CreationKit:Community Portal/Organization

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Questions unrelated to the Wiki[edit source]

I was wondering what the consensus was, on the subject of allowing the creation of new articles for generic modding-related questions. If it's no different from the CS wiki, perhaps something like this could be implemented this time around?
shadeMe ^TALK 05:22, 22 February 2012 (EST)

Yes, this should be all things modding, not just the CK, despite the name.

As for the welcome script, everything I said then is still true, though I don't think the DWbot account is set up yet.

Dragoon Wraith TALK 22:09, 22 February 2012 (EST)

Making Papyrus entries the main ones[edit source]

(Moved from Talk:Reference functions)

This page seems to be talking about the old scripting system, which was used in Oblivion and the Fallout games. As far as I can see, there are two ways in which it could be updated to be relevant for Skyrim:

Change the page to talk about console functions, which still use the syntax of the old language
Re-write the page to talk about how to call non-global functions, and why global functions are different. This might work better with renaming the page, though, so perhaps it would be better to create a separate page for this (assuming one doesn't exist already?)

Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

-- Cipscis 18:41, 9 February 2012 (EST)

I suggest rewrite the page to talk about console and condition functions. We also need to figure out a way to handle these two scripting languages effectively.

--Qazaaq 08:56, 10 February 2012 (EST)

I've added a disclaimer to the top of this page for now, but it still needs a bit of a re-write.

Perhaps a template with a disclaimer like this would be a good idea for other pages in a similar situation? I'm not very experienced with templates, so if anyone else could set one up I'd be grateful.

-- Cipscis 17:42, 14 February 2012 (EST)

Discussion branched to more general topics, decidedly unrelated to reference functions, so I've moved it to the new area that was for just that porpoise.

--Catwheezle 02:37, 18 February 2012 (EST)

Yeah, I've noticed there's a serious overlap between the URL-space of the two scripting languages, which makes it a confusing mess to read. How's about a template for each type? They'd stick an icon in the top-left of the page, that'd make it clear and intuitive what you're looking at:

- a console page (icon: black screenlike consoley thing with a '>' in it?)

- a papyrus page (icon: a scroll? Or does Papyrus have a logo?)

- a creation kit page (icon: simplified image of the CK UI, or maybe the creation engine logo?)

- or something entirely different (no icon)

I've only minimal knowledge of templates myself, but I've been meaning to learn, so I might be able to make that work, maybe? I'll have a bash, if it sounds useful. --Catwheezle 19:13, 15 February 2012 (EST)

The overlap in URL-space is something that concerns me a bit. In my opinion, searching for "PlaceAtMe" should go to the page for the Papyrus version of this function, but instead it goes to the console version. It would be a pretty large undertaking, but I'd love to be able to just use function names to redirect to the correct documentation page for the Papyrus version, if it exists.

Disambiguation pages would work for native functions that have different versions (for example, Cast - Scroll v.s. Cast - Spell), and like console functions link to Papyrus versions, Papyrus functions should link to Console/Condition versions if they exist.

I might be getting a bit ahead of myself there, though. That would be a pretty big undertaking, I think.

As for templates, I really support the idea of using templates for function definitions. We did it on the GECK Wiki as well, although I don't think we ever managed to convert all of the functions to use it. I don't know much about templates, but you could take a look at the GECK Wiki's Function and FunctionArgument templates for some examples.

Ideally, I guess, the template would be set up so that if the function wasn't defined using the template, it would still add whatever header or image we end up using, so it can be applied relatively quickly to all the appropriate pages without needing to convert the documentation of every function to the template's syntax first.

-- Cipscis 20:57, 15 February 2012 (EST)

Proposal As I noted on the forums already I think the console/condition functions shouldn't be the default. We should definitely move them to a page with (condition) behind the name. There's no need for manual work, a bot can do this. We have to agree on a term for this though, I have the following suggestions:

usage:

condition
console
condition/console

script language: (this term is used all over, but I don't think it's an official name)

tesscript or tes script, TESScript, TES script, etc

definition location:

data file

--Qazaaq 14:42, 16 February 2012 (EST)

Interesting, and raises lots of questions.

1) Is that where we report bugs like "Creation Kit:Copyrights was deleted but is still linked from the edit page, even though that doesn't show on its 'what links here'? page, and I can't fix that."?

2) I'm not sure if the above are a list of suggestions for possibilities, or a proposal for a set of terms to use in different situations. "Condition", "console", and "condition/console" seem like the correct three terms to use for things which can be either or both). Either way, they seem like the right terms to me. 'TES Script' seems the clearest and most readable form, particularly for non-English-first-language users.

3) Who's got the botting skills to do this? Would it also be possible to apply a template at the same time? Because these all really *ought* to be templated the same way as the procedures are now.

4) How should we deal with stubs, which are nothing but the command name? I would vote to use Template:Incomplete Article on them.

5) Would it be possible to have a checkbox on the search that would allow someone to filter only by a certain category of thing (tutorial, console commands, papyrus pthings, etc), just like you can filter by talk pages, content, etc now?

--Catwheezle 16:06, 16 February 2012 (EST)

I notice that Bethesda appears to prefer the term "Legacy" for the name of the deprecated script? A rather romantic term. --Catwheezle 01:46, 17 February 2012 (EST)

Heh, I quite like that. I'm a little wary of using a name like TESScript, as it was also used in the Fallout games and, of course, Skyrim is still an Elder Scrolls game.

-- Cipscis 02:21, 17 February 2012 (EST)

In Morrowind and Oblivion, they were sometimes referred to as MorrowScript and ObliviScript, respectively. SkyScript would be misleading, though, since ultimately Papyrus is still a scripting language, albeit a much more robust one.

I have no time right now, but hopefully tonight I'll have some real responses.

Dragoon Wraith TALK 11:16, 17 February 2012 (EST)

Legacy is not ambiguous, one word, and it fits all applications of the language. Works for me.

--Qazaaq 11:39, 18 February 2012 (EST)

Wiki based discussion[edit source]

We have forums for this stuff? Where? --Catwheezle 16:06, 16 February 2012 (EST)

As for forums, those would be here.

Dragoon Wraith TALK 11:16, 17 February 2012 (EST)

Darn, I was hoping for wiki-editing-specific forums somewhere. Is the beth modding forum the right place to discuss wiki formatting/policy and bugs? Geck had a specific place for that kind of discussion, but all I've found here is Help:Wiki Editing Style Guide. --Catwheezle 14:30, 17 February 2012 (EST)

Now there is: Creation Kit:Community Portal

--Qazaaq 15:42, 17 February 2012 (EST)

Yay :)

--Catwheezle 02:37, 18 February 2012 (EST)

Icon templates to differentiate page types[edit source]

As a beginning towards differentiating the various page types, I made a couple of tests.

Very simple effort made as proof of concept at Template:Console and Template:Papyrus. These templates can themselves (I suspect) be included at the top of some future function template, but can also be used on non-function pages. I've added them to two pages as a demo, for the time being: Category:Console Commands and Category:Papyrus.

Let me know if it's the right direction or whether I should revert and try again, or what! :) --Catwheezle 01:01, 16 February 2012 (EST)

The images give a good indication of the script language you're looking at. I'd move them to the right side of the page though, they're not really part of the content of the page.

--Qazaaq 14:42, 16 February 2012 (EST)

Done - with the Papyrus template. But it really doesn't feel right to me there, though: having the type icon on the left is the wiki style, established by Template:NewFeature and Template:SteamTip (both of which, yeah, I just created, but they were around as inline code before that!). It just makes more sense to have the thing preceded by the marker that tells you what it's about: it's a "what follows is on this topic" sign, rather than a "this image is related to what you just read" sign. Stuff on the RHS is literally *invisible* to people: eye-tracking shows that it's utterly ignored by many, which is why that space is typically reserved in wikis for infoboxes and other stuff like that, that people have to actively look for, and would "get in the way" on other parts of the page.

Personally, I feel the images as I made them are way too large (150px), and need scaling down to 64px or less, but leaving on the left. So I tried that as an alternative, with the Console template.

Which feels best? --Catwheezle 16:06, 16 February 2012 (EST)

You have a good point. I'd be happy with 64px icons on the left.

--Qazaaq 11:34, 18 February 2012 (EST)

Box templates to replace the callout box code seen most commonly on tutorial pages[edit source]

(Am clicking the "+" icon at the top of the page, to see whether this new section adds to top or bottom of page: I suspect the bottom, sadly.)

I've added all templates I've found to Category:Templates, so they are perhaps more discoverable and useful to editors. These were:

I've also made a couple of test differentiation templates, described elsewhere:

I made some more templates, too, to replace the blocks of code for making callout boxes, as seen mostly in the tutorials:

Would appreciate feedback on whether any of that was worthwhile or useful to anyone :) --Catwheezle 02:44, 18 February 2012 (EST)

Couple notes on these templates:

1) they cope badly with large blobs of text, so they can't handle the one in Function Reference. I'm hoping the max length of the arg can be specified somehow.

2) I have no idea how to embed tables in them, so they can't handle the one at the bottom of Bethesda Tutorial Papyrus Events and Properties. This might just be another instance of the above, though.

--Catwheezle 02:52, 18 February 2012 (EST)

I don't know what's wrong here. I have a hard time imagining that there's a limit on the amount of text a template can take.
There's always HTML. Ideally everything would be in wiki syntax, but we don't live in Utopia.

--Qazaaq 11:32, 18 February 2012 (EST)

This is very useful, I'm sure it helps a lot in the long run!

--Qazaaq 11:32, 18 February 2012 (EST)

Thanks for applying them to Category:Getting Started - and for indirectly teaching me that you can just use {{name|blah...}} instead of the decidedly more cumbersome {{Template:name|blah...}}!

Turns out the ErrorBox was only ever created by one user, in one place, and I've since replaced that with a WarningBox anyway. It's pointless and confusing when WarningBox exists, and the ErrorBox icon could be confused with IncompletePage icon. So I've Afd'd it.

SteamTip is only used on Main Page. Would be cool if it could be replaced by the template, to take advantage of Qazaaq's cool size-fiddling.

WarningBox is a dumb name that I now regret, and I'd rename it if I knew how, and if I could think of a better name.

--Catwheezle 00:32, 19 February 2012 (EST)

You can "rename" anything by Moving it. Moving will keep its associated history, and set up a redirect (which works as hoped for with Templates).

Dragoon Wraith TALK 09:25, 20 February 2012 (EST)

Snippets[edit source]

There are quite a few pieces of information on the wiki that could be used in multiple places. Examples of this are hotkeys and the summary of a script function. I'm going to call these pieces snippets.

Snippets are ideally defined only once. That allows us to make changes more quickly, and it makes it easier to keep the information accurate.

The ideal place to define a snippet is on the page that also contains the detailed information on that topic. This means the following for our examples. The summary/definition of a function can be defined under its own heading on the script function's own page. Controls can be defined on a separate page listing all controls available for a specific window.

Applying snippets can be done by transcluding the page (note, this is not necessarily a template) with the snippet into the page where the snippet should be displayed. For this page containing the snippet should be setup with <includeonly>, <noinclude> and <onlyinclude>-tags to only display the snippet after transclusion.

A problem arises when more than one snippet needs to be defined on the same page. For example a controls page could have different snippets with sets of controls for different tasks. There are two viable options here:

Snippets on subpages: This allows us to keep the snippets related to the page they belong to. Ideally all subpaged snippets are used in the article they belong to.

Snippets on templates: This allows us to keep the snippets

Keeping track of snippets[edit source]

I have identified the following options for tracking snippets:

Snippet category: Keeping all snippets in a snippet category. Note that only complete pages can be added to a category. This means not a snippet is added to the category, but the article containing it. This is not an issue if all snippets are defined on their own page.

Manual listing of all snippets: This method works unrelated to where the snippets are defined.

Unfinished Qazaaq 09:59, 21 February 2012 (EST)

I ran into this problem last night, with the Preview window controls. I put them into the tutorial I was working through, realized that was a retarded place to duplicate the information, and moved them into the page about the Preview window instead.

I'm unsure that having the controls hidden off on a separate page would be terribly useful to someone reading the tutorial (the controls would be two clicks away; or there's need to be two tabs they'd need to open up). But at the same time, it kind of makes sense to have quickref sheets as a separate thing.

I'd vote for using templates instead, because they're cool and froody... but they may fail with large snippets, so may be considerably less froody than expected.

With other templates, I've had them add to a category on the assumption that other people are like me, and want to find all the cool tips, or all the new features, in one go, and want to have a list of pages that contain them. though admittedly, we've got "what links here" for that anyway, so maybe that's pointless redundancy. --Catwheezle 20:45, 21 February 2012 (EST)

Add to the bottom of the page or the top?[edit source]

The "+" button does the exact opposite of what the lede asks us to do - and most people reading the page will know to look at the bottom, or the history, anyway, because wikis are always add-to-bottom. Should we change the lede, or enforce post-to-top? --Catwheezle 20:41, 21 February 2012 (EST)

Standard MediaWiki practice is to find new things at the bottom of the page. Probably because there's usually header stuff on the top of the page that they don't want getting messed with when a newbie wants to ask a new question. I vote we stick with this practice, because changing the '+' behavior will probably be impossible. The lede will, of course, need to be changed.

Dragoon Wraith TALK 23:13, 21 February 2012 (EST)

Porting from the GECK wiki[edit source]

Is there a list of cool stuff that the GECK wiki has, that we should port? If not, should we make such a list? --Catwheezle 20:41, 21 February 2012 (EST)

I'm not aware of any such list. I'm not sure the list itself will be useful; just port whatever you might want to use.

I know that the Oblivion CS Wiki's Function template is quite robust; not sure where the GECK version stands.

Dragoon Wraith TALK 23:14, 21 February 2012 (EST)

Template:Unsigned[edit source]

So, I made a bit of a change to template:unsigned, so it wouldn't care what order your arguments were, or even whether you'd left the date off.

This came about because of a conversation with Fowl, where they created a second template, Unsigned2. This is how mediawiki handled the problem, and it is a good option... but I felt that two templates would be a little unfriendly and confusing, and we'd have to choose which is the better of the two, to recommend that people use, and things like that.

The revised template SEEMS to work, and was a good learning experience for me towards more complex templates. Interested whether people think it's crap and shouldn't be used, though.

--Catwheezle 03:21, 23 February 2012 (EST)

I'm amazed this was possible with markup, well done sir. --- Fowl 18:04, 23 February 2012 (EST)

Heh - thanks :) Sadly, though, it's a more brittle solution than yours, for all its snazziness. If the wiki gets an update that happens to change that error message, then the template will stop accepting arguments in the non-default order until someone updates the error message in the template to be the same.

Not a huge issue even then, maybe, because bizarrely, it seems like the ones entered in the past won't be affected because it caches those in some freaky-weird way that I didn't understand when I was testing, and made me spend ages going "hey, this isn't changing... why isn't this changing?" --Catwheezle 01:58, 24 February 2012 (EST)

Papyrus Functions Organisation[edit source]

I know it's been awhile since people have posted here but hopefully we can start up the organisation conversation again. I think it would be beneficial for a page dedicated as a list for all functions that can be used within papyrus.

The Papyrus category is hardly a good way of finding functions due to... well being spread out all over the page(As all categories are). So instead this dedicated page would be similar to CSWiki, quite simply functions categorised into tables from A-Z, or alternatively it might be more efficient to sort them by Script Object, Actor, ActorBase, ActiveMagicEffect, etc.

I don't mind doing the legwork for this page but I would like input from others before I commit to any changes/creation. So what do you guys think? I am leaning towards having it Script Object Based. --CraftySentinel (talk) 2013-08-24T05:35:24 (EDT)

Sounds like a great idea to me. --Catwheezle (talk) 2013-08-24T15:09:12 (EDT)

Created the page (List of Papyrus Functions) to begin with it's flagged as incomplete for now. All Papyrus Functions should be there that are on the wiki, also added a Compact ToC template. I just hope I haven't jumped the gun on this.

I noticed there's a small number of pages that do not follow the usual naming convention for Papyrus pages(Function - BaseScript) Perhaps it will pay to move them to names that are inline with the naming convention for uniformity? By my count there's only 7. --CraftySentinel (talk) 2013-08-25T06:16:16 (EDT)