User talk:Nephele/Sandbox/4

The NeedsImage Tag

To avoid flooding the Category:Pages Needing Images page with hundreds of image requests for even the most minor of background characters, I haven't been adding the tag to all NPC pages.

I added the tag for:

• Merchants
• Trainers
• Quest-Related NPCs
• Otherwise noteworthy NPCs

where I take "quest-related" to mean "someone you actually interact with during a quest". Thus the head worshiper at a Daedra shrine, who tells you about the required offering, gets the tag, while the others don't.

That still seems to encompass the majority of NPCs in existence.

-- JustTheBast 03:27, 11 March 2007 (EDT)

That works fine for me. I hadn't really thought that the NeedsImage tags were needed yet, but since everyone else was starting to add them to pages I figured I'd add it to the instructions. Trying to prioritize them for the relevant NPCs makes sense. --Nephele 03:43, 11 March 2007 (EDT)

I honestly never thought this tag would get so widely used when I created it. I figured it would just go on quest pages and major locations. (And I mean major - there's no need for a picture of every single cave entrance and ruin in the game, they all start to look the same after a while.) I can see it being used for important NPCs - specifically quest-related ones. (Less sure about merchants and trainers, but whatever.) I certainly never expected that people would decide that every single inconsequential character would need to have an image - I mean, the server has limits, as we've seen before. But people have even been adding pictures for random bandits (in Morrowind) who have no dialog or quest-significance whatsoever, they're just people that attack you. One reason I'm glad that Oblivion opted NOT to give every single random bandit and smuggler their own unique name, unlike Morrowind. So far, people have been using relatively small images, mostly close-cropped head-shots, so I'm not complaining too much, but it has the potential to get out of hand pretty quickly, especially when you consider just how many NPCs there are in Morrowind. --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 14:01, 11 March 2007 (EDT)

Should I turn my approach down a notch? Maybe only tag major quest actors? -- JustTheBast 15:06, 11 March 2007 (EDT)

I'd say it's your call on who you think needs or doesn't need an image. I've revised the instructions to basically say "if you think it needs one". Disk space on the server actually isn't an issue: when the server had problems, it was because 90% of the disk was taken up by error logs. Since then, the error logs have been cleaned up (and autorotated) and a new disk dedicated to images has also been added. So the decision on whether or not to include an image basically comes down to what editors think would be useful. --Nephele 18:12, 11 March 2007 (EDT)

Just out of curiosity (and getting off-topic) - What was causing so many errors that the logs exceeded the capacity of the server? I mean, generally, you'd expect logs to be pretty tiny unless something was seriously, seriously wrong. Has that issue been addressed yet? --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 19:35, 11 March 2007 (EDT)

I know of a couple specific issues that have been addressed with the logs. I know that PHP was spitting out some pretty harmless warning messages... but those messages were being generated every time anyone accessed any wiki page. So ten lines of warning for every page access would start to add up. Daveh did some fixes a while back to get rid of those messages. It's also possible that the server problems in early December created a lot of error messages; the problems behind that issue have been resolved in various ways. I also know that Daveh has started automatically compressing log files after a day (see UESPWiki:Upgrade History); it's possible he's also not keeping log files after a certain period of time. --Nephele 01:21, 13 March 2007 (EDT)

Morrowind

Just out of curiosity, how difficult would it be to modify your script to work with Morrowind NPCs? I mean, one part at least would be easier, in that you don't have to worry about their schedules. (MW NPCs pretty much just sit around in the same place 24/7.) We'd of course have to cross-compile it with Hoggwild's list of notable/non-notable NPCs, though I've found a couple that were listed as non-notable that shouldn't have been. The harder part might be how well the data exports from the CS, which I'm not sure about. Worth looking into after this gets done... --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 22:53, 12 March 2007 (EDT)

It should be doable at some level. The biggest difference will indeed be how to get all the data to feed into the script. For Oblivion I've been gradually developing some tools to parse the Oblivion.esm and other .esp files, which is how I accessed all this info. I know those Oblivion tools won't work on Morrowind esm files because the format has changed. But I could easily deal with anything that can be exported to a text file from the CS. There is an export NPC data option; I'm staring at what that produces right now and it has at least some of the info (although figuring out what each of the fields actually is will take a bit more digging... if anyone happens to know already, that would be a big help).

The limitation is that all the info probably isn't going to be available in the exported text files. (I know that's true with the Oblivion export data feature, which is why I started messing with parsing the esm file). I could pull in some additional info from wiki pages, for example Morrowind:Trainers.

So I should be able to put together some good chunk of what's needed without too much trouble, which will at least be a starting point. --Nephele 01:21, 13 March 2007 (EDT)