User talk:Marbx

Icons & Formats: PNG vs. GIF

Matt, since you were so handy at finding and uploading all those icons for the people page, any chance I can entice you into checking on some more icons? I was thinking it would be nice to show the icons associated with each spell; I'm exploring setting up individual pages on each magical effect (a demo is at Oblivion:Absorb Attribute), and showing the spell's icon (i.e., the icon that shows up in your lists of spells, and also on the screen when an effect is active) in the side table seems like it would be a nice touch. Unfortunately, I'm XBox-handicapped and can't get at any icons (or any other behind-the-scenes info), so I'm left begging others for help. If this seems doable, it would be nice to start just with the Absorb Attribute icon so I can add it to the demo page. Thanks!--Nephele 17:55, 18 July 2006 (EDT)

Nephele, I'd be happy to help. I put up a quick icon for it: 64x64 pixels. It's got the basic "page" background from the journal, so looks a little weird against the purple. Now, cleaning up the background is easy, but may be a problem. I'd prefer to make it transparent, but I think only a couple browsers actually do transparency on PNG format images. I could do like I did with the merchant icons and put it on a white background, but that doesn't jive with the purple background in the table. And a purple background wouldn't work if the icon was also used somewhere else. What do you think? -- marbx Wed, 19 Jul 2006 02:00 CEST

Thanks for the quick response! If you're up for tackling detail questions like the background color, there are probably a couple options. I agree transparent is out because it's not widely enough supported. My inclination is to place it somewhere else on the page so it's against a white background (then it can easily be used elsewhere, i.e., in the main tables on the Magical_Effects page). There is also the naming question that Lurlock has pointed out at [[Image talk:Oabsorbattribute.png|Oabsorbattribute.png]]... can't provide too much advice on that one right now since I'm not game-capable at the moment (and may not be for a couple of days: got too much Tour de France to watch). Perhaps just Oabsorb.png?--Nephele 20:30, 18 July 2006 (EDT)

Why not use GIFs instead of PNGs? They have transparency, and work in pretty much every browser. They're also generally smaller. --TheRealLurlock 21:55, 18 July 2006 (EDT)

I thought about GIFs. I guess the biggest deal there is their appearance - you'll get dithering and aliasing due to the reduced feature set. The size difference is pretty compelling, though: 4kB GIF vs. 10kB PNG (9kB after pngcrush), and 12kB if I save as a mid-quality JPG! Although I have to admit, when I actually compare the two side-by-side, the GIF doesn't look a whole lot worse... and I'm not sure the PNG is worth the extra 5kB. -- marbx Tue, 18 Jul 2006 21:10 CST

GIFs are looking like the winner to me. I can't see much of a difference quality-wise between the PNG and GIF; and if GIFs win on size and transparency sounds like the way to go.--Nephele 23:26, 18 July 2006 (EDT)

For the record, (I do this for a living) the main differences are color depth (GIF is only 256 color while PNG can full 32-bit), and alpha. GIFs have basically 1-bit alpha, meaning each pixel is either completely transparent or completely opaque. PNGs can have a full gradiation between them, which makes them look less blocky on a variety of backgrounds. However, both of these features cost file size, and neither of them is really necessary for the purpose. (GIFs on the other hand, have the advantage that they can be animated, though we're not using that here.) --TheRealLurlock 22:00, 20 July 2006 (EDT)

Lurlock, is file size still a big deal for a lot of people? Personally, I and most people I know are on broadband now, and downloading a 10kB PNG file vs. a 4kB GIF file isn't a big deal. On transparency support, Google points me to this PNG support webpage. Looks like transparency is good on all the major players except Internet Explorer. Sheesh, Microsoft. I guess y'all have been sleeping on the job. -- marbx

Spell Icons

Nephele, I have not forgotten your icons, I just haven't worked on them in a couple days. Right now the consensus is: 64x64 pixels, GIF format, 255 colors + transparency, file names prefixed with O for Oblivion. I'm grabbing more icons right now, and should have at least a small batch up tonight. I'm gonna start with what I think are some of the more common spells - Ofiredamage.gif, Oshockdamage.gif, Ofrostdamage, shield, burden, feather; stuff like that. -- marbx Thu, 20 Jul 2006 19:30 -0500 CDT

Hey, no rush. (I try not to be too demanding when asking someone to voluntarily do something for absolutely no reason....) One minor naming thing: I was wondering about perhaps going for, i.e. O-absorb.gif. Put some punctuation in there so its more readable (for example Oresist could be really confusing if someone tried to read it as one word, vs O-resist). If that sounds OK to you, I might try to bug Aristeo about how to move the icon you already created (and presumably it won't freak out the system too much to move a .png file to a .gif file, in anticipation of you overwriting that file with an actual .gif), along with the associated talk pages, etc to O-absorb.gif.--Nephele 21:27, 20 July 2006 (EDT)

I figured we'd request deletion, like for the first JPEG merchant icon I uploaded. Or renaming, either is fine, since it's only being used in one location for now. I like the O- prefix; it does more to point out that O is not actually part of the spell name.

Man, are there ever a lot of spell icons. I'm flipping through the construction set, and some of these I haven't even seen! Although that's probably because I haven't played a magic user yet. ;) Anyway, I thought that it might be easier to pull icons from the construction set, but it doesn't look like it's possible. We'd need an additional tool to unpack the ESP file, I think.

Also, transparency is a little thornier on some of these. The absorb icon has a nice thick border, while some of these icons have no complete border around them. If you don't dig into the middle of the image you can end up with a hard transition between the journal beige and your background - white, purple, or whatever. So tell me what you think of these three icons - I think they look acceptable on white, "journal beige," and I hope the pastel colors you folks have agreed on for the spell schools. FYI, the journal's color is approximately #EEDDBB. -- marbx Thu, 20 Jul 2006 21:20 -0500 CDT

I just tested them out against the destruction school background, and they look great to my non-discriminating eye. And I'm guessing Aristeo would prefer to move the existing page over deleting (especially with all the contribs on the talk page)... that's generally his preference.

Thanks for all your hard work on this, and no need to go out of your way to get the images. If some or even most are missing for a while, no one will complain. I'm guessing a huge number of the spell icons are for all of the different summon creature spells: I think each one has its own icon. Since I'm just lumping all the summons together into one page, all I need is any random 'summon creature' icon. But based upon the game's mini-guide book, it still comes out to 42 icons. Ouch... I didn't ever bother to do the math before coming up with this idea (although I do know I'm looking at 50-odd individual effect pages, so I should have been able to put 2 and 2 together). So again, take your time... --Nephele 22:51, 20 July 2006 (EDT)

Matt, just to get the names of all these files sorted out, I went ahead and uploaded Image:O-absorb.gif (using the absorb_64.gif file that you'd posted earlier as a demo). I'm not sure if that's the file you'd like to use; feel free to overwrite it or whatever.--Nephele 16:30, 21 July 2006 (EDT)

New icons! I'm slowly getting these done, hopefully this takes care of the more common ones. If you have ones you'd specifically like me to add soon, let me know. This is all for today, I'm afraid.

Thanks! I noticed these uploads appearing in the recent changes list. I'm starting to work my way through the new pages to use these icons, but it's pretty slow work (with all the stuff I'm incorporating in these pages, it's alot more than just cut and paste). So I'll try to follow your lead and fill in the pages that use these icons. --Nephele 18:15, 23 July 2006 (EDT)

If you're interested in seeing how the icons look in practice, I've put together at least one page using each of the icons: Absorb Attribute, Fire Damage, Frost Damage, Shock Damage, Command Creature, Drain Attribute, Paralyze, Weakness to Poison, Resist Poison, Restore Attribute, Shield, Soul Trap, and Open. If you're trying to decide which icons to do next, the Damage (i.e., Damage Attribute, Damage Health) and Fortify icons are two that are used on multiple pages. But I'll take whatever, whenever. And if you'd like to take a break from being the icon guy, that works for me, too! Thanks again for all your work so far. --Nephele 21:08, 24 July 2006 (EDT)

New round of spell icons. Besides these, I've got a few more to upload: spell absorption, bound weapons & armor, calm & frenzy, charm, disinegrate, and light. Any other spell effects I haven't been able to find in the game. Helpful pointers would be appreciated.  :) I uploaded two options for the summon icon; I wasn't sure if atronachs or skeletons were a more iconic choice for summons. Oh, no, I just realized that I forgot to give these the O- prefix. I'll go back through and put a move request on them, or however that works.

Say, have you ever noticed how close the pink and purple colors are here? -- marbx Sat, 29 Jul 2006 17:23 -0500 CDT

OK, I guess image pages don't have a "move" button on them. How do we rename these? Talk to an admin, like Aristeo? -- marbx Sat, 29 Jul 2006 17:29 -0500 CDT

My memory is that last time I re-uploaded the image with the correct name then got Aristeo to delete the first one. So I think that's what needs to be done again, here: upload them all again with the right name, then later get the wrong names deleted. --Nephele 18:33, 29 July 2006 (EDT)

And thanks for this latest round. Yep, the pink and purple colours are pretty similar. Most of the colours were originally darker; there was a decision to pastel-ize them so they wouldn't clash as much; in the process, the pink and purple became harder to distinguish. Once these are on the pages (which you can do if you want to, or I'll get around to it tonight) I'll see if I can figure out what's left and what's an easy way to find those icons. --Nephele 18:38, 29 July 2006 (EDT)

All righty then, icons with the right names are uploaded and bad ones have been marked for deletion. I've got some time, so I'll see about setting up effect pages. Which, I'll warn you, will be little more than cut-and-paste from existing ones. By the way, are you interested in going after non-spell effects also? The only problem with getting icons for those is that there's no spellbook-sized list, so I'm not sure we can get icons that are large and look as nice as these. -- marbx Sat, 29 Jul 2006 18:24 -0500 CDT

Oh, I see, you've already got the pages setup, so all I need to do is add the icon in. Well, that's no problem at all. But I just noticed that I'm inconsistent with capitalization. The batch of icons I uploaded today has two capital letters - i.e. O-Burden, as opposed to the O-restore names that I have been using. And this matters, 'cause the Wiki, or at least the 'Image' tag, is case-sensitive! So, nuts to me. -- marbx Sat, 29 Jul 2006 18:32 -0500 CDT

Yep, all the pages have been set up now, and you've obviously figured out where to insert the image name. Your call on the capitalization. I don't see having an inconsistency as a big problem; the image names have to be manually entered no matter what. --Nephele 19:39, 29 July 2006 (EDT)

For finding some of the missing icons, presumably the icons on the "Active Effects" page would work? In which case, you don't necessarily need to get your hand on a spell, but anything that gives you the effect. For example, reflect damage is pretty tough to get as a spell, but much more doable as a potion (alchemy=50, green stain cup cap + strawberry). You just drink the potion, and the icon will pop up on the active effects page (pops up on screen as well, but I'm guessing that's alot messier to use with background, etc). --Nephele 23:08, 29 July 2006 (EDT)

Good idea! That should be a lot easier than chasing down obscure wizards. -- marbx Sat, 29 Jul 2006

Last Few Spell Icons

I've just added my final batch of icons. I am still missing two effects that I know of: weakness to disease and weakness to magic. I guess I should double-check in the construction kit to be sure, but that's all that I see linked from the Oblivion:Magical Effects page. I would guess these are only on enchanted items; at least I see no ingredients with these effects. And hey, now I see how you get the signature automatically added. I never knew about the four-tilde shortcut; I've been doing it manually up 'til now. -- Marbx 15:32, 31 July 2006 (EDT)

The wiki just got upgraded last night, so Aristeo was able to add in all those handy shortcuts. Also it means that you should now be able to replace any images that you want to update. As for icons, Weakness to Magic just uses the damage health icon; I filled that in last night. Weakness to disease is a pretty rare effect, it may also re-use an icon, but in any case it's a really low priority. Later, I'll try to see if I can get the game to show me the icon for weakness to disease... might take some work. Thanks again for all the effort you've put into this! --Nephele 15:40, 31 July 2006 (EDT)

OK, there's two icons we're missing: "stunted magicka" and the weakness icon used for normal weapons and disease. I can see them in the construction set, but I don't know how to find them in the Oblivion files in a form that I can use to make icons for the wiki. So, I'll keep an eye out in-game, but I don't recall having seen these before. And at any rate, it's been fun doing these. I had some ideas for other places that could use icons, but it looks like Lurlock has beaten me to the punch.  :) -- Marbx 17:22, 31 July 2006 (EDT)

Just to ruin the party, I noticed one more missing icon: Fortify Magicka. It's got its own icon, different from all the other fortify effects. At least it's not too rare. The other ones you mention though are really difficult to get. Weakness to Disease is probably the "easiest": if you have 3900+ gold to spare, you can buy Boots of the Swift Merchant from Seed-Neeus in Chorrol. For stunted magicka (which is an unpleasant effect to have to deal with), I think you'd have hunt down a Dread Zombie and let it infect you with Astral Vapors. For weakness to normal weapons, there is one scroll in the game that you can randomly find in loot. But it's not common (checking the collected loot of my two characters turned up none), and even then it wouldn't give you a clean full-size icon. Definitely not worth the trouble to search those out. --Nephele 00:04, 1 August 2006 (EDT)

Er, I did upload an icon for fortify magicka... but I called it "O-fortifymagic.gif," and I forgot to add it to the effect page. My bad! In the construction set, weakness to disease and weakness to weapons use the same icon, so I should only need one of those. Easier to buy the boots, I think. As for stunted magicka, I think I saw a dread zombie the other day, in fact - if they start showing up before level 20. Either way, you can spawn one. In the construction set I see four dread zombies in the game, with form ids 9851b, 9f955, 9f956, 9f957. So you can open the console and run "player.placeatme 9851b" to spawn a dread zombie at your current location. -- Marbx 03:04, 1 August 2006 (EDT)

Note: Five and a half years after this discussion, it was decided to change the GIFs to PNGs due to the fact that GIFs resize horribly with our current software. The images linked to above originally all pointed to .GIF versions but in order to preserve the original formatting, have been changed as of this edit to the PNG versions. Similarly, the file names have all been changed to correspond to our current naming standards (OB-icon- instead of just O-). Just noting this in case anyone's looking at this and is puzzled by the fact that they're all now PNGs when clearly GIFs were what was being discussed. – Robin Hood↝talk 07:37, 13 May 2012 (UTC)