Tarquin/Wiki Diary

2 September 05

UnrealEngine2's editor changed the behaviour of the red builder brush, and it no longer remembers its rotation from one build to the next. This I find annoying, though I'm sure it's cut down on a lot of n00b posts in forums.

But ever since this, I've wanted to include a rotation parameter in my brushbuilders to make up for this lost functionality.

So I've added a rotation parameter today. But not any old rotation. It's a string rather than a regular rotator, and you can specify rotations in RUU as normal, or in degrees, with a string like "90d".

What's even cooler is that the Cylinder builder overrides the parsing function, and lets you specify an angle in terms of the number of sides you've given for the cylinder.

August 05

I'm not promising anything... but I've done some coding on brushbuilders for the first time in years. Basically, I'm mapping, and I'm finding myself irritated with what the existing stuff does. The problem is that I lost the lastest version of my code in a hard drive disaster, so I'm working with older versions (still newer than what's been released, but not the very latest). I'm hoping to get my data back at some point. Watch this space.

September 04

A problem for our new admins to resolve...

I see an increasing number of people post something at the foot of a page like this:

NoobUser Oh yeah, that bit about FooBar is wrong, it's actually a Boojum.

Why are they leaving comments when all they need to do is correct the body of the page? Is it that they don't dare alter the wiki, or that they want to leave their user name to make their mark?

August 04

Due to some new commitments I am soon taking on, I will not have as much time to devote to Unreal Wiki. At the moment, I am checking Recent Changes at least once a day. I anticipate that around September/October, and for the forseable future, I will be around perhaps only once or twice a week.

I suggest giving admin access to a few more people to compensate for this. My proposed list is:

• Wormbo, one of the oldest and most prolific contributors here
• EntropicLqd, who's not around as much as he used to be these days, but again, has been around for a very long time
• GRAF1K?, because he volunteered.

Please remember (everybody) that admins have no special social status. They are just janitors, not "mods" or "ops". Everybody here is an op or a mod. This wiki works best when everybody helps out a little bit with cleaning up and keeping an eye on recent changes. I've made a page explaining just what it is wiki admins can do, but I'll say it again here: I hardly ever make use of my admin powers, other than deleting obviouos "junk" pages or "delete me" requests.

Things to do before Ocbober:

• I have to patch the script so newbies can NOT save a page with the "blank page" text. This is the most frequent reason for me deleting pages, and will save new admins some work. (A quick a dirty patch will just DIE the script with a brief explanation – unless script death would affect BU's server?)
• Ask Mych to look at the WookeeTree parser module. It doesn't yet make links in tree branches.

This wiki has had very little trouble with vandalism, despite having a relatively high profile among the modding community. All vandalism has been of the sort that any users can revoke, so having a few more admins is just a safety measure: I do not anticipate that new admins will be making much use of their powers, if at all.

If there is anything else I need to do on the script side of things, now is a good time to remind me (My UseMoo project is barely an alpha, so we won't be switching to that any time soon!!!!)

GRAF1K: I suggested that anti-n00b script over a year ago, but was told that it wasn't a problem.

Tarquin: it probably wasn't at the time... or rather, the idea of coding it seemed like more hard work than dealing with the problem

EntropicLqd: heh - I hadn't noticed you suggested me for an admin :o. If you think it'll help then I'll be happy to wear the hat. Since I think I'm in a different time zone to the other admins it might be useful. I'll try and stop by more often than I have been.

Tarquin: New admins, meet me in IRC sometime for the password

GRAFIK: Can either you or Mych please email it to me at 3dgraphicdesigner [at] gmail.com?

GRAFIK: Thanks.

Mychaeel: As you may have noticed, I had some time to spare this weekend, so I implemented the "cannot save new pages without changing the default text" feature. While I was at it, I also implemented Wiki Templates (which, I hope, helped to greatly improve our "page not found" page) and finally got around to improve Wiki's search by using Google. The search results may be a bit out of date, but it's still better to find the right pages from two weeks ago than not to find anything at all from the live Wiki.

Graphik applauds Mych and runs off to test the new features.

Tarquin: Nice work, Mych!

EntropicLqd: Since I've not managed to crawl onto IRC at all to collect the admin password, if someone could mail it to me (entropic a t snout-clan.co.uk) I'd appreciate it. Neat work Mych. btw

spring 04

Yay! We have Deus Ex content!

We might be out of the Google wilderness.

I've finally taken the plunge and did some work on parsing wiki markup hierarchies. As I was on a roll, I did the code for game icons in classes.

sometime in 03

Seems more and more interesting ideas and info is gathering on personal pages or diary pages. The problem with this is that these pages are considered private property, so there's not much interaction going on. Any that does happen is stuck in Thread Mode and doesn't convert to Document Mode.

This wiki is starting to feel like lots of people working in their own corners. I can appreciate that people feel more comfortable working in their own space, as you can treat it like "work in progress". But come on... it's not like the "public" areas of the wiki are these pristine things that can't be touched (or maybe it's because they're a mess in places that puts people off. hmm, complicated).

I appreciate the irony of me making a point about Walled Gardens on my own personal page .... but I couln't think of where else to put it (yeah, so call me a n00b ).

In brief, this is me with my  WikiMaster hat on saying: erm. what I said up there. Don't be too shy to ramble in public places. Remember that rambling and lengthy discussions can be refactored into Document mode text.