User talk:Furrykef

I was thinking it would be helpful to show/hide furigana for templates with reading. This way, you could by default hide furigana and only show them if you are unsure about the reading. This site [1] seems to have an easy way of adding hide/show, but it requires a change to Common.js which I do not have access to. Or pehaps it is already possible and I do not know how? What do you think? Blutorange 19:50, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

I've had that idea too. I might get around to it soon, but I've been extremely busy lately... - furrykef (Talk at me) 14:04, 4 January 2011 (UTC)

Hymmnos-Reading

Did you have the Hymmnos font installed (see link at template)? It should look like this: Or do you think displaying the original script is not a good idea? Blutorange 09:23, 8 January 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, my mistake. - furrykef (Talk at me) 09:36, 8 January 2011 (UTC)

Voice Clips

Do you know how the legal situation is with uploading voice clips from games here and would you even want that (server costs, ...)? Blutorange 09:37, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

Voice clips are fine with me, though it'd certainly be easier to avoid legal trouble with older games than with ones that have just come out. I'd really love to get the clips from Star Fox 64, for instance, but, alas, I have almost no idea how to rip them. - furrykef (Talk at me) 09:44, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

It's possible without "hard ripping" http://www.megaupload.com/?d=G5PRJ0GG :) Although it requires triggering each voice you want to record in-game... If the voice clips are to be hosted on the wiki, you will need to allow an audio format for file uploading on the wiki (currently only images are allowed). For playing the audio, the easiest way would be too use <embedded> html syntax, or perhaps implement an audio player plugin on the wiki...? Blutorange 14:43, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

Will you consider allowing .mp3 files to be added (or your preferred format; I hear others are better with the filesize/quality tradeoff)? Will you consider allowing .anki files to be added? Jcdietz03 13:20, 23 April 2011 (UTC)

MP3: Yes, I will try to add support soon. I prefer OGG, but MP3 might be better because not everybody has OGG support. I've yet to look into what would be the best solution here (for one thing, I'd like the user to be able to play clips without leaving the page). As for Anki decks, I'm not sure. For one thing, not everybody uses the same methodology for making Anki decks. I doubt many Anki users use a model like mine. (For example, I typically create three cards per Japanese fact.) - furrykef (Talk at me) 13:32, 23 April 2011 (UTC)

I've added html rendering to my script and the result looks like this: http://img706.imageshack.us/f/japaneseexample.png/ . The voice clips are implemented with a few lines of javascript, the onmouse-furigana simply use the tag. Implementing this in the wiki should be easy. I think this is the tidiest of of showing the readings, and it also forces you to try to remember how the kanji. Optionally, it would be easy to add some button to trigger showing only kana (and kanji on mouseover?).

The javascript for supporting voice is this:

function DHTMLSound(surl) {
     document.getElementById("dummyspan").innerHTML=
     "<embed src=\'"+surl+"\' hidden=true autostart=true loop=false>";
     }

This works much better than <embed> and doesn't crash the browser.

You would then use it like this:

<span id=dummyspan></span>
     <form>
     <input type="button" value="Voice" onClick="DHTMLSound(\'' .. voicefile .. '\')">
     </form>

Move the mouse over this text.

Blutorange 23:37, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

I still don't know if I like the furigana idea. Furigana like that would be a mess to edit, and quizzing yourself on the reading was never really the intended purpose. As for the voice clip stuff, maybe, but I'm busy with many other things at the moment, so I'm probably only going to concern myself with basic wiki administration for a while... - furrykef (Talk at me) 06:30, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

Provided the reader understands a fair amount of kanji used in the game, leaving out the reading line makes the whole text shorter and so it may actually be easier to read. Also, if one wants to look up furigana, locating the reading in one big line of kana may be harder than moving the mouse over the the unknown kanji. Anyway, I think we should leave it to the reader to decide how to display the information. As for implementation, if the reading for each kanji word is known, it is easy to format the whole line once in kanji and once in only-kana. As for editing, I'm currently writing my text with an IME using a modified dictionary, so that "かんじ" converts +感<かん>じ or +漢字<かんじ>, thus making it ridicolous easy to provide furigana for each word. I then parse this to produce wiki syntax. Syntax such as +感<かん>じ is definitely easier to edit than, say , but I was thinking one could make this even easier by making just a slight change to the template, eg:

{{jp-r-en|「振仮名」とは、漢字又は外来語の上に発音を示す仮名。|「　ふりがな　」　とは、　かんじ　また　は　がいらいご　の　うえ　に　はつおん　を　しめ　す　かな　。」 | Furigana are characters above kanji or foreign words displaying the pronunciation.}}

is easy to read an edit in the wiki, and can easily be parsed by javascript with

  var array_kanji = kanji.split("　")
  var array_furigana = furigana.split("　")
  if (array_kanji.length == array_furigana.length  and  user_wants_it_like_this == true) {
     document.write( span title=furigana[0] kanji[0] ... ) }
  else {
     document.write( kanji | furigana ...) }

This way it's also quite error proof, when the furigana don't match you can just fall back to the current style, and it would preserve backwards compatibility with the current syntax. You could also add an optional argument to the template plain_reading = (default)true you would have to explicitly set it to true, avoiding coincidental matches in the amount of spaces. Blutorange 15:27, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

And here's a working demo of how this might look: [2] or [3]. Note that this is on my home pc, so links may not work when I'm offline.

Dragon Warrior

I may assist in kanjification later on, but my first goal of posting all of my work for this game is done. Woohoo! "Wish list" to "Almost finished" in one week! ^_^

I do have a question: What is the "policy" on remakes? Would the SNES and GBC versions of Dragon Warrior be useful? I ask because I'm going back to concentrating on my "Side x Side" project for the time being, and that's what I'm playing. I'll be transcribing the text to pull out kanji for vocabulary anyway, so it would be no big issue to post it into the wiki as I go. Thoughts? - X loto 03:57, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

I don't really have a policy on it. Do whatever makes the most sense. - furrykef (Talk at me) 04:13, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Okay. In that case, I think I might go ahead with building a Dragon Quest I&II (SNES) page in the near future. The GBC version...I'm not so sure about. There doesn't seem any significant difference between the two so far, except far fewer kanji for the GBC. If I find something drastically divergent I'll reconsider, but from what I've seen having both would be redundant. - X loto 04:35, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Another question, about the naming conventions: We use the title "Dragon Warrior" because that was the N.A. title...what about the remake? It technically has no N.A. title, but it's a remake of a game that does. What would you do--"Dragon Quest (SNES)" or "Dragon Warrior (SNES)"? (I'm probably over thinking it and I should just go with Warrior....) - X loto 04:44, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

I'd go with whichever fans use more often. If you don't know, I'd choose Dragon Quest, myself, but that's just me. - furrykef (Talk at me) 05:09, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Script dumping?

I'm working on a dump for DQI&II, and I was wondering whether you know a way to view the kanji it uses. I've tried a mem viewer, but it seems like the "kanji+" font isn't kept constantly in view like the simple kana font is. But if there's no easy way to do it, I can just post an incomplete dump and add in the kanji as I see them. - X loto

The way I find things like this is I just edit text in a copy of the game (usually making a save state just before a certain bit of text appears, then editing that block of text) and watch for what values print out which characters. Of course, you must be careful to make your dump from a fresh copy and not the one you've been hacking on. Let me know if you need any help with this. - furrykef (Talk at me) 03:11, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

Wow. That's a really good idea. I can just edit the King's opening speech to spout all the kanji at once, then plug them into the table. Thanks! - X loto 07:48, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

Yep! Just be careful not to get any similar kanji mixed up. That can be a pain to fix (usually a mild one, but a pain nonetheless). I remember when I ripped the text from Star Fox 64, I mixed up 左 and 右... - furrykef (Talk at me) 18:33, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

Indeed! I made the King's intro text into a string of about 700 kanji in nice little rows, and I sifted through the first 128 last night.... Only one to give me trouble was 様, I think. The two diagonal ticks in the center of the right half look like a horizontal line in the game font, and searching brought up a mere one instance in the dialogue, but it fit the Princess' speech pattern so I'm pretty confident in it. ^_^ X loto 17:02, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

Btw, I followed you on Twitter...though I see you haven't used it lately, lol ;-) - X loto 21:48, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

Spam >_<

I haven't stopped in for a couple months (blame Xenoblade ;-), and when I came back to check it out every edit has been just spam. Is there no way to block unregistered users from spamming edits? Perhaps there isn't, or perhaps you just decided you'd prefer not to go that route, but there's been so much of this going on that it must be hard for you (or at the very least annoy the hell out of you) to keep up with cleaning all that mess.... - X loto 03:18, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

It's annoying, but so far it's been rare. That's actually the first large-scale attack I've seen; until now it's only been a couple of pages at most. I always check "Recent changes" every few days (often every day) even if I'm not doing anything else on the site, so it's unlikely spam will stay up for too long. As for how to prevent it... I'm not sure. Forcing user registration won't prevent spam since unregistered users already have to answer a captcha, and anyone who can answer a captcha can register. For now I'll just clean it up when it happens and I'll revisit the issue if it becomes a real problem... - furrykef (Talk at me)

There has to be a way to ban this idiot. - X loto 13:15, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm tired of him too. I could just ban the IP, but I hate IP banning because the IP could belong to someone else later on and it will likely just change anyway. Maybe I'll try changing the captchas and see if that trips 'em up. - furrykef (Talk at me) 16:19, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

The problem seems to be that the captcha is not working for edits from anon IPs at all. The captcha question is not being asked and the edit goes through without a hitch. I probably need to upgrade the relevant plugins... - furrykef (Talk at me) 04:08, 8 July 2012 (UTC)

...It may be time to block that IP. He might move to another, and someone else may get his and have to contact you to get access to editing, but it's really ridiculous. By the way, it's me, X. I forgot to log in.--98.87.106.73 22:33, 24 August 2012 (UTC)

Most of the spam now is from creating accounts, and I don't have the IP addresses for those accounts (though I could get them from server logs if I want to... after I start logging things in the first place). I still want to try other measures first... I just haven't gotten around to it... - furrykef (Talk at me) 05:26, 27 August 2012 (UTC)