User talk:Akashanephthys

Dye channels

Aren't dye channels more like a property of skins rather than items? For example see Tempest's Loop (skin) and its API listing dye channels/slots. Furthermore, wouldn't it be better to list the amount of dye slots compactly in the infobox rather than writing down the same line over and over again.

Your "I'm planning to add the dye channel infos to the armor pieces" would for example justify skin infobox adjustments in order to put it in an consistent framework. --Tolkyria (talk) 13:12, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

I didn't know how I could do that, I would put it there instead, I'm new here and I didn't ever edit any wiki, I just decided to do it because at Wintersday Earmuffs I saw this info in the Notes but I didn't see it anywhere else and I thought it could be useful info. (I also didn't know its in the API) (I also not sure if I'm replying as I should so sorry if not.) --Akashanephthys (talk) 14:03, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

As a new user you obviously don't have the required insight.

While in my opinion such a note is fine on a few pages, it's a terrible idea to put it on all pages for several reasons (others may disagree with my opinion though):

• There are ~4500 armor pages on this wiki or ~2200 armor skin pages. That's lots of work.
• How should we keep track of these pages? After a certain amount of notes is added, there's no way to find the pages where the note is missing and where it was already added.
• What about new pages? Wiki-editors are lazy, most of them use a tool to create new equipment/skin pages, most likely nobody will add the dye channel note. Then again how should we identify these pages after a while.
• The note isn't very wiki user friendly, buried below at the bottom instead of being at top visible in the infobox. Also cosmetical options should be present in the skin infobox (as the skin of an item - also the transmuted one - define the dye channels). Again, what if the note is missing on a page due to being unable to track those pages? This would provide inconsisten wiki user experience, letting them ask: Why this information is available there but not here?

Okay, this may sound very harsh, but nevertheless I can't see a way to do this consistenly.

So what could be done instead?

The wiki has tools to keep track of parameters set to templates, here I would suggest Template:Skin infobox. Thus, we can identify pages which still missing. Furthermore, it would be consistently applied in at the same spot, allowing the wiki users to quickly get this information. Two options:

• We could add the parameter dye channels to the Template:Skin infobox which would display the line Dye channels | <number> above chat link.
• Or we could go one step further and add the parameter dye slots which is set to the dye slot material. Here we would only implicitly list the amount of dye channels, for example displaying the following:

Dye slot 1 | Metal

Dye slot 2 | Leather

Dye slot 3 | Cloth

Edit: Well, those are sometimes depending on race and gender, I think we can't really apply it.

Sure, these solutions are not very user friendly (at least to set up, which I can do of course), but they provide maximum reuseability both for wiki editors and users.

P.S. Welcome to the wiki, I hope that I haven't drove you away yet. :-) --Tolkyria (talk) 18:10, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

Profane Masque

Skin type

Headgear

Weight

Light

Dye channels

4

If you guys decide/agree how you want to present it, I (or someone else) can run a bot to insert that data into the {{skin infobox}}. I've stuck a visual example above my comment here.

@Tolkyria - example of different slot by race/gender? -Chieftain Alex 18:35, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

@Tolkyria – I understand your concerns completely, I knew it isn't a really good approach just didn't have any idea how to do anything on my level of experience. :)

@Alex – I really like your example, I would be really happy if you (or someone else) could do it. :):) I will clean up after myself then on the pages where I edited it in.

Thank you guys for helping me :) --Akashanephthys (talk) 19:28, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

Alex, few examples:

• Firstborn Coat (skin) (API) - Sylvari t3 armor: various dye slots; well obivously here it doesn't matter due to the race limitation.
• Nightmare Court Breastplate (skin) (API) - Dungeon armor: various dye slot material, here it matters, even different slot quantity.
• Nightmare Court Mantle (skin) (API) - Dungeon armor, sylvari: cloth, rest: leather.
• Bear Ceremonial Garb (heavy skin) (API) - Default 3 slots, all male overrides 4 slots.
• Protector's Shoulderplates (skin) (API) - Human t3 armor, no API slots.

However, I'm not sure how representative those example are. If you can think of a nice way to add several dye slot materials options for different race/gender, then the second option would be on the table again. Otherwise, I would go for your proposed infobox format.

Akashanephthys, now we somehow end up exactly what I was fearing, we are more or less hijacking your project (mostly due to the sheer size), giving me an awkward feeling all the time. Positive effect: when Alex joins, it get's done in a reasonable amount of time; also the API is incomplete, so some dye channels still needs to be done by hand. --Tolkyria (talk) 20:00, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

(corrected template link above from Skill infobox to Skin infobox)

I'm really surprised we haven't done this before - I would have sworn blind we'd discussed it somewhere. That's probably why I'm keen to help if I can.

I'm thinking adding the number of slots would be the "easy" option. There is the default dye and race specific data in the API as you mentioned- depends how much of that we want on the wiki, and I am not sure how useful that information is. -Chieftain Alex 21:23, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

I think I cleaned up after myself successfully on the pages I edited today

Maybe the best option would be to add the number of slots but maybe somehow indicate that there's more info about dye channels/materials in the API (because I as a basic wiki user and absolutely inexperienced in wikis and APIs and everything, I didn't click on the API link at an item ever) but maybe that isn't an easy or consequent thing to do.. I didn't even know there's cases like this at all --Akashanephthys (talk) 22:05, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

Appreciate the self-reverts. I'm thinking discuss what this looks like now, before I press go with the bot later in the week (in any case it'll be a weekend job as I'm at working in the office this week, no opportunity to supervise any bot runs). I've extracted the information I think is suitable from the API (if you press edit on User:AWB Alex/subst you'll see what I've done). I'll go play with formatting now. -Chieftain Alex 23:08, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

Proposal compatible with different race/gender options.

We could look at showing swatches of colour + material for each race but idk how useful that is, and it would certainly complicate specifying the parameter. I think dye slots is something useful to know; the default dyes I always replace; and the material I tend to experiment with different dyes on ingame if I'm interested. -Chieftain Alex 23:21, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

I don't know if it could be overwhelming to look at if there's a lot misc info, but I think knowing the number of dye channels is useful, so if there's a difference in a specific race's or gender's number of dye channels opposed to the default, it's good to know. As for the materials, I think it wouldn't be necessary to display, because as you say it's more a thing which someone experiments with ingame anyway, and I think just because something acts like leather for example, I would still be unable to imagine how it would look like exactly. --Akashanephthys (talk) 09:38, 15 June 2021 (UTC)

I have now implemented the wikicode into {{Skin infobox}} however my list scraped from the API has clearly been mangled by my excel sheet + I had to abort the bot run midway through. Will try again from scratch tomorrow or on Sunday. -Chieftain Alex 19:02, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

Sorry Alex that I disappeared, but thank you very much for implementing this, and for everything :) --Akashanephthys (talk) 15:25, 27 August 2021 (UTC)

No bother, Kvothe went one step further and added it to all the back items too :) -Chieftain Alex 17:04, 27 August 2021 (UTC)

Happy to help! —Kvothe (talk) 17:34, 27 August 2021 (UTC)

Thank You too, Kvothe :) You guys(or girls or inbetween :)) are awesome!! --Akashanephthys (talk) 07:42, 4 September 2021 (UTC)

Question regarding page requests I send to the wiki page

Hi, I'm a fairly new user on wiki, so I'm not sure if I'm doing this talk thing right, but I have a question which is a bit specific maybe, or at least I don't really know how to search about this on the internet :D

I'm making a little home project for myself, which is inspired by gw2style.com, and I know it isn't the best approach but this works for me, I'm creating my own database for it. So I will have the clothing items in my db for example, but I don't want to store images on my server, so I thought I would link the clothing item icons from the wiki site. But when I will have a lot of these on my page, I think it would create a lot of requests to the wiki site. Can this cause a problem? Could my IP get blocked from reaching the site? I don't want to cause trouble, so if it would cause problem, I will download the pics and host them myself.

I'm not like a pro programmer or anything so I don't really understand APIs and stuff like that so I do this project in this 'peasant' way :D and it is good for me like this, just started to be anxious if these requests could cause a problem.

I'm also not pro on wiki, so sorry if I didn't ask this question in the right way.

Thanks for answers in advance (but I don't really understand how or if my question will be even seen :D) --Akashanephthys (talk) 12:30, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

Sorry I pinged everybody who might be watching this page, I'm a noob, but I was thinking you guys might answer me with 'use the API' which is a more professional way, so I thought I might use the image link in the API instead of the image link from the wiki, so this way I wouldn't send the requests to this wiki page, but instead to that render.guildwars2.com site, which could be more built to recieve that much request if the API links there I think.

Sorry really for being this noob :D

--Akashanephthys (talk) 12:53, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

No bother. Any edit you make, anywhere on the wiki, can be seen on Special:RecentChanges.

Yeah I'd strongly recommend using the API:Render service. The official gw2 API is designed for high volumes of traffic and to serve resources. The wiki isn't designed for serving images outside of itself really, and is poorly optimised to do so. However, once you've requested an icon for a given session, usually your browser does some optimisation and does not perform a second request for the same file, it caches the response.

Something I would suggest however, if its for your personal use and not actually going to be a webpage, you could have an html file on your PC, and if you put the files in an adjacent folder, you could access them fairly easily (I do this exact approach for map tile resources). Obviously this doesn't work if you want to share with others. -Chieftain Alex 17:53, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

Thank You Alex for the response, I corrected the icon paths in my db to the render ones already when I wrote my second "comment", because I thought so that the wiki might not designed to handle high traffic :) I host this project on a raspberryPI with limited space and I also didn't want to download the pics, but I think this way it'll be good :) Thank You for always helping --Akashanephthys (talk) 14:56, 13 December 2021 (UTC)