Forum:The Icon Situation

Forums: Index > The World that Never was > The Icon Situation

Chitalian8 ^Say...— Only by allowing strangers in can we find new ways to be ourselves.

_{Life's little crossroads are often as simple as the pull of a trigger. — 02:10, 16 September 2015 (UTC)}

So with the recent introduction of the 3 new decimal-placed HD remakes, in addition to Unchained χ, the bloat of game icons at the top of the pages, and the multitude of minor edits it spawns, is becoming more apparent. Users have discussed having a mouseover pop-up menu in the corner, but here's my preferred solution:

If the article in question is present in the base game, use that logo.
- There could be a hover-over pop-up menu on the base game's logo to show other versions of the game.
If the article is exclusive to a certain version (E.g. Eraqus Armor, Cavern of Remembrance, Lingering Will), then use that logo (e.g. HD remake, FM, or Unchained Chi)
- Going off this, stuff like Lingering Will would have the KH2FM, as it made its debut there, even though it's also present in the international HD versions.

I may have forgotten some special cases, but feel free to throw other ideas out that are better than mine.

Shard of Truth Once you believe, truth and lie are quite the same thing. ^{— 05:58, 16 September 2015 (UTC)}

I feel this is generally a good idea, also for the image file naming convention. If something appeared in another game before without change, just use the normal parser instead of a very complicated one (e.g. (KHIIFM) KH2HD) if you're uploading an ability animation for example. The about template can be used to clarify any source without problems.

There are special cases though when abilities or items disappear in later versions of the game as it's the case with Group Esuna or the Follow the Wind card. There is also the extreme case of [chi] & Unchained (and to a lesser extent coded & Re:coded). At the moment these games share some stuff but not all, it can't be assumed that if something is part of [chi] it is also automatically part of Unchained. Since our coverage for these games is patchy at best I don't think it's really a problem at the moment and of course there is always the page itself to clarify the current state but I would prefer a solution that is bijective.

TheSilent Hero ^{— 06:50, 16 September 2015 (UTC)}

My idea is similar to Chitalian's, except using the most recent release icon. Here's what I wrote on the 2.8 talk page:

Here's an idea: Instead of using one icon for KH, one for KHFM, and one for HD1.5, use a KHFMHD icon if it appears in the HD version, use the KHFM icon instead if it only appears in non-HD KHFM, and the KH icon if it only appears in non-FM KH. So basically, only use the icon of the most recent released version. (We'll need to add "HD" to the current icons, though.)

KrytenKoro - "That's when we bumped into Hannity. Sean Hannity. See the thing about this dude is, at first he's fair, right? And you're like "Wow!" But then BOOM. The dude's balanced, too. And you're like, HOLY SHIT."
TALK -

Because the Final Mixes have a compilation nature, using the most recent icon will result in losing more specificity than if we use the original icon -- there's much more that was added by later releases than there is that was taken out. Also, the most recent icons tend to be pretty cluttered, with FMs and +s and HDs. As such, I feel that using the earliest icon will present the clearest list of icons while preserving as much information as possible. However, that's not to say that I think merging the icons is the best option, so don't write me down as definitely voting for it over anything else that gets suggested.

I'm seconding the pop-up menu. As cluttered as it all may seem, getting rid of a few extra icons will not get rid of the pages they link-back to. As long as every game and its iteration has its own page, it will need a quick and simple link-back. This is a wiki. We're supposed to be informative. Trying to oversimplify it to the point where entire game entry pages go unnoticed is counterproductive, to say the least. So to prevent clutter, I say the pop-up menu is the way to go. --Webber22 (talk) 16:06, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

Chitalian8 ^Say...— And here's me, playing the world's tiniest violin.

_{Your face is priceless. — 16:22, 16 September 2015 (UTC)}

My alternative would be something like a cut down version of the main page mouseover icons, with only the rereleases/other versions in the pop-up.

Something like this, but with smaller dimensions (Mouseover):

It wouldn't need to have all of the fluff like the ones on the main page (so no characters, game description, or tagline), but would retain the essential information. That way, we could still have the icons fo the rereleases, but they wouldn't take up as much real estate.

The only problem is, the fact that the icons reside in the corner of the screen could pose a problem with how it shows up in the browser, so it could easily get cut off by the window boundaries.

TheFifteenthMember Yes. You're creepy. I can't say we'll miss you while you're gone, so it'd be best if you did go. We all win that way. ^{— TheFifteenthMember 17:20, 16 September 2015 (UTC)}

Keep in mind that content is sometimes removed in a remake game, such as Blazing Donald.

Neumannz — Looks like I'm gonna have to jump...!
TALK — I work alone! Except when I work with Xion...which is all the time.

— 17:29, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

EDIT CONFLICT: I'd prefer something more bare-bones, like:

Just something to act as a wrapper for the extra icons.

KrytenKoro - "It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. It's called living."
TALK -

Content is sometimes removed, yes, but it's basically negligible.

Chitalian, the thing you posted doesn't read on my Chrome or Firefox -- do I have to be using a specific skin to get it to work? I would prefer not having content on every single page of the wiki that requires a certain skin to work. The Game Portals article was giving the same error for me, if that helps any.

Webber, we already list the games within the article itself -- virtually every article has an infobox listing appearances, and then anything introduced or removed in rereleases gets notated (or should). Even if we're not using them as a timeline, the icons are very much meant to be "at-a-glance" -- if the main way an article is communicating its topic's appearances is through the icons, then it's doing it wrong.

If we reduce things to having one icon per "story", we should have a max of nine icons per page (ten if we treat BbS 0.2 as a separate "story" rather than a new episode, and poss. a few more if we include the manga/other media icons) Most articles will have far less than those nine.

Building on the above -- I'm wary of making the game icons much more code-complex than they already are. For one, unless we can figure out a way to template Nezzy's example without having to change the on-the-page code much from what it is now, it's likely to be impossible to add to new pages correctly without a primer, meaning we'd have to wait on long-term wikiprojects to get pages edited. For two, it makes the articles a nightmare on slow computers or mobile users.

Personally, I vote we do Nezzy's draft if we can get it to have the same on-the-ground code as we're using currently (meaning we do one intense change to the templates themselves and let the changes automatically propagate to the rest of the site), failing that we reduce down to first-story-version icons or even get rid of all multi-version icons and just use the base-game icons, even for FM content.

Chitalian8 ^Say...— Only by allowing strangers in can we find new ways to be ourselves.

_{Life's little crossroads are often as simple as the pull of a trigger. — 18:38, 16 September 2015 (UTC)}

Neumannz' draft was actually what what I had in my mind, yeah, I just couldn't figure out how to cut down the sizing of the table in my example.

		Neumannz — Looks like I'm gonna have to jump...! TALK — I work alone! Except when I work with Xion...which is all the time. — 22:17, 16 September 2015 (UTC)



		In theory, it should be possible to do by changing the template (plus a possible simple substitution with AWB), but we might need to ask Porple about getting a Sribunto extension for the wiki. Unless someone gets REALLY creative, the template would end up really bulky otherwise. (Still possible, though.)

You guys are forgetting something: This isn't going to work for tablet users. --Webber22 (talk) 23:33, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

Chitalian8 ^Say...— Every Player had to give up something. Everybody makes sacrifices.

_{It was me. All of it. — 23:41, 16 September 2015 (UTC)}

Yeah, the thing with pop-up menus is that they can be weird for other browsers/hardware, as Kryten and Webber have both noted, which is the main drawback. In this case that this is too major of an issue, I default back to my original idea.

Part 0.2 -A fragmentary continuation-

So we're basically still were we started, same with the naming policy (see here), but using the wiki the last months I've leaned more and more to Kryten's opinion. All this HD categorization doesn't make thing clearer, it just gets worse.

So I propose to remove the 1.5 and 2.5 icons and replace them with the actual game's icon in case the content is exclusive to the HD remasters and go with the "new title ==> new game page" kind of rule, which essentially means more footnotes. Same for the crazy HD naming policy because with the "aboutfile" template there is a convenient place to explain the origin of a file as detailed as desired and if for whatever reason a difference should be made more clear there is always this method.

It's obviously not a perfect solution, but it's much simpler to use. So what do you think, anyone for or against this? We could also vote if everyone already made up their mind. --ShardofTruth 13:03, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

I think I'm the only one here to thinks things are fine as they are. I have no problem navigating the pages. I mean...it's not our fault the series has become as convoluted as it is, but as far as things go it's not too cluttered for me at the moment. There's no doubt it'll get bad one day in the future, but I think it's fine as it is right now. --Seagram (talk) 13:46, 20 June 2016 (UTC)