User talk:mzs

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FANDOM (talk) 19:29, June 29, 2020 (UTC)

Fruits of the Zee guide

Really good work! Thank you!
Fynnkaterin (talk) 16:36, August 19, 2020 (UTC)

Light Fingers

As far as I know, the Ambition qualities are supposed to be pyramidal. You can see that here, for example. Ambition: Light Fingers! Navigating the labyrinth
Tfftff (talk) 09:00, February 15, 2021 (UTC)

Oh, oops. They’re all labeled Discrete on the Quality pages and I took that as true without actually exploring all the Gain pages.
mzs (talk) 09:29, February 15, 2021 (UTC)

Template for S-Curve Tables

I’ve noticed your sandbox template for producing tables of values for the S-Curve scaling formulas. Do you have plans to finalize it and promote it to a real template? I’ve used your sandboxed version in the Scaling guide I wrote, as well as my own sandbox template for annotating scaling effects in articles. I would like to replace those with “real” links before putting links into main articles.

Let me know if there’s a way I could help make them production-ready (whatever that might mean). Features, documentation, error-handling, etc. And no concern about breaking changes at this point, I’m only calling it in two places.

Links to what I’ve used it for:

Logistic Scaling

User:PSGarak/Sandbox
PSGarak (talk) 20:11, March 7, 2021 (UTC)

Yeah, sorry, I got side-tracked from that–or, more accurately, it was originally itself the side-track and I got pulled back to main-track stuff–but an S-Curve template–or set of them, for varying purposes–is a real need and I can get back on that.

Really, what I’d like most is suggestions!

I really don’t like the limitations of using tables here. They’re nice for Mired in Mail, where the range of unique values is small enough. We start to run into issues with the Research actions, where we’re fine for now, but as the maximum attainable skill bonuses increase we won’t be able to represent all attainable values. The Chessboard Pawns table already has this issue as well as the fact that a table of weird multipliers isn’t a great experience. Enlighten Moulin having a sigmoidal Difficulty is another issue.

Just having the equations themselves would be problematic, of course. Calculators–either in-page or linked–would fix all of these issues, but bring a different set of problems.

And that’s all I’ve been able to think of, other than clever combinations of those ideas. I’m really hoping there’s something good I haven’t thought of.

But as I type all of this, is does occur to me that the tables are still useful for at least some cases, even if we have to find different solutions for other cases. I should be able to get a production-ready version of the table template and underlying components done within the next few days. If there are any features you want me to add–especially ones that would be better to do now rather than adding down the line–let me know! Actually, on that note, I would like some feedback on the parameter names. I wrote them to make sense to me, but as a mathematician I’m the worst judge for what parameter names are good for a mathematical function.
mzs (talk) 23:46, March 7, 2021 (UTC)

I guess some of my suggestions are already part of the other pieces I’ve been working on. Take a look at those two links when you get a chance. They also include a calculator, like you mentioned.

I think the tables are a useful. To my mind, the main issue the trade-off between being brief enough to fit in-line and not overwhelm other info on the page, vs being complete enough to let players plan for both their current item gain as well as understand the value of improving gear. My experiment is to put minimal information in-line and more complete information off to the side, to try and serve both goals at the same time. I’m currently using footnotes for that purpose, but another approach would be collapsible (pre-collapsed) sections. A table is a valuable part of the “full” explanation, along with the parameters and link to the guide.

My background is also mathematics, so I probably can’t offer a different perspective on the parameter names. I have to think hard just to find something other than “domain” and “range.”

Did you know the wiki supports LaTeX formulae inside <math> tags?

One useful feature for tables would be that the first and last elements have something to denote that the same value goes forever. Like in the Mired in Mail example, the logistic effect saturates at MiM 10. I’d like if it the last item was “10+” instead of making the table go to 12 or 13 so the pattern is obvious. Not sure how to easily extend that, though, and it only makes sense when rounding is true.
PSGarak (talk) 02:52, March 8, 2021 (UTC)

Hey, I took a bit longer than I expected, but I’m pretty happy with what I churned out, at least tech-wise. I’d love for you to check out the latest version of the template before I migrate things out of User-space. Any feedback is appreciated.
mzs (talk) 02:07, March 12, 2021 (UTC)

Wow, you rewrote the whole thing in Lua? That’s extreme dedication, while also being completely reasonable. Great job on the compacting, especially getting the table to squish automatically! The results are very clean and readable.

The documentation examples with Mired in Mail have negative values for both k and height, the result being that the CP gains scale up from 14 to 70, instead of down from 70 to 14. We should settle on one place to have the negative value. My preference is k, but your documentation seems to imply height. If we do say the negative sign goes on height, then I might want to rename y_offset into something like y_start or y_initial.

I’m not sure the Formula Use category should be added by this template, or if it is, it should be a toggle. I would use this template for guides and calculators, which shouldn’t have those categories added. One of my planned templates is explanatory text and links around the table, for use inside Gain templates, which might be a better place to put the Formula categories.
PSGarak (talk) 03:22, March 12, 2021 (UTC)

The documentation examples with Mired in Mail have negative values for both k and height, the result being that the CP gains scale up from 14 to 70, instead of down from 70 to 14.

Oh, whoops! I had to test with all combinations of positive and negative k & height to make sure my compacting logic worked and then I copied the wrong one into the examples.

We should settle on one place to have the negative value. My preference is k, but your documentation seems to imply height.

I see what you’re saying, but I think it varies per case, at least in theory. In this case, 70 is the most intuitively fundamental offset–it represents the “full” amount of the gain, what it always would be if they didn’t have to nerf it, and the S-curve is just taking away from it–so the height has to be the negative.

If we’re going to standardise on only one of them being allowed to be negative, I think cases where negative k results in the natural offset are likely to be rarer. So I think my preference is unconstrained > only height can be negative > only k can be negative, but I can be easily swayed.

I’m not sure the Formula Use category should be added by this template, or if it is, it should be a toggle.

And here I thought I was being exceptionally clever in ensuring the categories only popped up where appropriate by conditioning it on namespace! I’ll turn it into a (still-somewhat-clever) toggle, since it’s still correct to be a Formula Use if it’s used on action pages. That decision can be revisited when the derived templates exist.
mzs (talk) 06:22, March 12, 2021 (UTC)

Church in the Wild unlocks

Thanks so much for fixing that issue! I didn’t know what to do about it myself, so I really appreciate it!
Try.else.finally (talk) 00:15, March 13, 2021 (UTC)

No problem! For future note, the Unlock template is just a thin wrapper over the IL template except it also adds the page to the use category. If you have an Unlock on a page that shouldn’t be added to the category (like a guide) you just want to switch it over to IL.
mzs (talk) 03:21, March 13, 2021 (UTC)

Account rename completed

Hi! I've finished renaming your account. Alan (talk) 21:02, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

Archaeologist +1 CP

Hi. I just wanted you to confirm that the Deep Haven really only increases archaeologist by 1 CP, or if it's unchanged.
(https://fallenlondon.wiki/w/index.php?title=A_Shrine_of_the_Deep_Blue_Heaven&diff=next&oldid=329800) — Aximillio _{(Message Wall)} 13:34, 14 May 2021 (UTC)

I have no idea! That edit was for template use & formatting only and any values being changed were entirely unintentional. Mzs (talk) 19:32, 14 May 2021 (UTC)

Oh, that's good news =) I'll fix it =) — Aximillio _{(Message Wall)} 19:34, 14 May 2021 (UTC)

Problems with IL and Tale of Terror

You might remember how broke table headers, and you edited Template:IL afterwards to do this. Now, you may know that extensive transclusion of IL frequently causes issues, and it causes more issues the more stuff IL does internally. So I have been wondering if we could revert that edit if it serves to only fix that one item, and instead use {{IL|Tale of Terror}} when needed (Tale of Terror is a new redirect). Would that be fine with you? Do you know of any other items this would affect? -- RagCall (talk) 14:44, 11 January 2022 (UTC)