Community Projects > The FreeSpace Wiki Project
Ship and weapon entries for wiki
WMCoolmon:
Have a page with all ships listed in alphabetical order with a short description for each, make the names links if they have much history.
As for ships, if we want stats to be in the wiki, they should be in the table, not on the ship page. I don't care so much if a ship has "100 shields" unless every other ship has 500. Ship pages should be for history, description, and hints and tips, not stats you can figure out by reading the table files. A table, OTOH, is useful because you can't compare ships as efficiently with .tbl entries.
FireCrack:
--- Quote from: Black Wolf on November 15, 2005, 08:23:10 am ---That looks good - we also need to add the sidebar used on the GTD Orion entry, assuming that links to all the correct places (I haven't played with it enough to be certain). It might also be worthwhile adding the FS Reference Bible data to the FS1 ships in addition to the techroom stuff - it's similar, but not the same.
--- End quote ---
just so people know, the way to add that sidebar is to start the page wiht:
{{FS12_Ships}}
on the first line
Black Wolf:
--- Quote from: WMCoolmon on November 15, 2005, 10:25:22 pm ---Have a page with all ships listed in alphabetical order with a short description for each, make the names links if they have much history.
--- End quote ---
Wanderer's doing that - converting CP's list to Wiki format.
--- Quote from: WMCoolmon on November 15, 2005, 10:25:22 pm ---As for ships, if we want stats to be in the wiki, they should be in the table, not on the ship page. I don't care so much if a ship has "100 shields" unless every other ship has 500. Ship pages should be for history, description, and hints and tips, not stats you can figure out by reading the table files. A table, OTOH, is useful because you can't compare ships as efficiently with .tbl entries.
--- End quote ---
I think shields and hitpoints should stay, as they're a very easily comparable, quantified way of comparing hull and shield strength. You can no know a thing about tables, look up two ships and know exactly how much stonger one is that the other. Useful, IMO.
Wanderer:
I added a link to the sidebar to the CP's list... you can access it through any entry that has thesidebar included
WMC might be partially right, though there might need for some small details about the general performance of the ship, like in latest revision of Colossus. Though it still has all the subsystem data which IMHO is not needed for the players to know. Infact i like that page, it has all the relevant data but nothing too much (apart from the scan time and subsystem data) so it is just great. Some small details like number of fighters carried and the crewnumbers are nice also.
So i'm with Black Wolf on this one
For true comparisons we would however indeed need an organized table (so do we need comparisions?). Like different ships on the rows and attributes on the columns, though which attributes should be added to the table? Just by looking to the VPView gives an image of the amount of data available but we can not include every value to the table. Name (obvious), Lenght (from POF files), Velocity + burner velocity, Turn rates, # PBanks, # Sbanks, Hitpoints, Shield, # Turrets. There is no point in including all the entries to the list as VPView does that trick already.
Eishtmo:
--- Quote from: StratComm on November 15, 2005, 09:44:17 pm ---I think a system similar in classification to the tech descriptions would be best (high, average, low, whatever) since trying to quantify manuverability by a single number is going to cause problems no matter how you do it. Rot. damp is meaningless to a player, and just because his ship is more responsive because of it's value doesn't need to know that value. And that's pretty consistant about all of the manuverability stats, they're part of a greater whole, not something that can be viewed in isolation.
--- End quote ---
I agree with that. I'm thinking though, how do we determine whether a ship deserves a good/poor rating? And once determined, how do we justify it? We can't strictly use the tech database for each ship since in some cases they vary between the games. I'm thinking if we do define it, we should have rating, then justify it with a subsection containing the data. In a sense, it makes it easy for someone who doesn't know what rotdamp means to still understand that the ship is good/poor at a glance, and gives modders a chance to see what makes it good/poor.
--- Quote from: WMCoolmon on November 15, 2005, 10:25:22 pm ---As for ships, if we want stats to be in the wiki, they should be in the table, not on the ship page. I don't care so much if a ship has "100 shields" unless every other ship has 500. Ship pages should be for history, description, and hints and tips, not stats you can figure out by reading the table files. A table, OTOH, is useful because you can't compare ships as efficiently with .tbl entries.
--- End quote ---
I can't disagree more with this sentiment. I think have the stats on the ship page can be pretty important, speed varies greatly between the different ships, so does the maneverablity information and such. I'm thinking that this should be the comprehensive guide to everything Freespace, starting with canon, which includes the stats and table data, then moving on to opinions, histories, etc. Say, something like this. Sorry, the Tomcat's my favorite.
The point is, when listed, modern planes have their physical characteristics listed out, alongside the specs for it. The ships we're covering are virtual, so their specs are table entries, so they have just as much importance as anything else. I see each page as being useful for everyone, very comprehensive but at least readable. That's why I think we need to figure out what about the table data is important and what is not. 100 shield probably isn't important if they're all the same, but whether a ship is shielded or not may be. We still need the history and stuff, but we should have the specifics to back up our claims.
Now a comparision table would be a nice addition, but a pain to impliment, unless you wanted to reorginize the fighter/bomber/auxilary catagories and such. Or set up a completely seperate page. Still hard though. Probably worth it in the end.
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