Team Fortress Wiki talk:Tips Revision

The following discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.

Poot details here

Is the Wiki officially tasked to create a list of useful tips? Will the tips be loaded from the Wiki when the map loads, or will they be copypasted in a text file in the gcf and then rot away to obsolescence like the previous ones? — Wind 07:02, 30 January 2011 (UTC)

I asked Robin about the wiki revising them and he liked it, but he obviously holds veto power on tips he doesn't like. They will be copypasted and rot. ;) ~G-Mang (T|C) 07:06, 30 January 2011 (UTC)

Do we get the Steam forums involved in this? This would be a great attraction for users to sign up for the wiki, but one can only imagine the untold horror tips that will be unleashed D: —Moussekateer·talk 07:10, 30 January 2011 (UTC)

I don't think we should keep it a secret or anything, but I'm wary about advertising it on SPUF. Doing so will increase the number of submissions, but considering the "takes all kinds" nature of the forums the average quality of the tips would plummet. It would mean more work for us to moderate these tips and more work for Robin in the even that we miss some of the atrocious ones. I guarantee that people will jump at the opportunity to have their words in the game, but not everyone's words are exactly of the highest standard. A good comparison might be to the hat description contest. Consider the number of submissions there were for that, then consider how many of them were likely quickly dismissed for being poorly written or inappropriate. Now imagine that we were the ones that had to sift through them. There are undeniably some good, intelligent people lurking around SPUF but the forums hold a certain reputation for a reason. -- - _{(talk | contribs)} -- 10:54, 30 January 2011 (UTC)

I'm assuming translation is on hold until we have the English tips in a final, submittable state? seb26 [talk] 07:14, 30 January 2011 (UTC)

I believe that would what we're doing.--Piemanmoo 07:24, 30 January 2011 (UTC)

Tips for Promotional items?

Should there be some tips for promotional items? Like "Don't be intimidated by the Spy's Big Kill, it shares stats with the standard revolver" or "Rumor has it, a few lucky people managed to get a wrench that lets them turn people to gold!" Balladofwindfishes 15:59, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

Probably not. The former example isn't that important to know and can be inferred by the fact that it has no special stats listed when it says "____ is wielding the Big Kill". The latter both is incredibly unlikely to be relevant to gameplay and doesn't actually provide any tip. ~G-Mang (T|C) 19:41, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

Bonk doesn't list stats either, neither does Sandvich Balladofwindfishes 19:45, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

Tips

Is there a specific file within the game files holding all of the default tips? Bandit Stache 14:23, 14 April 2011 (UTC)

Robin Says...

To not bother with kill taunts, and to feel free to add stuff for game modes other than arena. ~G-Mang (T|C) 10:38, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

Le revival!

WindPootis reminded the IRC channel of this ded project, and because it's so delicious we've decided to revive it. There have been some changes made to how the project is handled to make it easier to keep up quality on the tips that are suggested to Valve (the /Final article). The project page has been updated to document the new process. -RJ 00:31, 15 September 2011 (PDT)

Documenting for the sake of open-ness.

It seems that when inquiring with Valve about their interests in the project, the Contribute site would have to be the platform for submitting tips - with each individual author of tips submitting to it (and with that, each modification to a tip would have to be submitted by whomever modifies it). This is not viable for the project and we're making efforts with Valve to try and resolve the Contribute-site dependency. Please feel free to continue contributing to the project, but at this moment in-time there's no guarantee Valve will use content submitted to the project. -RJ 00:23, 16 September 2011 (PDT)

And dis is resolved. Project is a gogogo. Although I'm still unaware how Valve will get them from the Wiki to in-game (do I send them what we've got every [some timeframe], or do I leave them to get the tips themselves)... sent an email to get that clarified. -RJ 17:56, 20 October 2011 (PDT)

We are success!

Good verk everybody. Now Valve have some coding to do to implement the rest of our new tips (so... give it 6 months? only took 4.5 months to get these non-coding-needed tips implemented), meanwhile feel free to keep submitting - although new ones aren't guaranteed to be in the next batch of tips (I imagine Valf are working through these ones - twas the last version of the page I emailed about). -RJ 12:02, 23 March 2012 (PDT)

We've got a problem

Many of the longer tips do not fit in the respawn tip text box. I specifically noticed these two

• "As a Pyro, the Degreaser inflicts less afterburn damage but allows you to switch weapons almost instantly. This allows you to more easily perform deadly combination attacks, such as setting the enemy on fire and then using the Axtinguisher in order to inflict a critical hit!"
• "As a Demoman, use the Claidheamh Mòr to maximize the effectiveness of your Chargin' Targe. You won't inflict critical hits or collect heads, but the extra duration of your charge will allow you to cover more distance, or make a quick escape!"

Both are cut off at the bottom (the first one by a lot). Tips roughly the same length probably have the same issues, I'm not quite sure (seems likely). We're going to have to re-word many of the longer tips to be quite a bit shorter. Balladofwindfishes 07:37, 24 March 2012 (PDT)

Shugo alerted me to this yesterday, but I forgot so thanks for reminding me. The tip container can hold 7 lines of text, the text being in Size 8 Verdana... which poses a problem, Verdana is not a monospace font, it is dynamically-spaced (each letter has its own individual width). That means means we cannot enforce a hard-limit on the length of tips, to find out which tips do and do not fit in the box, we have to test them out individually. I have a few ideas I'm going to play around with to solve this problem, until then we will have to look at the longer tips and see if there's anywhere we can save space - while still retaining the messages clarity. -RJ 10:44, 24 March 2012 (PDT)

Alright, I was wrong with my earlier statement. The game uses size 14px Verdana, but in the files it is defined as "tall" "8". Anyway, I have thrown together a (very hacky and horribly coded) Python script to generate images of the tips, bounded as the tips container allows, that also generates a list of whether or not the tips are too long. The output of the script can be found here. And now I am adding the too-length tips to the 'Suggestions' page to be revised. -RJ 13:06, 24 March 2012 (PDT)

If that doesn't work, you might be able to just make a custom tf_english and remove all the tips except the one you want to test (set it as the only tip for every class). I'm not sure if the game accepts custom tf_englishes though (I don't see why not). Balladofwindfishes 17:39, 24 March 2012 (PDT)

Not sure what you're referring to with "if that doesn't work", guess I was unclear somewhere. The python script used to generate and evaluate whether the tips would fit works fine as far as I am currently aware; if there are any tips it generates as a 'success' (i.e. the tip fits) but in-game the tip actually doesn't fit then I need to be told so I can figure out why the script is wrong (your demo tip is an example of this, the script generates it fine but you've stated otherwise - I'll have to look into that one tomorrow). We can also test with custom tf_english files, but this is a longer and more laborious process than using a script. -RJ 17:51, 24 March 2012 (PDT)

That tip cuts off the bottoms of those letters with hanging parts, iirc Balladofwindfishes 18:15, 24 March 2012 (PDT)

Right I've re-jigged my script - TF2 draws the tips from center in-game, but I don't know how to replicate that with the tools I've got for now... but I've gotten the generated text a pixel-perfect match for when there's 7 lines of text. I'll upload the results later on today, but I'm still going to count tips getting the little trails cut off as successes... it's such a minor detail that it's not worth bothering over - the only solution would be re-doing all the tips so none of them are 7 lines long in-game. -RJ 07:31, 25 March 2012 (PDT)

The preceding discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.