NPC articles[]
Hi there! I've seen that you went to work on the NPC articles to convert the template information into plaintext (nice!). In your Log section I found the following:
- offers-a-mission is wrong way to do
- add features-a-npc relation to the mission article
- add featured-in-a-mission table to the NPC article (how?)
On that note, I wanted to point out (I realize that given the above quote you're probably already aware of it) that I've recently started to include two sub-headers in the NPC's Associated Missions template fields: "Missions Started" and "Others" (Example: Estavan Covarrubias). The idea behind this is to show all the missions a NPC is involved in, also those that have you talk to him but are started by someone else. So maybe offers-a-mission and featured-in-a-mission both have their use (with the first being a subset of the second)--Ailar 06:50, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
- My problem is different. Kind of chicken-and-egg problem. You can add info about missions to NPC's infobox on his/her page. You can add info about NPCs to the mission box on the mission page. Two places, the same info. In SMW terms - one relation.
- I started by adding missions to NPCs pages. "NPC offers mission Foo and Bar." But it's unintuitive and the real world (-; doesn't work like this. You play the game, do the mission and meet people. So it's more like "You start mission Foo by talking with NPC1. Then you meet/kill NPC2." All on the mission page. SMW: "You start mission Foo by talking to <smw:mission-features-a-npc>NPC1</>." On NPC1's page I'll have to collect (pull) this info somehow. Some kind of SMW equivalent of DPL query. I'm pretty sure it's easy because it's so obvious application of SMW. I just don't know how to do it yet. What makes the whole experiment so interesting, right? (-: -- Nef (talk) 13:21, 1 May 2008 (UTC)
- Okay, different scenario: I get into a town where I've never been before, and I want to know if there are some missions to be had here. There are a couple of NPCs there which I can interact with, but none of them offer missions (yet?). So I look up those that seem most likely (the Magistrate, for example) on the wiki by doing a search for their name (or just checking if they've got an entry in the NPC category). If they are there, and if they have any missions listed, I can then check these mission for requirements like preceding missions, etc.
- I realize I'm talking about the same thing as you, just from the other direction :) Although I must admit I'm completely clueless about SMW, so I can't really help in that regard. If I had to figure out a way to do this, and knowing nothing about the system, I'd ask How is the information stored, and how can I do a search for a specific string? Some kind of database query, as you say. I'll keep watching what you're doing, I'm curious now ;) --Ailar 17:38, 1 May 2008 (UTC)
Mission Locations & Level[]
Hiya :) While doing the write-up for a new mission (Playing with Fire), I decided to do some experimenting with SMW. Specifically, I added the involves:: property to the NPC field in the template. I also started a new property, Mission Location::, and added that to the location field in the template.
It's that second part I wanted to ask about: what we have right now is a Bot that can be run on demand, and that will parse the mission articles for locations and then add a mission including its level to the appropriate location article. So this gives you a list of missions, sorted by level, right there on each port's Wiki article (example: Vera Cruz). Is there any way we can do this with SMW, hopefully eliminating the need to run that Bot ever so often? The Mission Location:: property is only half the answer, what I really want to know is if there's any way to connect the mission level to the location, and have both show up on the Mission Location:: page. A secondary property within (and local to) the main Mission Location:: property if you know what I mean... --Ailar 08:21, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
- If we tag mission with is-a::mission + is-located-in::XYZ requires-lvl::123 then on the port page we would add something like this: {{#ask: [[is a::mission]] [[is located::{{{PAGENAME}}}]] | ?name | ?lvl }}. Here's an example: http://www.semanticweb.org/wiki/Africa (with a nice shortcut, SMW mixed with already existing info, with categories).
- Btw, most if not all of this lists we can generate right now using DPL. However, one of my goals is to keep PotBS DPL-free - but as cool as any DPL wiki! Reason being DPL is very db-heavy. I'd like to test if SMW can be an answer to this problem. -- Nef (talk) 08:46, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
- Hey, that's cool :) Just what I was hoping to get - I'll tinker around with it on the weekend and try to set up a few town articles like this. Thanks! --Ailar 09:22, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
- Okay, after some tinkering (and a bit of google'ing SMW...), this is what I came up with so far: User:Ailar/Sandbox#New_mission_list_in_Port_article. Not too bad, but I still have to figure out if it's possible to show the level in the first column (even though it's not the condition of the query). Any comments/suggestions? --Ailar 15:51, 9 May 2008 (UTC)