Template talk:Critter at a Glance

Disease

I was just updating Ghoul and noticed there was no Disease field. I am going to just combine it with the Poison field for the following reasons:

• The At A Glance list is already pretty cluttered, in my opinion.
• The number of critters that poison or disease is small enough that it's more efficient to combine them.
• To avoid having to go back and update all the critters (like is having to be done now with the Poison field now)

Information about the poison or disease the creature causes should be in the In Depth field anyway, so that should be sufficient I think. --Grindinghalt 22:12, 25 March 2007 (CDT)

Upon further thought, should there even be a poison field? Currently there are just two critters in the poison category, and only the ghoul so far that causes disease. Would it be better to just merge the poison and disease into Special Attacks, and elaborate in the In Depth section? I think so.

--Grindinghalt 22:36, 25 March 2007 (CDT)

I agree, I've been meaning to get rid of some of the extraneous categories within the bestiary as well. Such as does not have boxes, does not have gems, etc etc.--Naeya (talk) 22:42, 25 March 2007 (CDT)

I've removed the poison field. Most of the creatures hadn't been updated since the field was put in anyway and it was just causing page errors. The good news is that the data wasn't lost on those that had been updated in the field comes back in the future. --Grindinghalt 02:23, 26 March 2007 (CDT)

Images

I added a field for the image file so that it appears inside the At a Glance box. This gives much more room for content and makes it easier to format. But I can't get rid of the extra line (<p><br/></p>) that the wiki is putting above the descriptions. Please look at Giant Black Leucro and Jackal to see what I'm talking about. Still need to figure out how to best arrange the rest of the content now that we have all this open space. --Grindinghalt 05:17, 26 March 2007 (CDT)

Good work, I like the image in the box. Husband and I played a bit with the floating of the boxes. Take a look, they're on the left side now. I like the layout, but you are right, there is a ton of open space. At one time, I had the description somewhat sandwiched between the At at Glance and Skinning boxes at the top. The balance would be off now that the At a Glance box is quite long. That and no all critters have a skinning box... so. Let me know what you come up with.--Naeya (talk) 07:34, 26 March 2007 (CDT)

Yeah it looked ok for most pages sandwiched, but sometimes the images are too small or too large and it causes formatting issues. This way the image is always 200px wide, and will make the critter pages look much more uniform. I may put the image at the bottom of the at a glance box, or hard cap its height. I'll fiddle with it some more. --Grindinghalt 12:24, 26 March 2007 (CDT)

How about this Test creature page layout --Grindinghalt 15:12, 26 March 2007 (CDT)

That actually looks pretty good. It flows, and even for some critters with no skinning info, it shouldn't as sparce. Nicely done.--Naeya (talk) 15:17, 26 March 2007 (CDT)

Skill caps

Would it be useful to add data indicating the max rank critters will teach? Probably would want fields for shield, armour, weapons, evasion, parry, and MO if it's done. Admittedly, collecting such information acurately would be slow, but easy enough to get ball park values: if a critter teaches, you've got a minimum value, and if it doesn't, you've a max.

Da Next Pope (talk) 12:47, 19 April 2007 (CDT)

I think that could get too involved and perhaps not very useful for these pages since you could feasibly add all the other skills like TM, hiding, stalking, escaping, perception, disarm and lock (and whatever else), never mind all the variables introduced by stats, spells, and class bonuses. Either it should be a very general skill level (ie you need about 100 effective ranks in applicable skills to survive/train in blood wolves) or there should be a separate "hunting guide" page that lists all the above info either in one massive table or separate tables per skill. EDIT: Like I see you're already trying out on your user page.

--Grindinghalt 22:28, 19 April 2007 (CDT)

I agree. I think that something like this should be in a separate guide/table. The data could be on individual pages perhaps as well, but the need for a table format with all creatures, or all creatures in a certain skill range, would be best. That way, one could glance at it if trying to gauge what creature to hunt for their skill level instead of having to search through individual beastiary pages.--Naeya (talk) 22:35, 19 April 2007 (CDT)

DoesYesNotNoYesNotNotBlankMaybe ... aaaagh!

I think the use of nested sub-templates is an overly-complex, and difficult to debug, way to define categories based on what parameters are set for a given critter. It could be done a lot more clearly and efficiently by using the #ifeq and/or #switch parser functions, and without requiring all those extra template articles. Maybe we didn't have those parser functions in the wiki when this was originally written, but since we do now, I'll try and find time over the next few weeks to work this change in.

FWIW Kraelyst uncovered a gap in the category code where Evil and Corporeal must both be defined, or neither. Defining one without the other causes a nonsense category. --Farman 15:32, 20 October 2007 (CDT)

Both fixed! -Caraamon Strugr-Makdasi^(talk) 21:08, 3 June 2008 (CDT)

Template Revision

I did a major revision of the template, mostly regarding category inclusion. I did this to make the categories more expressly indicate that they were creature categories.-Caraamon Strugr-Makdasi^(talk) 21:22, 3 June 2008 (CDT)

Warning Box

I don't think the yellow warning box is at all necessary. It's pretty obvious if data is missing. At the most it should add the Incomplete template, minus the box that it adds (see my discussion there). --Grindinghalt 20:04, 13 June 2008 (CDT)

Poachable

The poachable category is rather redundant and I'm not conviced it's needed as a seperate row. From what I've seen a creature is either backstabbable or it is poachable. There might be an exception to the rule out there somewhere but I've never seen one. Creatures are either one or the other, never both. So essentialy poachable = nonbackstabbable and backstabbable = nonpoachable. Cierst (talk) 22:25, 29 June 2008 (CDT)

Stats

Anyone have an idea what the ranges are on appraising critter stats? Curious what qualifies as "about as agile" and the other lines.
-Glimmereyes 21:24, 1 October 2008 (CDT)

I know "about as", is not exactly the same. There is a "exactly as". -Caraamon Strugr-Makdasi^(talk) 13:25, 2 October 2008 (CDT)