I've been working on some dialogue boxes to imitate the dialogue boxes used in the games. The plan is to integrate this with {{Q}} so typing {{Q|Line|Speaker|rel=codename}} would produce the textbox for the relevant game.
This isn't intended to replace the current display of Q, I think it should only be used when the quotes from the game being used are for content and not flavour (by flavour I mean like quotes at the top of articles, by content e.g. Sector 4, Dali).
So far I have these:
Of course, none of this will show up on mobile, however it's specifically designed to display decently on mobile. It will be clear to readers it's a quote and which part denotes the speaker. You can use the Mobile preview button on this forum to see how it will look.
Thoughts? JBed (talk) 22:01, August 23, 2017 (UTC)
Looks really nice, would like them to be implemented, just a couple notes:
- If you set the template using this to use the Quote template type, rendering will be handled automatically and it'll look fine on mobile regardless.
- Would prefer to put the css for this in MediaWiki:Releases.css, and for it to be generated in Module:Codename.
- Could this replace not only the Q template but also Template:Dialogue?
- For some games, the dialogue box may look different depending on version, for instance FFVI mobile/Steam, which looks drastically different to the SNES/PS/GBA dialogue box. I think we should clarify some place which version we base the dialogue on.--
Technobliterator TC 23:21, August 23, 2017 (UTC)
- (1) Interesting. I'll check out the witchcraft behind how it handles that.
- (2) Since it varies from game-to-game it's not something that's easy to auto-generate. There are some commonalities in the structures (e.g. quote marks/no quotes, name above text, left of all text [X, DoC], left of text on first line [VI and earlier]) so I can probably look into that.
- (3) Yeah, I guess. I imagine the benefit of Dialogue is that it displays longer discussions in a shorter space since it doesn't give an extra line to the speaker each time. There'd be no similar benefit using game textbox style with Dialogue when a bunch of Qs still look the same. But it's simple to incorporate and I can increase Dialogue's capabilities at the same time so sure.
- (4) I did have to think a little about this. I glimpsed VI's steam design but I ignored it because they were not VI's textboxes. I understand I am biased but most restyles at least stick to a similar design (IX remake has a different resolution but same texture). I also searched the TZA version of XII to design that one -- and then saw the original version's with the stylised small-caps and I resisted an incredible urge to use that. These aren't too difficult to make, and I assume most of the mobile games have their textbox sprites on spriter's resource; but I think if we are going to do one for each version and need a rule it would be to aim closer to the original version's design rather than most recent. I think I'd say the same any time we wanted to design something based on the aesthetics of a specific game.
- JBed (talk) 02:16, August 24, 2017 (UTC)
- If there's a way to store some of that information in Module:Codename/data, and have the dialogue box module draw from that, then at least we can put it all in one place.-- Technobliterator TC 09:28, August 24, 2017 (UTC)
- If there's a way to store some of that information in Module:Codename/data, and have the dialogue box module draw from that, then at least we can put it all in one place.--