User:Gwyneth Llewelyn

Profile

Born:

31 Jul 2004

About:

Winking Loudmouth

Achievements:

• Still around here!
• Edits SL Wiki in her spare time

Yay! LOTS of templates!

If you have peeked into my user page, it's highly likely that you've caught my name on the SL Wiki logs, desperately and furiously creating new templates over a comparatively short period of time...

Well, everything has a story. And here's mine!

In mid-August or so, I was busily trying to get the old QAvimator to compile under the latest-generation Qt framework, at least on macOS (I might be able to test it under Linux as well). Things were actually progressing well (who'd thought...) — not bad, for someone who only heard about Qt, but never actually coded using Qt's libraries, and who had learned C++ in the mid-1980s and never really did much afterwards — and at some point I was double-checking animation priorities. I was pretty sure they went up to 4, but couldn't quite remember if they started at 0 or at 1. A friend in SL told me that I was completely out of touch, and that priorities, these days, were 'theoretically unlimited' but for all practical purposes, most of those being sold these days would be at priority 5 or 6...

That got me completely flabbergasted. And, naturally enough, I immediately tried to upload one of my old animations. Sure enough, the familiar BVH uploading dialogue box popped up, but — exactly as I remembered it — it didn't allow any other priority but 1, 2, 3 or 4. Was my friend confused? Or making fun of me? She sort of hinted that 'it wasn't possible to upload them at higher priorities using the "usual" way'. So, uh... what is the unusual way of uploading animations?!

Well, it was time to peek into the SL Wiki, and, to my utter surprise, my friend was right! Apparently, the current generation of the SL Viewer does, indeed, allow animations of at least priority 5 to be used, and possibly even 6. Priority 0 anims did also exist, but they were reserved to the so-called 'Linden Animations'.

Although I couldn't figure out how to upload anims with a higher priority than 4 (at least using the standard viewer), it seems that, when using a BVH editor, you can set specific bones to higher priorities, and the uploaded animation will respect such priorities. Although technically you cannot upload a full priority 5 animation, the workaround seems to be to simply set all bones to 5 (or higher...), and upload the anim as priority 4 — the viewer should not change those priorities to a lower value, but rather respect them. I don't know, I haven't tried it out myself, but it surely explains why it seemed to be impossible to override some animations I've got. Hm. Worth exploring a bit!

While browsing the SL Wiki for more animation-related information, I noticed that there was a small notice saying that two articles were to be merged together, something which was proposed... in 2011 (!). The proposal is actually quite reasonable (no links here, since they may already have been merged at the time you're reading this) and I hope it goes ahead. Still, what caught my attention was how poor the Merge message was. I wondered why it didn't stand out as, say, on Wikipedia.

A little peeking and probing showed that the template used for the merger proposal is simply way too ancient, and that's why it doesn't look even remotely like what Wikipedia has.

Ok, so it was time to roll up my virtual sleeves and do some template tweaking. I'm a bit rusty at WikiSyntax, but the cool thing about MediaWiki is that you can, of course, 'learn from the masters', namely, from either Wikipedia itself or the general-purpose reference wiki for all MediaWiki installations. And of course there are a few more! Vastly inspired by those great MediaWiki template writers (i.e., shamelessly copying their code), I started copying some of the templates over to the SL Wiki. After all, that's exactly what the earliest SL Wiki writers did, in the late 2000s — that's why there are so many 'familiar' templates, as well as some very early hacks that don't exist in Wikipedia anymore but are faithfully preserved here, exactly as they have been written in, oh, around 2005 or so.

The trouble with starting to edit Wikis is that it's hard to stop.

So, once I 'ported' (= shamelessly copied) the most generic Merge template — and actually figuring out that the particular choice used was not present on Wikipedia.org any longer, although it had been preserved elsewhere — it was clear that there were some other templates missing in order to make that template work. Hmpf. Ok, so let's figure out what those templates actually do, and copy them as well.

You know what happened next.

The 'new' templates, of course, rely upon a few more; so, I had to copy them over as well. These, in turn, depend on others still... and so on. It's not an exponential, unbounded, uncontrolled growth: rather, you have to trace some of those templates to their root, and, once you get there, you can switch to the next branch in the tree-of-templates, follow it to its root, and so forth, until, at the end, you have all templates you need to get that original one working satisfactorily.

Only... sometimes this means adding a few dozens of new templates. Or perhaps even a few hundreds. Some are very small one-liners; but in the past decade, Wikipedia (as well as their sister projects) have started to document all those templates in a standard way (the visual design will match each wiki, of course, but the underlying functionality is pretty much the same). Since I pulled in templates from different sources, that meant adapting them to one particular design. Such designs, of course, require more templates. Which, in turn, rely on even more templates just to do some fancy UI effects. Grumble! That meant adding another few dozens of templates, just to get the documentation right for the other templates that I actually needed!

This was actually going well for a while, with 20+ tabs open on my browser, each following a specific branch of the tree-of-templates, going deeper and deeper, until I started hitting some roadblocks.

The first was easy enough to spot: video support — on those pages embedding video (mostly from Torley...) explaining how several things were done — was broken. That's not quite LL's fault: they were using a very old template, designed by my friend SignpostMarv Martin, who adapted it for use in the SL Wiki, as an extension, which the Lindens, back then, were glad to add. It used Flash to embed video (like pretty much everything in those days did). But around 2020 or so, Adobe dropped Flash support entirely — the browsers having started to discontinue it, one by one, as HTML5 video became the de facto standard, even though Flash continued to be supported for a while as a 'fallback' option.

The trouble is that you cannot directly embed things on pages of a 'standard' MediaWiki installation. Indeed, the work done by SignpostMarv Martin was to create a special extension that allowed videos to be embedded with the <videoflash> tag. Without that extension, such a tag — defined at the system core PHP engine, not on the templates — would simply not exist. We'd need a similar extension for HTML5 video embedding, or possibly just change the existing tag and let it embed HTML5 video instead. This is actually the work of a few minutes, since SignpostMarv Martin released his extension code as free and open source.

When Flash was officially discontinued, the MediaWiki community improved on that work, and created their own video-embedding extension, EmbedVideo. This is not installed on the SL Wiki, so there was nothing I could do about that.

Back to the merger template, I noticed that the icon looked simply horrible. And no wonder: it was an ancient PNG fro pre-historic times, when browsers had a 640x480 resolution at best. It was time to replace it with a modern, contemporary  SVG, which, being vectorial, renders flawlessly on all possible resolutions, present and future.

And this is when I noticed that SVG support on the SL Wiki is broken.

[to be continued...]

And in the very remote case that you wish to know more about me...

You see,

I'm just a virtual girl in a virtual world...

— Gwyneth Llewelyn (talk)

Visit my blog (some years it even gets updated)

More info on me on the Second Life History Wiki

My reported issues:

View the issues Gwyneth Llewelyn has filed at jira.secondlife.com

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I, Gwyneth Llewelyn, declare my intention to make all contributions I have made to this Wiki under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (International) license (or any posterior version, at your choice), but allow any re-licensing under a different license, which, however, must include terms that comply with CC-by-SA.

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Haiku
Wonderful summer A redhead loudmouth winking beyond the flower — Gwyneth Llewelyn