Template talk:SAB NPC infobox

What's wrong with the NPC infobox?--Relyk ~ talk < 18:27, 24 December 2014 (UTC)

Super Adventure Box has different attributes to the rest of the game, and NPC infobox isn't designed to fit them. Yeah, you could edit it, but you'd be overcomplicating yourself by giving exceptions to the defaults of NPC infobox, like race, and asking for a new SAB yes/no field. A different template is good for further changes too, you can modify it easily and even aim for something different, all without affecting NPC infobox. Also, now it's green, but blue would fit it better, being the theme of SAB and all. SAB NPCs aren't your usual NPCs, and I think the distinction is worth a different template.--Lon-ami (talk) 19:12, 24 December 2014 (UTC)

They are still NPCs. Any functionality should therefore stay within the NPC infobox. The only additional code you added is for hitpoints, which is simply health and not unique to NPCs in SAB. I don't see any reason for a separate infobox.--Relyk ~ talk < 21:24, 24 December 2014 (UTC)

I plan to change the green to blue, and change the functionality of the location so it shows world and zone number. I think it's worth having it separated.--Lon-ami (talk) 22:42, 24 December 2014 (UTC)

Relyk: By that logic, weapons and armor are items too.

I do support the creation of specific infobox templates if they reduce the complexity of the general one (here: NPC infobox), by having another simple specialized one. poke | talk 00:22, 25 December 2014 (UTC)

This doesn't reduce the complexity of the NPC infobox. The code is the same except for the hitpoints and that's not enough to create a specialized template. We are expecting users to understand the usage of another infobox. I'm not seeing the benefit to users.--Relyk ~ talk < 10:12, 25 December 2014 (UTC)

@poke: Weapons and armor (and trinkets and back items) are very significant subsets of items, with multiple features that differentiate them; SAB is not a particularly significant subset of NPCs, and as Relyk has pointed out twice, there is only a single distinguishing feature about them. And that feature isn't all that noteworthy, either - the only reason they have a static health value is because it's party-based content, i.e. it can't scale up due to more than 5 players. We could probably document the same thing for creatures in dungeons. —Dr Ishmael 00:22, 26 December 2014 (UTC)

I wasn’t really serious about comparing this to the weapons etc. infoboxes. It was more a general comment that a simple “is a” identification is not enough to select the correct infobox. I also didn’t really look at this infobox in particular but meant that I would support new infoboxes if it helps reducing complexity (you can add a “in general” in front of my previous comment). If there is nothing else that would make sense to be added to this infobox, then I would agree with you and think that the NPC infobox can cover this good enough. poke | talk 01:26, 26 December 2014 (UTC)

Quoting myself from some lines above: I plan to change the green to blue, and change the functionality of the location so it shows world and zone number. Also, I would like to find some kind of SAB icon and add it to the corner of the infobox, to properly show the page is about SAB and doesn't work by the game's standards on combat. SAB NPCs don't work like the rest of the game's, and readers should see that at first glance. A different template helps, while adding all of these functions to NPC infobox would make it even more complex than it is now. And templates should be as simple as possible.--Lon-ami (talk) 10:55, 26 December 2014 (UTC)

Which by the way, is there any way to work with Property:Located in without automatic links? I want to add "World 1 Zone 2" to Dark Woods, so that the NPC template shows it as the parent location. I don't want "[[World 1 Zone 2]]" with a link, since it doesn't exist, and if it existed it would be a pointless page. Maybe I should just make a new property?--Lon-ami (talk) 11:11, 26 December 2014 (UTC)

You can't change the color, that would break the wiki's color scheme - NPCs are NPCs, no matter what game mode they appear in. You can't add an SAB icon, because NPC infobox icons indicate the service they provide (i.e. they correspond to the floater icon that appears above the NPC in-game). SAB doesn't even have a single identifying icon, so you'd have to make one up somehow, in which case the meaning wouldn't be immediately clear to readers.

"And templates should be as simple as possible." No. Templates should be simple to use, but the code behind them can be as complex as necessary to provide the required functionality. Adding a couple optional parameters to an existing template doesn't make it more complex to use. On the other hand, making a new template that mostly replicates the functionality of an existing one can cause unnecessary confusion.

Your last point doesn't make any sense. "World 1 Zone 2" is not a location, much less the parent location of anything. It's just another way of referring to "Dark Woods" which doesn't need to be in the infobox. —Dr Ishmael 15:22, 26 December 2014 (UTC)

“Located in” is a page property, so it requires that the value is an article on the wiki. poke | talk 16:48, 26 December 2014 (UTC)

So we can't create properties with just integers or strings? I could add a switch instead, but it's not the same. Also @ish, world and zone numbers are important. Putting them in the infobox would help know where each zone is located in SAB's progression, since people don't usually know the zones by their name.

As for templates being easy to use, I'm pretty sure users having to add new SAB fields to the NPC template, together with the removal of the now default values in case it's referencing SAB and more, is much more complicated than just typing a different template, it's pretty obvious what "SAB NPC infobox" is for. It's the same reason things like {{E}} exists, nope? Or should we remove those and make them all something like {{ProfessionIcon}}, or just {{Icon}}? I don't think we have bandwidth problems, but having a few less ifs and calls should help loading pages, too, even if it's just a small bit in the long term.--Lon-ami (talk) 17:15, 26 December 2014 (UTC)

Check out Help:Properties and types for how properties and types work. The world and zone numbers aren't helpful as the player doesn't understand what those mean until the read the Super Adventure Box article. You do not need those labels for the location hierarchy as we define the zones as being areas within the dungeon Super Adventure Box. This information is part of the location hierarchy and follows how the game implements them. We want to lead readers to the SAB article on why areas in this dungeon are labeled by world and zone as this differs from the standard structure of dungeons.

Players do not understand what "SAB NPC infobox" means. We can't expect players to understand what NPC stands for but players implicitly understand it's a template for entities in the world. We definitely cannot expect new players to know what "SAB" stands for or why it's being used. Having players use a new NPC infobox template is a magnitude harder than using the existing one.

{{elementalist}} ({{E}} redirects) is a convenience template. Profession icons are a common use case and reducing them to single letter templates makes it simple and intuitively easy to use. {{tango icon sizes}} does the job of a general template. I'm not sure what you mean by less if statements and calls, that has nothing to do with bandwidth and pages get cached.--Relyk ~ talk < 17:26, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

Then maybe there should be a disclaimer banner at the top of every SAB article, so readers know they aren't part of the core game, and they don't work like any other content in the game. And maybe do the same with the activities. It would be much more effective than another extra field in the infobox, and easier to see.

Also, I think you're understimating player intelligence, everyone knows what a NPC is. I've added documentation to the template too, this isn't harder to use than {{NPC infobox}}, and I would even dare say it's in fact easier to use, for it has less parameters. The code is cleaner too, unlike NPC infobox which is hell to edit.

The "World X Zone Y" labels are kinda necessary, for each zone is referred to like that ingame. The unique names of each zone are only present at the loading screens and a few secondary texts.

In the argument for template variety, I would say this case is just like {{Weapon infobox}} and {{Armor infobox}}.--Lon-ami (talk) 20:15, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

The NPCs work exactly the same, simply saying they aren't part of the "core game" doesn't actually make them different. A disclaimer only partitions information in the summary to a box and I'm not a fan of abusing header templates in the first place. Only people familiar with MMO genre and its terms are familiar with NPCs; that's not an assumption we can make. And that doesn't refute my argument that people won't know what SAB stands for.

Less parameters at the cost of a separate template does not make adding an NPC infobox easier, so I disagree there. That's an issue that forms are useful for addressing. The code isn't cleaner; it's redundant with the code in the NPC infobox and in a separate template, which makes maintaining the code harder. The weapon and armor infoboxes were already mentioned earlier, let's not go in circles.--Relyk ~ talk < 01:29, 24 January 2015 (UTC)

Gallery2 parameter

Would it be possible for someone to add a gallery2 parameter to this template for the portraits used by certain bosses? Sunlion (talk) 01:14, 26 January 2021 (UTC)