Monster template

Hey, it's me once again lol.

As I mentioned in another thread, I was working on making the wiki work as a database (if you're interested, there's a discussion on this on DFO Nexus. As part of that, I wanted to rework the Monster pages because the current format is kind of unwieldly. Since you are the only one working with monster pages right now, I'd like to get some feedback from you.

Infobox - That's the main monster template. Compared to the DataTemplate template, there's a lot of stuff not in there. Family is left out completely because that's something that hasn't been used in years ingame and there's no real way to find out the family without guessing. Images are automatically resized, so there's no need to specify a sprite size. Cards would be an entirely different (item) page, so they're not included.

Spawns - The template used on dungeon pages if a monster appears there. If you use that, the dungeon will automatically be listed on the monster page, including if the monster is a boss or named monster.

Drops - The template for item drops of the monster. Using that is the main reason I want to improve the monster pages. That's needed for the monster to automatically appear on the item page if it drops that item.

Nilvas Gracia is an example monster if you want to see how it'd look in action. Tell me what you think and could be improved upon.

Gardios (talk)

In terms of basic logic and layout, those are fairly solid. The whole idea behind family I feel is so that one can click it and look at other monsters that are obviously of the same race/enemy type/group etc., but if you do not include it in your template we can still manually add categories to each monster page and it'd work functionally the same way.

If we look a bit more in-depth, it's just nitpicking. Like Nilvas Gracia already written under a Boss: section in the Monster section, then behind the name Nilvas Gracia it includes (Boss)? While I understand this is so that monsters that are Bosses in some dungeons may be just Special mobs in some other, I feel changing the text color and bolding it like we have right now with FormatMonster Icon+Name works better, both visually and textually. But that is just for aesthetic. We can change that whenever the templates are functionally ready.

Some more things. Currently your Sprite needs to be specified while Icon defaults to PAGENAME. But the way I have been uploading Sprites and Icons are the opposite: Sprites is PAGENAME.png while Icon is Icon-PAGENAME.png. Also, while omitting Card is understandable (the current FormatMonster Page does not display it anyways; only viewed through the FormatMonster Data), I feel like having Portrait built in to the template is definitely useful. What more, you can make it so we can include more than one Portrait, like your Type logic, to make cases like Nilvas work. Because currently FormatMonster Data has only 1 Portrait field. Definitely a limitation I've ran into already.

Overall, and once again, definitely looking forward to your work. I'm currently mainly just uploading Sprites and Models, and only WHILE in the process am I using DataMonster and FormatMonster templates to update our horribly outdated pages. So as long as you flip the Sprite and Icon logic, then the transmission between DataMonster templates and your templates would be super smooth.

JunEcho (talk)

Also, I'm definitely for having the monsters' portraits on their own pages. I don't really like it clumping up the sides of the Dungeon page.

JunEcho (talk)

Also one more thing to add about Families: they make it pretty clear about some enemies' families, if you have access to the game files. Also, it's pretty easy to recognize which monsters belong to the same family, simply by how they look like.

JunEcho (talk)

Sorry for all these chain replies. Thoughts are just popping into my head XD

For the Sprite and Icon logic, I was mostly referring to the PAGENAME logic. Sprite can definitely differ between PNG and GIF depending on animation, so Sprite should still require the file extension specification. But for Icons, I hope you can default it to Icon-PAGENAME.png at least. Would make our transition so much easier. (meant transition instead of transmission earlier XD)

JunEcho (talk)

Okay, I changed the default value for icon to Icon-{{PAGENAME}}.png. I've also added a family property back.

I've also added two portrait properties, they are separate since filenames may include commas and semicolons. I'm not really happy with that though, the portraits (even when it's just one) make the infobox look 'really' crowded. I think it'd work better if they were added to a gallery. Nilvas Gracia has both the portraits in the infobox and in a gallery section so you can see how both options look.

Oh, and I've removed the (Boss) for boss encounters on the Spawns template, it's just a colored link now.

Gardios (talk)

Thanks for hearing me out.

The portraits should be better as thumbnails on the page, such as Evanescent Ferman. But I'd be okay with it being in a gallery section too, but that might entail people adding too many things to the gallery, and may look redundant to pages that are both monsters and NPCs, like Isadora or Vangelis.

Good work on the Spawns colored link; looks pretty equivalent to our current one~

JunEcho (talk)

Well, no gallery section didn't stop people from posting so many images on the Black Crusade page lol. The gallery section isn't actually part of the template, so that should be fine.

Unless there's anything else, I think the monster templates are ready to be used then?

Gardios (talk)

If you've checked all functionalities that our current DataMonster PAGENAME|Format=FormatMonster Data/Page/Icon+Name currently has, then yeah, it should be good to go...and then time to Move all the ununiformly named image file names to correct ones...

JunEcho (talk)

Yeah, everything should be covered.

Gardios (talk)

Ok, then perhaps you can start using it on Luteon and its monsters first, then I'll take a look and implement that to the rest of Abnova, then if everything works fine I'll go ahead and start converting everything to your templates.

JunEcho (talk)

Okay, I've done Luteon. As a note, the Monster section on the dungeon pages uses Template:Spawns, but in the infobox template of the dungeon Template:Monster link should be used instead.

If you used Spawns on the dungeon page, but the dungeon doesn't appear on the monster page yet, refreshing the monster page (in the arrow drop-down menu next to "View History") should fix that.

Gardios (talk)