MAngband

Just had this thought -


It would be interesting to, together, make a kind of encyclopedia for MAngband. We have some faqs, some guides, and some largely-Angband-focused help files and spoilers. It would be neat to draw all the info together into an encyclopedia that is focused on MAngband. Using a wiki of course comes to mind.

A shortcoming of spoilers is that they dont provide context. They may, for example, list the stats and attacks etc of a nasty monster, but don't provide broader information about the monster relative to the player. For example, a gnomish mage is way more important to a player when they first encounter them than just a normal monster  - so i envision an entry in our hypothetical wiki that doesnt just list the stats, but also explains why this monster matters to a player who first encounters them, things to be wary of, and strategies to employ to deal with them (namely, run!).

Or, Greater Storm Wyrms. Simply describing their salient stats doesn't paint a picture of why a player should care about them. Our entry would also go into some detail about why they matter: phat loots from a monster whose damage type is of a "lesser" elemental attack.

Or, undead beholders: you wouldnt necessarily grok why they are so nasty from just reading their blrb. Its the subtler details about them that matter (easy to overlook, relatively shallow, and summon hellfire and doom).

Uniques could be described from the standpoint of the player as well: not just who they are, but why this particular one is quite nasty, and how a player might approach taking them on.

Also, this could be a place to further delve into the topics that are unique to us: what is cheeze? what the heck is an audit? what's all this about time "being slower at the bottom"? why does 1000 feet represent a major threshold? why does everyone get worked up about boots of Mirkwood? what's a potion of life, and why should anyone keep them vs. sell them? why does dex matter? whats the point of the intelligence stat? whats this about staticing levels? why is it lame to static shallow? what is PvP? why does my damage against a player seem different than against monsters? what is out-of-town?

A lot of these topics are covered in faqs, but faqs or guides by their very nature get ungaingly to plod through as they get long. An encyclopedia wiki would be an interesting way to both bring together the knowledge we have, and also spread out the task of doing so.


-fink

Sounds great.

There is already something like this, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAngband, however, it doesn't go into anywhere near as much detail as Fink was describing. However, due to the nature of wikipedia, it is possible for us to edit it to include more information. I would be more than happy to help with this if anyone decides to undertake it as a project.

Well, wikipedia itself wouldnt be the place for such info - its an encyclopedia, not a game guide. However, there's lots of open source wiki software out there to toss up on a web server that could be looked at, should we ever consider doing such a thing.

<edit>

There does seem to be a game guide wiki associated with wikipedia in some way, tho.

We really should have a seperate site for it, though. Wikipedia is not the appropriate place for the in-depth info Fink is suggesting, nor would it be the intuitive place to look for a game guide.

Totally. I suspect that if we wanted to do some kind of thing like this, it would be easy enough to sort out some hosting somewhere.

"Some hosting somewhere"... hmmm. Hey Crimson...  ;D

[edit] Thanks for posting the Wikipedia link. I took the liberty of correcting my name as it appeared incorrectly in the article.

So, I've been considering using my nice shared-hosting account from elsewhere (HostedToday) for something worthwhile... the MAngband Wiki that Fink suggested.

But before I go ahead and start playing with that idea any more, I would like to know:
What Wiki software are you most comfortable with? Got any requests?

I do not intend to run an image hosting site, so still no luck for the folks who want a place to dump screenies or avatars.

Uffda! Good question, heh.
I have no sense of the scope/scale of the work required to set up a wiki. I do have one comment - of the different packages available, there does seem to be quite some difference in terms of functionality.

On one site I use, the admin added a very bare-bones wiki deal (and annoyingly, I cant for the life of me figure out what he is using). My point here is that in the end, I found it to be a little *too* bare-bones. Only the simplest of formatting etc was possible. It kind of got the job done, but only in the most rudiementry of ways. So, if nothing else, perhaps we should consider avoiding the overly simple when sorting out a good wiki package.

I noticed this page on wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison ... i_software, which lists a frightening number of wiki packages and some quick-n-dirty comparisons.

I suspect that I, like a lot of people (and a growing number of people), are used to dealing with MediaWiki (the packed used by and developed for Wikipedia) - it's seems to be slowly becoming a bit ubiquitous. However, I'm not sure if that is a bit beefy or might require too much work to set up or not (as mentioned, a topic I have zero clue of). 'Course, the Homestar Runner wiki uses it, so perhaps it isnt that bad

I'm in favor of TWiki myself, but that's just because I had to use it at my job. That is, until I convinced them that Joomla would make a lot more sense for what they were doing! You have to pick the right tool for the job.

I'd prefer either TWiki or MediaWiki personally, without looking at features. However, I will check out features first. I'm interested in the best one for what we're doing, not necessarily the most feature-complete package. It's possible that the formatting syntax of the one we all choose will be slightly different from what we're used to, but that should be a relatively small hurdle.

My preferred site for Wiki comparisons is http://www.wikimatrix.org/.

It's in the works now. I have a functional TWiki with a skeleton web for MAngband. Perhaps by making it invite-only for a few weeks (or until some real content exists) we can avoid having people think there's nothing to MAngband. I think this will be the best way to get it really started. So, just email me or send me a message, and I will give you the URL. I would really appreciate if those who request access create documents and publish collected bits of information from the forums and crud.net archives.