EVE Information Portal

it goes on forever—and—oh my God—it's full of stars....

An interesting read and good to know that Abraxas and the rest of the crew are working on stuff.

Sadly, though, a lot of things in that dev blog continue to reinforce my feelings that the new combined fiction "team" - inasmuch as 3 devs and a ton of volunteers can compare to some of the larger teams out there - is chronically (pun fully intended) overworked. Here's hoping CCP finds the cash to add some more persons to relieve some of that.

Note here - I'm not bashing the efforts of Mercury or ISD; rather, it's been made apparent to me on several occasions that the bottleneck in fiction production by the volunteers is having it checked by the official devs to make sure it doesn't invalidate existing EVE lore. The solution, to me at least, would seem to be to bring in more fact-checkers.

Finally, on the note of fact-checking - I'm sorry,Abraxas, but I have to ask - did NOBODY in the fiction department double-check to make sure that stuff in Templar One wasn't contradicting existing PF? There's more holes in that book than on a Minmatar hull.

As a suggestion:
If artwork is the bottleneck - why not always have player based submissions for the Art component . EG After new content there is an open contest for 2 weeks for players to submit different pictures relevant to the story in question. Prizes for the content are: Credit for the artwork (eg Char name or RL name mentioned), and faction stuff (Say between 50-400M isk) . There is always room for 1-3 pictures per article. Then amend the story with the artwork.

Its a good way to get quality artwork on the cheap, & player involvement.


Cheers and Beers
Ramm

I also failed to find an easy path and hacked in a temporary link to the Chronicles portal into the main page (in the popular pages block). I am quite sure that CCP Abraxas has already a better solution in mind and will fix it later.

CCP Abraxas and all the imersion folks:

Great job on this dev blog. All sorts of good details and I am very eagerly awaiting the new collection and organization. That is filled with so much win it almost makes up for the lack of picture/artwork thumbnails. :)


What I would suggest for the pictures as others have suggested is FAN ARTWORK!!! Bolded, underlined, starred for all sorts of win.

A few reasons:

1) Yes the art department is a bottleneck and we don't want to distract them from the POS redux - hehe. : ) Which is fine.

2) But this will give the players a chance to do what CCP wants them to do most - GET INVOLVED. Players love to do this sort of stuff and be imortalized. All it would take is yourself and the Imersion/fiction team reviewing applications after the story is released and PICKING the best one. IF there were no good ones...leave the contest open until there is and post all over the website you are still looking or leave an open THREAD for people to check on. Just make sure the art is original and viola!
I akin it to Magic or something where they have all sorts of differnt artists making the cards but all the same topic/style.

3) Saves money probably doing it this way but adds untold value to the game. (A picture is worth a thousand words). If you want to reward players who submit art, just give them a PLEX.

4) The art helps players remember the stories too so don't rule out player submissions.


Anyways - I step down from my box, great article. Just try and come up with something in legal to work in fan made pictures for every story if possible.

CHEERS!

I hope this will be a fact one day. I am quite dissapointed that EVE has relegated its vast lore on its main website to "archive"
and dumped all the information in one dry wiki without any art support.

You may think that the stories themselves are enough but the art that accompanied the Chronicles was always of a very high kaliber, it brought something extra to the stories. Like the dam torsad chronicle and others. Art is a bottleneck, yeah perhaps, but its also one of the things that differentiate EVE from others.

The EVE website from what I have seen will look like most other MMO websites, flashy but without any real inspiration or depth.

A search function specifically for the Fiction Portal would be nice, though I'd imagine not easy to do.

I meant to answer all these quite a bit earlier, but then I also meant to have perfect health over the past week, and oh how the gods love good intentions. Anyway:

No art / Fan art: I know. I wish we could; I loved the art I had with my chrons. Dropping it wasn't an easy decision and it was argued against in-house for a while, but eventually we just had to accept the fact that art production - though no fault of the artists themselves - has a hugely detrimental effect on our production schedule for the chronicles. Yes, even now, when we're only doing a few per year. It was a hassle back when we were a fully staffed team, but now there are fewer of us and we have radically different responsibilities than before. Think of it this way: It's a choice between having three-four chrons for a single expansion, or having just one, or even none at all!

As for fan art: Nope, we can't. All CCP-sanctioned art goes through an approvals process, so we'd only be talking about taking the previous way of doing things and making it even harder and more unreliable.

But, look, remember - we're not hamstringing your own creative efforts. There is nothing stopping you guys from illustrating one another's chronicles. There is also, as you may derive from that earlier point, nothing stopping you guys from writing your own chronicles. They can be posted anywhere else on the web - just not in the one place that has CCP-sanctioned content.


We haven't yet updated all the links on the official homepage. We'll do it soon.


Mostly that we don't want just to have full automatic generation. It'd love it if I could autogenerate a category, then dive in and muck about with it by hand - adding descriptions, moving things about, choosing a different ordering scheme, etc. Right now, for instance, the only possible category-based presentation of my Black Mountain series is a completely uncommented alpabetized one - which for obvious reasons is not the one I'd like to have.

We may do something in the future with templates and scripts or whatnot, depending on what I can reasonably ask the YARR team to do, but right now our dataset is small enough that rigid automatic generation doesn't have enough pros to justify its cons. The reason that our current listings (like the Tech Articles) look very much like content category listings is simply because we haven't yet had the time to flesh them out more.


I did this a while back and meant to update the files, but it's really hard to find the time these days. I'll see what I can do, but in the meantime, if you google a little there are like three or four compendiums that the players themselves have compiled and posted. Latest one I spotted was here


Oh yes. I really can't stress this enough: The two portals I've set up, the Chronicle Portal and the Fiction Portal, are very much tools for CCP to share official info with you all. The rest of the entire EVElopedia is entirely your own. There really is nothing stopping players from writing alliance reports, writing fiction, posting their own artwork, etcetera. There also isn't anything stopping you from tying it all together in a player-created portal. But we have to keep a clear boundary between player-created and CCP-created lore, for reasons I explained in my last two dev blogs: if we don't, we lose the ability to do everything else we'd planned, like fleshing out the lore and keeping it consistent, establishing an in-game connection, publishing more stories, etc.


Dude, dry? I nearly got us banned in Germany for writing some of this stuff.

Well. for ordering you'd have to tell it when you categorize the article where you want it sorted. So, Black Mountain can be sorted under "B", for example.

[Category:Amarr Faction|Black Mountain]

Meaning it would categorize it as though the page title was "Black Mountain".

Mediawiki link
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Categories#Sort_key


Descriptions in the Category page I don't think are inherently supported.

---

Let me make a recommendation that might make your life easier in terms of managing descriptions though. IF you use transclusion and the noinclude/includeonly tags it might make it easier to manage things from one place rather than multiple places.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Transclusion

You can build into the page the commentary you want to have, rather than have freestanding text on each page you want to index the article. To make any changes to multiple places, you would modify one location and it would change all the references. So, each article would be composed of a section for a blurb on the chronicle, then the actual chronicle. You can tell the blurb to never appear on the page (so it wouldn't ruin your presentation) and then you can exclude the chronicle from being embedded into a page when you call on it as a transclusion.

I'm going to use ^ for < because I'm not allowed to use "html tags" in the posts.

Using the ^noinclude^ and ^includeonly^ tags this can be done easily.

For example, currently you call on a link to the chronicle using this code :

*[[A_Beautiful_Face_(Part_2)_(Chronicle)|A Beautiful Face (Part 2)]]


Instead of doing that, you can use some ^includeonly^ tags in the article itself to encompass the "description" you'd like to see propagated and have that right into the actual page itself so you only have ONE source (if you want), so you can manage any notations with the page - rather than tracking where you've cited that chronicle. When you try and embed the article into another page, you get that small section only, and it can be modified from one place, letting you build more and more indexes with less concern about how many you have and if you need to sort them later.


*{{:A_Beautiful_Face_(Part_2)_(Chronicle)|A Beautiful Face (Part 2)}}

If you ever want to only link the article without a notation, just use the normal code to call a page with [[article_name]]


So, in the page you'd put the following,



So, whenever you call on that page, you will get that include section embedded and it will be manageable from one place. You lose the ability to embed the whole chronicle into another page.. but really, why would you want to do that?

This should be totally kosher and make it easier for you to propagate the page in different article indices without giving you carpal tunnel syndrome and having to run around tracking each index every time. Now, there might be some concerns, but look it over and maybe try it and see what you think.

In general, I also recommend really looking into using templates when you're building massive things like this that are interlinked. They let you do many changes across multiple pages without a headache down the road.

Interesting, although these days it doesn't take allot to offend Germans. What I meant by my comment is that to me it seems that the eve-fiction is relegated to a number two spot in favour of a flashy but superficial new website. Archive isn't the place for the primary lore of eve-online. Additionally I would like to ask if the DUST 514 chronicles will have art?

The lore itself is great and is getting fleshed out more and more with interesting (and perhaps for Germans shocking ) information but it is the art that gave if flavour, it always did. A wall of text can only interest somebody to a certain point. Especially on computer screens. Its just, you know, a shame.