User talk:Explorer09

First of all, thank you for your active and industrious work on WKB.

I would like to ask why you changed the weapon boxes to resample all icons larger than 48x48 down to 48x48. (Admittedly Weapon_longname was a quick hack, but I thought the fix would've been to give Template:Weapon a width parameter.) Doing a marginal resample like this creates a significant amount of blurring, and if 48x48 is indeed going to be the size limit on weapon info box icons, then I will want to recreate all the extra-large icons at 48x48 so that they don't have to be doubly resampled. But please, explain to me why 64x64 is too large.

Deadcode 00:47, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

1. Because I'm using 1024x768 resolution, and I usually think that the 48x48 icons in Windows Explorer looks good for me. However, if you prefer, you can change them to 64x64 (and I don't mind that).

Also, if you can find and upload images whose size are multiples of 64 (like 128x128 or 192x192), do so. Because it'll be less blurry when down-sampling.

Explorer09 07:46, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

EDIT: If you can't, it's recommended to upload the largest image and let MediaWiki scale it down. [1]

Explorer09 07:46, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

2. The Template:Weapon now uses the Width parameter as you wish. (I'm just learning how to use some template functions so I know how to change it.)

Thanks.

Explorer09 01:15, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

Nice work on the Weapon Icon category page. Thanks!

Deadcode 08:17, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

You're welcome. Explorer09 11:15, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

Category:People

Hi, what's the purpose of the People category, and its advantage over the URL classification, as well as the change to how auto-listing on Community works? A category seems to imply additional maintenance effort, how is it justified? I noticed that your change shortened the list considerably, so the logical follow-up would be to add [[Category:People]] to every People/* page, but why is this effort necessary in the first place? --Vladimir 15:13, 31 July 2009 (UTC)

Because I found something that might confuse the reader. First, not all persons' articles are subpages of "People" (page titles begin with "People/*"); some pages are in the User namespace, which would not be shown on the list unless a redirect is made. Second, some people have 2 or more nicknames. Therefore sometimes 2 or more People/* pages will be made to redirect to the same user (take Glide for example), that would make duplicated items on the old list.

For the reasons above, I decided to make a Category to clean things up. Actually, adding a page to Category:People isn't that hard. You may have noticed that I've modified the ParentArticle template so that EVERY page that is "up to People" will be listed in the category. So, just add {{ParentArticle|[[People]]}} and that's it.

--Explorer09 15:51, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

PNG optimization

Just curious, have you been using PNGOUT for your png optimization? I notice you've gotten small sizes that pngcrush cannot acheive, and not even AdvanceCOMP or OptiPNG can acheive. I also noticed by experimenting with some parameters, that PNGOUT can acheive even smaller sizes than you've been getting, even preserving chunks (not that it'd be worth reuploading the images for such small improvements). Too bad it's closed source. —Deadcode 23:24, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Well, I used a combination of 4 programs to optimize the images: OptiPNG, AdvDef from AdvanceCOMP, PNGOUT, and DeflOpt. And you are right; there is PNGOUT included in. The idea was taken from here, so the "/ks" switch is used in order to preserve the setting from OptiPNG.

By the way, can the image be even smaller by removing the "/ks" switch? I haven't tested that yet. --Explorer09 07:57, 25 August 2009 (UTC)