User talk:Ryan W

Hey! Welcome to the Doom Wiki. Good work on all those cleanups, keep up the good work! Make sure you read the style guide if you haven't already. Fraggle 08:49, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)

disambig. pages
Last we discussed, you were asking about automated tools. Any luck? Or are you doing them by hand? -- Jdowland 14:33, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * I did do them one at a time, although I avoided retyping all the level names by cutting and pasting back and forth from an OpenOffice spreadsheet. It actually didn't take very long.


 * Now we just have to wait for somebody to add a new list of levels for a megawad, and see if they remember to update the disambiguation pages. :D Ryan W 23:52, 27 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * would it not be better to have e.g. E3M8 as the disambiguation page, with a template inserting something like for other maps occupying the E3M8 slot, see E3M8, rather than hand-writing a paragraph to the same effect on every map article? -- Jdowland 08:46, 23 Sep 2005 (UTC)


 * Actually I've just tried this. See E1M8 and Template:map. I'm now not convinced if this is the best approach, perhaps a category for each map slot? I certainly don't like the idea of manually assembling lists of articles for each slot. -- Jdowland 08:53, 23 Sep 2005 (UTC)


 * I'm afraid I don't see how this is any improvement over the way I did the MAP## pages. (I would have done the E#M# pages the same way, if any large PWADs from that era had complete articles yet.)  It still involves hand-compiling a list of the level names.
 * A category for each map slot would be even more unwieldy, since each level's entry would need to be edited in addition to updating the disambiguation lists.   Ryan W 06:07, 25 Sep 2005 (UTC)


 * I like the idea of a category for each slot. The category page would become in effect an automatic disambig page; there would be no disambig lists to manually update.  (The MAP07 page could be a #redirect to Category:MAP07.)  The only problem is that the game/megawad name needs to appear on the category page in addition to the level name.  This could be solved by renaming all the level articles to include the game/megawad name, such as for example "MAP07 (Doom II): Dead Simple", "MAP07 (TNT: Evilution): Prison", etc. radius 13:08, 25 Sep 2005 (UTC)


 * So, if I understand you correctly, you're saying:
 * [a] 132 68 new categories with names like "E2M3" and "MAP25" would be created.
 * [b] Articles about individual maps, such as E2M3: Refinery and MAP25: Desecration (respectively), would be in those categories.
 * [c] The current E2M3 and MAP25 pages would be replaced by redirects to Category:E2M3 and Category:MAP25 and so forth.
 * [d] Articles about individual maps would have their names lengthened to include the name of the game/megawad.
 * I think the first three items together are a better solution than what Jdowland suggests above (as exemplified by both of our attempts, disambiguation pages tend to be clumsy things). I'm not sure about the fourth part because I've learned to be suspicious of extremely long URLs, but if you really think people are going to be typing "E2M3" by hand rather than clicking on "Doom" or "Heretic" from the main page, then I'll go along with that too.   Ryan W 01:02, 26 Sep 2005 (UTC)
 * I've started to construct this system. I apologize in advance for some links being broken whenever the changes have been applied to only part of a given episode &mdash; everything should end up okay in the end.   Ryan W 20:52, 2 Oct 2005 (UTC)
 * The way you're doing this at the moment, the pages like E1M1 are simple pages with one line giving a link to the corresponding category. Wouldn't it be better to make it a redirect? Or is there some reason for doing it this way? 84.92.173.189 00:35, 3 Oct 2005 (UTC)
 * Automatic redirects to categories do not work.   Ryan W 00:38, 3 Oct 2005 (UTC)
 * Wow, lots of editing! But I think the plan worked out well. Credit to User:Jdowland for coming up with the category-per-slot idea. Too bad the hard redirects to a category are not yet implemented; maybe someday soon the wiki folks will get around to it. radius 05:43, 3 Oct 2005 (UTC)
 * There's one other bug I thought of, which is that existing links could be broken by a map which had the same name as its counterpart in an IWAD (or, more likely, in an established and well-done megawad that we already had large and immobile articles about). Hopefully that won't happen; level designers have many qualities, but consensus usually isn't one of them.  :D     Ryan W 06:11, 3 Oct 2005 (UTC)


 * Well done with this, by the way. I like the way the level articles are a lot more consistent now, and the way it's been implemented (with the template that gives the header at the start and sets the category) is really elegant. Fraggle 09:19, 3 Oct 2005 (UTC)
 * It needs to be said that after Jdowland had written the template and radius had sort of distilled this conversation, there was absolutely no creativity involved. :>   But let's hope it keeps working &mdash; I see some new Scythe 2 pages already using it.    Ryan W 19:43, 3 Oct 2005 (UTC)
 * Yup, I included it in the WAD skeleton template. Ducon 19:57, 3 Oct 2005 (UTC)

Stats for IWADs
I think the "Appearance statistics" version is better, because it 1) explains what kind of stat it is, and 2) doesn't have a link in the middle of the title. Fredrik 14:09, 2 Oct 2005 (UTC)


 * Yeah, I'm starting to think that too, now that I see how that revision actually looks.  :7    Ryan W 14:14, 2 Oct 2005 (UTC)

about E1M1
for organizational purposes, i think it should be, but maybe the E1M1 page (and other disambig level pages) could be edited to add a quick link to the original E1M1? --Insertwackynamehere 01:54, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Category VFD
You didn't need to tag the categories of the analogies for deletion because they didn't actually exist in the first place -- TheDarkArchon 21:19, 21 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Hm. Special:Categories said they did.  Maybe I was looking at an out-of-date version.  Well anyway, thank you for deleting them.    Ryan W 21:33, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

Template:Code
Wow, I don't even remember :P You can probably delete it.. I think I was trying to make a template for posting long blocks of code.. but I apparently sucked at Wikis back then heh. I doubt anything uses it --User:Insertwackynamehere/Signature 22:45, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Special:Wantedpages
Most of the expensive special pages had to be disabled from live mode (that is, updated on each edit), due to server slowodowns associated with a recent upgrade. These include things like Wantedpages, Shortpages, Longpages, etc, which are now (usually) calculated by a nightly cron job. Certain other special pages with less costly computations are still live, like Doubleredirects. Others like Whatlinkshere/image links/categories in templates are now calculated with a job queue that updates them amortized over a few minutes after the edit (see Special:Statistics). --Splarka (talk) 01:18, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

DHT?
Do you know what happened to the DHT? It was shot down a few years ago, but I still find these links. Can we still compete here? Ducon 07:14, 19 September 2006 (UTC)
 * http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~fms27/dht/dht5/
 * http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/~pliml/dht.html


 * At this point, your guess is as good as mine. (Maybe ask at the Doomworld forums?)  Those links look quite old, however &mdash; the top one lists Simon Widlake as the COMPET-N maintainer and rejoices that Quake 1 is finally on the shelves.    Ryan W 12:42, 19 September 2006 (UTC)


 * IIRC the Public DANG sometimes has similar contests, though not really systematized.   Ryan W 13:22, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

Dylan in the community
I don't think Eric Harris and Dylan Kleybold were ever actually in the doom community.. they made some levels and published them on a website, but that's about the end of it, I think. -- Jdowland 12:41, 24 October 2006 (UTC)


 * *L*  So we VfD the articles because releasing levels doesn't by itself make people notable?


 * Given the amount of actual information in the article Columbine High School Massacre (i.e. not a lot, especially by comparison with the wikipedia article), maybe every related article could be merged in and made a redirect. Harris levels, for instance.    Ryan W 17:33, 24 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I don't think their articles should be deleted. I'm not sure if the content should be merged into the main Combine one. But my point is, they were people, but not community members, so a distinction between the two might be necessary. -- Jdowland 20:21, 24 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I think that this type of notability is a sufficiently rare event that it doesn't merit a change to the infrastructure of the wiki. (And I say that as someone who has made such changes without waiting for a groundswell.  :>   Also, it seems confusing to redefine non-technical words, inasmuch as those new definitions are not in general use on Doom sites.  If we assume that Klebold isn't going to have his own article, then merging still sounds simpler to me.    Ryan W 05:10, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

Talk:Technical support
By the way: I answered your post at central. Due to it being a default behavior in MediaWiki, it probably isn't something we should try to change on Wikia specifically. You might request on bugzilla.wikimedia.org a more intelligent diff engine, that can check more data and display more context if warranted. --Splarka (talk) 05:54, 11 November 2006 (UTC)


 * Thanks! (Hey, and now I have more information about which Wikia help forum is supposed to correspond to which type of problem &mdash; that's always good.)    Ryan W 19:10, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

slime trails
I'm kind of curious. Why all the slime trail screenshots in E1M6? :-) Fraggle 16:04, 21 November 2006 (UTC)


 * * shrug *  Those were the ones I saw while watching the COMPET-N demos.  If there are that many in every large map, maybe they could be collected in their own article just for screen shots of slime trails (to reduce clutter in the map articles), but perhaps that would be overreacting.    Ryan W 17:47, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Doom colector's edition help
Hey Ryan, it's me Aaron Pepin. I use Doom collector's edition. I don't know how to use the dehacked program I downloaded (I used the recommended site from the doom wiki for the dehacked program). I can't make my own 32-level games from scratch and I can't use my own sprites, sounds, music, or textures. I also use doom builder downloaded from code imp. I want to make my own monsters and create different damages for them. But all I can do is make levels. My levels are pretty awesome too, but I want to make them more awesome! Can you help? I don't know much of the vocabulary also, like pWAD, megawad, patch, it's all too confusing! (Also, what do you use to make levels? If you do make wads?)


 * I'm afraid I know very little about DeHackEd. Most of what I do know comes from Enjay's reference documents, which include a series of worked examples to teach you how to do things.  How much you can edit also depends on which port you have in mind, EDGE for instance allowing you more freedom than, say, Doom95.


 * Many editors cannot handle graphics or sound patches, and AFAICT most editors do not allow group saves, at least in their shareware forms. Since you ask, my editor of choice is DeePsea, though I still use it mostly for bugfixes and wiki research, and have not had the nerve to release any of my own levels to the world at large (yet... the one I'm working on now might be good enough).  I have never used Doom Builder, but I would think that a 2.9MB manual is cause for optimism!


 * Your remarks about vocabulary are reminding me of yet another David Cook line &mdash; the game is big, but eventually you'll bring it under control. :>    Ryan W 03:16, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, I will probebly somehow send in some WADS or something

Well...
Technically this isn't warez. It says it's abandonware, but I downloaded it and it's just the shareware version. It could be classified as spamming though, so you were right to revert an anon adding it. :-) oTHErONE (Contribs) 08:17, 16 February 2007 (UTC)


 * I was at home, so I couldn't download it to check. But it was advertised as warez (unregistered shareware cannot become "abandonware" because you didn't have to pay for it in the first place), which may be sufficient to cause trouble, so I removed it.    Ryan W 18:51, 16 February 2007 (UTC)
 * It's worth noting that the same site does have the full (warez) version of Doom 2. So it probably isn't somewhere that we really want to be linking to. Fraggle 21:58, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Sysop


There you go! Fredrik 18:31, 20 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Thank you... I think.  :>     Whoa, new buttons &mdash; I didn't even have to log out and back in.    Ryan W 20:11, 20 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Congratulations! I hereby present you with this cake as celebration of you finally becoming a sysop! Fraggle 20:38, 20 February 2007 (UTC)


 * * L * Very chuffed.  I assume this means you agree with Fredrik's "mop and bucket" evaluation.    Ryan W 21:27, 20 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Congrats. You certainly deserve it. -- TheDarkArchon 13:32, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Uh...
Hey Ryan, why exactly did you make this edit? I don't think capitalisation matters with templates... oTHErONE (Contribs) 10:33, 23 February 2007 (UTC)


 * When you edit a template or a MediaWiki message string, the change doesn't show up in other articles (which include it) until those articles are themselves edited. So, to test my change to Template:Delete, I edited Ben "jassteX" Talbot in a way that altered the source code without actually affecting the article.  You can also, for example, add or remove blank lines at the very end.


 * I confess that "prod" may or may not be standard notation; I used it because I saw Jdowland using it. :>    Ryan W 11:27, 23 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Oh, ok. oTHErONE (Contribs) 12:28, 23 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Just a note, the m:Job queue (status shown on Special:Statistics) is a system in MediaWiki that queues up modifications to templates (specifically to categories and images in templates), as well as images, MediaWiki: messages, and a few other things, and then goes through and m:null edits them all (that is, saves without any changes, which in most cases forces the page to update itself). This should make the manual null edit requirements almost totally deprecated (some exceptions include images or categories in templates that are both both transcluded and redirected). --Splarka (talk) 08:02, 25 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Hey, that's good news! I had heard about the job queue, but for some reason didn't think it included the main space.  Also, I see here that the upgrade to MediaWiki 1.6 was more recent than this edit and this edit, so Jdowland's behavior was completely valid &mdash; it was just a case of me not keeping up with the news at central (and, realistically, I might not have remembered it anyway because so many refinements have accumulated by the time a new version is actually rolled out).  Thank you for the information, as always.    Ryan W 09:02, 25 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Welcome ^_^... just so you know though, you usually don't have to change anything to do a purge. What I do if something isn't changing after something is edited that should have changed it: action=purge it like this, then reload my browser cache (ctrl+R), then null edit, then actual edit, then I bug a tech. --Splarka (talk) 11:50, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Hey Ryan
What the exactly did this guy do to Entryway? I know it was vandalism, but I can't seem to get a diff on it without it timing out... oTHErONE (Contribs) 03:48, 1 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Diffs are sometimes hard to load when there are large changes, I'm told. Try viewing the old version by itself.    Ryan W 04:02, 1 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks. (Jeez, some admin should really consider semi-protecting Entryway...) oTHErONE (Contribs) 04:19, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Hi Ryan
Thanks to our comments on the Discussion page. I renamed the article to the name that you suggested and also merged to Songs which sample Doom sound effects. Sorry but i think that Doom Wiki have the same laws of English Wikipedia, talking of the fair-use. Thanks for your suggestions, i'm noob here ;P--Marctc 00:11, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Heretic, Hexen
Ryan

I tend to think that for

Hexen Hexen : Death Kings of the Dark Citadel

the only way to do a proper walkthough is links from each Hub rather than from each level. Level based => It is too confusing. In most cases you need to revisit a level several times as more parts of the level has opened up. Strictly speaking the secret levels of each Hub are not necessary to complete the level but they should be there.

I have played many times over on maximum difficulty for each character class. I know all the secrets.

If you apply the CDROM sound patch to DKofDC, it adds 5 DeathMatch levels + 1 transit level which allows you to access all 5 DM levels.

Heretic, Hexen & DKofDC show several signs of lack of polish by Raven:

Heretic: (i) Map E2M2 - lacks the Serpents with the Green balls outside the Green door. All other key doors have a Serpents with the apporopriate ball colour. It is the only one that lacks this. (ii) Map E5M8 - DeathMatch teleports dont work.

Hexen: Clerics "Amulet of Warding" is positioned off the map in Darkmere

Hexen DKofDC: (i) Extra cleric piece of Wrathverge in Catacombs (lacks symmetry with Fighter, Mage) (ii) Final mirror in Blight to next Hub is 1-way (iii) Dynamic red cloud missing from teleports in Market Place IDLover 00:26, 27 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Hi IDLover, welcome to the wiki. I personally don't have any big plans for those articles, and I don't know that anyone else does, so you're welcome to expand or change them as time and desire allows.  My edits were meant only as a very small first/second step toward further organization.


 * Having said that, is it possible that we could someday have this amount of information about each map? If so, a single article for the entire hub would be unbelievably long and no one would plow through it.  I could understand combining all the "Essentials" sections into a single article (that's what I've been calling them anyway; see here and here for the reasoning that led to that section structure) because, as you say, it might make the overall route a lot clearer.  There must be a better way to handle the other parts than just stacking them on top of each other, however &mdash; think of the poor dialup users.    Ryan W 02:31, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Ryan: You're right, but I meant just the walkthrough, not merging articles on each level into a hub article. It is similar to discussing the United States as country and discussing each State like Arizona. You have to distinguish between what is at Federal level with what is at State level. It is just that unlike Doom, Doom 2, Heretic where you can do a walkthrough for each level, for Hexen and DKofDC, a walkthrough makes sense at hub level.

For instance on 1st Hub of Hexen You visit The Guardian of Ice 1) First time to flick central switch so that Guardian of Fire/Ice doors on Seven Portals opens up. 2) Second time to place Fire Mask and get Fire Key, get Steel Key 3) Third time (if you wish to visit Bright Crucible) to take portals to secret areas of Guardian of Fire/Ice

So I am saying - discuss things pertinent to the hub at hub level (walkthrough, hub objectives) - discuss things pertinent to each map at map level (items on map, map overview, monsters, secrets)

IDLover 11:54, 27 March 2007 (UTC)


 * I agree. I ought also to say that I am far from an authority on Hexen (not sure I've actually played it since 1999), so I am not really certain of the best way to write walkthroughs.  My comments above should be taken as, at most, an arithmetic perspective.    Ryan W 16:42, 27 March 2007 (UTC)