Talk:Lore Character Template

Changes to the template

Removal of {{Intro}} - Since these are lore articles, the introduction and associated links do not make sense. Instead, important dates should be listed in the dates section of the character summary template, and can be mentioned in the character information area as well. Related quests will instead be listed in the related pages > quests section. Links to patches should instead be links to dates - see the third column on the Patches page for all associated date articles. Removal of Character and Background section - This section header is redundant as the first section. The focus of the page is about the character and background, so this is not needed. Removal of Lore and Dialog section - Lore and Dialog is a section used on quests and NPCs to list just that - lore behind the quest/npc and associated dialog. Since the page is about the lore, that part of the section title is redundant. And the lore page is not the ideal place to list dialog. This is why there are links to the NPC/Creature versions of the character and the related quests - so a person interested in what an in-game version of that character has said can do so on the correct pages. It is also better to view dialog in context with the rest of the dialog from the associated quest. For example, Asheron has appeared in countless live events and quests. Listing everything he has ever uttered on this article would make for a really long section, with a lot of it seeming odd without the rest of the dialog. Removal of Other Lore and Trivia section - Trivia sections are discouraged. Information here should be worked into the main area for lore or the the related pages sections. A trivia, miscellaneous, or OOC section should only be added if that information cannot be worked into the other sections. Restructure of Related Pages - This is just some simple reformatting to better structure the article. All the previous sections of related information should fit into one of these sections. By creating them all under the section of related pages, it helps distinguish it from the main lore, which should be the focus of the article. --An Adventurer 02:02, 31 October 2010 (EST)

Thx a bunch, sure helped to restructure the pages better (and more logical...), was struggling with it myself (now I just have to rework the entries of the past week :) ). Just a few remarks: Is it possible to add a "Faction" to the Character Lore Summary? For some characters, a direct link to "where they belong" might prove helpful I have not used the "Dates" entry a lot. One of the reasons is that the entry for major characters would become quite long, another that it is sometimes (for historical characters) hard to find out when it happened. Also, for historical characters, the timeline is ambiguous: use the -3,000 years or the "Alaidain" denomination (which might be hard to figure out for people not that into lore) Would it be an idea to add a "top menu", like the ones we have for quests and such instead of a ToC? Categories and minor/major. It is sometimes hard to determine how much influence a character has on the story.. And, this role could change. I wouldn't be surprised to see some of the Dericost characters pop up in the next story arc, if this will evolve around Geraine IV. I also kinda miss a category "Historical Character" (like the one for the locations): i. e. Lore Characters who are, a. deceased (and definitively...), b. only appear in "historical" texts. They are usually somewhere between minor and major, since they might have had a huge impact on the storyline, but are long gone and have not be seen since the start of AC "Other references" to the character. I would like to have this option to add links to "canon" which (at the moment...) might not seem important, but for example indicates links between characters. Also, this might be a place to put entries to the CoD Database and other links which might be useful for research in the future --Sanddh 07:47, 31 October 2010 (EST)

Factions - yes, that'd be possible. I'd have to build it in such a way though that if no variable is listed the faction doesn't show up. And really, the rest of the variables should be the same way. I'm just not skilled with making wiki templates, so it'll take a bit of testing, or pestering Tlosk to do it ;) Dates - I agree, it is often hard to use this field. But I thought it was important enough for some characters to include - for example - the reigns of rulers, the births/deaths of important characters. If I can make it so that if the field is left blank the "Important dates:" does not display, that will help. I also have long term plans to go back and do a lot of clean up to both timelines, which would help us at least have estimates for some events. Top Menu - good idea. It can certainly be done, I'll just need to poke around in the code for the quest summary wiki template to see how it is done. But I assume it should be very easy to modify for this template. Major/Minor - Yes, it can be hard to determine. That's why in the decriptions of both categories (see: Category:Major Character & Category:Minor Character), it says "Determined on a case by case basis." If anyone is ever unsure they can always start a discussion on the talk page for that character and others can weigh in on what they think. And thankfully, since I merged the old Minor Character Summary template into the Character Summary template, changing a character from major to minor is as simple as changing that one word in the category listing. Historical Character - One thing I try to avoid is making lore articles from an Isparian perspective. While the game began with just humans, we now have shadows, gear knights, undead dericostians, and will soon have yalaini, tumerok, and lugian player races. Since it was revealed that we'd have non-human playable races, I've tried to avoid using Isparian specific dates as benchmarks for lore. So for example PY -15, when Aluvians first began arriving on Osteth, is no more or less significant than PY -29, when tumeroks began arriving on Marae Lassel. With that in mind, it could be hard to determine what is historical and what is recent enough to not be. There is also the very real possibility that characters which have only been mentioned in lore will begin making appearances. With Yalaini soon returning, its is very possible that the Emperor, the Nali, or other important Yalaini could return and have some major role in the story. That said, I understand the idea. I created a category, Category:Lore Text, specifically for texts which are only mentioned in lore and do not exist as readable text items in the game. I can see having a similar category for characters. If they have never appeared as an NPC, creature, or dev controlled character in the game, they could have the additional category of Lore Character, Unseen Character, or something similar. The problem I see with this however is that this category would encompass such a wide array of characters that I don't see it being particularly useful. For example, Elous VIII, a king of Viamont mentioned in The Reign of Alfrega which we know nothing about, and Geraine IV would both be in this category, since neither has been seen in game. It could work, but it could use some possible refining. I'm always open to more categorizing though. The information gathered on the wiki is only useful if people can find it. Some ideas for possible additional character categories are: Unseen Character (or similar name) - described above. Deceased Character Living Character Pre-Sundering Character - The Sundering is a significant enough event that it could be used as a benchmark for characters. This would be similar to the historical character category you've suggested. Other References - Regardless of if we keep this section or not, it should not be at the bottom. the References should always be last. Now, on the section itself. I don't really understand what purpose it serves. Looking at the entry for Maila Realaidain, for example. The items listed under Other References seem like they could easily be used as an actual reference (with the ref tag) and worked into the body of the article. Could you explain your reasons for having it? --An Adventurer 03:11, 1 November 2010 (EST)

Factions: I was so free to add a faction entry in the template. It will only show up when a faction is entered. The code isn't really elegant, since I'm only dabbling with templates, but for now it will do I guess ;). I'm not 100% happy with the word Faction though, since it implies there is another faction possible. In case of for example the Order of the Hieromancers or the Dereth Exploration Society, there is no opposing faction. For the entries of Date and Related, I agree that if there is no information entered, they should not show up. Name should always be entered I think (not entering it must be a mistake, may it is an idea to put the Lore Character Template there as a default). Also the "race" entry should show, imho, even if unknown. --Sanddh 06:58, 1 November 2010 (EST)

I was thinking Associated Groups or something similar instead of factions. If I have time tonight, I will try to get some more work done on the template, including the top menu, more things being hidden if no info is given, and possibly expanding the tempates to include true/falses for all the categories (e.g. if Aluvian = true, include category:Aluvian Character) I'll be doing my work on User:An Adventurer/Sandbox 2 and {{User-An Adventurer's Sandbox}}, so you can keep tinkering with the current character summary and sandbox templates if you wish. --An Adventurer 07:05, 1 November 2010 (EST)

I have finished my work on my test page and template. You can view the test page here: User:An Adventurer/Sandbox 2 and the test template here: {{User-An Adventurer's Sandbox}} I did not get everything functioning as I would have liked to, but I think it will do for now. Features: Top menu - a menu similar to that on a quest page with links to the page's subsections. Each link can be set to true/false to make it display or not. Updated basic info - There is an associated groups section now. If any of these fields are set to blank, it will not display. Automatic categorization - setting the various category flags to true add the corresponding category. Unneeded variables can be deleted to save room. Stuff I couldn't get in: Since many character pages will be rather short, I wanted to be able to hide the top menu. This is why there is a Display Top Links variable. However, I wasn't able to get it to work. I've left the variable in the code though, so when I have more time to tinker around with it, we can turn on and off the visibility on existing pages by just changing it to false. I wanted the Race field to be automatically populated based on the category flags set at the bottom of the template. So for example, if Asheron is has Empyrean = True and Yalaini = True it would display Race: Empyrean (Yalaini). However, I wasn't sure how to deal with creatures, or characters who could have multiple race flags set. For example, Adja is assumed to be Yalaini but of Falatacot decent. Dardante is Isparian, Viamontian, but also currently a Shadow. Because of these issues, I've left the Race field how it was before, where we simply enter a link to the race page. Let me know what you think. --An Adventurer 12:41, 1 November 2010 (EST)

I like the idea of "Associated Groups", a lot actually ;). The whole template looks great for Asheron, so for major characters it would work pretty well I guess. Setting the categories to True and False: I think this will work for Major or Minor character, since there are only two options available. I don't know (but would have to test this in practice) how it will work for the "Race" entry. Adding the categories automatically would be a rather big benefit though. Display options for the Character Lore Summary: this will work fine I think. If no entry is given for the Name of the character, an idea would be to set the default to the PAGENAME. "Race": I think this is a rather essential entry. If nothing is entered here, the fact that the race is "Unknown" is something informational too. Dates: Yep, if no dates are entered here, it should disappear. I don't know however, for some characters at least a period when they were "active" is known. Maybe in the description of the template, ask people to enter at least some sort of indication, for example the Empyrean epoches, or at least "pre-Sundering"? This will give a one-look overview, without reading through the maybe large amount of text. Top Menu: looks a lot better than the right side ToC. I don't know however (would need to test it) how the "smaller" entries under Related Pages will look when only those that are actually used are shown. When all entries are shown, it looks rather crowded, though it would work wonderful for navigational purposes It would indeed be a nice idea to have the top bar disappear for small entries. Already small entries (with one or two sentences) look a bit weird with the huge "Reference" caption. No clue how to get it to work automatically, because it would have to search for the length of the page to determine if it would be necessary to display or not. I don't know how workable it will be to set so many parameters to True or False to make them show in the top bar. A way to work around it is probably to let the "major" entries set by default to True, and the smaller to "False", just to make it easier. I don't know how it is done in the Quest template, would have to look into it. I tried experimenting in my Sandbox to see if Ifexist also can take a look at captions, but alas... guess setting True or False is the only way. Looking at the example of Asheron, I wonder if it would be possible to wrap for example the Item Tables or the Images section around the Character Lore Summary, so that you don't have to scroll down over some empty page section. Would need to play with wrapping and/or floating parameters prolly for the Summary though. If a Top Menu is going to be used, what will be missing will be a ToC for the first, basic, part of the article. Especially with Major Characters, using captions to structure that basic part would not be a bad idea. However, these caption can't be shown in the top bar. A separate ToC for that section would be an ugly workaround. --Sanddh 13:05, 2 November 2010 (EST)

My thought with the true/false racial/cultural categories is that if we ever need to add a new race to the template, it would be extremely easy to do so. Since each variable does not need to be included, only the ones set to true, we wouldn't even need to go back and edit in false values to older articles. I also think that by making the categories true/false options in the page template, it makes it much easier for people to categorize pages. They don't need to worry about spelling the category correctly, or remember to add it to the bottom of the page. Its right in front of them as they are filling out the first section of the page. On the dates - I agree, having some sort of era listing would be nice, since specific dates are so often hard to find. I think I will add an Eras variable, in addition to the specific dates. So for example, Asheron's character summary would look something like: Asheron Race: Yalaini Associated Groups: The Order of the Perfect Light Asheron's Order of Sentinels Era(s) Active: Rhethis Eipoth Torethis Eipoth Hyrethis Eipoth Moriqui Eipoth PY Era (or something similar, something to differentiate the last empyrean era with the present era) Important dates: RE 336 (date of birth) HE 647 (casts The Sundering) Related characters: Atlan (Father) Maila Realaidain (Mother) Elysa Strathelar Top menu - I am going to remove the dashes between the smaller related pages. They only display correctly if the first and last are set to true, and rather than dealing with a ton of variables to control whether or not the dashes appear, I'll just replace them with non-breaking spaces. I agree, it will look a bit crowded if all are set to true, but I don't think that will be a very common occurrence. On the item table wrapping issues - I honestly didn't notice this, I usually run the wiki full screen at 1680x1050. Looks like (for me anyways) it begins to push the items below the summary when the window width is about 1000-1050px. So that is something we'll probably have to look into if we assume 1024x768 as the most common viewing size. But for now, if it is an issue we can instead use {{Item Table Three}} or {{Item Table Two}} so there are fewer columns. ToC - Well that is kind of the choice we have to make. A nice looking ToC across the top with fixed, predetermined items, or the auto-generated wiki ToC. I do not think the Top Menu needs a link to the first section of the article, as that is going to be directly below it. However, if the main lore section has sub-headers, it could be an issue. I could look into creating, say, 3-4 customizable Top Menu links, where if you enter the exact name of the section, it will create a link to it. But that is something which can be worked on later. --An Adventurer 00:34, 7 November 2010 (EST)

I've made a few more changes. I believe that my sandbox template is in good enough shape to go live, so I will be implementing the changes to the {{Character Summary}} template and Lore Character Template. --An Adventurer 01:33, 7 November 2010 (EST)