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Approved Submission [Lazarus] Stealth shroud technology

OsakanOne

Inactive Member
Retired Member
Submission Type: Technology
Submission URL: https://wiki.stararmy.com/doku.php?id=lazarus:inflection:stealth_shroud

Faction:
FM Approved Yet? NA
Faction requires art? No

For Reviewers:
Contains Unapproved Sub-Articles? Yes (SEE ALTEX
Contains New art? No
Previously Submitted? No

Notes:
Simple and inherently limited. Stealth technologies so far seem all to be too effective or not effective enough and lack factors involved with character skill or the fortunate/unfortunance of circumstance. The stealth shroud is far from perfect and I think that's a big part of its charm.
 
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Yeah, I'll go ahead and review this for you.

Looking this over, it may be more complicated to do than initially thought. This appears to be both an article about the technology itself, as well as the end product on which the technology is integrated into and sold as. We'll have to separate them; here, I suggest focusing on just the technology. The product to be sold can be done later.

- This needs to be reorganized; for now, let's do an "About" section to summarize in brief what this is and what it does
- The imgur image needs to be replaced with something on-site instead; I suggest a png with transparent background for best results
- Fix the title
- The name space is more complex than needed; you can use a simpler one
- It needs links to structol itself
- An IC date for when this was produceed is needed
- A link to the Lazarus Corp is needed.
 
I'm afraid I can't make the change with the image for the banner: The website's own image hosting unfortunately results in clipping with banners due to differing behaviour of how it treats its own images verses how it treats remote images from another source.

I'll show you:

ai.imgur.com_6yjP7b1.png

Results in...

upload_2015-8-14_11-26-46.png

Yet

ai.imgur.com_2lAxb6j.png

Results in...

upload_2015-8-14_11-26-15.png

Side by side comparison:

ai.imgur.com_wLU28n1.png

ai.imgur.com_NHksuv6.png


You can't actually do banners using locally stored images because of this behaviour exception. There's lots of situations where locally stored images get treated oddly, making many forms of formatting impossible.

Its a known flaw in dokuwiki's programming that hasn't been fixed yet.

So no: No can do, @CadetNewb: Specifically for the banner, outbound loading has to stay unless Wes is willing to add another image host. You can't do wikibanners using locally stored images because they corrupt, get stretched and they break because of where the wiki deals with them in server-side memory.

You will also find that the background of the image is precisely color-matched to the web safe colours of the wiki's background, as seen in the CSS: Many browsers cannot display transparent PNGs or transparent PNGs may create problems when processed by the wiki, altering the colour of images as part of the compression/reduction part of reprocessing the image, similarly to the uploading transcription scripts which drive the forum's avatar storage and display systems (which with my last few avatars I've been intentionally hiding things in to see their limitations, as I have already with the wiki).

If this is not the case due to the colour display configuration of your computer or you are using css scripts or an alternative colour scheme for the wiki, please be sure to show screen-shots and tell me if possible what your monitor colour profile is (available in the display settings) in order for me to rectify this problem. Thank-you.
 
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Well, since the image hosting isn't working right, there's nothing we can do except bring this up with @Wes . As for the rest of the article itself, it's not bad, but could be organized better.

- I would suggest having the opening of the article be just one or two sentences stating what it is from the customer's point of view - a specific type of stealth system - along with it's release date
- Prices, I think should be in separate bullet points; anything to make it neatly stand out from the paragraphs rather than being lost in them
- All the more detailed information on how it works should likely go into its own sub-section rather than the article's opening
- Renaming the 'Shutdown' section and having it specifically detail how to use the device is another thing you can do as well. Right now, I don't know how to turn it on or off, refill the material or do other things with it.
- The 'About' section is pretty good for the time being; just having it focused on what it appears to be and what it can do for the user is just right I think
 
What's the issue with images? Please don't use imgur, put all Star Army images on Star Army.
 
Honestly, I'm not entirely sure what it is Wes. It seems to be some sort of issue with our own image host; the banner comes out right with an outside one, but not our own. Also, the banner isn't color matched for me Osaka. It's coming out as a lighter shade of blue. Still, I thought that transparent PNGs were good to go for us though. The artwork I've commissioned before was one, and it's displaying fine on my end.
 
Wes, we need an alternative place to store images. The wiki isn't good enough. It doesn't cut the mustard and freaks out whenever you do anything even vaguely interesting.

We need an alternative image hosting service on the server.
 
I would suggest trying a transparent PNG, and maybe a larger logo; those worked for me, so it may be worth trying again. Still, for the time being, I suggest focusing on the article since that's the primary focus.
 
Bullet points aren't needed for such a criminally simple point. Broke things up an added the top down.

Also, your png trick doesn't work. Again: the background is color-matched: your fetish with transparent PNGs doesn't make sense unless your browser isn't HTML 4 compliant (in which case it wouldn't be able to display transparent PNGs anyway).

For the record, I've used that banner on a lot of pages so far. Pretty shocking that you chose now of all times to notice it, and pretty interesting too. If you can come up with a hosting solution that works, that's fine but until then I'm going to stick with what works because it works and image hosting on the SARP does not work.
 
A PNG Fetish? That's a new one. To be honest, the banner has never been color matched to the background for me, and I have never brought it up because I know it's annoying/frustrating to deal with sometimes. It's only now that this all came up since I noticed the outside link, but given the circumstances you've talked about, I think it's ok.

Going back to the article though, it looks like we've gone backwards. Can you put in sections for the About and Appearance? The opening would work fine with the first and last sentence there, with the rest going into the About to be honest. Some of the stuff I suggested earlier hasn't been touched on either; there's still no info on how to operate it as the user.
 
Why bullet points if a single sentence will do the job? You're over-complicating things and the second object in the sentence depends on the first for context, otherwise the article is unnesesarily bulked into three lines and two bullet-points of hugely differing length (one short one long). Making them equal would mean turning that earlier sentence into a paragraph. Its unnessesary thickening/bulking. I know what I'm doing.


Second, the title is descriptive and does everything it has to do. It does not need fixing. I know what I'm doing.

Next, the namespace is fine: Inflection is the namespace of Lazarus Consortium (not corp)'s hardlight and out of tidiness I keep all of my hardlight projects and products under that namespace.

I know what I'm doing.

Look.
I like you as a person. I like roleplaying with you. I like talking to you.

But you burn me out as a writer faster than any other techmod and the others don't even come close.

I feel dread in my belly if I've submitted something new and I see you're the one who's reviewing it.

"Oh, we're going to play the formatting game again, okay"

Its mainly because I submit a lot of technology and special items: Things which are guidelined, not templated because you can't apply templates to articles of this nature, just requirements.

I don't mean pedagogy and understanding: "oh, could you explain this further, its confusing?" or stuff like that.

More than anything, you you ask for largely unnessesary rearrangements of articles instead of deferring to experienced writers who know what they're doing from a player standpoint.

Examples? Gladly:
What header type you think something should be under, because it looks neater.

That something should be broken up into bullet points because costs are involved, which would then demand an extra sentence demanding an explanation of the relationship between the two purchasables.

That some areas could be collated together into a smudged mishmash of misunderstanding and no clear distinction because they're two seperate functions of the same thing.

What does any of this stuff have to do with the article? I'm the one writing a guidelined article, not you.

And my point is, it burns me out. Unnessesary re-writes that are specificall to meet formatting demands, not player-understanding or article-explanation demands suck the joy out of what I'm doing.

So I ask: In future, could you let someone else get to my articles first, even if it means they sit cold for a while?

I like you. I really do. In fact, I think very highly of you.

I just think most of your demands are unnessesary, wasteful and you tend to circle the drain with lots of small collections of demands, not a giant list of shit I need to do (which if I'm honest is what I really WANT: I want to do it all in one sitting, not go back and forth back and forth over and over over formatting).

Sorry if the nature of this response is heated.

I've got stuff I'm sat on and I don't want to submit it because I don't want to go through this again.

Other than the checklist of basic requirements (which should be your bible and should be stuck to the entire way through the submission very aggressively), you only have three jobs that stray from it:

1: Make sure its scientifically reasonable.
2: Make sure its good for the game, not OP or out of place
3: Make sure shit is understood, clearly communicated

If you have problems with subtle formatting on a guideline article, not a templated article, that's your personal subjective preference.
 
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