Lore Slot Abilities

[Cannonfodder]

So there's one article right now http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Clockwork_Lore that I filled out with information I copied from the game.  There are currently a total of 35 more articles to complete the current Lore abilities.

Incarnates Ascend (19.5) will bring us an additional 108 abilities.

We could use some templates and formatting and such to help get us started filling these pages out.

The good news:  The power details for all the Lore abilities is constant (recharge, end cost, duration, power type, etc.)  The combat attributes of every pet seem to be the same from the limited sample I've been able to view (needs confirmation). 

So potentially these could be made into a template and either placed on the individual ability page or linked to a common "Lore Pet Stats"/"Lore Power Stats" page or placed on the main Lore Slot Abilities Page.

Once standardization and templates are done, the only individual information that needs to be placed on the pages are pictures of each of the essences (currently 3 per ability) and the powers and power details of what each essence has (3-4 per ability depending on if a pet has attack powers or not).

I'm not a template whiz nor a formatting/standardization expert, so I ask for help.  Once the article structure is in place I'll be happy to help fill in the blanks. 

[eabrace]

I'll work up a sample template and leave you a note on your talk page so that you can let me know if there's anything I need to tweak before we move it into the main namespace.

[eabrace]

Rough draft of the monster template is available for review here:  http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/User:Eabrace/Lore_Pet_Template

Let me know if you see anything that you need/want changed.

[Supa Troll]

Hey guys.

That's a lot of pages. Especially with the new ones coming out. So I thought I'd save you all some typing and wrote a quick tool to automate it. eabrace, you hadn't posted the template yet when I started, so I just went with some standard pieces I grabbed from other pages. Here's a couple of examples I uploaded:

http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/User:Supa_Troll/Warworks_Total_Core_Improved_Ally
http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/User:Supa_Troll/Warworks_Core_Superior_Ally

I can update the tool to use a standard template. I can also easily get the combat numbers and attributes if you want, though I wasn't sure if there was precedent for that since none of the other pet / power pages have anything like that.

Let me know -- once we decide on what format to use it's just a matter of bulk uploading the pages. I can even do the new I20.5 ones, though it might be best to hide those in a user namespace until it's officially released  

[eabrace]

Whatever format we decide to go with, hold off on putting any I20.5 info up unless it's already been previewed in an open beta or an event that was publicly accessible to everyone (i.e. the new trial preview.)

Edit:  Just looked over what you added Supa Troll.  Looks pretty good.  I could pretty easily massage the template I laid out earlier today to break each pet summoned by the power out into a separate template call.  That would allow the flexibility to add only one or as many pets as we need to each power's page.

[Supa Troll]

Oh don't worry, I haven't forgotten the debate that erupted about the witch costume pieces... Just was mentioning that I can have it good to go and ready to upload the day the patch goes live.

Edit: Cool. Let me know when you have a template that you're happy with and I'll modify the program to output in a format that uses it. I was thinking that if we do go with full combat attributes, it might be best to use javascript to collapse them into the heading by default (if we have any templates that can do that) so that the page isn't forever long.

[eabrace]

I think the only question remaining is whether or not we want all of the combat attributes for every pet summoned by a power on the page for that power.  Seems to me since most of the powers can summon multiple pets, that could become very messy.  If we want to add those blocks, I would suggest that it may be best to create linked subpages with each pet's individual combat attributes.  I would also suggest that we place each of the subpages into a separate category of "Incarnate Lore Pets" or something of that nature with the "Incarnate System" category as a parent.

[Supa Troll]

The other caveat is that some powers summon pets with the same name but different attributes. For example, in the Warworks ones I posted, both of them summon a "Mk-VI 'Victoria' Essence", but the very rare version gets an extra power (Lore Power) that modifies its attributes. So with the separate page method, those would have to point to different pages, which gets a little messy due to the name collision.

We could always use the internal name the game uses for the pet entities, as those are unique, but I was trying to avoid 'leaking' any of the behind-the-scenes mechanics into the wiki page.

[Aggelakis]

I don't think the wiki needs any of the in-detail combat data in the articles; look at the various powerset pages and enemy group pages for examples of the level of detail should be there. (e.g. mostly just the short and long form descriptions of the powers - more like what SupaTroll's done than what Eabrace's done).

City of Data, if that's ever updated, can handle all of the minutiae.

[Cannonfodder]

Detailed Stats on City of Data:  Agreed.

Supa Troll's Templates:  Yep, that's what I was going for.  A few tweaks here and there as we set it up and find out what works and what doesn't.

New Lore Pets in a namespace:  Open Beta started today.  http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?p=3665525#post3665525  We should just be able to put the pages on the patch watch list, correct?

Same Name pets with different attributes:  Can we nest templates within each other?  For example, template the powers and call them to each page as needed.  Some of the powers such as "Lore Evasion", "Super Leap", "Lore Power", "Resistance" would be useful on almost every page.  Other powers like "Plasma Full Auto" would have limited usefulness but would still be called by five or six pages depending on the Lore Ability.

Thoughts?

[Supa Troll]

I don't think the wiki needs any of the in-detail combat data in the articles; look at the various powerset pages and enemy group pages for examples of the level of detail should be there. (e.g. mostly just the short and long form descriptions of the powers - more like what SupaTroll's done than what Eabrace's done).

City of Data, if that's ever updated, can handle all of the minutiae.

I tend to agree, I've never seen the combat numbers directly used on the wiki, and it seems a little bit overkill.

I made a few tweaks to the generator to create pages that more closely resemble the existing Judgement / Alpha slot pages. I'm going to go ahead and start uploading them to my personal namespace, if an admin wants to move them that's fine, or if further tweaks are desired I can make changes. I think I'll go ahead and put up all of the new ones, too, since the public beta happened tonight and everyone has had a chance to see them.

Does anyone know of an easy way to bulk upload 144 wikitext pages? In the meantime I'll see if I can script it with perl or something.

EDIT: And Storyteller posted while I was writing my reply and said pretty much the same thing

Yes, templates can be nested -- the {{IComponent}} and related templates work that way. I'm not sure if it's worth the effort since I'm bulk generating them from game data, but is an option.

[Sekoia]

Does anyone know of an easy way to bulk upload 144 wikitext pages? In the meantime I'll see if I can script it with perl or something.

Yes, look into Pywikipediabot. In particular, the pagefromfile script. Basically, format the 144 articles into a single text file using special delimiters and then the script creates the articles for you.

Alternately, if you don't want to muck with getting the bot to work, I can probably do it for you if you provide the article texts to me. The page creation would go under SekoiaBot's username, but I can attribute them to you in the edit summary. If you want to go that route, send the article text to me via email at sekoia@cohtitan.com.

[Supa Troll]

Thanks Sekoia, I'll look into that for next time. I managed to get the upload going using the MediaWiki Bulk Page Creator php script, after some mucking around with cookie and form variables to make the session hijacking protection happy. Next time I'll look at that one and see if it has that part built in.

Looks like a couple of the templates will need to be updated to work with the new lore abilities. I'll see if I can figure out a way to make them more generic or if we'll have to put every single ability in the list.

EDIT: Upload finished! They should all be here: http://wiki.cohtitan.com/w/index.php?title=Special%3APrefixIndex&prefix=Supa+Troll%2F&namespace=2

EDIT 2: I fixed {{IAbilityImage}} for the new pets. I *think* the {{IncarnateList*Ability}} templates for the "Used In" section should work once the pages are moved into the real namespace, but I'm not 100% sure how it's doing what it's doing. I wanted to upload them into my own user space first, since while the wiki is supposed to be open participation, I think blasting 144 pages at once is probably pushing it for someone who hasn't done a whole lot on it before .

[eabrace]

I modified the additions to IAbilityImage slightly in order to make them more maintenance friendly.  (For example, if Carnival pets get their own icons instead of reusing the WarWorks icons, we only need to change the name of the Rare icon once rather than four times.)

Detailed Stats on City of Data:  Agreed.

Supa Troll's Templates:  Yep, that's what I was going for.  A few tweaks here and there as we set it up and find out what works and what doesn't.

I will go ahead and modify the sample template I set up accordingly.

New Lore Pets in a namespace:  Open Beta started today.  http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?p=3665525#post3665525  We should just be able to put the pages on the patch watch list, correct?

The new pages can be moved to the main namespace and tagged with {{Issue20.5}} at the top.  The [[Patch Watchlist]] category will be automatically included when you use that tag.

Same Name pets with different attributes:  Can we nest templates within each other?  For example, template the powers and call them to each page as needed.  Some of the powers such as "Lore Evasion", "Super Leap", "Lore Power", "Resistance" would be useful on almost every page.  Other powers like "Plasma Full Auto" would have limited usefulness but would still be called by five or six pages depending on the Lore Ability.

Yes.  Templates can be nested.  We abuse that feature all over the place. 

Although we do not generally have separate templates for powers, that's not to say that we couldn't.  I could set up some templates under a category of something like "Lore Pet Powers" that make use of the "Power" template.  That would allow you to make a call of maybe "{{Lore_Evasion}}" rather than having to copy/paste or enter by hand "{{Power|[[File:SuperReflexes_Lucky.png|18px]]|Lore Evasion|Auto: +DEF(AoE), +Res(All)|Lore Allies have very high defense versus area of effect attacks and moderate damage resistance.}}"

(Note that using the Power template instead of Lore_Evasion would still work just fine, so the automated generation Supa Troll has working would not need to be modified.)

[Supa Troll]

Thanks again Sekoia, I looked into that python bot and got it working, seems to work better than the other one I tried.

The only thing I haven't figured out is how to get it to flag edits with a 'bot' flag so they don't spam recent changes, or do I need to ask somebody for a separate account for that?

I modified the additions to IAbilityImage slightly in order to make them more maintenance friendly.  (For example, if Carnival pets get their own icons instead of reusing the WarWorks icons, we only need to change the name of the Rare icon once rather than four times.)

Ah, I didn't know they could fall through like that. I just copied the existing ones. Should make it a little more compact.

(Note that using the Power template instead of Lore_Evasion would still work just fine, so the automated generation Supa Troll has working would not need to be modified.)

I can go either way, I can special case certain powers so they're all referencing the same template instance, or leave it as-is so the wikitext is more readable. I'm a little leery about using a whole-page template since that makes it difficult to edit, for instance if someone wants to add pictures of the pets.

[eabrace]

I can go either way, I can special case certain powers so they're all referencing the same template instance, or leave it as-is so the wikitext is more readable. I'm a little leery about using a whole-page template since that makes it difficult to edit, for instance if someone wants to add pictures of the pets.

That's fine.  I'm just presenting options.  I'll let you and storyteller decide what you think works best and move that into the main namespace.

[eabrace]

I've now broken down the template into two separate templates:

Lore Power Template
Lore Pet Template

The Power Template is an overall template for all of the information about the power used to summon the pets.

The Pet Template is a template that can be used to record all the information for an individual pet (and can be called as part of the data entry for the Power Template.)

The big chunks of combat attribute data have been removed from both templates.

[Supa Troll]

We look to be pretty well converged, so I'll start manually moving the (live, issue 20) pages into place. Templates can easily be dropped in for the pets and power lists if desired with minimal editing; adding pictures is a good time to do it since the template requires an image.

[Supa Troll]

Moves complete! All your edit history are belong to us.

Please poke around the Lore page and see if anything is broken. I did fix one typo in IAbilityImage that I happened to notice, and added a proper plural for Genomic Analysis (one of the Seers powers uses two).

[Sekoia]

Thanks again Sekoia, I looked into that python bot and got it working, seems to work better than the other one I tried.

The only thing I haven't figured out is how to get it to flag edits with a 'bot' flag so they don't spam recent changes, or do I need to ask somebody for a separate account for that?

I'm glad it's working well for you.

There's no way to flag individual edits with the "bot" flag. That flag is assigned to an account, so you would need a separate Titan account for it. Unless you're planning to do a lot of bot work in the future, I wouldn't worry about it. You can just use your normal account.