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Forum: Table of Monarchs → Content Discussions


So. I was going to get to work on making some faction pages, and I ran across some issues. You can see what I mean here. Now, I have all of the information I would need to fill these sections out (you'll note I uploaded something like 30 images for this purpose), the trouble is, how should the information be laid out? There are a lot of ways this could be done. Starting with the buildings section, there are a couple of ways we could do this:

  1. A sort of branching tree of information, hybrid images/information. The most intriguing option, if difficult to implement. I'll ask a friend of mine who's good with coding about this and see if he has any ideas on the matter.
  2. Table with images. Mind, this still leaves all sorts of options about what kind of table, since tables are very customizable and all.
  3. List information, with images in gallery below. Seems like the weakest option to me.

Now, with regards to creatures, I was thinking something sort of like this but not terrible(I'll get back to this in a minute), along with a paragraph or so of information about how the faction's units stack up against the units of other factions. I'm open to alternatives, though.

Finally, we get to the Heroes section. I'd like to make a couple of tables about the primary/secondary skills of knights (side by side, even, maybe?), but the issue is how to make them and make them look good. I'll be honest. Tables? Not really my thing. However, having said that, I do have an idea as to something we can do to make the tables look better.

Now, a lot of the tables on our Wiki have strange colors; they're either colored generically, rather vibrantly (is there some sort of pattern to the way you pick colors, Energy? Some of your choices are sort of confusing to me.), or completely colorless. It would be cool to have some way to sort of regulate the system for colors on templates, and conveniently, I have just such a system from my other home, the FFWiki: Class codes. Basically, class codes are a system of two codes, ###a and ###b, that preselect certain colors and alter text to match; for example, see these two pages: those two colors are the preselected colors for those two games, respectively, and templates about those games can input class="FFVIIa" on the top line and class="FFVIIb" on another line of the template in order to make part of the template, or the table, etc. that color. If the class color is a dark color, the CSS coding will also change the text of whatever line that happens to be to white (unless you specify otherwise), saving you that trouble. Now, the FFWiki determines class colors by the colors of the game's logo, but we can't do quite the same thing all the time since our logo is usually some manner of vaguely yellow/gold/orange text, but we could go by the boxart of our games.

Now, before we start (if we start), I'd like to point a couple of things you want out of class codes. For one, you want the two colors to contrast in lightness, enough to make the difference noticeable, but they also shouldn't clash, that's really not a good thing to have. So, since I apparently have too much time on my hands, I decided to go through and make some suggestion colors for the main six Heroes of Might and Magic games:

  1. From this boxart, I got
  2. D2B43C and
  3. 7B85C2 from the prarie grass and sky of the book's art.
  4. From this art, I got
  5. 36204E and
  6. CEB477 from the left side of the shield and the lion. It was that or the white <_<;
  7. From this one, I got
  8. E5dA1E and
  9. 1A1476 From the sickly yellow of the words and the blue on pretty much all of the haven guys. (I was tempted to do the red eyes of that blood-mad beast the hero is riding on, but that's a color the world is not yet ready for.)
  10. With IV, there's only so much one can do. I got
  11. D19B37 and
  12. 4B4142 from the... entire color of that boxart, and the words. It seemed unfair to delve into only one of the four pictures shown in the boxart.
  13. V was much more cooperative. Here we have
  14. 547993 and
  15. CA9340 from that swanky cape and the gold trim on that Knight. The latter color is also reminiscent of the logo text at the top. There are a lot of yellowish brown shades in this. Hmm.
  16. Finally, we have VI. As a change of pace, here we have
  17. E8560D and
  18. F4CB4F, with only one color oddly similar to previous entries in the color collection. These colors are from the Angel's burning wing and his sword, though really you could pick any part of his body sans his face and wings and it'd be a different shade of the latter color.

Really, guys, I'm just trying to throw some stuff out here, get things started. Tell me what you think on anything I've mentioned. Even if we do class codes, which we don't have to, we could pick colors a different way (title screen of the given game, maybe?), or pick different colors via the same method on the same image, or pick colors a totally different way. I'd just like to see some progress in one of the ways I've requested here. How should we do the H2 faction pages? What do you think of class codes? Ideas are welcome. Jimcloud 06:54, February 19, 2013 (UTC)

That's... quite some forum, but I'll reply to your suggestions.

About factions, you could use the building template. If there are too many buildings, I suppose this should settle the problem - usage of <div class="va-collapsible-content mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" data-expandtext="> (see here).

The creatures can be listed as an overview, so that template can be used.

And the colours - they are usually random, including the infoboxes for H4 and H6 creatures. If you think that may be a problem, then I guess we should fix it... one way or another. Energy X 21:09, February 19, 2013 (UTC)

A table works, but I was hoping for something a little more visually impressive. My friend suggested forming the images together in one image and making it into an imagemap, sort of like this page's, with links you could click to go to individual pages or sections of that page. Maybe both in conjunction? That could work. The creature template would have to be radically altered, as it is now it's only designed for Heroes IV. As for the colors, it just seems kind of, I dunno, disorderly to have them at random, I'd argue that some cohesion in terms of colors would help give each game its own feel. Jimcloud 22:05, February 19, 2013 (UTC)
All right, the best bet seems to have the image map and then link it to the table section. The colours can be added per your proposal, so that should be it. Energy X 11:09, February 20, 2013 (UTC)
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