Project:General Discussions

This page is meant to be a hub for general discussions about this wiki, it's use and it's editing. Feel free to use this page to note wiki problems and leave messages for the community. Feel free to add/revise sections as necessary and move items that have been completed to the "Completed" section below.

TOC Issues
While working on the Dolphin Manual I've realized that it's going to have content box that will GIGANTIC. The biggest content box on the wiki ever. It will be even worse than the FAQ. I need a way to deal with this. Looking around, I found this: wikipedia:Template:TOC limit on wikipedia. It looks extremely simple, with very short code, and it would help. Honestly I'd rather have a put the TOC into the sidebar, like the mainsite's faq, but since we can't do that... this will do. Do you guys have any better ideas, or should I go on ahead and try this template? (and inevitably break something and need Jhonn to bail me out :P) - MaJoR (talk) 06:47, 18 April 2013 (CEST)

Heads up: website guides now hosted on the wiki
Just so you know, MaJoR is probably aware of it since we already talked about it on IRC: the guides displayed on http://dolphin-emu.org/docs/guides/ are now hosted on the Dolphin Wiki. I purposely did not make it too obvious on the website (no link to the wiki page, no edit link, etc.) to avoid attracting vandals.

If you want me to add any other good quality guide to the website, ping me by email (best way to make sure I notice your ping... I tend to miss stuff happening on the wiki).

Thanks for these guides, and try to keep them up to date :) delroth (talk) 19:36, 9 April 2013 (CEST)


 * Really cool, but the main site is multilingual and the wiki is English only... How we'll address that? Also, maybe we can remove the wiki's FAQ now since the FAQ of the main site is multilingual and the one in the wiki is just a duplicate, and english only... What do you guys think? Jhonn (talk)


 * Not sure how to handle guides translations - I think in the first place we should try to get good quality english guides, then think about translating them. My current idea is to export the wiki pages as separate Transifex projects, and have a bot syncing the Transifex translations with wiki pages named like "Performance guide (fr)" or "Performance guide (de)". I don't really want to work on it atm, if I haven't done anything about it in a month just ping me. delroth (talk) 23:34, 9 April 2013 (CEST)
 * Don't worry. However, my only suggestion here is using subpages instead of separate ones, like what we do with the Navigation template (eg. "Performance guide/en", "Performance guide/de", "Performance guide/fr") Jhonn (talk)


 * Delroth just gave me access to the main site's FAQ. Well... there wasn't a lot of activity on the wiki FAQ anyway, so hopefully that will help keep everything up to date. So I guess now it's time to remove our FAQ and link to the main site's FAQ. Anyone opposed? - MaJoR (talk) 00:56, 10 April 2013 (CEST)
 * We should have done this a long time ago, the wiki FAQ always had duplicated content, even when the site was hosted in Mamario's servers. Delete the Wiki FAQ!!! Jhonn (talk)
 * OK, but seems counter to the change that started this (i.e. moving guides from site to wiki). Why is it better that only limited folks can maintain the FAQ? If it's the content duplication that's of concern we might want to get rid of the other FAQ, and preserve the editable one on the wiki.Kolano (talk) 04:06, 12 April 2013 (CEST)
 * The FAQ on the main website has several features that we want to preserve, most importantly internationalization. That's one of the reasons why I'm limiting who can edit the FAQ: every edit needs translators for more than 15 languages to update their versions of the FAQ. If one has to go, it won't be the one from the main website. I'm open to giving more people access to it though, it will never be completely open though. delroth (talk) 09:39, 12 April 2013 (CEST)

AX-HLE
According to Delroth, the new AX-HLE merger should fix the vast majority of DSP HLE issues. How are we going to update this? It's a ton of games, and I doubt we'll be able to get someone to test everything... - MaJoR (talk) 21:19, 2 April 2013 (CEST)
 * A rough approach would be filtering games that doesn't use AX UCode (Zelda, Mario Galaxy, etc.) and then crossing out all HLE problems in all game pages... It'll be easier to filter out games that doesn't use AX UCode than filtering games that use it... -Jhonn (talk)
 * I asked Delroth, and unfortunately he doesn't have a list like that. One of the other devs might though. - MaJoR (talk) 21:58, 2 April 2013 (CEST)
 * Yeah, this is why the various developer infobox fields never got filled in properly. They would have been what we'd need to filter on something like this.Kolano (talk) 22:13, 2 April 2013 (CEST)
 * Unfortunately we can't rely on that entirely. Skyward Sword uses AX. - MaJoR (talk) 22:20, 2 April 2013 (CEST)
 * There are a lot of HLE mentions on the Wiki though it's unclear how many of those ~2132 results are from test results and the like (If we can perform a regex search we can probably whittle that down to just the pages mentioning HLE in problems/compatibility). My guess would be that the HLE update will effect a bunch of titles that we never logged problems for though, so appropriately accounting for the update will still be problematic, even if we account for reviewing all the current HLE issues. I wonder if we could work out some scanning tools, similar to the ones for the title icon uploads to get a better DB of these sorts of wide-scale software types. There are various issues related to use of certain unsupported video codecs that might also be nice to scan for, I'm guessing there are other examples.Kolano (talk) 22:13, 2 April 2013 (CEST)

Universal problems are buried
I know VC titles are pretty low on the totem pole, but they are pretty cool to play in Dolphin. That said, they are kind of a crapshoot. There are a lot of problems with these games. NES, SNES, Genesis, they all have universal issues spanning every game. But uh, the universal problems are only on the system pages. The virtual console page shows every title, and people just click the game in that and boom. It's convenient, but no one goes to the system pages where the universal problems are. No one ever sees the universal problems. So, I have two solutions I'd like to propose to fix this.


 * 1. A grid of buttons for systems on the Virtual Console page, sort of like the mainpage's. That way people can easily access pages for systems, and see the universal problems and stuff. Of course I'll have to dust off that gamepage project and get them up to snuff, but eh, I can do that.
 * 2. A universal issues template. Considering it would only have to copy paste text, it should be pretty simple. The only issue I can forsee is integrating it in with the layout of the pages (like how various problems have links in the nav). Might be worth ignoring that however. But yea, ideally, all we'd have to do is put onto all the SNES game pages, and bam, we have a super easy way to change the universal problems across the board.

Any thoughts on these ideas? For or against? - MaJoR (talk) 20:09, 5 March 2013 (CET)


 * Hm, I liked... I can help with the templates, and if we change the main Virtual Console page to grid of buttons (like the main page), I can delete some crappy templates we've around here (some unfinished work that I didn't touch in the last 2 years -- completely useless now). Also, since we're going to do major changes in the main Virtual Console, we could implement also an infobox with common information about the service, like the infobox we got in GameCube and Wii page. Regardless of what we do, I'm in with this whole thing - Jhonn (talk) 22:29, 5 March 2013 (CET)


 * I'd also be on board for both changes. Sub-pages for VC systems will eliminate some of the template issues there (i.e. one can't edit the lists from the main page), and generating {{{{universalproblems}} templates will allow universal issues to be universally shown (though some special handling may be needed to get the edit links right). I'd also suggest adding sub-links below the "Virtual Console" link in the sidebar for the system pages, which would make them more quickly accessible. Kolano (talk) 00:43, 6 March 2013 (CET)

Recent Discussions
Below is listed only what was discussed last month. You can search the archive for what was discussed since General Discussions page was created.

Collapsed Navigation Templates
Currently the navigation template defaults to a collapsed state. I'm a bit confused by such, since that defeats their purpose of providing clear linkages to related series titles. Most of the navigation templates only take up a line or two of the display anyway, so I'm also not clear we're gaining a lot by having the collapse. Can we perhaps redesign the template to:
 * Purge the title row:
 * Purge the hide/show link or reposition it and default to show
 * If the hide/show functionality is preserved, I'd at least like to see the hide/show setting be set to a cookie, so it would apply across the navigation templates, rather than just the one on the current page.
 * Purge the "view" link, since I'm not clear it serves much purpose
 * Reposition the edit/discuss links to the upper-right corner (so they generally won't overlap/offset links, when appearing on the same line).

Please let me know your thoughts. Kolano (talk) 19:09, 10 March 2013 (CET)

I agree, the navigation should be shown by default. Having it collasped is just a hold over from wikipedia. But for us, it's always very small, and it's very handy to have. So I think it should be shown. As for your ideas... I like the title row, so I don't want to just remove it. As for the "view" link, it provides an easy link to the template itself, so it has some use. As for the rest... I don't really care. *shrug* - MaJoR (talk) 19:46, 10 March 2013 (CET)
 * Ok, did some tweaks: all navigation templates are expanded by default and "view" link was removed. I agree with MaJor regarding to the title row, it should stay as is. I won't implement a cookie to store "hide/show" preference because it would be a lot of work for something that shouldn't be cared about. And since the code used to implement the functionality of the hide/show buttons are shared by a lot of templates, I can't remove it from navbar without breaking the show/hide functionality of Test Entries and the "contents" chart. Also, moving the talk and edit links to the upper-right corner caused a lot of issues with the positioning of show/hide button, so I'm just leaving it in the default position. - Jhonn (talk)


 * View link is gone, but templates still remain collapsed by default, refer: Super Monkey Ball. Kolano (talk) 16:15, 11 March 2013 (CET)
 * Fixed for real now - Jhonn (talk)

Importing game banners on the Wiki
As you may have seen on the forums, I've been crowdsourcing the collect of game banner images (the 96x32 images used in the Dolphin game list). These images should probably be hosted somewhere on the wiki like the covers, but I don't know how you want to handle that. Could someone look into adding banners for a few games? I will then use a bot to import everything.

When the import will be done I will be able to add the banners to the new Dolphin website compatibility list: http://dolphin-emu.org/compat/ :) delroth (talk) 05:22, 5 February 2013 (CET)


 * A rough idea would be using the game ID as filename (like "G8ME01.png") and including the ID somewhere (like as an hidden parameter in Infobox VG). Banners maybe different based on release (NA/EU/JP), so, I think we should have a preference, like NA first, then EU, then JP. The 4th digit in the game ID reveal this (E for NA, P for EU and J for JP). Well, what I'm trying to say is: if the game has been released in all territories, use NA banner. If it was released only in Europe, use EU banner. And, if released only in japan, use JP banner.


 * Also, adding all banner images in a category would be nice, like [Category:Banner images]. Well, I'll try to exemplify this in a sandbox... Jhonn (talk)


 * I've thought about putting the banners in the infobox, but I haven't come up with a method that is actually useful. Let me explain. Our brains respond to visual stimuli far better than text. That's why a collection of icons on the desktop is better than a big list of words. Our brains are trained for this stuff. So, in the list inside the dolphin emulator, the job of the banners is to give a visual reference of the game, to exploit our how brains work and help us find stuff faster. On the wiki pages though, cover art already does that, and far better than the tiny banners. Banners on game pages would be kind of redundant. But we could use them in the same way that dolphin does... Banners would be pretty awesome in compatibility lists. Imagine the wii article with banners in it. It would give that quick visual reference that the lists need. I think it would be great there. - MaJoR (talk) 18:34, 6 February 2013 (CET)

---

Actually the banners wouldn't show up in the infobox with the covers, I proposed having Game ID as a hidden parameter thinking in easily getting this ID for use in other template, but this is completely out of question now (after some tests I found that there isn't any way of getting a parameter from infobox VG template in another template). So, my initial idea now is: Then, delroth could hotlink the banner images from wiki, this way we could share only one copy of the banner in the main site and in the wiki aswell. Jhonn (talk)
 * Have the Game ID as file name (like G8ME01.png), and add all banner images in a category (Category:Banner images)
 * Prefer NA banners, then EU banners, then JP banners
 * Add the banners in the main lists too (GameCube, Wii, etc.) -- Something like delroth is doing for the main site

A user had started to gather banners here previously. The banners from his minor effort to do so are categorized as "Title images" and can be found. See them here, http://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=Category:Title_images. I've added John's recent upload to that category.
 * "Banner images" seems a more accurate category. We can move them to the new category, as we have only a few images uploaded... - Jhonn (talk)

My feedback here would be:
 * We'll need to decide if we want all the banner images or not, in some cases there may be 5 or 6 of them per game disc. Since we may be likely to only use one image I'm not clear it makes sense to capture them all.
 * If we wanted to use these on game pages I'd suggest they be tied into the "Release" section, where it may make sense to capture a title image per region.
 * Tried in a sandbox and the infobox got somewhat "ugly" (at least in my opinion). If we're going to use the banner in infobox, putting only one banner image in "see also" section (before the links) seem better. - Jhonn (talk)


 * Judging from our current banners, the images seem a bit overly compressed (even though we've re-saved them as PNG to avoid compounding artifacts). Likely not a big deal, but we should try to make sure to avoid compressing them further and increasing artifacts.
 * Well, from what I've seen, all banner images delroth got with "bannerget" were extracted directly from the Dolphin's cache file, so, it's compressed only one time. - Jhonn (talk)


 * Though I would like to see them on the game list pages, adding 600+ image loads to the page may have a significant impact on performance/load times. The list pages are already fairly slow today (I'm guessing from the many ratings loads), so we should be careful. Kolano (talk) 21:21, 6 February 2013 (CET)
 * Yep, this is true... Completely forgot the loading times when I suggested this - Jhonn (talk)
 * There might be a way to get this to be fast with a custom MediaWiki extension and some CSS sprites usage (basically, only one large image would be loaded for each list page). I could learn how to do that if you think it would be a nice addition to the compatibility lists. delroth (talk) 00:52, 7 February 2013 (CET)
 * The list table is rendered through MediaWiki markup, I'm unsure if we can mess CSS sprites with MediaWiki formatting without major issues. However, if this can be done without loading issues, the main list is the best way for having the banner images (better than in infobox VG) - Jhonn (talk)
 * This is a good point... Dialup user here so, a giant image would SUCK for me. Lots of smaller images are easier to cache. But a thousand banners on the wii page would suck no matter what for me. - MaJoR (talk) 04:50, 7 February 2013 (CET)

Bots/Scripts
Now that we actually have access to the wiki on a basic level, I'm been investigating how to automate tasks here around the wiki. Stuff like updating the list of games, manipulating categories, on and on could be done wiki-wide with a script. We could potentially even kill spambots with it (or at least flag them to make clean up easier). There are all kinds of things we could do. Now obviously, I'm an artist, not a programmer, so my contributions to this are limited. But I can learn things quickly. Anyway, I think this could go a long way to help us save a ton of time in large scale modifications, and let us do things like updating game lists more often. For reference, here are some bots and scripts I found while looking around: Bot Status - Bot list sorted by edits - User Scripts List - User Scripts Tutorial.

Delroth and the devs brought this up, cause well, they are too lazy to do manual edits :P. Our needs would probably be better served by scripts than bots, but, having stuff done automatically might be nice sometimes. So, what do you guys think? Do you want bots and scripts, and if so, what would you want them for? - MaJoR (talk) 14:51, 14 December 2012 (CET)

Talking about bots, I wrote a simple script to update the Template:CurrentGitRevision page automatically when a commit is pushed to the Git repository. That should be one less thing to worry about. delroth (talk) 03:35, 5 January 2013 (CET)

My grocery list of scripts: I asked Delroth about the revision template recently. He said he could get it working with the new site in no time, but since that would cover only a tiny fraction of revisions, I told him to wait till he can put in a complete solution that ties to google code. To be honest I'd prefer the main site just be updated to go back all the way but eh, that isn't in their plans. - MaJoR (talk) 03:25, 7 January 2013 (CET)
 * System to allow the revision template to understand GIT codes, restoring it's functionality from before the GIT migration
 * Script to collected and create GameIDs and direct them to relevant pages

I have a list of about 300 gameids which should redirect to existing Wiki pages. Could someone review http://codepad.org/RKdGIvUF and tell me if it's ok to mass-create these pages? delroth (talk) 19:54, 2 February 2013 (CET)

Talked with him about it in the channel. Everything either checks out or will create a double redirect. So, he'll upload it, and then we'll check the double redirects to fix any issues. Simple enough. - MaJoR (talk) 14:20, 3 February 2013 (CET)


 * I should actually be able to check for double redirects pretty easily. The bot will do it automatically. delroth (talk) 15:49, 3 February 2013 (CET)


 * Done! I also fixed all the other double redirects at the same time. delroth (talk) 07:46, 4 February 2013 (CET)

I also have some cron scripts listing stuff to do on the Wiki: for example:
 * http://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/missing-gameid.txt GameIDs missing a redirection, from the "Go to Wiki" menu in the emulator
 * sXAP52, r8pj01, suke01:Capitalization on these ones is odd, we have an entries with appropriate caps, not clear what's with the lowercase letters
 * £×Uº²�, ŽÔç_ìÂ, èl9/C, +¾‹Ešn,#•Wõ�d:These have various odd characters.
 * GCOPDV, GBLPGL: The first 4 chars of these align with "GCOP52: Call of Duty: Finest Hour" and "GBLP52: Bloody Roar: Primal Fury" but I'm not clear they are the same.
 * GGCOSD: GCOS GC MultiGame DVD), GCOPDV:GCOS MultiGame DVD, MRRP01: New Super Mario Bros. Wii Retro Remix, GBLPGL:Xeno GC Homebrew Boot: These are various IDs associated with homemade multi-boots, or other homemade images. Not clear we should track these.
 * Most other residual ones I'm having trouble aligning to a known game title, they don't seem to show up on GameTDB.
 * http://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/missing-redirs.txt All game pages which don't have a 6 chars GameID redirecting to that page
 * Peach's_Castle: Seems to have the invalid ID "00"
 * System_Menu: GameID for system menu wads is blank
 * Toy Wars:These don't have disk images and are just distributed as resources /w DOL files
 * Call_of_Duty:_Black_Ops/sandbox_(Wii): Sandbox pages should generally be isolated, there's no gameid for the sandbox
 * MaxPlay_Classic_Games_Volume_1: This game is unlicensed and steals a gameID from other titles typically "NHL HITZ 20-02: GNHE5d"
 * Channels and some WiiWare titles seem to use 4 character IDs, and aren't filtered from the 6 char list. Will need to avoid filtering the few non-Channel games, (i.e. History Channel ??? and Pokemon Channel). Dolphin seems to postfix these with "01", but was unclear how we want to handle them here.
 * Kolano, I talked with Delroth about the 4char GameIDs. Both the 4 and 6 character IDs are correct. The last two characters in a 6 character GameID is the publisher code. For WiiWare, Wii Channels, and Virtual Console games, Nintendo decided to detach the publisher code. Plus, the code is based on platform, not publisher. 01 NES, SNES, and N64 VC games, for example. The Dolphin devs decided to go for uniformity, and put the publisher code back in. So to Dolphin the GameID includes it, even though officially the GameID according to Nintendo does not. But it is official information from nintendo. - MaJoR (talk) 11:41, 7 February 2013 (CET)
 * Per that I guess we should have entries for both. There are likely some double redirects from when I first noticed this to clean-up, and the scripts here may need to be updated to also track the 4 char IDs.


 * http://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/compat.txt All values found in ratings pages (should have only 0/1/2/3/4/5 ideally)
 * http://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/unknown.txt Games with rating 0 (unknown)
 * http://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/review.txt Games with rating 1/2/3 not updated for 4 months (listed because some of these games might be fixed now)

Tell me if you need more. delroth (talk) 23:06, 3 February 2013 (CET)

Another thing I will automate: editing infoboxes to add the link to the forum thread when a forum thread exists. Trivial to do with access to the forum database, just needs some infobox template parsing... It's on my TODO for tomorrow. delroth (talk) 07:46, 4 February 2013 (CET)

One thing I'd like to get a bot/script to perform would be mass search and replaces. For instance, we noticed a frequent mis-capitalization of Single-player as Single-Player. It's easy enough to search and find most instances of this, but actually editing/saving each page is tedious.Kolano (talk) 07:17, 7 February 2013 (CET)


 * I second this. A find and replace script would be GREAT. - MaJoR (talk) 09:55, 7 February 2013 (CET)


 * It's already in PyWikipediaBot (the framework I'm using). Just tell me what mass replaces you want to do and I'll run the bot. delroth (talk) 14:44, 7 February 2013 (CET)
 * Single-Player > Single-player
 * Wiimote, wiimote > Wii Remote
 * Only in infoboxes or in the whole page text? Whole page text would be easier, but I can do both without too much of a problem. delroth (talk) 11:57, 8 February 2013 (CET)
 * Personally I'd prefer you keep it to just infoboxes. There are times where I use Wiimote, Wii Remote, etc etc as variation in pages so it doesn't sound dull. - MaJoR (talk) 14:13, 8 February 2013 (CET)
 * Wiimote should already be corrected in all infoboxes. Wiimote is not the appropriate name for the device though, so I'd personally prefer it be replaced everywhere. Though I don't really want to fight about it. The Single-player capitalization fix can be applied everywhere, but be careful about the capitalization (i.e. we don't want to capitalize lowercase single-player outside of infoboxes, but we would if it appears in an infobox. "Single-Player" to "Single-player" should be a safe global replacement though, if capitalization is respected).
 * Actually, Wiimote is used in dolphin for various settings, like Alternate Wiimote Timings. Wiimote should definitely NOT be replaced everywhere. - MaJoR (talk) 04:18, 10 February 2013 (CET)
 * That may be the case, but that just means Dolphin devs have failed to use the appropriate term for the device. It does unfortunately complicate the replacement though.

Noticed Major adding redirects to account for capitalization differences. Something to automate the creation of such might be nice, though I'm guessing there may be easier ways to account for such. Kolano (talk) 02:58, 19 February 2013 (CET)

I'd also like a script that could match instances of the template on the used on the Wiki to the open issues on Google code. So we could identify closed issues for alignment with issue reporting on the Wiki, and provide consolidated reporting for open issues. Kolano (talk) 20:29, 25 February 2013 (CET)