NWN Lexicon

[Legacy_AndarianTD]

               

Pstemarie wrote...

I'm with eeriegeek on this one. The Lexicon is considered as close to "official" cannon as you can get when it comes to scripting. IMO it would be best for the Community to have the CP 1.70 changes entered into a "Community Patch" version of the Lexicon and maintain the original Lexicon as a separate document. Many people don't use the CP 1.70 and having such entries - even boxed - in the Lexicon might cause mass confusion.

Strongly agreed.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_acomputerdood]

               

eeriegeek wrote...

I think it would be useful to at least see what form the original data is as stored in the SQL database. If the original owner is willing to dump it to a standard text file or SQL statements I'd be glad to take a look at it and we can see if it seems worth preserving in that form.

well, the content owner said that the SQL database system was in disrepair at the moment and would need some effort to get back online and working correctly.  that's why we decided on going the pure html route.  i could always ask him how difficult it would be to get the db back online to just dump everything out, though.

I use the CHM form locally because it's easy, but I agree we could live without it.

yeah, i know the offline version is handy, but i think we can make it easy for people to download an offline version for offline use.

I worry about going to pure HTML for maintenance since it always seems to be too easy to allow non-well formed constructs to creep in. It can also make maintenance of things like headers and indexes painful to maintain if they are not auto-generated. Keeping a more formal data model makes automated processing of the complete lexicon much easier.

i worried about having some version control with the pure html version, but the site owner is willing to give a few of us scp access to the site to push updates to.  i think it will be ok if we have a core team in charge of reviewing the updates before being uploaded, we'll be ok.  i also don't think there will be a massive number of updates.  i mean, how long is this thread up changes?  and it's been here 2 years?

I think github is actually a very good idea. It keeps the source in a well known publicly accessable place. It would be a bit of a learning curve, but it solves version merging nicely. It would allow a 1.69 version to go up quickly with edits for known changes. A fork could be made for 1.70 edits, and when they are complete, they could be merged into the baseline. It also has some wiki/bug tracking features so it should make it easy to coordinate updates.

as mentioned before, i slightly agree with you about having version control and such.  i've never worked with github (though i guess this is a good excue to learn something new).  i don't want to make the site owner set something like this up to integrate, though.  he's obviously moved on to some degree beyond the lexicon, so i hate asking too many favors of him.

it is, however, something we could set up for ourselves.  as a community we can take advantage of some collaboration system to flesh out the updates before the "lexicon team" uploads the finalized html documents to the official lexicon.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Shadooow]

               

ShaDoOoW wrote...

eeriegeek wrote...

I think for patch 1.70 changes, personally, I would like to see the lexicon remain essentially a 1.69 document with added "boxed notes" for changes for 1.70 and future any versions.

Yea, I expressed myself wrong, since the community patch is not official patch and peoples still uses 1.69, there must be basic info about 1.69 behavior. But the "box note" about the "update" from community patch would be cool to have I think.

On a second thought, there isn't actually much sense of doing that. The knowhow doesn't changes. If there is a bug in function, like in DetermineclassToUse, a lexicon article should inform about it. Stating that CP fixed this bug would be redundant. Especially if this would be under more functions.

On the other hand, I see no reason why would you wouldn't want to include constants I "added" since they work without Patch - the numbers always worked I just found that out and added nwscript constant for them. But thats up to you. Honestly, I dont need lexicon anymore, I just felt that my knowledge could help someone so I wrote it here and I allow these informations to be reused without credits.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_acomputerdood]

               i know this was poo poo'd before, but i still think there's merit to having it as a wiki.  i've cleaned it up quite a bit and correctly categorized things now.

still TODO:
- i'd like the category tree to remember where you were and stay open when you click around on pages
- there are still some missing and red links i have to chase down - i fixed the ones where it's looking for the wrong files.  there are still red links but they're either images not uploaded or the pages are missing from the lexicon itself.
- i need to figure out how to upload the images - fixed my permissions and uploaded a couple on the main page to test.

but aside from that, i really think this is how we should proceed (assuming the lexicon owner would let us use a wiki on his server):

http://www.dalakora....x.php/Main_Page
               
               

               

                     Modifié par acomputerdood, 26 juillet 2012 - 11:50 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_acomputerdood]

               so, it's been about a week now and was wondering how everyone else thought we should proceed.  i think the 3 most viable options are:

a) keep the lexicon's format the same, and pick a group of people to do pure html updates to it (we need a group of people for this or it's not an option)
use some github system (we need somebody to understand this and teach others what to do)
c) proceed with a wiki like i demo'd in my previous post.

well, i guess there's also the option:
d) we do nothing and keep the lexicon in it's current, out of date state.

if i get no feedback (and volunteers), then i'll assume nobody else cares and the choice will become mine.  i do hope that there's some community effort here, though.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_acomputerdood]

               well, i didn't hear from anybody, so i'm guessing there wasn't much interest in the community to get a team together dedicated to keeping the lexicon up to date.  therefore, i had the owner create a wiki for me to populate.  now we don't need a team to keep it up to date.

the beta version is located at:
http://beta.nwnlexicon.com/

in about a week, if there are no big problems, i'll ask the site owner to move it from beta to official.
               
               

               

                     Modifié par acomputerdood, 21 août 2012 - 10:10 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_Squatting Monk]

               Awesome! I didn't get a chance to speak out, but I think a wiki version is the best way to approach this.

Since the wiki format allows us to make edits and add new pages, it'd be nice to have some updated or expanded tutorials. I had a coupla things I was interested in writing up, but is there anything in particular folks think we need?
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_KooKoo88]

               It looks good, @acomputerdood.  Making it a wiki is an excellent idea and you did good work from what I can see.

I went in and put my current website link on the contributor page.

I couldn't find the current change log with details on what's been added with each update.  I may just be clumsy in searching though.

As far as contributing anything further, I haven't worked in NWN in a few years now.  It's a major task even updating a page, but I wish you all the luck with your efforts. '>

Kookoo
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_acomputerdood]

               

Squatting Monk wrote...

Since the wiki format allows us to make edits and add new pages, it'd be nice to have some updated or expanded tutorials. I had a coupla things I was interested in writing up, but is there anything in particular folks think we need?

personally, i never really liked the organization of the tutorials.  i (and i'm sure many others) didn't know what the heck "Lyceum" meant, and then i'm not sure what the difference between a basic scripting tutorial, advanced scripting, primers, etc.

but i should be more careful about complaining because i'm certainly not volunteering to fix it!


and back on topic, that's great news SM - i hope many new pages get added to the wiki.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_acomputerdood]

               alert readers will notice that the official lexicon has been updated to the 1.69 wiki.  enjoy!

Squatting Monk did an excellent job creating some "<nwscript>" tags you can use on the wiki.  they're like the "code" blocks, but they do automatic syntax highlighting and link relevant functions and keywords to their appropriate pages.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Lightfoot8]

               There seems to be some HTML/ CSS formating code bleading through into the wiki/lexicon.

example. 
?: Ternary Conditional
               
               

               

                     Modifié par Lightfoot8, 13 septembre 2012 - 04:28 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_acomputerdood]

               thanks for the tip!  the html2wiki script i found didn't do the best job at converting the old lexicon pages.  or maybe it's an artifact from my conversion of the code blocks over to squatting monk's (VERY!) nice <nwscript> formatting tags.

anyway, that page is cleaned up.  and just a reminder: anonymous edits are enabled if anyone sees fit to make a quick change.  or if you feel it might be controversial or question something, use the page's "talk" page to discuss first.

OR, people can just leave a note here (or a page's talk page) and somebody else will come along and clean it up.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Squatting Monk]

               I'm going through page-by-page to check for errors and sprinkle a little more wiki magic around. I keep an eye here and on the recent wiki activity, so if you spy any problems you can't fix yourself, I'm happy to do it.

Also, I created some templates that can be dropped into pages or sections in need of expansion or examples. If you see an article that needs more cowbell but you don't know enough to write it yourself, you can use them to others know about the problem.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_acomputerdood]

               i don't know if squats is fully aware of the amazing contribution he's making, largely due to the fact that there are 2200+ articles in the lexicon that he's been diligently going through and improving by hand.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Shadooow]

               I wasnt totally in to the wiki-ize the lexicon, but I must admit that the final result is fine. Just that there would be more peoples contributing there, not just me.

BTW few days back, there started to registering strange accounts - very probably spambots. Something to take care of ASAP before they overcome the math CAPTCHA.