Thargoid wrote:So you have ships and ship sets seperately? And it's still not so clear cut, for example is SR/SR2 a core expansion (as it adds planets/moons) or an enhancement (as it retextures the main planet and sun)? And your list completely misses out equipment (and missions, but I presume you're including them in expansions) whereby again you get straddling OXPs like Aquatics which would appear in probably all four of your categories.
I think you're missing the whole point...simplicity!
Enhancement OXPs add eye-candy but do not introduce anything that will affect gameplay in any way. Expansions DO add features that will affect gameplay eg new ships, missions, stations, weapons, equipment, interactive characters etc.
Ship sets that re-texture (eg Deepspace ships) or replace the core ships (eg Griffs) are Enhancements. OXP ships (ie NEW ships that are not core) are Expansions.
Equipment, weapons etc ADD to the game, so they are Expansions.
SR and SR2 don't add anything which will have an influence on gameplay, so they are enhancements. Likewise for OXPs like YAH. They enhance the look of the game without having any effect on gameplay or adding anything which alters the game. They are eye-candy.
As for your Aquatics example, this is a great example of where we've gone wrong in the past. As things stand it would appear in almost every catagory. Multiple entries lead to over-long lists which is one problem we have now and need to address. In this system I'm suggesting it appears only once, in Expansions, as it adds tons of stuff to the game.
This is the whole point of what I'm suggesting...Each OXP appears ONLY ONCE (in the appropriate catagory).
Thargoid wrote:
I repeat again that we're also getting multiple lists, which are too much work to maintain, either for OXP authors doing just their own OXPs (especially when there are lists that people don't even know exist), or people who only maintain the lists and don't write OXPs.
But we already have, not only multiple lists, but multiple pages and Indices as well. Many try to do the same job, and no-one sems to know where they all are! My suggestion is to have just four lists (pages). Again...simple.
Thargoid wrote:
I'm probably the extreme case given the number of OXPs I have (although Eric can't be too far behind), and I know I'm not going to spend what would probably take several hours to find every single list and update every single entry for every single OXP I have every time Oolite is updated to a new version and they all have to update (not to mention updating their own wiki pages etc).
I understand that this will involve some effort from many OXP Authors. Any overhaul will cause this. However, with each OXP having only ONE entry on just ONE page of the Wiki, it should be a relatively straightforward affair.
Thargoid wrote:
Hence why the idea of using tags to automatically do it is so appealing. What may be better is to ditch the whole idea of "maintained tables" (like we have now, where someone has to write the individual entries), but use the tags idea but expand them if possible to include the information that's in the maintained tables (last update date, synopsis etc). Hence the tags can be embedded as now in the OXP page, and then wiki code underneath can make the table.
That may or may not be possible, but if not then the whole concept of such lists becomes very difficult to work with and we need to go find Dizzy and get OXP Central back on the drawing board...
If this can be done automatically, that would obviously be great
I'm not trying to make work for people here, and in fact it should massively reduce the work involved in updating OXP entries because each OXP has just one entry on one page.
I'm just trying to come up with a simple system that gives people the information they want, quickly and easily.
