Engine/developer pages, new infoboxes

[Suicide machine 53]

I was originally planing to post this one inside of Newmansan's thread "New infobox". But after thinking about it for a moment, I realized this is not touching on a a subject he's talking about in his thread, so to make sure, I accidentally don't derail his thread - here's few a bunch of problems I have with new infoboxes and developer pages.

 

1. Porters listed as developers.

One of the problems with new Infoboxes I have is that usually we list teams like Nixxes or QLOC as developers, when all they did was just port the game to PC, so I'd love to see some clear way to list them as PC porters. Or should be just stuck them under {{Infobox game/row/winporter|}}, but then what to do if we have a game that was also ported to Mac in addition to PC (aka Windows)? List them twice?

 

2. Developers changing names and having (potentially) new pages

Another thing that bugs me is - Engines and Developers. With few developers it's already a case of changing a name. One of such examples would be DICE Los Angeles (previously known as Danger Close and EA Los Angeles... and DreamWorks Interactive). Basically, it would be cool if links sent to one page and if developer changed name - there would be a line in a table Games Developed as some name - that's my thought about developer changing names. This way tracking what such DICE Los Angeles made previously would be easy. An example of how this (I think) should work is a wiki page for DICE Los Angeles - except this is obviously hardcoded as a table (and doesn't have fixed length, which makes it look awkward), which doesn't work for what we're doing here. Alternatively we could just mass edit each game page every time a dev. changes name, but I don't really like that idea.

 

3. Splitting each generation of engine into a new page.

With engines, I'd just love to see all Unreal based games on one page. Again divided into tables for Unreal Engine, Unreal Engine 2 etc. This is because, there are some developers that have their own engines, but they they make one or 2 games based on their engine and then move to another one - they don't licence it or anything and a making a page for a engine that was used only in 2 games is kind of pointless.

 

So that's it.

[Suicide machine 53]

Re 1. OK, I'll try to remember that. And, no, I won't edit every page where Nixxes was a porter, because I just realised that.

 

Re 3. Well, to be honest.... we have Geo-Mod 2.5, Geo-Mod 2.0, Geo-Mod 1.0 - and existence of these kind of irritates me :D

 

-- EDIT --

Wait, I now realized with Saints Row 2 we have Volition, Inc., which links to Developer:Volition, Inc, which is just a redirect page to Developer:Deep Silver Volition. So, if let's say - we were to marge Geo-Mod engine pages into one Engine:Geo-Mod, and then make Engine:Geo-Mod 1.0, Engine:Geo-Mod 2.5 and Engine:Geo-Mod 2.0, all redirected to it, that should work, right? And at the same time leave full engine names in infobox of a game, right? Or should this be avoided at any cost?

[Nicereddy 109]

What if we changed it so different versions of the same engine (Frostbite, Geo-Mod, CryEngine, etc.) would simply be a separate 'input' so it would look like {{Infobox game/row/engine|Frostbite|2}}?

[Andytizer 268]

Whilst we want to preserve version numbers, it might be more useful to group certain engines together, especially if they are close in version number and share similar fixes. However we should consider the cases before we make any decisions.

 

Are there any other examples of pages where engine version numbers with decimal places (e.g. 1.x) are appended to the end?

[Pridit 39]

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