User talk:Loci

I've been seeing your edits on the recent changes page for a while now. Good job. :-) Emufarmers 08:22, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the information regarding creating new pages. I have removed my question from where I posted it and will add a Wiki Editing section to the FAQ. 13thEssence 00:30, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

Creature Type Pages

Are those supposed to be stub articles, or did you mean to create them as categories? --Quietust 22:28, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

Mainly I created them as stub articles so I would have somewhere to link the "interesting" attributes in the creature info box. That way the info box can just say "No Stun" with a link to more information if the user desires, but without cluttering up the info box with excessive common knowledge. While I also considered adding these tags as categories to the proper creature pages, I haven't put in the time to make that all work yet. --Loci 22:35, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

Eh, I tried to set up categories for the various "interesting" attributes, but the creature pages would display the categories without actually being assigned to the categories. Presumably it was a problem with transclusion depth, or formatting, or something. Someone more familiar with the system could probably get it to work, but I didn't feel like spending any more time on the problem so I removed the categories. --Loci 12:39, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

That's because you were just inserting page links - if you wanted to put them in categories, you should've used [[Category:DF2012:whatever]] rather than just [[whatever]]. --Quietust 13:52, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

Not quite. I actually had added the categories using the {{Category|foo}} template, but removed them because they didn't work. Your links aren't working for me, either. When I click on Category:DF2012:Flying, for instance, I get "This category currently contains no pages or media." If, however, I add the category template {{Category|Flying}} to a creature page directly, the creature shows up on the category page. However, I certainly don't want to modify each and every creature page individually, so any workable solution has to be based on a template transcluding data from the creature /raws. If the creature pages won't register in the categories, I'd rather have the links to the "stub articles" than links to non-functional categories. --Loci 14:24, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

Using {{Category|foo}} will include it in the category and {{Catlink|foo}} will make an actual link appear on the page - if you want both to happen, then you need to use both of those (see {{attrib proc}} which I just recently modified). --Quietust 14:50, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

If you click on Category:DF2012:Flying, you will find that the majority of creatures with flying are *not* currently included. This is exactly the same problem I ran into with my revision 179580, which looks remarkably similar to your revsion 179609. In short, the creature pages show the category links, but aren't actually added to the category until the creature page is edited directly (the three flying creatures currently listed in the category have all been edited since your change). That means the categories won't be complete until *every* creature page with an ability has been edited (or the category lists are administratively regenerated), which is why I chose to revert the categories and just link to an ability page. --Loci 23:15, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

Well, it was empty... then when I edited Giant bat it was added to the category page (even though I didn't edit the creatureinfo box). I only added a sentence about how much fun giant bats are to see what would happen. Strange that just editing a page would add it to a category... --Lethosor (talk) 02:47, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Yep; that's exactly the problem I ran into. For a technical explanation: whenever a template is edited, the wiki software queues up jobs to automatically "regenerate" all the pages that include that template. As those jobs are processed, the pages should pick up new categories from the template. Unfortunately, the wiki software is not handling this specific case correctly--it appears that the raws are not being transcluded correctly during the regeneration, leading the conditional logic to conclude that no creature has the [FLIER] tag. When users edit the creature pages, though, the categories are regenerated correctly because the raws are transcluded correctly. I'm still looking for a solution to resolve the automatic regeneration problem, but since it only happens in the server's back-end processing it's hard to pin down. --Loci 08:47, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Wow, I just noticed you said pretty much exactly what I said in the post before. Anyway, I noticed Template:Creaturelookup/0 is using "/raw" as the path to raws. Maybe the wiki software isn't resolving this path correctly (which could be hard to track down, like you said in the section below). --Lethosor (talk) 21:04, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Regenerating cached categories

I will reset the caches this weekend. --Briess 09:48, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Thanks! --Loci 16:02, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

It appears that the pages still aren't being categorized--the jobs are likely stuck in the Job Queue (currently 730 jobs waiting). Manually running the queue will hopefully put everything in the proper categories. --Loci 21:35, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

I simply forgot to clear the appropriate caches. The full job queue is run on a scripting server every 30 seconds, that estimate is always wrong. --Briess 21:19, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

For context, a single page rebuild creates about 100 jobs in the queue, so the expected number of jobs for this reset should be in the 10k-100k range. --Briess 21:20, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

Alright; sorry for the confusion. --Loci 21:43, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

No worries. The refresh cycle is running now and will take between 6-10 hours to complete. --Briess 21:45, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

Just an update - clearing the cache failed because of some silly issues with the way mediawiki creates jobs. We will need to null edit every page in order to get things working properly again. I will probably set up a bot to do this for us. --Briess 05:48, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

That, sadly, does not sound like a very workable solution. When I changed the formatting in one of the templates, all the categories were emptied again. So all the creature pages would probably have to be null-edited again after every change to any template on the creature pages. Unless the bot can be fully automated, the categories are practically guaranteed to be incomplete. In light of these problems it would perhaps be best to scrap the categories entirely. --Loci 19:03, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Let's not do that yet. I'm planning on upgrading mediawiki again shortly, and I believe there are fixes to this issue in newer versions of the software. --Briess 01:26, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

I did some experimentation on this problem; the automatic regeneration is running, but it appears that the creature raws are not being transcluded correctly during the regeneration, which prevents detection of the necessary tags. I believe the #df_raw function is not correctly returning the raws when executed from the context of the job queue process--is that something you could take a look at? Alternately, is this code available somewhere I could take a look at it? Unfortunately, since this is probably DFwiki-specific code, I doubt a Mediawiki update will fix it. --Loci 09:12, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

[1] is the repo. --Briess 06:34, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Thank you. While I don't see any significant problems in the code, I do see several paths that could lead #df_raw to return without the raws. You suggested above that the job queue is running on a separate server. Are the two config variables $wgDFRawEnableDisk and $wgDFRawPath setup correctly on this server? You might also try setting the correct values in DFRawFunctions.php directly, in case the global config values aren't being applied when the job queue is run. Whichever user is running to process the job queue needs to have read permissions to the raws directory and all files and subdirectories inside. That user may also need directory-list/execute permissions on those directories as well. --Loci 17:11, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Variations

Thanks for fixing up the issues with namespaces and large/gigantic variations (although I must admit, "Tis" is pretty interesting). I tried adding spaces to Template:Creature/basename, but I'm unsure if #mreplace is aware of spaces. It looks like the variations don't show up on DF2012:Giant mantis (although I neglected to see if they did before, but they probably didn't, since Giant mantis man and Giant giant mantis don't exist). The link is still incorrect on Template:Creature/variation links, however. Also, I created Template:Creature/exists as a potential replacement for #ifexists (which is "expensive" - the examples at Template:Creature/variation links list an expensive function count of 68/100). A DFRaw function should do the trick, but I have yet to find a working solution. The problem I ran into previously was how the raws of base creatures contain no references to variations. I suppose, as a workaround, we could have a script build a cache-type template (probably run outside of the wiki and generating template code), but it would likely break easily with updates and take up a lot of space for a template. --Lethosor (talk) 22:55, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

Note: DF2012:Giant tortoise man does display variation links, but none to itself. --Lethosor (talk) 22:56, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

I wouldn't worry about the expensive function count--each invocation only uses 4, but the 17 examples on the template page are the reason why that particular page is so high. In normal use, each creature page should only need 4 (actually 6 since creature/variation uses 2 as well). I have an idea to override the variations output which should make it possible to "special case" around the bugs. Really, "Large" and "Gigantic" could be handled as special cases too, since there are only a few of them. I'll see if I can get that working here shortly. --Loci 23:19, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

Double Redirects

I'll take a look and see what broke there. It used to work properly but something got finagled at some point. --Briess 18:24, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

Image Issues

Should be fixed now. Thanks for the heads up. --Briess 20:40, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

Wow; that was fast! Thank you for your dedication to the Dwarf Fortress Wiki. --Loci 20:47, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

Creature categories

In case you haven't noticed, the recent upgrade seems to have fixed the issue with the categories (Category:DF2012:Exotic pet lists 273 creatures). --Lethosor (talk) 12:58, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

They worked briefly, but sadly they're now broken again in a new way: Category:DF2012:Exotic pet currently includes Cat, Dog, Dwarf, and all other creatures that use the attribute template. So we traded empty categories for incorrectly-filled categories, resulting in equally worthless information. --Loci (talk) 20:39, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Just a sec, I've started the repair process there -- for future reference, when this happens, just do a null edit of Template:Creaturelookup/0 (that is, an edit that doesn't change anything), and the wiki software will automatically fix this, though it might take a little while (incidentally, it wasn't the update that fixed it, it was me, using this trick) --Zzedar (talk) 20:55, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

I also started rerunning all the category regeneration, so it should be super fixed. :) --Briess (talk) 21:00, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Excellent! That appears to have fixed it. I don't know why my change to Template:Attrib proc wouldn't cause the same regeneration, but I'm just glad to finally have useful categories. Now we finally have a list of all the critters with shells and syndromes. --Loci (talk) 21:17, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

DF:Next

I have no idea why I created that. I might have thought it would be useful in a template, but right now it's only used on 2 content pages. The only reason I can think of is that it could help detect things that need updating once the next version is actually released, but that can probably be accomplished with a search. Personally, I agree that "the next version" is clearer than "DF2013". --Lethosor (talk) 21:36, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

Recent changes to the exploratory mining page

_{(Recent changes page lurker)} Why did you remove the reference to the "Pinwheel Shafts" from that page? Seemed quite appropriate and non-harmful. Also, if you could link any research you point out in the text (mainly about FPS death, which I believe should go to a new, separate section but within the same topic), that would be great.--Doktoro Reichard (talk) 22:39, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

Eh, that design was significantly similar to the mineshaft design, yet less efficient and did not provide 100% visibility. The only "claim to fame" listed was protecting against dwarves falling down stairways, an event so rare in this version that I've never even seen it happen. I didn't feel that the design was particularly clever, so I removed it from the page. If you are fond of it, feel free to put it back.

This forum thread was the source of my comment on FPS death. Specifically, blue sam3 notes that open space causes lag, and later on ghostwoods compares linear space to square space.--Loci (talk) 20:13, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

No, I'm not particularly fond of that design (I'm more of an organic development kind of fellow), but I do like to know why things that might have been good yesterday are deleted today, without any apparent reason (even in the changelog).

Also, I did read that post fully (it's even in my userpage due to the relevance). I would have to argue that just opening space by mining costs FPS. What does cost is, as I think you mentioned, the increased pathing calculations that results from the open space. That research also came a bit before the current DF2012 according to the Release information page. This being said, my main concern about that part is that FPS death is a diagonal subject to Exploratory mining and would deserve a section of its own, if enough relevant information is present in the page.--Doktoro Reichard (talk) 22:33, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

<gallery>

The reason this didn't work is because parser tags (like <gallery> and <pre>) don't treat their content as wiki markup. The easiest way around this is to use {{#tag:}}, which passes its (parsed) arguments to a tag:

{{#tag:gallery| {{/gallery}} }}

Also, nice work with the random images and galleries – using pipes is a lot cleaner than using Regexfunctions (which I apparently hit the limit on when redoing the old gallery). —Lethosor (talk) 16:52, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

Ah, that makes sense. I think I'll leave the forgotten beast page the way it is though--it's already quite long, and the gallery works well enough as a linked subpage. My goal was to add random images to the forgotten beast page, but when I researched the Sg template I discovered it was only a single-purpose design. Rather than copy it and create another single-purpose template, I decided to generalize it. Luckily the syntax for images and galleries is interchangeable, so I was able to simplify the code and take the images directly from galleries. The random images don't seem to rotate very often (probably the result of server caching), but other than that they seem to work. Hopefully I can find more great artwork on the forums to spruce up the wiki. On the topic of images, I think the main page gallery could stand to be cleaned up a bit; one long string of text does not translate well to a thumbnail. Some could be cropped to a more compelling image (like the "attend party" one has been); others may require reformating or replacement.--Loci (talk) 19:53, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

Purging should usually update the image - I use this script to add a menu option that does this to the navigation bar (under the move/watch menu). I agree that some of the captions need to be shortened - I like the fact that they're more visible than before, but some of them end up being too long when displayed (particularly for narrow images, like File:Cacamefight.gif). —Lethosor (talk) 20:08, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

Plant raw pages

Not sure if you noticed, but QuietBot already created DF2014 plant raw pages (at least trees, possibly more) - see DF2014:Orange tree/raw, for example. —Lethosor (talk) 01:26, 22 July 2014 (UTC)

Wish I had caught that before I created all those duplicates. We seem to have a naming issue (which is carried over from the raws): DF2014:Alder/raw vs DF2014:Abaca tree/raw, DF2014:pineapple/raw vs DF2014:Watermelon vine/raw vs. DF2014:Raspberry bush/raw vs. DF2014:Tomato plant/raw, etc. Sorry for the mess; feel free to remove the unnecessary pages and clean it up however you prefer.--Loci (talk) 02:00, 22 July 2014 (UTC)

FWIW, I prefer the shorter names. You can inline-wikilink cherry in a number of different ways (cherry wood, cherry fruit, cherry wine, etc.), however cherry tree is significantly less accommodating (cherry tree wood, cherry tree wine? cherry wine?). Adding the extra descriptors doesn't really gain us anything unless we want a separate page for cherries-as-a-fruit.--Loci (talk) 02:21, 22 July 2014 (UTC)

For all of the plant raw pages, I used the plant's [NAME:foo] (or [ALL_NAMES:bar]) token; thus, the inconsistency comes from Toady himself. --Quietust (talk) 13:15, 22 July 2014 (UTC)

I went ahead and finished creating the stub pages for the new trees.--Loci (talk) 16:22, 2 August 2014 (UTC)