Fwurg

[Mercury]

I am currently listing the population entries for the NPC worlds, however I am running into some issues.

First off was the unlinking 's' at the end of the race names. That's just very ugly - I fixed it, but now I can't seem to get the first letter to be capitalised. @Brend: do you know if that's possible? If not, I think current uncapped is better than an unlinked s which is just plain ugly.

EDIT: issue with this: 'Duros' gets lengthened to 'Duross' - unfortunately Duros is both singular and plural. I can't for the life of me think up how to fix it o_O

Regardless, the population entries require both a system and a planet (through their page) in their current context. This is practical when you have a full system worked out, but I don't have 15 fully worked out systems for the NPC worlds (and I don't plan on making them for a while) - that means the current entries are somewhat unfortunate in some area's. I thought up several idea's to solve this (change the data model & move entries, make a separate datatype for NPC populations, just leave it and accept the NPC bookkeeping page is ugly, etc), but I haven't found one that's fully satisfactory yet. Do any of you have any idea's?

[Brend]

I thought as I wrote, so over the post my opinion will change.

First off was the unlinking 's' at the end of the race names. That's just very ugly - I fixed it, but now I can't seem to get the first letter to be capitalised. @Brend: do you know if that's possible? If not, I think current uncapped is better than an unlinked s which is just plain ugly.

There was a reason for the unlinked 's' at the end -- exactly the issue you tried (and not really) fixed O_o

Personally I think the unlinked 's' is better than the uncapped name, especially when taking into account names with spaces (which now contain an underscore) and the fact that sometimes the race name is just plain wrong (i.e. 'remunzian'+'s' instead of 'Remunzian Mixed-breed Human'+'s').

I will try to rework the block to do without the plural, but if this doesn't work out I'd rathr go back to the unlinked 's' than the uncapped version that might even be just plain wrong.

EDIT: issue with this: 'Duros' gets lengthened to 'Duross' - unfortunately Duros is both singular and plural. I can't for the life of me think up how to fix it o_O

Unfixable. Unless we give each race a singular and plural field (which might fix the other problem as well ) Actually, the page title is already in singular, so we really only need a plural field.

Regardless, the population entries require both a system and a planet (through their page) in their current context. This is practical when you have a full system worked out, but I don't have 15 fully worked out systems for the NPC worlds (and I don't plan on making them for a while) - that means the current entries are somewhat unfortunate in some area's. I thought up several idea's to solve this (change the data model & move entries, make a separate datatype for NPC populations, just leave it and accept the NPC bookkeeping page is ugly, etc), but I haven't found one that's fully satisfactory yet. Do any of you have any idea's?

• change the data model & move entries: We could include a Location_ref field in the population segment, this would allow the segment to be placed on another page than the actual planet/moon they live on. The only problem with NPCs is that this is still useless, as the planet they live on just doesn't exist.
• make a separate datatype for NPC populations: No! The whole data trick is working because we do not really have big exceptions. As soon as you introduce such an exception for NPCs we will accumulate all kinds of neat 'tricks' to get NPC data working. We should fix it in a PC/NPC agnostic manner.
• just leave it and accept the NPC bookkeeping page is ugly: Would work, except that we can not find out where the population lives this way.

So to conclude:

If we expect a lot of races for which the plural is not generatable from the singular (i.e. if one can not just append 's' to the name to get to the plural) we should add a Plural field to the race model.

We can include a Location_ref field in the population model, but this will only allow us to put the population segments on other pages, this will not magically fix the 'unknown location' problem. That is, overviews that offer insight into the population's location will just list unhelpful red links -- though the Location_ref could be set to the faction if need be.

Would that fix the issues you encountered?

----

As an aside: wouldn't it be better to list the total population in the faction template? This 'Population' header with the little table doesn't really add anything in my opinion. We could add the list of Races to the template as well maybe.

Not sure how to handle this, but the little table isn't cutting it for me; it's just sitting there, completely detached from the actual content of the page...

[Mercury]

So far there are two races with pluralisation exceptions: Duros and Vratix are both singular and plural forms of the same race. I think a location_ref would be helpful, and it'd also help solve the issue of "where is my population again" for people with a lot of planets. This can also solve the issue of the population since it can be on the faction bookkeeping page for everyone and then every faction can have their total population and races listed on the regular faction page.

[Brend]

But....

So far there are two races with pluralisation exceptions: Duros and Vratix are both singular and plural forms of the same race.

So we want this. I'll update the relevant pages immediately (data model, template and the race pages).

I think a location_ref would be helpful, and it'd also help solve the issue of "where is my population again" for people with a lot of planets. This can also solve the issue of the population since it can be on the faction bookkeeping page for everyone and then every faction can have their total population and races listed on the regular faction page.

For NPCs the Location_ref would indeed allow the location to be placed on their faction bookkeeping page.

But for PCs I think you're just imagining a problem into existence here. Why would I ever want all my population on my faction page? The whole idea of the planet pages is to have the relevant data over there -- this will become more useful once people start having population in multiple places.

You have to take into account the number of zones (you can have at most 1.0 per zone) and the power cost of population 1 per 0.1 . All of these things easier to manually check with the population segment on the planet page itself -- and growth is also per planet, and as such, having all population on a planet actually on the planet page is useful.

Besides, the problem you just came up with (i.e. the 'where is my population again') is just as easily overcome if you leave your data entry on the relevant planet: one can just as easily find one's population by looking in the overview on the faction page and hitting the link to their Location_ref, thus sending you to the correct planet. We should use good indexing to make things findable, we shouldn't just dump them all on one page.

Shall I add a Location_ref field to the population model and template, and add an example population overview to my faction page? That way I can show what I intend and we don't end up in a rather long to-and-fro about where the population segments should be placed.

If everyone decides that they'd rather have all their population entries on their faction bookkeeping page we can always move them later. (But let's just move all zones over there as well -- it's just easier to find them and I won't have to go 'Where was my zone again?'....)

EDIT: By the way, we don't NEED to put population segments in the faction page to get a working overview -- you know this right?

[Brend]

Just added plural to all races and population template!

[Mercury]

Shall I add a Location_ref field to the population model and template, and add an example population overview to my faction page? That way I can show what I intend and we don't end up in a rather long to-and-fro about where the population segments should be placed.

Sure! Let's see what it looks like

Just added plural to all races and population template!

Yay!

[Brend]

I've added the Location_ref fields to my own population, and added a better overview.

See Mirda and Veolian Commonwealth.

This seems to fix both problems? If it does, I propose we do this with all population segments, and we could add the faction demographic to every faction page.