Medieval Engineers Wiki:News

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2018-01-05 Preparations Complete (mostly)

Twenty Eighteen...that phrase will take a while to get used to. I written a rather large news post and changelog so I'm making use of that nice expandable template I worked out. There have been a lot of organizational changes lately but no content. As far as I can tell, I've reached the end of 0.6 organization and I'm ready to move on to data exporting. Hopefully I'll be flooding the wiki with data updates soon. ~CptTwinkie

About History and Tags 

History

In the past few days I've focused a lot on history in the wiki. I realized, very slowly I know, that keeping history for an early access game will have some challenges. I had already done some research about wiki history so I knew some methods but it was only now that I rationalized those methods to our humble ME Wiki.

There are two main/popular/easy methods of history for any given article on a wiki: history references and sub-page archiving. References are the easiest because you only need to link to a history state of the page and you're done. This works well for, what I call, non-functional pages. You can view them and with a little effort you can even update them (edit → save → undo → save → new history created). This doesn't work well for functional pages, things like categories and templates. A good example that we have is Category:Schematics. Schematics have changed completely from 0.5 to 0.6 and they cannot be updated. The old schematics no longer exist and a bunch of new ones are in their place with new rules. This is where archiving comes in. Move the category to Category:Schematics/0.5, re-link all of the schematic pages, create a new Category:Schematics and add new schematics pages to it. This gives us separate content, separate histories, and easy updates. It's also a lot more work.

With all of this history activity going on I realized that a lot of pages were acquiring links to the past. I started making a history template when I realized that our two kinds of history keeping (references and archiving) called for two kinds of template (it's technical :P). So I made Template:HistoryId, which uses reference ID's, and Template:HistorySub, which uses archived sub-pages. They have identical formatting to each other and the Version template. Place just after the version on pages.

Tags

Do you look at the Recent changes page? As an admin I'm on that page all the time. Like right now I'm looking up my own recent changes to write this news. With so many changes happening it's not always clear why a change was made. Sure, I could go back to adding messages every time I save a page but that takes time and I can't always remember how I worded something before...so I don't do it. I know, lazy editor. Those messages are still an option for something truly out of the ordinary. For the most part, I tend to do mass updates for simple things like template changes and re-linking. Having a way to quickly identify those common action in the recent changes is really attractive to me. It turns out that the MediaWiki software has my back! I've added some basic tags for template updates, linking, categorization, pasting game data, and importing pages (yes, I have an offline test wiki I can export things from). So far I've only found one thing confusing. When I change a template or category and I need to touch all of the linked pages, should I use Tag:Template and Tag:Categorization or Tag:Links? What I decided is that I will use Tag:Links anytime I'm just changing the target of something. If I move/rename a category - links. If I rename a template or image - links. If I move pages from one category to another (reorganization) - categorization. If I update a template with different attributes - template.

Change Log

• Created Template:HistorySub to link archived sub-pages.
  
• Created Template:HistoryId to link history ID's.
  
• Created Template:Anchor because it seemed like a good idea at the time.
  
• Created Template:TransclusionNotice, used on Taxation which is transcluded into Claim Block and Wooden Claim Block.
  
• Created Template:Quest prototype. It has some cool categorization behavior but, I had to guess at the information I would export from quests so, it may not be complete.
  
  
• Updated Template:Crafting Blueprint with more concise labels.
  
• Documented Template:Fullurl, which is actually broken but does exactly what it needs to do so don't judge the source.
  
• Fixed Template:Infobox/End by adding more robust linking to work properly with categories.
  
• Fixed Template:Version to have consistent padding.
  
  
• Archived Category:Research and Quests/Schematics.
  
• Archived Template:Resource.
  
• Archived Template:Crafting Schematic.

2018-01-03 Happy New Year!

Progress continues on the 0.6 preparations!

• I updated the wiki style a little bit for the default theme and the templates. It's a collection of subtle changes but I like it.
• Template:Draft was added because it finally seems like we're at a point where many articles are incomplete but others are functionally complete. That seems a good fit for the standard wiki use of draft and stub.
• I'm working on a guide in my free time that gives some documentation to the game saves. I'm working on annotating save files for those who are interested.
• There is the new Key template which provides key graphics. You can use that when you're talking about shortcut keys.
• The Tag template got a 0.6 update and new categories for the new tags.
• Template:Expandable created. This basically lets you add forum style spoiler sections that can be expanded or collapsed.

My next task is to come up with some organization for the new research system. I'll probably be adding templates for quests and updating the schematics template. Hopefully I'll complete that by the end of the week and then I'll only have a few minor tasks to finish up before I can begin working on exporting data. I have to do a little bit of code research before I get started but hopefully I'll be able to export a lot more than in 0.5.

The things I know for certain I won't be exporting are planet and environment data. This means all information about kingdoms, biomes, wonders and flora will be manual entry. If anyone wants to lend a hand, the planets category is a good place to start. The Engineer's Book category also needs content. Get as detailed as you want there but stop short of adding actual quests/research. I'll be exporting as much of that information as possible. There will likely be a quest category with a research quests sub-category that can be linked to for that information.

It looks like I'm going to be keeping busy for some time to come. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. Happy New Year 2018! ~CptTwinkie

2017-12-21 0.6 Progress and Plan

Welcome to 0.6 everyone! I'm hard at work on updates! ~CptTwinkie

Progress

Added templates for game versions, info boxes, kingdoms, biomes, wonders, and mechanical blocks.

Template	Progress	Documentation
Template:Version	Complete	Complete
Template:Infobox	Complete	Complete
Template:Kingdom	Complete	Complete
Template:Biome	Complete	Complete
Template:Wonder	Complete	Complete
Template:MechanicalSource	Complete	Complete
Template:MechanicalTransmission	Complete	Complete
Template:MechanicalSink	Complete	Complete
Template:MechanicalToolhead	Complete	Complete

Archived old planet pages and organized biomes, kingdoms, and wonders into sub-categories of planet. It is probably worth pointing out that I plan to archive 0.5 content rather than keeping it as history. This will allow us to update or even expand the 0.5 content. This will benefit players who still want to play on the archived game branches for whatever reason. If any of you want to update a page for 0.6, move the current 0.5 page to a /0.5 sub-page and recreate the main page.

Please start updating planet. I'm pretty sure I have pages ready for everything there. They just need to be filled in.

Added Power Sinks, Power Sources, and Transmissions to the Mechanical Blocks category.

Don't forget version numbers. If you are creating a 0.6 page, make sure there is no old information on the page and then add a version template for 0.6. This may mean that you have to remove some large portions of the page. That is ok, even if you are simply unsure of the accuracy of the information it is better to remove it. If you want to add the information later after it is checked or updated then you can wrap it in a comment tag <!-- --> so that it is not visible on the page but will still be in the source for editors.

Plan

My plan is to:

1. prepare and organize as much as possible for 0.6. This may take a few weeks.
2. export data from the game. This is difficult to estimate because I have to pull data in a logical way from many parts of the game. This could take a few days or weeks or even more than a month. I'll try to post updates during this process.
3. improve the quality and completeness of existing content and generate new content to achieve a higher level of completeness for the wiki overall. This could theoretically take months but in all honesty I will probably only work on it when I have some free time in my schedule.

Note about biomes and flora

Biome information will not be exported from the game. The reason is that there are not 7 biomes in the game, there are very many. There are transition biomes for each biome pair. Forest has grassy forest and deep forest sub-biomes. There are a lot of biomes defined so exporting them in a meaningful way for the wiki would be difficult in every circumstance. Instead, biome information should be interpreted from game definitions to logically fit into the 7 primary biomes. Sub-biomes should be treated as part of the primary and transitional biomes should be mostly ignored. That sounds simple but if you dig into the environment definitions you will quickly see that there is quite a lot of variety in every aspect of biomes. For an example, even simple plants have multiple sizes and growth stages. There will be quite a bit of manual information sourcing for these things.

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