Board Thread:Dark Assembly/@comment-653063-20150303021112/@comment-653063-20150317150937

So.

I looked at http://disgaea.wikia.com/wiki/Warrior_%28Disgaea_3%29, and thought, gosh darn it, all those stats are in a nice chart where you can see all 6 tiers of data at the same time. That's awesome! Is there any way I can take the fact that we JUST put all the D1&D2 stuff into t:TierStats and use that to make a "six-by-all" chart? six tiers, by, all the information about that tier?

The extreeeeemely short answer (get the joke? a short answer, from me?) is, "Yes." (Followed by a lot of 'eeeee omgomg it works ahhhh yaaaay wheeee it woooorks yaaaay', because I am silly-happy when difficult code works out X D)

The corollary is, "but should we?"

SO: take a look at http://disgaea.wikia.com/wiki/User:SannaSK/Sandbox?oldid=34521 = I am RIDICUlously proud of this, because I wasn't sure it would work. But yes, it is possible to have an 'outer' template, and call the same inner template multiple times; because each time the outer template calls the inner template, the outer template is treating it as the next in the sequence of anonymous paramters. BOOYAH.

For now, ignore the wonky formatting. My goal was, "how much fiddly specifying do I have to do on the inner template to get the table columns to line up with the outer-template/header columns" (answer: NONE. BOOYAH.). So yes, there is a lot of wasted space. Yes, there's a bit of formatting I could do to make some of that go away, and mayyyybeeee if I'm reeeeeeally lucky-and-smart, I can even make a really tightly-formatted six-by-all template that would display... everything that TierStats currently displays. Base stats/apt%, weapon, ReincCosts, jp/rom, mv/jm/ct/thr/rng/crit, and i've seen some later-game templates trying to store/display fire/wind/ice resistance (is that like, really important? do i need to be planning how/where to display that in TierStats?).

It can be done. It will take a lot of work.

Pros: six-by-all would mean no clicking back and forth between tabbers; users would see ALL the information in one(*) screen (it's so much easier/quicker to compare differences this way; and neoseeker and that other one have their data displayed in six-by-chunk formats).

Semi-pro: changing the D1&D2 pages can almost assuredly be done using a bot; since we already organized all the tier information into a really predictable pattern, if bots are as smart as they're touted to be, it would be easy enough to tell the bot how to make the changes, and it would just go. (For some definitions of 'easy enough' that mostly mean 'even though bots confuse me, it would still take wayyyyy less man-hours to figure out how to make the bot do the thing than humans doing the changes manually.')

Neutral point: inputting game data we currently don't have would not in any slightest way be any different than it is now; users/editors inputting such data would have no change in user-experience at all. This is the great benefit of separating 'content' and 'display', yaay CSS and templates and stuff like that yaay.

(Neutral/semi-con point: we'd have to run a bot to change all the 'Special Characters'/'Unique'/whatevers to use a different template; I'd have to copy current TierStats into something like 'UniqueCharStats', and the bot would have to change... basically anything that isn't a class-with-six-tiers over to using that template. The one thing that makes this not suck is it would literally be changing only a single line of code; extremely predictable = extremely bottable. Still, it's work to copy-template and set-up-and-run-bot, and it's work that doesn't have to be done if we don't do this.)

Cons: It's a lot of work. Have I mentioned that? haha. It would take me more hours than I want to think about right now, to design this thing, to code the various #ifs, to make sure it handles everything, to get really fiddly and try to conserve every single pixel. Because, that asterick up by 'one screen'? Yeahhh here's that asterick: "for some definitions of 'one', that really only apply to desktop computer users; tablet users would almost assuredly have to scroll sideways, laptop users and desktop users with small screens would probably have to scroll sideways, and mobile users are, uh, politely, screwed."

Back to a semi-pro point: Even if we just continue doing tabber-T2C for D3&4 and decide later we want the six-by-all look, it will be no harder to switch everything over at that point, because again, getting D3&4 data into TierStats parameter-block layout will just mean a bot will go through more pages to make the exact same changes. You know what I mean? We're not now making it harder later to do this, if we decide we want it.

So, basically, I've answered my "can it be done" question with 'yes', and "should it be done" with no. There's only the one Pro point, and it is a really big point, in my opinion; seeing all data in one glance is a point not to be underestimated. I'm just not sure if it's worth doing now...

So, blah blah, that's that, now it's written down and has a timestamp, etc.

I still haven't figured out if Evilities need to be displayed in TierStats, but what I understand about them makes me think 'no'. What probably can/should happen is, I need to figure out how to make a central database of all Evility data, and then make the templates call out the lines of data they want. Like SED, but... better. Probably it will not use DMAC/HCSC. And probably I will not tackle that now. So... once I figure out this range/crit-display issue, we can start T2Cing D3.

And/or... I should learn how to do bots... because, going back to that Warrior-D3 page... all that info is in a table already. Surely it's within the capability of a bot to take the info and whip it into a TierStats param-block, and do it in like 5 seconds. That would be spectacular... maybe I need to learn how to bot. Or, do you know anyone from the other wikis you inhabit who is already well-versed in running a bot, and wouldn't mind coming over here and doing that? There's a pro to 'just learn how to do it myself, because probably I'll want to do this more in the future,' and there's also a pro to 'get someone who's already good at it, and save myself the brainspace/time.'

So yeah. There's... that. What do you think?