User talk:Shimpchip

Question for Shimpchip

you listed a photo for "Call of the Commissar" shield. How do you get this shield, it is not ever on sale on the trading post and not sold at the Karma vendors, so i'm confused how to get it? thanks for your help. Varmint cong on Stormbluff server.

Hi Varmint. I have no idea how to get this shield. I don't actually own the weapon, I just used an item code to preview the weapon. This shield was data mined by another user, I just found his list and added it to the Wiki. Shimpchip talk 04:19, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

Weapon prefixes

800+ edits and no talk page? D: You've not been annoying enough people!

The Etched weaponset hasn't really been setup yet, but Shaman's Etched Branch should really be located at Etched Branch since we're not going to have seperate pages for each prefix. I'll make the page move. --Chieftain Alex 23:44, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

Cool. I just dumped the image into a pre-existing page. There will have to be lots of clean up in the future for sure! Are there automated scripts that could be run? For example, I want to add a comma to weapon damage numbers (1110 -> 1,100) to match in-game descriptions. Shimpchip 00:01, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

Provided the data is on the page, I'd say don't bother making comma edits unless you're doing something else on the page at the same time. (i.e. don't waste your time doing it... ish could probably conjure up a bot to run that if necessary). And yeah there are bloody loads of page moves left for weapons... like all the family page names currently stored with singular "weapon" are due to be moved to "weapons" and all the links fixed ><

I thought of something else I should mention; whenever you upload an image from the game - please make sure that you add {{ArenaNet image|screenshot}} to the summary if you're uploading images from scratch, or edit the page afterwards and add it if its a replacement image. This is so our copyrights are correctly applied to the images. --Chieftain Alex 00:08, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

Or the simple solution: Wrap the min and max values with {{formatnum}} in the weapon infobox template. This will automatically add the commas. (Which I just did, so you don't have to worry about it)--Relyk 00:14, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

Right on, let's just focus on creating content rather than focusing on small details. I've been using the drop down menu to apply the ArenaNet screenshot classification, is that sufficient? I think the one image that you fixed for me was a one-off case where I missed it. Also nicely done Relyk! Shimpchip 00:19, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

Hmm, {{formatnum: 2,300,000|0|,|,|,}} & {{formatnum: 2300000|0|,|,|,}} luckily display the same so wrapping a comma separated value wouldn't be a problem. --Chieftain Alex 00:20, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

That would be terrible programming if it didn't.--Relyk 00:27, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

move

There is a "move" function tab in the page-top navigation that lets you move a page to a new title, without having to copy/paste the content. —Dr Ishmael 05:21, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

unused infobox parameters

Ah-HAH! So you're the one doing this. *ahem* When you're creating new weapon pages, please clean up the infobox by removing any optional parameters that don't have values. When a parameter is present but the value is blank, MediaWiki still considers that to be a "defined" state for the parameter, and it can cause all kinds of bad things to happen in the template. This is especially important for the icon parameter, which should only be used in rare cases - generally, the default behavior of looking for "File:{{PAGENAME}}.png" should be sufficient. If you could clean these up in the future, it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for all the work you're doing, though! —Dr Ishmael 04:34, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Thanks will do. I just copied a random weapon template. The formatting is definitely inconsistent across many weapon articles. I'll go and clean up the icon parameters whenever I'm free again. I'm not sure if leaving the other parameters blank will have any other negative impact. These weapons come in many level and stat variants. Shimpchip talk 05:05, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, the numerical parameters aren't as much of an issue currently, but they could be in the future. What we should do is make an alternative infobox for when we're documenting a weapon skin, rather than a specific item with exact stats, so that the infobox doesn't have parameters for the stats at all. —Dr Ishmael 05:23, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Golden Wing Sword

Hi, can we try to come to a consensus on the appropriate image for the Golden weapons? I only changed it back to the original image in order to keep the gallery uniform - and the preview window is a tad less cluttered-looking than the in-game shot. Serbaayuu 15:49, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

Ideally weapon images should take up as much of the screen as possible when taking the screenshot - weapon previews are tiny + often miss both detail and animated graphical effects. Although the lighting may well be less stable with non-previews, they're generally better images. (i.e. don't just upload ugly organised preview images over decent pics!) --Chieftain Alex 15:55, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

Good point, I had forgotten about particle effects. Consider me satisfied with that answer. Serbaayuu 15:57, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

Darn, was typing up my response but Alex managed to answer your question in less words. Here is my answer anyways:

Hey. IMO the new image, while with more clutter, is higher resolution and better displays the weapon. I took the screenshot off the vendor NPC so there is clutter. If you disagree, just crop the old image and re-upload. In terms of consensus, I noticed that many of the gallery images are mixed between weapon previews and in-game screenshots. The only way to get them uniform is to have the same person take screenshots for all of the weapons, which would cost a lot of gold or karma to acquire the weapons. The ideal gallery would be like the GW1 galleries where all the weapons are shot with the same (or similar) background. Obviously, GW2 is quite new so the weapon galleries are still a mess. Galleries will not be uniform while the game/wiki is still new. Shimpchip talk 16:02, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes, that's fine. I may try to take better images myself - I'm actually going for a full set of Golden weapons for my ranger, so I will have a bunch of them to use eventually, though not all. For now the current one is fine though.  :) Serbaayuu 16:18, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

Images

You've got some nice images going up today ^^ - I'm looking at File:Kodan Sword.jpg and it seems to me that you may have cropped off the tip of the sword. If you have the original, would you mind uploading one with the tip included? If not, no worries. thanks either way. --Chieftain Alex 15:55, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

The images I'm uploading are from Dulfy's sword gallery. Some of the images are badly cropped, unfortunately. Shimpchip talk 16:02, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

dpl galleries

<dpl>
  category = Verdant weapons
  notcategory = weapon types
  notcategory = PvP reward galleries by type
  allowcachedresults = true
  format = <gallery perrow="4">\n,Image:%PAGE%,.jpg|[[%PAGE%]]\n,</gallery>
</dpl>

You should just made a template and stick it on the weapon set pages. Any reason for including the two notcategory parameters?--Relyk 04:22, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Those two lines of code were blatantly copy/pasted off a weapon type gallery - where you need to exclude the weapon family page (it has no image/infobox). :P

Imo theres no reason to use dpl on those weapon family pages since the names should be pretty fixed now, but whatever, it seems to work. --Chieftain Alex 08:48, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Mostly unrelated, but if the weapon exists in game under a certain name, we probably shouldn't delete the article, just redirect it. This should help anyone searching for it. Chieftain Alex 14:32, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

I'm trying to figure out how to deal with PvP weapons. I don't have access to the game right now but I think the actual names don't have PvP in them, making it harder to filter out. If I redirect PvP weapon names to the PvE variants, we would then need to include the PvP acquisition methods on the weapon page as well. Might be easier to redirect the individual PvP weapon names to the PvP weaponset page. I'm trying to avoid unnecessary data entry. Not sure how to proceed. Shimpchip talk 14:41, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Eventually we'll end up creating a category with PvP only skins in or something, and when that exists we can exclude that category of pages.. until then don't worry about it. :P busy time of year, bound to be something else worthwhile to do ;) Chieftain Alex 15:14, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Capitalization

Hey, I noticed that you've renamed a number of images from something like "... skin.jpg" to "... Skin.jpg." It was my impression that we were naming files and articles with proper English capitalization standards, where we would only be capitalizing proper nouns or the beginning of a sentence/phrase. Did I misinterpret this? —Jyavoc 19:16, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Hey. These articles/images are named after the actual item names. In these item names, the word "Skin" capitalized and included. These items don't come in weapon form but instead come as skins. Hopefully I was able to explain it for you. Shimpchip talk 19:20, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Ah, no, as it turns out, I wasn't looking hard enough; my bad. I knew that, especially with the releases of the Wintersday skins, that there were a number of new items with the word "Skin" in them, and I knew that was suppose to be capitalized. But I thought that I had seen a couple of changes from something like "File:<Miniature> side.jpg" to "File:<Miniature> Side.jpg" tucked away in the changes, and that was what I was asking about :P My mistake. —Jyavoc 19:28, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

del tagging

Hiya, when tagging pages for deletion, try not to replace the content of the page with a delete tag, just slip it in at the top. Admins rarely delete a page without checking what was on it, so replacing the content just requires a search through the history tab. Also, if the delete reason is "redundant," try to name or link what it's redundant with - it might be obvious to you at the time (especially if you're on a spree of tagging and everything is from the same category or whatnot) but looking at the pages months later, it might not be apparent at all what the page is redundant to. Thanks :D -Auron 00:49, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Ah, yes that was a while ago. Noted and I will do so in the future! Shimpchip talk

Just make sure you leave random messages on spam pages for speedy deletion, like "I like apple pie" and "sweetcheecks kurabonga" for reasons; the admins love it.--Relyk ~ talk > 03:08, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

As long as the page is quite obviously spam, you can make the delete reason as silly as you want. Just leave the spam so we can see it too. —Dr Ishmael 04:56, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Featured page "promotion"

^has been done. You can easily do it yourself by replacing the current text at the top of Template:Main Page/featured - its not protected or anything. Just remember to have <onlyinclude> and </onlyinclude> tags around the bit you want to include on the main page. (and don't worry if it breaks, someone else will fix it :P ) -Chieftain Alex 01:40, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

About the .gif

Hey, shimpchip. I'm really, really sorry to just now reply to you. Must've forgotten about it and just earlier remembered your question. So, here's what I did and what programs I used: First I turned my graphics settings on the highest possible in-game, save for render distance. I turned Anti-Aliasing FXAA on. My refresh rate was 30 FPS but feel free to use 60 or VSync. For Render Sampling I used the default option. I also moved the camera position so the weapon was more in the center of my screen. I recorded a few minutes of the unsheathed weapon with Fraps. I then used VirtualDub to crop the video so it only shows the weapon (select an area with your mouse, Edit -> Crop to selection). Afterwards I ran into some problems exporting the video (File -> Export) into an animated GIF, it would either pixelate heavily or have some serious framerate drops. Instead I exported the video file into an image sequence. This gave me the entire cropped recording in images frame by frame. Finally I used AniMake to create the .gif of the weapon from the exported image files. Hope this helps and again my apologies for the delayed reply. Akula 12:45, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

Seasatchel

Hi, you uploaded a photo for Seasatchel and I cannot for the life of me figure out what this thing is or where it comes from. It doesn't show up on the trading post and other fansites have no information about it. Do you remember how you came across this weapon, or how you got an image of it? Psycho Robot (talk) 00:49, 30 November 2013 (UTC)