ideally I think that in the end if someone has a question someone else could point them to the specific Wiki page that addressed their questions and that Wiki page would be properly linked to other pages.

For example if a page is discussing a specific brush entity then a simple link to a page describing what a brush entity is (without the details in regards to using them in specific situations) would save a lot of time and space. That way someone who already knows what it is won't have to slog through unnecessary text to get to what they need to know.

For the more technical stuff like editing progs.dat and QuakeC then I would think that there would be some assumption of basic knowledge in regards to coding and so on before tackling those subjects. 

yeah, i'm just going to rewrite them all anyway (if i do them) because they are not verbose enough in most cases and don't have a proper way of documenting function arguments and return values. 

I really like the separation between Gamer and Editor focus. If I visit a website, I do not want to scroll. I want the information I am looking for right there. 

I argued that too, but in the end, negke convinced me that having each separate is just silly, as one of the good points of having a wiki page is being able to learn EVERYTHING about an object. It also seems silly to have 2 smaller pages about 1 object. Like how much are you really going to write about Rockets?

So now I am in favor of pages which are about "Rockets" (for example), with everything there is to do with Rockets as a player and as a designer on a single page, and the page "item_rockets" forwards to the appropriate section of the "Rockets" page. 

Good work so far, guys. I'm digging the site, layout, and especially the logo. The logo is just perfect, whoever did it.

BTW, I noticed a couple of people sign up today--when checking the "Recent Activity" page(at bottom of left menu). They look like bots. Wayne66P‎, and Priscilla 

Admins, can you add a captcha to the registration process to stop the spambots? 

http://quakewiki.org/wiki/Test:Vore

feedback would be helpful. If this is better than two pages, we can go through and do everything like this. 

The pic is broken - either that or that vore has a serious problem with her legs. 

We are going to replace the pics at some point. The existing pictures are all fucked up.

If you have any comments specifically regarding the combination of monster and entity information it would be especially helpful. 

The pics have some weird transparency settings which is a shame because they are very nice otherwise. I tried replacing the empty bits with black but that is not the right colour. 

Looks fine to me (image aside). 

I think that page looks excellent. I didn't notice the broken legs until someone mentioned it (above).

The information you're written on is really cool.

I like the entity information, but I don't like "duplicate content" -- I fear we will have an entity section of the site, where we would already have entity information there as well, therefore having duplicate content.

Your thoughts on that? 

You could make pretty good pictures with TrenchBroom if you disable the entity bounds and classnames. Then it will only display the model. You can even change the background color to whatever you want by adding a value to the preferences file. 

yeah, it was something Negke and I considered. I couldn't use it on this machine though, since models don't render in the 3d view properly. I'll take a pic and put it on the tracker tonight.

Negke said he made a plain white map for taking pics, and he already started doing the monsters, so maybe he'll do the others too.

Spirit: should we be using gif or png for images or does it not matter? 

http://oasis.xentax.com/index.php?content=downloads

I used this to take shots of the Quakeguy. It can open basically every format known to man, and displays animation frames and such so you can pose the enemies as you want. 

png! please try to use gamma in the app you capture in rather than changing it later. negke's item pictures look pretty bad imo. what I really like about the current images is that they are not the boring idle stance. 

Well, I used png, but since I am currently stuck on my very small, crappy windows xp laptop, I was only able to take shots using QME, which doesn't have a very nice zoom function, so the shots I took are not especially well sized.

I've used the naming format monster_<game>_<monster_name>.png for all images, and the size is 640x640 for everything. Some of the images could use zooming in, so if someone else wants to fix them, that would be most helpful, otherwise I might do it in the future. Perhaps they are too dark also, since I didn't change the brightness at all.

I went through all the standard Quake monster pages and updated the images and added the new monster infobox format. I did not add other information about the entity or clean up the description text at all. 

ok, so the page for the Vore is mostly done, although it needs a better image, and it would be nice to have more information with extra in game pictures perhaps?

I also added the entity information (no detailed usage tips etc. though) for the Zombie, Grunt and Shambler and set up redirects from the old monster_shambler etc. pages to the new entity information section of each monster page.

I was actually going to do some mapping tonight, but there is no time left now :/

Please help fill in the information if you have any time. 

By the way, I also thought briefly about how we might link files to the wiki for direct map or map page links that don't have to be manually changed if some site goes down. Quaddicted and Quaketastic seem to be the best and most reliable Quake file hosts, and hopefully neither of them will go down, but just in case they do in the future, I thought it would be good to link files via template instead of direct url. In case you are linking a map on the wiki, please use this template I set up:
{{file_map
| file = e1m1rmx
| text = e1m1 remixed
}}
file is the filename of the map, sans extension.
text is a description that will appear on the page, though it can be omitted and the filename + extension will appear in its place:
{{file_map | file=e1m1rmx}} > e1m1rmx.zip
{{file_map | file=e1m1rmx | text=e1m1 remixed}} > e1m1 remixed

The template I set up is here: http://quakewiki.org/wiki/Template:file_map

I would like to set up other templates for tutorial files and stuff, which would hopefully be hosted on quaketastic. It would be nice to have a tutorial or wiki_files folder on there if an admin is reading this ;)