Tarquin

Hallo. This is tarquin, also called tarq for short. I tend to prefer lowercase. I'm sure there's a reason for it. Aparently there's a UT player who goes by TarQuin. That's not me.

My email is probably working... but Planet Unreal occasionally disable their SMTP server, and I get so much spam in my inbox that I rarely check it. If you need to contact me, post here.

Announcement

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, 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. I can nominate people, or the collective can, or people can volunteer. Another thing I want to do is 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.

— tarquin

(More on my /Wiki Diary.)

GRAF1K: I've been expecting this announcment for quite a while, especially with JB200X and such. I volunteer. I'm on RC several times a day due to my lack of a "real" life.

(OLD) Plan

I've not been greeting newcomers here recently. I'm not ignoring you, folks, I'd like to get some mapping done! (plus I've run out of variations on "hi and welcome to the site" )

get screenies of the major parts of the UEd 3 interface made & uploaded
before that, work out a quick standard form for such image filenames, so I don't get confused later
get some maps made!
work out how to make the Moz sidebar work on type 1
deal with http://forums.beyondunreal.com/showthread.php?s=&postid=1803048#post1803048
Empty_page_text

Contact

Before you email me questions, please read the section below: I DON'T KNOW. I AM NOT AN EXPERT. ASK AT BU'S EDITING OR CODING FORUMS

Triage

I don't know the answers to most of the questions I'm asked by email. So, to save yourself time:

Questions about coding & editing: ask on the BeyondUnreal.com forums or on a wiki page. I usually read those & will answer there if I can help
Questions about brushbuilders: read the Tarquin Brushbuilders FAQ. I don't know when I'll finish the next version, or if ever.

I'm reachable via tarquin@planetunreal.com, or sometimes in #beyondunreal, #unrealwiki or #utjb on irc.enterthegame.com.

Mychaeel: Interesting. What have you been asked?

Tarquin: *breathing deeply* ... usually stuff I don't know about & I keep having to type emails saying "sorry, I don't know, go ask at the forums". I'm happy to asnwer questions I *know* about on the wiki or the forums.

OK, I've taken the plunge. I now have a standard response to n00b questions:

Hi.

I don't know the answer to your question.

Emailing me questions about mapping or coding is generally a bad idea.

I am not an expert, and what I do know is already written up on the Wiki site.

I recommend you post at the BeyondUnreal forums, the people there are very knowledgeable, and if I can help I will reply to threads there.

Editing: http://forums.beyondunreal.com/forumdisplay.php?forumid=9

Coding: http://forums.beyondunreal.com/forumdisplay.php?forumid=101

I hope that's not too rude — I'm just fed up typing the same thing out several times a week, and since UT2003 is out, daily.

Ramblings

Quick Biog

Bought Unreal when it first came out. The signle-player was far less replayable than Quake, but I never tired of Botmatch on DM-Loxi. UnrealEd used to crash at the drop of a hat, so it wasn't until version 2 that I really started messing around with it. My delvings into the class tree got me as far the the class BrushBuilder, which I discovered could be cusomized. I released my pack of brushbuilders around February 2001. You can read about them on Russian sites, which I think is pretty cool. But then again, small things amuse me, like talking to SpoonDog on IRC when it's morning here and, like, whoa dude, night-time there.

It always bugged me that it was so hard to find stuff on UnrealEd. I personally hate tutorials. Hmm... so why do I appear to be half-running a site of them? Well, more specifically, I hate being confronted with a page of headings that go "Basic / Intermediate / Advanced". How am I supposed to know what the site author judges to be "intermediate"? I don't need to read the basics of subtracting a room to put stuff in for the 19th time. And I don't want to swim through an interminable paragraph to find what I'm looking for. I prefer a reference page from which I can quickly extract the information I need.

That said, there's a n00b born every minute, or so they say, and tutorials are addressed to them, not me. Between the dozen or so major tutorial sites, I really didn't think there was much point in starting a new one: it would only confuse, I didn't have the time to commit to it, and it would end up as just one more site for the tutorial links in forum stickies.

What changed? The url http://www.wikipedia.com came up in a Google search one day in January 2002. I had a look around, read up on how it worked, and why it worked (WhyWikiWorks...), and talked to Mychaeel about it who agreed that the idea of running a wiki for Unreal documentation had potential. I didn't know at the time that the UDN also runs on a wiki. The other catalyst was a member of the BuF Editing forum who had recently announced his intention to compile (yet another) help file of tutorials. The sleepy editing community woke up a little bit for this one, and it seemed a good time to harness this to more productive ends. Yes, I'm ranting. It's my page. If you don't like it, go read Actor or something. What's the problem with a huge helpfile, or a list of links? Two things: organization and obsolecence. Just the other day I saw a thread on the InA editing forum: someone was following a tute and had come a cropper: where was the toolbox on the right-hand side of the screen? "That's in UnrealEd 1," we all cried. Great, problem solved. But isn't it just silly that so many tutorials on the web are still confusing people because they refer to the old version? Isn't it silly that it's all scattered all over? Oh dear I'm ranting again. Time for more coffee.

Other rants can be found on /Rants if you're really interested.

...and he ought to write something about himself here.

bah... why bother, when I can find such LMAO-worthy gems of comedy on the Wiki such as this... – Tarquin

Actually, an incredibly sophisticated intergalactic Arftificial Intelligence (AI) Implementation and associated server-farm (hidden in an abandoned mine complex, miles deep in Canada somewhere) that monitors and administers the local franchise of the Unreal Empire. Light-years more advanced than anything ever developed locally. Rapidly evolving and omniscient, this AI has "Intel" tentacles extended globally. Renders text to Earthlings. Has numerous "Aliases".

Guestbook

ARG! it's like when you're at university and EVERYONE crowds into your room for drinks & stuff!!!!!!!! hey... I don't mind really – Tarquin

I can't decide whether to:

remove a lot of the obsolete discussion
shunt it to a subpage for posterity
just leave it here for the same reason.

TechnoJF: Tarquin, I sent an e-mail to Tim Sweeney asking him for permission to port content written by Epic over to this site. He wrote back saying to go ahead, and to copy and reformat as much as we like. I'm going to do a few such pages in just a bit. I just figured that this was something I should inform you of.

Tarquin: That's great!

TechnoJF: I'm still trying to put Tim Sweeney's UnrealScript Language Reference in an acceptable format. Let me tell you now that this thing is a monster to try to work with!

Tarquin: Indeed. The CGI seems to choke on it a bit & MacIE crashed halfway through loading it... I've split it into subpages.

TechnoJF: I'm having a slight problem with the markup language. In UScript code, you know that sometimes it is organized and divided with commented lines with Hyphens. Well, even when I tell the Wiki that I want that code written as is (by beginning the line with a whitespace), Wiki still parses it as a whitespace, two slashes, and a horizontal rule on the next line. Could you make a hack or something so that Wiki will ignore a group of hyphens longer than 10? It would really help me out with this page.

Mychaeel: Or maybe just such lines that actually solely consist of a line of hyphens. Should be reasonably easy to patch by replacing

s/-----+/.../g

s/^\s*-----+\s*$/.../gm.

Alternatively (as I just found out while typing these lines), you can enclose lines of hyphens by <code>...</code>.

TechnoJF: Eh, thanks, but the code tags took out all the line breaks in that section. However, I finally managed to get it right with pre and /pre tags.

Mychaeel: I was talking about "enclosing lines of hyphens" (and not "enclosing the whole script") for a reason...

TechnoJF:Oops! At least I'll remember that for next time. I used PRE tags because I had already seen them at work in the source text for the page.

Tarquin Would the < nowiki > tag do the job?

TechnoJF: Just a quick question, but let me preclude it by saying that the em-dash parsing was an excellent idea. However, I just want to be sure about something. It will only be parsed if there is a space on each side of it, right? After all, the double-hyphen is also used as an operator in UnrealScript to decrement a variable, and I don't think we need those instances of it to be parsed into em-dashes.

Tarquin yes. It only replaces "space hyphen hyphen space". Actually, I hadn't considered the decrement operator. oops.

Note from Nuclear Fuzz Grunge: Tarquin, I've had time to explore the Wiki in greater depth. I'm really impressed. You have put an enormous amount of time into this Project. Very professional and comprehensive.

Tarquin: thank. but the wiki is the product of everyone who works on it. I just set it up, with a lot of help & advice from Mychaeel.

TechnoJF: Tarquin, I'm thinking of working on the ScriptedPawn section of the class tree a bit. I figure I'm going to need to get a few screenshots of the creatures as well. Should I just send them to you?

Tarquin: yup. you can then embed them with "@i@filename"

TechnoJF: Thanks. I'm still taking screenshots. I think I have 18 of a total of 20 that I'll need. I set up a room with no lights and then have been using Pawns and Carcasses with bUnlit set to True. The effect is quite good! I just need shots for the fish and squid before I'm finished, and I'll be setting up a NitrogenZone in the room to accomplish this. After that, I can just clip the shots, erase the crosshairs, save as .jpg (unless you'd prefer masked .gif's), and e-mail them to you.

Thanks for deleting OshadowO. That idiot was getting on my nerves;) -shad

EntropicLqd - Tarquin m8 - Any chance of changing that "Wiki Markup" link in the top left hand part of the page so that it opens a new window. I keep forgetting that it doesn't while I'm editing text and losing the text (senility approaches). I'd have e-mailed you but I wanted an entry on this page

...and while you're on it: the [Wiki special characters]? link isn't created yet – Wormbo I've got to remember to set my name in the preferences

erm, right-click & select "open in new window" maybe?EntropicLqd - That works fine - I just keep forgetting If you hist the browser's Back button the text should still be in the form. How about I add it as a new-window link at the bottom of the Edit form. Wormbo, check the Category Personal Page page for info on logging on from different machines. As for Special characters page.... arrrg.... I still need to rewrite the main markup page. – Tarquin

EntropicLqd - Words eaten. It's shape dependant - Gnaarrrrr.

UT/UT2003/Unreal2 discussion moved to Project Discussion/Versions :-)

As for Special characters page.... arrrg.... I still need to rewrite the main markup page. – Tarquin

i worked a bit (hehe, a while) to clean some of the garbled mess up, missed alot but i fixed some of the confusion with the wookee format regarding the "<table>" and "<pre>" tags (used <nowiki></nowiki> for <pre>), so it should at least be readable now. updated the [Font Colors]? page as well. Hope that helps. whew! – Simianangel

enourmously. I've been avoiding that page for weeks now, it's the Demon Page of Wiki, much like the Demon TrashCan that no-one wants to empty for fear it's evolved into a lifeform. I'll talk to Mych about maybe formatting tables with a border (Wookee/Suggestions), as I can't see one in Textbook style. – Tarquin

I worked a bit on it, too. (and changed a lot of <nowiki> into <wiki> with following space) – Wormbo

ZxAnPhOrIaN: Could you please update the page that has information that lets you customize skins on the Wiki?

Tarquin: I've updated Project Skins/Styles Testbed a bit. Probably still some styles missing. If you want a CSS template to get you started, you can grab the stylesheet off the server (look in the source for any page for the URL) or I can email it to you. (I thought "great... :rolleyes: I'm being hassled to update that dratted page..." then I read the page and I'd written "hassle tarquin if this isn't updated"... sigh. I only have myself to blame. )

Mychaeel: I still think it'd be a very convenient thing to allow people to enter a CSS URL in their preferences.

Tarquin: Agreed. It's on my todo list. ... ... done. It's uploaded to the cvs & BU. It doesn't handle File:/// urls though, and relative urls are tripped up by the directory structure that the browser perceives.

Tarquin: "?! How did the logos get there?" <- ?

Mychaeel: See revision 79.

C0ry: Whats new?

Mychaeel: See Posting logo 1310231.

C0ry: I don't have access to post new threads or replies....

C0ry: Got it now

sleepite: 20020820 Hello! I'm new! Prolly the wrong place but how where the UnrealEd console commands discovered, was it just through trial and error? I'm trying to get new polysFactory to work!

Tarquin: Hello. Welcome to the site. I expect the list of console commands was released by Epic at some point. It's been posted all over the web in different formats. The one we have here has been reorganized a bit. I still mean to go through and put in interface command equivalents... one day! PolyFactory... that sounds like heavy stuff! (BTW, I've returned the visit at Sleepite )

Kerlin: Thanks for the pointer to MyLevel. Sometimes finding the right words for what you're looking for is the key. "And knowing is half the battle."

Category Personal Page

But the open source movement is energized by the other sort of joiner. This sort of person joins many tribes. These are the people who inhabit the intersections of the Venn diagrams. They believe in ANDs rather than ORs. They're a member of more than one subset, more than one tribe. The reason these people are important is, just like merchants who go between real tribes, they carry ideas from one intellectual tribe to another. I call these people "glue people", because they not only join themselves to a tribe, they join tribes together. Twenty years ago, you couldn't easily be a glue person, because our culture was not yet sufficiently accepting of diversity.

Larry Wall, Perl, the first postmodern computer language http://www.perl.com/pub/a/1999/03/pm.html

Antispam: http://members.hostedscripts.com/antispam.html

Trystan: Tarquin encouraged walled gardens!

Tarquin: lol... you can make yourself a hideout on Developer Journals. I agree with you, there are too many tip sections. Design is an important aspect of mapping, so it definitely belongs on the site. We're slowly growing the Map Design Concepts page...

Tarquin: You don't ACTUALLY listen to a word THAT idiot says, do you? :rolleyes:

Trystan: Heh, yes! I'm now on a mission to spur community involvement with the Wiki outside of the walled gardens. I still cringe when I do a recent changes and see my name like twelve times though. Let me know if I'm screwing stuff up. hehe.

ZxAnPhOrIaN: Ohhhhhhh!!! mych, kick his butt!

Mosquito: I'm new, I'm guessing Tarquin, you run the show!

Tarquin: Hmmmmmmmmm sort of, but not really.

Wormbo: Yes, tarquin and Mychaeel are the godkings here. We bow before them and worship them and we do all the work for them.

EntropicLqd: I can't resist adding to this one. Mychaeel is like a big scary alien with the brain the size of a planet and Tarquin behaves like a flustered and occasionally agressive cockerel. I'll get me coat. :snigger:

Tarquin: ermmmmm........ o_O

EntropicLqd: Sorry Tarquin (and Mychaeel). I don't know where that last comment came from – I appear to have become a little random. Normal service will be resumed after a re-boot.

ZxAnPhOrIaN: Errr... everybody went INSANE, i tell you!!!!!!!!!!!!! INSANE!!!!!!!!!!

Tarquin: I think what you're seeing, Ent, is a conflict between my fundamental nature as a control freak, and my desire to run this wiki in a laid-back manner, and let people try whatever they want to. So yup, I'm going loopy like Wikipedia logo HAL 9000.

CH3Z: tarquin, you are one patient man. I'm sorry for getting psycho on ya (I Need to sleep more). Maybe i need to get back up to that lake for a bit.
The more i look around here the more impressed i am and the more i appreciate you. I'll learn my way around here and make it up to ya. Don't know what else i can do. I'm sorry. You deserve a lot more respect.
I still think yu might have hounded me a bit, (no biggie) but i believe the rest was not any kind of deliberate act against me, and what's more, was totally your call to make. Thank you for your patience. (even if you just dropped it to go to bed ) You didn't deserve any of that.

Tarquin: If you'd arrived on a day other than the Night of A Dozen Vandal Edits I probably would have been a bit less stressed... no worries, we're cool

GRAF!K: I was wondering... why was my auto-refresh edit on RC undone? :confused:

Mychaeel: Because it doesn't work (you should have noticed that the <meta> tag had been escaped and was just displayed as text in the browser) and because it's not desirable (just press Ctrl+R if you want to refresh the page; and who'd leave Recent Changes open that long in a browser window anyway?). – Plus, it was done without any explanation by somebody anonymous.

Wormbo: You should log in with your user ID and password or at least set your username on the preferences page so others can see that you edited a page.

Mychaeel: ...not that it would have changed anything in this case, as explained earlier.

GRAF1K: tarquin, any idea why GRAF1K? is displaying the Unreal Wiki logo instead of my screenshot I uploaded? It only does that on my computer apparently, because Foxpaw and Wormbo can see it perfectly.

Tarquin: Weird. Try clearing your cache.

GRAF1K: I did a full reboot and removed Mozilla from my system tray. Still no pic. Also, why is my name listed 3x under Users Online?

Tarquin: I'm baffled. You get the UW logo instead of a graphic if the server thinks you are reading the image embedded in another site. Could it be a firewall thing?

GRAF1K: I am going through a firewall, as well as some other hefty security junk. My network is run by a web security pro for a bank.

When I Copy Image Location and stick that in the address bar, the picture loads fine. I go back to my page, the pic displays properly. But then if I reload the page, the pic is gone and there's the stinkin' UW logo again. :confused: All other pictures do the same, but only on Unreal Wiki.

Wormbo: Sounds like at some point the referrer gets modified. Is that a Mozilla option?

GRAF1K: Actually... I think it happened when I upgraded to 1.4.1! That ought to be the problem, anyway.

GRAF1K: I reinstalled Moz. Same problem. :angry:

GRAF1K: Went back to 1.3. Fixed.

GRAF1K: There are a LOT of dead personal pages. Should we get rid of them? I was thinking of an "if not online in 90 days, delete" script like for MSN accounts. Look at Category Personal Page

Wormbo: Only those that only contain a welcome and no reply from the "owner" should be deleted, if any at all.

GRAF1K: Why do you think that?

Mychaeel: Unreal Wiki's embedded images are only meant to be displayed in pages on wiki.beyondunreal.com. Any other refer[r]rers (like www.unrealwiki.com, with the exception of referrers which are left entirely blank) return only the Unreal Wiki logo. – I'll look into adding www.unrealwiki.com to the list of allowed referrers. (Why is this discussion here and not on Project Discussion?)

GRAF1K: Wow... thanks tarquin! That -nogamma trick will help everyone. :tup:

GRAF1K: Hey tarq. I sent you an e-mail, but just found the note on the top of this page. Anyway, I found a few typos on http://www.planetjailbreak.com/features/codedesign200x/

"Mychaeel had this to say aboutearly progress"

"This is a considerable blessing to mappers, who under UT Jailbreak had to work with different classes and settings just to these up." The boldface begins at the point at which the sentence ceases to make sense.

"after all, it's the same architecture Epic's mutator system"

Same architechture as would be the revision here.

Tarquin: Thanks!

joe: Thanks for your chongqing support. I just added a link to your chongqing page to my blog. I always like to check out where spammers hit, do you have some example pages at Css-discuss your latest submission hit? So far he seems small time, but its easier to convince them to stop before they are a really big spammer.

Tarquin: He spammed the front page a few times [32]. Like you say, small time. Css-discuss seems to have been hit by a wide variety of spammers, but no single major attack. Thanks for the link; feel free to add links to Chongqing Page.

Dark Ryder: (Sorry if this is the wrong place to report, but since the front page is edit-locked, I couldn't think of any other place...) Broken link on the front page: "Bot Navigation]]" → "Bot Navigation" (SuperApe: Which is now Bot Support. )

GRAF1K: You can edit it yourself on Home Page/Changes.

Dark Ryder: Neat; thanks for the tip. How often does it get synched with the Home Page? (Since it doesn't seem to be "live".)

Tarquin: It's synched when an admin spots someone has edited it

Dark Ryder: Ah-ha! Verrry tricky. ;-)

SavannahLion: I know it's been a while Tarquin, but I hope that you remember me. I'd like to have a short and quick talk with you as soon as possible. I'll check back here once in a while, or you can drop by my home form at [Planet Half-Life Forums]. I've got some pretty crucial questions that I think you've solved.

Tarquin: Oh dear... I hope it's not about quaternions, as I've forgotten most of what I did with them... but ask anyway

SavannahLion: And I just realized that you've given me the answer. I knew you've encountered the same problem I have. Even better what four hours of sleep after an emergency patch to my Wiki solves. I hate sounding stupid, but I'd prefer not to have an public discussion on here. I did, however, explain a little bit of my plight on the Chongqing Page.

Ghost3021: hey, neet brush builders! and they dont suffer from the ued goblin! no matter what you do to them!

Copperman: Had an idea for a BB Tarq. How about the inverse of the Cylinder Builder to make something like this: allowing similar options to your Cylinder Would be good for making round corners etc. Intersecting makes them badly so please Just one more new BB.

Tarquin: I think I was working on something like that... sadly, other commitments mean that the work in progress is just sitting on my HD I will one day wrap it up!

Copperman: Hope to see it one day (soon).

MythOpus: Hey tarq, I just deleted some sort of hentai porno pictures from the Image Uploads. I don't know who put them there, but I didn't think they were appropriate at all. Just FYI.

Tarquin: Thanks

MythOpus:No problem Mind if I clear out all the porno pics and signatures and all those that don't have a place, or a use for the wiki?

Tarquin: heck no! Go for it!!!

MythOpus: I've deleted quite a few already... and I've found a new respect for you and the rest of the hard working admins everywhere. Gee Whiz... Maybe we should put a pic sticker on top of the image uploading page that says THIS IS NOT AN IMAGE HOSTING SITE or something. Heh, seriously. I was just wondering if there was a way to currently delete a lot of pictures at once.. it's very time consuming to click on 'Show management Controls' and then find the pick, click delete and do that all over again. :S ?

Tarquin: Speak to Mychaeel about it. We didn't anticipate this many images I think! It won't work as an image hosting system, as it checks the referrer. Offsite use of our images just produces the logo, but I guess people try at least one image before they get wise to that.

Mychaeel: Well, it does say "Remote linking of images is forbidden and doesn't work." Of course, people don't read. If somebody has a better idea – perhaps even just putting this text in red might help – sound up...

MythOpus: Wouldn't the remotelinking of images still work as effective 'spam'? I don't really understand what I said myself, but I remember deleting (I haven't gone through all the images yet heh) a nike shoe, probably from a previous spammer. :S Personally, I don't think many of them care about what it says about remote linking. They could be just trying to ruin the rep of the wiki or something :S

Blip2: Can I get a copy of the wiki script yet?

Tarquin: hard drive still dead. ask Mych.

MythOpus: Good Show Tarquin! Nice job fixing the search

Tarquin: Sorry it took so long. BU's FTP access is fuxx0red since they moved server.

Defx: you are too slow to greet newcomers lol just kidding

Graphik: O_o

Kartoshka: Sorry about the markup page...it definitely was accidental. I was working on refactoring the page and my computer decided to lock up as I was submitting some changes. Somehow that must've trashed the page...again, sorry

Tarquin: No worries But I simply reverted to the version before any of your edits, so you might want to have another go at whatever you were doing

Kartoshka: I gave it another shot...looks OK this time PS - that page you just reverted...did you see the link at the bottom of the page?

Unreal3 I am Korean user. http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/wiki/unreal_engine_versions why this page blocked?

I am not a spammer

Tarquin: Not sure. You're obviously able to edit now. Was it only a temporary block?