With the characters and logs functionality of AresMUSH, it’s theoretically possible to replace the character/log galleries on a game wiki with the web portal.
But would people actually be interested in that?
If so, what’s the essential functionality that you’d need for acceptance? Replicating every single thing wikidot supports isn’t going to happen any time soon, but it wouldn’t be hard to offer a few standard things.
Some of it could be drawn from the actual game too - like a damage listing or even the relationships list.
I’m of the opinion that if it’s not broke, don’t fix it. We already have had the wiki running for over six months now and people are used to the interface and @Faraday has put in a lot of work for the transition of logs and such to wikidot. Nothing wrong with keeping it as it is now.
But really, it’s what’s easiest for you, Fara. We’re just the players on your game, you’re the one testing new things.
My preference is the wiki, at least for now. I feel like the web portal has a LOT of promise and makes things like log posting easier (I’m a person who doesn’t mind cleaning up logs, and I was struck by how easy it was), but the wiki feels better for a collaborative game. The tags and search function make it easy to dig for information and tie things together (I think the ‘tying things together’ is its most powerful feature). I’m also not sure how update-able the web portal is at this moment (like Calliope’s page, from when I genned her, barely seems applicable anymore).
I do really like how you can read the bboards directly on the web portal, and perform functions like cgen from it. For me to see it as a replacement, it’d probably need a way to replicate the way you can build a larger story/theme through links from one page to another and player contributions. The wiki does this seamlessly and adding to it is easy.
I would want the page to be editable from both in-game and the web portal. One of the nice things about the wiki is that I don’t have to edit it from the game – I can make changes from what is effectively a word processing window.
I like automatically drawing the damage listing from the game, although it would be nice to be able to edit that too (or at least add information to it) – I like noting where in the chest or head or arm or whatever someone has been hit.
It would be nice to have basically a “notes” section where you could put Common Knowledge, Playlists, whatever you want to spice up your character page with. Sure, it wouldn’t be as cool as the music players out there, but at least you could put some additional info about your character up.
I guess it comes down to the reason that I like a wiki is the flexibility, and the web portal seems to be replacing that flexibility with auto-updating from the game, which is nice, but not the reason that I like the wiki.
I think I worded my original question poorly because almost everyone seems to be fixated on the fact that you can’t edit the web portal pages
I know that you can’t edit the web portal character pages, because I haven’t built that functionality. But I could, just like I built the scene editing functionality. What I was trying to suss out was whether it’s worth the effort.
Imagine you had something that had, say, 70% of wikidot functionality. Not everything, of course,because it took them years to build that all up. But the basics at least - editing, tagging, revision history, file uploads, some customization. And then on top of that you also had the ability to auto-update some things from within the game (like the demographics and RP hooks).
Is that enough? Or are people so attached to the wiki that it’s a dealbreaker unless it can do everything the wiki can do?
And if it is enough, which 70% of wiki functionality is most critical? @Cidward mentioned tagging and search, for example. That’s what I was trying to figure out.
Here’s an example of the dumbest possible character page editor, which lets you change the editable demographic fields and the optional sections: demo.
I know this is super old, but I thought you might be interested in thoughts anyway.
So we’ve been poking at Ares for a new game concept we’re slowly working on, and one of the questions we’ve been asking is this exact one. Do we still need a wiki if we have the webportal?
It might be helpful here for me to note that I LOVE mediawiki. Like a lot. So the fact that I’m even asking this question is kind of a big deal. Here’s where we’re at:
It is terrible to have both a web portal and a wiki unless we can achieve tighter integration . If we have a wiki, it will be our main site, which means that there’s no real point to logs on the web portal, character pages on the web portal, etc. We desperately do not want to be going two separate places for different things. If we do a wiki, we’d probably link to the web portal’s CG and bb, but keep characters and logs on the wiki itself.
The reason we’d do this is the semantic wiki extension. It creates a faux-database that lets us auto-populate so. Many. Lists. Every character on the game by height. By birthday. By title. Everyone in any log linked to a plot. Any log associated with a plot. Or a character. Or a faction. Or… There’s just a lot that can be done. But in order to do it, it has to all live in the same place. Oh, and also you can search for logs by date, plot, characters, etc. That one’s a big deal.
So we’re weighing, here. Auto-update for character pages + auto log posting? Gosh, that’s nice.
Being able to search for stuff super specifically and create a lot of auto-populating lists? Also really freaking nice.
My guess is that something like that COULD be built for Ares, but it’s probably a lot of work? I mean, it’s a real database and not a faux ones, so pulling that data ought to be possible.
Other considerations:
We need to be able to create pages for plots and NPCs. As far as I know, right now the web portal doesn’t do that. Could it? Without at least this functionality, we’ll probably end up wiki. If it’s possible, then our choice gets harder.
So tl;dr, what I really want is the web portal, but with the ability to
Pull specific data from specific fields and manipulate it on portal pages and
Let players create (or at least edit) pages on a variety of topics, such as locations, plots, NPCs, etc.
Thanks for the input. A couple of updates since the original post was super old…
Ares 1.0 will include wiki functionality. Will it be able to do everything that MediaWiki and WikiDot can do? No, of course not. They’ve had a 10+ year head start on designing software and extensions that were geared around wikis.
But it will have what I personally consider to be essential wiki functionality - basically everything necessary to replace the BSG:U wiki to my satisfaction.
This will be prototyped on BSG:U in the coming weeks so you’ll be able to check it out.
Will it meet everyone’s needs? Probably not, to be honest. If that’s the case, then just disable the links to character and log pages on your web portal and continue to use the wiki.
Or you can go the opposite direction and write custom web portal code. Everything you mentioned - lists upon lists upon lists – the web portal can do all that. It’s got a database and the ability to display stuff from that database in whatever format you desire. You’d just have to have your coder write a little code to do it. You can even have your coder write an extension for a building block that you can then include on the wiki pages.
So, I want to set realistic expectations for 1.0 but really - the sky’s the limit in terms of how far it goes in time.
Ultimately my goal is to build up the Ares web portal so that the question becomes instead: “why would you ever want to have a separate wiki on top of this?”
We’ve ended up deciding to give just the web portal a try - which is a pretty big deal given how much I love mediawiki. The functionality is just THAT AMAZING.
I do think we might mess with some custom web portal code down the road - lists upon lists, as you say. But many of the lists I’m wanting, you’ve already built.
So mostly this is a post to say how awesome the web portal truly is. Because it’s really awesome.
Thanks! If you find something that you feel is pretty generic in terms of the lists, let me know. If it’s pretty widely useful, it could maybe be included in the base setup.
FYI - there’s a little architectural problem with the web portal right at this moment in the way it communicates with the game. Things like ‘who’s online’ and the event/combat notifications to the game are busted at the moment. It’ll be fixed in the next patch, but will require some code surgery. Just an example of why I try to make people aware that Ares is not a solid platform to be building games on just yet. I’m still tinkering - sometimes in major ways.
I’ll let Glitch know - he’s been coding some stuff for us. We know we’re likely to run into version stuff and possible problems, so I promise we won’t get crazy if you make big changes.
Regarding lists, there are two things I’d love to see that I don’t think the current version is doing yet:
It’d be nice if operations could have a list of characters participating (and then the character page could show operations/plots participated in). And if it could also have a place to list NPCs, with the same option for their page (assuming we’ve created them as a ‘character’ NPC and not just a combat-code one).
It’d be SUPER nice if anywhere a character name shows up as a part of a list, it was a clickable link. For example, in the scenes list. Actually I think that’s the only place I’ve encountered it so far where I’ve thought that I really wanted it.
“Operations” aren’t a first-class type of object in Ares because it’s designed to be pretty theme-neutral. I considered having some kind of “arc” or “season” concept that was a generic thing that could fit for operations, but I wasn’t convinced it was generic enough to work across games.
Mostly though I just didn’t want to have to go through all the old BSGU logs and assign them to different operations even if I did make a way to do it
Which “scene list” are you referring to that doesn’t have the character names as clickable links?
This page is where I’d love to see links where the character names appear.
I do think that ‘plots’ are a pretty generic concept that most games have and would want to document on a wiki. We can do it manually, but it’d definitely be nice to have some things automated. For example, this is the one thing I’ve run into so far that we used to do with semantic wiki on mediawiki and can’t on the web portal (which is really saying something great about the portal, btw) - I want a list of the most recent plot pages, along with a summary. Basically a directory like the ‘scenes’ page, but for plots. For games that do a lot of operations, plots, missions, whatever you want to call it, browsing something like that is usually a good way to get a gist of recent story. This is what our last one looked like in mediawiki: http://xfnyc.riverdark.net/wiki/Category:2016_Plots
It might be something we try to tackle down the road if it’s not generic enough for you to be interested in, once all the other things that need to be tackled have been.
I’ll explore something like plots or chapters or something that could serve for operations.
In the mean time though, I think that the Scene List tag does what you want? If you tag the scenes with a plot-specific tag, then you can just do [[scenelist plot:tag]] and it’ll build a list of all the scenes with that tag. But making that a first-class concept could be useful, sure.
It’ll do part of it, definitely. It at least gets me a list of scenes to throw on a plot page.
What I’m lusting after, though, is a list of PLOTS themselves, not the scenes in a plot. So someone can skim and see the last 5 plots run, with a summary. That sort of thing.
Workaround for now - that plot page you were talking about, where you’d put the SceneList? Tag it with a tag like ‘plot’ and then you can use the PageList feature to make a Plots page with all the plots listed. I know that’s not quite what you’re looking for, but it’s the closest available until I add some kind of plots concept. Maybe in the next patch.
Yeah, that’s exactly how we’ll do it for now. Or we might end up doing tables by hand for a bit, since they can offer more information and plots don’t happen constantly. We’ll see. There are ways to work around it, for sure.
