http://starbounder.org/UserWiki:MSipher Got the bones and a few vital organs of an overhaul of the player-race pages sandboxed here. Trying to make these suitable "hub" pages, giving small doses of information on just about every subject related to the race, and linking off to the more involved pages so a reader can find any information on that race they want just by starting at the one page. Exhaustive information is not terribly useful if it's not easily accessible. Also the old versions look like some of the more story-based bits haven't been touched since the earliest days of development, and not everything is really gonna be reflected in that anymore. Opinions? Something I missed?
This looks really good. The only things I can think of you may want to add are an expandable/hidden section for Floran tagged objects? Prob including the entire list unhidden is a bit much, but it could be helpful to have those objects listed inside the page somewhere. There's also race specific mech pieces, you may want to add those into a list under the armor sets? Let me know if you need a hand with any of it - looks like you've got it under control but I'm happy to help if you get stuck on a query or template. There's also a couple small things like maybe making the bottom section lore bullets icons, and setup a ! icon for the quest lists or something for list consistency. Maybe a Nuru portrait thumb right-aligned next to notable figures? I also wonder if the infobox would look better having the male/female sprites set under a larger non-game picture for each main race. There's a ton of official art for each race which would really jazz the page up. The only issue is that playable/non-playable races would have a design inconsistency since there isn't like painted art for Fenerox and other non-player races - but that's prob not a big deal. I gave you the permissions to edit templates if you want to take a crack at updating it.
Danke for that template-editing permission, and there will very likely be questions about templates incoming. I've worked on one wiki for like nearly a decade now, and gotten VERY used to its templates... a handful of the simpler ones I think the SB wiki could use (unless you do have them and I just don't know what their equivalents are). Like {{-}} that inserts a clean break so image files won't push down into other sections, or {{collist}} that automatically splits "lists" into the indicated number of columns so you don't have to sort them manually. CODING templates are far beyond my capabilities, however. The ! icon for quests is a good idea... though to tangent a tad, I always found it kinda backwards that "!" indicated an open quest and "?" indicated "requirements met", given quests always start with characters asking you "can you do this for me?" Always felt like it should be the other way around. "Can you do this for me?" "Oh! You've done it!" The full list of race-tagged objects would probably be a bit much to have on the page proper, even as a collapsible. Much as I like pages to be inclusive, pagebloat is always on my mind. The Tenant list felt needed because it pulls the snippets of directly-relevant info out of a WAY larger page. But each race Tag has its own dedicated page, so that'd just be needlessly repetitious. I think though that making a link to the race-tag page MORE OVERTLY OBVIOUS would definitely be a good idea. "For a complete list of Floran-tagged objects, [[go here]]" or somesuch in the Tenant subsection above the "fold" since that's where it plays in most. Yeah, using a smaller version of the official site's Floran main image up top would be a good call and help fill up that empty vertical space up top to boot. I think that the lack of NPC-race art would be okay, as it would really kinda highlight PC vs NPC. I'll be plugging away at this for a little while longer and try and have a complete page sandboxed before rolling it out to the other races. Glad it's going over well!
Okay, I think I've got the text and layouts where they'd be best. I've filled out everything outside of the "Pre-1.0" section, which I'm kinda okay with leaving as a Stub for rollout purposes since most of that stuff ain't relevant no mo, through I'm beginning to wonder if a different header name for that might be better. "Beta build differences"? "Beta development & differences"? (Part of me thinks "Koala Beta build" might be more accurate since most of the content was only Koala build, but for consistency's sake, there was enough major changes in the Giraffes to where that level of distinction seems silly.) The problem I butt up against now is my own general inability to code templates and make the alterations to them I need to. I can... kinda muddle through some of them? But the quest icons and making columns uniform widths and whatnot, not so much. I looked at the race template and will TRY to put the website's Floran sample art in there (actually I'll likely use a smaller version of the full-body art they revealed for the book), but I'm not 'zactly confident about pulling that off. Like I said, this wiki seems to use slightly different coding than what I'm long used to. A {{-}} that makes sure there's a CLEAN break and pictures don't go butting down into the next subsection would REALLY make the layout look better. But I think this is close to ready to go live and set the stage to update the other player-race pages to boot.
Okay yeah I got NO clue how I'd put a piece of new art into the Race Infobox template. I got a chunk of sample art uploaded (from the upcoming guidebook and yeah I know it's got some image transparency issues but for a test image whatever), but just how I'd get a space into that coding? I'm lost.
Take a look. I added in an optional "large_img" parameter, if there's an image it'll load it into the infobox. Right now the image width is set to fix at 250px, but we can adjust that if you find images don't match right. I added one into the infobox on your sandbox page. I also added some gender icons to the playable races infobox, and setup that {{-}} template (good suggestion) - let me know what you think!
Excellent, danke. I think with those, this is ready to roll out and get applied to the other playable races too. Now the only thing I MIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT suggest is that the gender/sex sample characters mmmmmmmiiiiiight maybe not should have clothes, but ehn?
Yeah, I don't think that's a big deal. In fact I think it's prob better to have them represented as sort of a 'Random NPC' as opposed to a biological specimen - and that's how players will encounter them in game.
