The new HexWiki - Revision history

Selinger: Added category

2020-12-28T21:17:21Z

Added category

Tommah: one more idea

2015-08-21T17:23:37Z

one more idea

Tommah: /* Ideas for improvements */

2015-08-21T17:16:58Z

‎Ideas for improvements

Tommah: added ideas and conclusion

2015-08-21T16:50:55Z

added ideas and conclusion

Tommah: initial

2015-08-21T14:25:06Z

initial

New page

== Welcome ==

Welcome back to HexWiki! [http://www.hexwiki.org The original wiki] went offline in 2013. The admin was kind enough to send us ([[User:Scrampy|Scrampy]] and [[User:Tommah|Tommah]]) a backup of the original site; that backup has been loaded onto this new site. The contents of the site should be the same as they were as of April 2013.

== User accounts ==

All the user accounts from the old wiki are present here too. If you have forgotten your password over the past two years, you can change it [[Special:PasswordReset|here]]. Let us know if the emails do not arrive; we had some trouble getting that working.

== Board diagrams ==

The bundle that we received from the former admin had almost everything we needed to build the new site. One piece was missing, though -- the code to display the board diagrams. Before we received the backups, we were operating under the notion that we would have to copy content over from [http://www.trmph.com/hexwiki/ z's archive] of the old wiki, which he luckily saved from [http://web.archive.org the Internet Archive] while the pages were still available. Unaware of how the boards were represented, I designed a simple format for this purpose (see [[New board diagrams]]).

When we got the backup, we saw how the boards were represented on the old site. The format is documented at [[Help:Hex]]. I spent some time building support for that format into my code, so that all the diagrams will still show up. However, I ([[User:Tommah|Tommah]]) recommend using the new format going forward. This is for a few reasons:

* The old format is very complex, and some of the features seen at [[Help:Hex]] are not supported by my parser. These include borders around the board and automatically restarting numbering.

* The old format has several ways of performing the same task, and the logic is difficult to get right; many of the commands interact with each other in complex ways.

* We have begun building a tool to include board diagrams graphically, and it uses the new board format. You can see its current state at http://hexwiki.amecy.com/board_gui.html. You can build a position there, and the page generates markup that you can paste into your wiki article. Eventually, you will be able to click on a board diagram to edit it in the GUI.

The boards are displayed in your browser by loading each cell as its own image and then arranging those cells into a table. As you can imagine, it takes some trickery to get the hexagonal arrangement to work. (Until I saw it in action, I would never have believed it would actually work!) In the future, however, we would like to generate each board diagram as a single image. This would be done with code that runs on the server, converting a board representation into an image. Such a method will allow some features that we do not presently support, including shading cells and showing partial boards. (Cell shading seems to be particularly desired; see e.g. [[Edge templates everybody should know]]. Diagrams that look like that are actually PNG files.)

← Older revision		Revision as of 21:17, 28 December 2020
Line 45:		Line 45:

	Enjoy the site!		Enjoy the site!
		+
		+	[[category: HexWiki]]

@@ Line 38: / Line 38: @@
 * Some content targeted at absolute beginners
 * More puzzles of varying difficulty.  We could consider having a "puzzle of the week" that is contributed by different users every week.
 == Conclusion ==
-HexWiki lives!  The current contents of the site come from a backup of the old HexWiki, taken right before the site went down.  Everything seems to work.  Let [[User:Tommah|me]] know if something is amiss.  I have checked many pages to ensure that they display correctly, but I may have missed something here or there.
+HexWiki lives!  The current contents of the site come from a backup of the old HexWiki, taken shortly before the site went down.  Everything seems to work.  Let [[User:Tommah|me]] know if something is amiss.  I have checked many pages to ensure that they display correctly, but I may have missed something here or there.
 Enjoy the site!

← Older revision		Revision as of 17:16, 21 August 2015
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	There are other examples of multiple terms being used where one could be used (e.g. piece vs. stone, in [[Edge templates with two adjacent pieces]] and [[Edge templates with one stone]]).		There are other examples of multiple terms being used where one could be used (e.g. piece vs. stone, in [[Edge templates with two adjacent pieces]] and [[Edge templates with one stone]]).
		+
		+	=== New content ===
		+
		+	The following would be nice to have.
		+
		+	* Some content targeted at absolute beginners
		+	* More puzzles of varying difficulty. We could consider having a "puzzle of the week" that is contributed by different users every week.

	== Conclusion ==		== Conclusion ==

← Older revision		Revision as of 16:50, 21 August 2015
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	* We have begun building a tool to include board diagrams graphically, and it uses the new board format. You can see its current state at http://hexwiki.amecy.com/board_gui.html. You can build a position there, and the page generates markup that you can paste into your wiki article. Eventually, you will be able to click on a board diagram to edit it in the GUI.		* We have begun building a tool to include board diagrams graphically, and it uses the new board format. You can see its current state at http://hexwiki.amecy.com/board_gui.html. You can build a position there, and the page generates markup that you can paste into your wiki article. Eventually, you will be able to click on a board diagram to edit it in the GUI.
		+
		+	== Ideas for improvements ==
		+
		+	=== Board images ===

	The boards are displayed in your browser by loading each cell as its own image and then arranging those cells into a table. As you can imagine, it takes some trickery to get the hexagonal arrangement to work. (Until I saw it in action, I would never have believed it would actually work!) In the future, however, we would like to generate each board diagram as a single image. This would be done with code that runs on the server, converting a board representation into an image. Such a method will allow some features that we do not presently support, including shading cells and showing partial boards. (Cell shading seems to be particularly desired; see e.g. [[Edge templates everybody should know]]. Diagrams that look like that are actually PNG files.)		The boards are displayed in your browser by loading each cell as its own image and then arranging those cells into a table. As you can imagine, it takes some trickery to get the hexagonal arrangement to work. (Until I saw it in action, I would never have believed it would actually work!) In the future, however, we would like to generate each board diagram as a single image. This would be done with code that runs on the server, converting a board representation into an image. Such a method will allow some features that we do not presently support, including shading cells and showing partial boards. (Cell shading seems to be particularly desired; see e.g. [[Edge templates everybody should know]]. Diagrams that look like that are actually PNG files.)
		+
		+	=== Standardize terminology ===
		+
		+	Players are referred to in various ways: Red/Black/vertical, Blue/White/horizontal. We should standardize on one pair of names (probably Red and Blue, since that is how the pieces appear in diagrams).
		+
		+	There are other examples of multiple terms being used where one could be used (e.g. piece vs. stone, in [[Edge templates with two adjacent pieces]] and [[Edge templates with one stone]]).
		+
		+	== Conclusion ==
		+
		+	HexWiki lives! The current contents of the site come from a backup of the old HexWiki, taken right before the site went down. Everything seems to work. Let [[User:Tommah\|me]] know if something is amiss. I have checked many pages to ensure that they display correctly, but I may have missed something here or there.
		+
		+	Enjoy the site!