Wiki - for collecting all the ideas

First of all: Why a wiki?
Because it's getting crowded in here. 2-3 threads on every topic, people repeating the same idea every 2 pages and a few hundred new posts every day. A forum is not suited for brainstorming. Also the devs asked for a wiki, guess they have a hard time on following all the discussions too.

Planetary Annihilation Concept Wiki

This wiki is meant to be used for the conception of the game and it's free to use for everyone. Feel free to start a new article on a topic which hasn't been adressed yet or to contribute a different approach to a problem which is yet to be solved.

The wiki is almost empty yet and your help is required to fill it, but if we all use it, then it will help us to speed up the development of this game by far.

We already have a Planetary Annihilation Wiki on Wikia that anyone can edit and it's filled with quite a lot of content...

The most notable sections are:

• Features: Proposed and Confirmed
• UI Design Considerations
• Orders as First-Class Entities
• Area Commands

I would encourage anyone to edit these pages and help fill out information in each feature page where additional detail could be useful for the developers and designers of the game.

Edit: Everyone seems to hate Wikia for good reason, so I moved the wiki to ShoutWiki and edited my post. All the complaining below here is about the previous Wikia links.

To be honest: That wikia wiki is a mess so far, no structure and the only content are posts which have been copied 1:1 from the forums. If a wiki is not moderated, then it's pretty much useless.

Just a little comparison:
What is more understandable, this or this? If we just wanted wall of text, we could just use the forums, but that is pointless for the development since none of the developers will even consider to read all those novels, no matter what genius ideas are hidden inside.

Trust me, it's not the first time that i use a wiki to structure a project and long walls of text did never help. Also wikia is great when it comes to document an existing game since it's open to every one, but thats not helpful when planing.

We should use coldboot's wikia. The link http://planetaryannihilation.wikia.com makes much more sense than http://planetary.makegames.de.

While the wiki is kind of a mess, you can go in and fix it up if you want to. Why make a new one when there already was one, and on a better site too?

Also, why does you wiki even have a bunch of different shield types listed? Uber has already confirmed that PA won't have shields, at the very least in any form we may currently think of as shields.

No, Uber has NOT denied that there would be shields, what they said, is that the shield system in SupCom was broken. The list here in the forum is incomplete / partly wrong and filled with missinterpreted cites. Seriously, if i were you, i would take not a single point on that list as given without double checking on the linked sources. Besides, that was only an example how a final article should / could look like if it was meant to be usefull.

And why to prefer one wiki over the other? Its not the wiki for the actual game but only for the dev wiki, so the URL doesn't matter, what matters is that the wiki is getting used and that the wiki is structured which is a lot easier if you have access to a full mediawiki installation instead of some crippled wikia stuff. And we got yet another problem with the wikia wiki, the starter (=admin) of the wiki is already inactive which leaves us without moderation capabilities.

You're exaggerating, exterminans.

It is true that the example page you picked is literally a paste from the forums, but the other links I referenced are well thought-out articles written from scratch. I pasted those details with the idea that I or someone else would polish the page.

You only added the "Shield" page to your wiki after I mentioned my wiki in this thread.

You can easily edit the wiki I mentioned, as can anyone else. I would encourage you to linkify the "Shields" word in this section and copy your wiki source over. Both sites are using Media Wiki software, so it should be relatively easy to do.

Please don't try to fragment the community. We're trying to help the developers consider all of the things we want this game to be.

Why would anyone ever care about how the raw URL looks like?

Um, I never said there won't be ANY form of shield. Please reread my post; the whole thing, including the second part of where I said no shields (followed by, in the form we think of as shields). They have confirmed that if they use shields, they won't be like any we are used to. That's my problem with your wiki. Dome shields have already been said to be broken, thus not going to be in TA. Why bother listing it then?

Also, I read every thread in this entire forum, I know what Uber has said, so please don't make assumptions on what sources I've read and which I haven't.

PA at wikia is going to happen no matter what. The idea is to avoid multiple wiki sites about PA.

Wikia is a cluttered inefficient mess lost back in early 2000-s design.
Demonstrating using MNC Wikia:
At the very common nowadays 1920x1080 16:9 ratio resolution Wikia shows extreme inefficiency to the point where more than 50% of the screen width is left unused.
This type of behavior is acceptable for places that rarely include walls of text and/or stretch if something real big enters the scene (like this forum). A wiki is the opposite of that.
Now compare it to a MediaWiki based wiki (Team Fortress wiki, TF2 wiki, Wikipedia itself) and see the drastic difference. The only fixed size part of that design is the sidebar, and it's thin enough to take up only 1/4 of the screen width on 800x600, much much less on a wider resolution.

Wiki wars! Wiki wars!

Well, I guess separation will go on, unless devs would raise up their own wiki, which would be undebatable official.

IMO, both wikis are crap (in comparsion with potential official wiki). Second (http://planetary.makegames.de) is better in terms of design and ads-free. Both are useless in terms of content.

Until there is no content, no wiki is better. And there would be no content as people wouldn't bother to post in wiki with unknown status and unknown maintainability. No content = no people. No people = no content.

So, let's close this useless argue and convince devs to setup their own mediawiki/whatever engine - it's quite straightforward and, surely, goes in line with "better communication" promise.

There is more than the default layout for wikia.

My main concern with the Makegames.de wiki is that I don't know who's administering it. Is the data safe on that machine?

I know Wikia is bloated and slow, but they're a real company and probably won't lose the data.

If there's a wiki service that's fast, clean and reliable, I'd be willing to move the data over to it. I don't like Wikia that much anyway. But it has to be reliable, not just someone's MediaWiki instance on their own computer that could go down for many reasons.

Whatever we do, we should make one single wiki that everyone can use. Fragmentation is really bad for the community.

Edit: I moved the wiki to ShoutWiki since Wikia is bloaty suck. All of my past posts have been edited to reflect this change.

I'm hosting it and i can assure that the data is safe. Dedicated rootserver with uptime >99,5%, daily automated backups of the database and uploaded files and in case an official wiki should be started, i can offer a dump of the database which can be used to copy all articles to the new wiki, including automatic redirects to the new wiki so existing links on the forums etc. won't break (not possible with wikia either, sorry).

We should use wikia, because it is a more reliable host (no offense, we dont know you), and also because it was already there. At this point, it doesn't matter where it was, it matters where most of the work has already been done. We don't want to fragment the community any more than it already is.

If I could chose one host outside of wikia, it wouldn't be any single person. It would be the devs OR a reputable community, e.g. tauniverse.com who has up until this very day and since the days of total annihilation, hosted on a continual basis, content and updates pertaining to TA/supcom.

Alright I just moved the entire wiki to ShoutWiki. ShoutWiki seems like a real company with reliability probably as good as Wikia, without all of the bloat.

All my links on past posts in the forums have been updated to reflect this change.

Looking back, the wiki created by coldboot only has 8 pages or so in it, so it hasn't really began yet either.

We need to make sure that this is where everyone wants the "unofficial" wiki to go. Personally, I haven't liked wikia or shoutbox just because of the crazy ads. I threw a post in over at tauniverse.com to see if anyone there has a good idea too.

It is inevitable that there will be multiple wikis.

I even copied over exterminan's Shields page with all of his pretty images and templates.