Semi Protection

Oblivion talk:People/Archive 2

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This is an archive of past Oblivion talk:People discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page, except for maintenance such as updating links.

NPC Pages

There's been talk on and off for a while about trying to create some type of infobox for the NPC pages. Most recently, GuildKnight brought it up at Oblivion Talk:Rohssan. In response to that, I put together a sandbox version of an infobox at User:Nephele/Sandbox/2.

If we are contemplating going through and revamping most of the NPC pages, it seems like it's worth doublechecking what info people would like to see added to the pages, and in particular what info should be included in an infobox. Looking through the various NPC statistics there are a few ideas that crossed my mind:

  • responsibility
  • level
  • health
  • essential?
  • follower?
  • factions
  • class (I've already added this to the current sandbox version, but thought I should bring it up for discussion while I'm at it)

Does anyone think some or all of these would be worth including on most NPC pages? Or are there other useful statistics I've overlooked?

As for the logistics of doing it, I was thinking of doing an info-dump from the construction set with a lot of the other information needed for the new infoboxes, all properly formatted, etc. I'd probably post it in one of my sandboxes so anyone who's interested in updating NPC pages can easily cut and paste the info. Adding in a few more statistics to the dump is trivial. In other words, as long as we decide ahead of time what we want, there's no additional work to add one statistic or twenty statistics.

Any feedback on any of these ideas? --Nephele 17:48, 7 March 2007 (EST)

Looks good so far! definitely think everything you listed should go in there, maybe Aggression too? Jadrax 17:56, 7 March 2007 (EST)
Mind if I take a crack at compacting some of the design a bit? Seems a lot of things are given a full row for something that will never be more than one word. Kind of wastes space. Another idea that occurred to me just now was the possibility of color-coding the charts like we did on the Magic Effects. I've got a color-scheme for races already as seen on Lore:Demographics, which could work. It could even be programmed to choose the color automatically via a template like Magic Effects used. (Though that would be for you to do - I'm great with charts but still only so-so with intricate template coding.) I'm going to see what I can do to streamline this chart a bit. Meet me at Camera Three in a few minutes... --TheRealLurlock Talk 18:02, 7 March 2007 (EST)
I've almost got it - the one thing that's bugging me is that the Template:Navimg template insists on creating a new line for its image. Is there any way to fix that? I can't quite figure what's going on there... --TheRealLurlock Talk 18:21, 7 March 2007 (EST)
Yep, color-coding the boxes according to race would definitely be doable... especially if you could give me the codes for the colours you chose on the demographics page. And I can see compacting the table some. But I think I'd prefer to spell out what the training skill and level are, and what the services are... although the icons make great sense on a table of all the NPCs, I don't think space is at such a premium on the NPC pages that we need to force readers to learn the icons and/or hover over the icons to find out what they mean. I figured adding the icons adds some decoration to the table, and helps people who are pretty familiar with them, but I'd prefer not to rely on them as the only source of information here. Oh, and she's level 10, BTW ;)
Jadrax: consider aggression added to the list :) --Nephele 18:22, 7 March 2007 (EST)
Colors:
Race Color
Altmer #dfbe00
Argonian #86ac01
Bosmer #847000
Breton #993365
Dunmer #848484
Imperial #0000ae
Khajiit #f39a00
Nord #00ffff
Orc #118500
Redguard #841a1a
One problem is that some of the colors are too dark to read against, so I had to change the text to white. Not sure how easy that is to template, but I'll bet you can do it. As for the icons, I'm trying to make them into navimg's, with rollover text in case you don't know what the icons mean. That's some more template work to get that to happen, though. --TheRealLurlock Talk 18:52, 7 March 2007 (EST)
I suggest trying to implement the schedule for the NPC into the table. It probably won't fit, but we could even put the times the Npc's home (if they have a home). --67.142.130.47 19:14, 7 March 2007 (EST)
I agree trying to document each NPC's schedule better would be a good addition to the pages. But I don't think trying to squeeze the schedules into an infobox makes sense, because for some NPCs they can get somewhat complicated (one day/month travel to another town, when at home visit three different inns, go to the marketplace on Sunday, etc.)
I've updated my sandbox with most of Lurlock's ideas, but not quite all ;) Unless we want to make the infobox fill the entire width of the page, I don't think it should try to contain all the information.
  • Moving the quests in particular seems to require dropping useful information (i.e., the quest description), so I'd rather keep them out of the box and have more info.
  • Adding a picture to the box pushes the useful info fairly far down the page (off the page for most readers). And I know there are some NPC photos (e.g., Dar-Ma) that are super-tall and therefore will be much worse.
  • It also seems that trying to squeeze the "training" and "other services" into half of a column requires losing some information, so I'd prefer to keep those full width. Also, there will be NPCs who offer training, but no other services, or vice versa. And there will be NPCs who sell spells, which I was anticipating being another section listed under services. So it's easier to deal with all that variability if each of those sections is full-width.
  • I've added the other suggested statistics at the bottom of the box.
So, any preferences from anyone else on some of the design details where Lurlock and I differ? --Nephele 19:36, 7 March 2007 (EST)
Yeah, I was a bit iffy on the picture. I actually did find one Oblivion female redguard, but she had a tall vertical picture as well, so I opted not to use it. Personally, I think we should just stick to head-shots for all the NPC pictures, but try convincing everybody who ever uploads a picture to keep to that. As for the spell-merchants, I realized fairly quickly that this template won't work for them. I'd suggest keeping the spell-charts the way they are, on the left, beside the sidebar. It fits in with the text, and it's not generally wide enough that they'd interfere unless you have a VERY small monitor. I'll give an example on my sandbox. --TheRealLurlock Talk 20:36, 7 March 2007 (EST)
The color idea for the various races appears great! Once you agree how the "revamped" NPC pages are gonna be, I can take a city or two and go through the NPCs therein. Dabs on Chorrol. :-) The black on dark gray (Dunmer) is a bit hard to read: I suggest lighter gray background or changing the text color to white for this one as well. But I don't think anyone is going to have extensive text in a colored box? I like Nephele's latest sandbox very much. However I have suggestion: swap Gender and Race. Thus, Race becomes first in that group as a more significant piece of information than gender, and will then furthermore be grouped vertically with the character's level. Finally, I suggest the statistics be dropped from the "Other Statistics" heading, since A) almost half of the stuff under it isn't actually any kinda stats and 2) I generally want to deprecate the word statistics. --FMan | Talk (contribs) 21:35, 7 March 2007 (EST)
Actually, I had the Race and Gender swapped like your suggestion originally. I swapped them for two reasons. First, generally each NPC page begins with a sentence like "So-and-so is a male Imperial", so you see gender first. Second, both Race and Class link to pages for all Races and Classes, while Gender and Level do not. It felt more natural putting the two linked ones next to eachother, rather than on opposite corners. Oh, another change I think is that we don't need to have the "Gold" field use the word "Gold" both before and after the number. Just seems redundant. By the way, Nephele, if you make this into a template, can you arrange to have it non-game-specific, so it can be used with Morrowind as well? Most of those NPC pages aren't done yet, so it'd be nice to have this system in place ahead of time. --TheRealLurlock Talk 22:20, 7 March 2007 (EST)

I suppose at the moment I've dropped the links on both "Race" and "Class" in the first stab at a template. With race it was mainly a matter of not thinking about it at the time. But with class, I feel like giving a link to Oblivion:Classes is going to lead to the same question that came up a day ago about NPC-only classes. I'd like to create a page like Oblivion:NPC_Classes that lists all the classes at some point; with a template it would be easy to then change that word to a link. Also, I think I'll wait on swapping race/gender again until there's more consensus... it's another trivial change to the template.

As for non-Oblivion-specific, I've been trying to stick in NAMESPACE instead of Oblivion whenever I remember. There are probably a few additional tweaks that are needed, such as the fact that pages on Essential NPCs and Followers seem unlikely to exist in Morrowind. But I'll leave those types of tweaks until the basic template is working. And keep my eyes open when Morrowind NPC pages start to use it to catch anything that crops up. --Nephele 22:44, 7 March 2007 (EST)

What if you should swap that too, ie. say "NN is an Imperial male"? I think race is more important than gender, so it would make change for it to be prevalent. Would it make sense to create a list of people to allocate places to work on, as to avoid two people working on the same NPCs, or am I going overboard? This just seems like a major project, so proper managing would be in order. --FMan | Talk (contribs) 22:52, 7 March 2007 (EST)
Not to try to bring this into a political debate, (most people see gender as more important than race when looking for potential mates, but we don't want to get into a whole gay-marriage vs. interracial-marriage thing here) I just wonder why you think race is more important? Going back to the games, personally, I can't usually tell the difference between one race and another in these games - Bretons, Imperials, and Nords all kind of look alike, and Altmer, Bosmer, and Dunmer can be difficult to distinguish at times as well. However, it's almost always immediately apparent whether the character is male or female. (Though when you're talking about Argonians and Khajiit, the distinction is slightly blurred, but it's usually not that hard to tell.) --TheRealLurlock Talk 23:13, 7 March 2007 (EST)
Looking at the template now... Is there a reason why the race has to be given twice? Seems to me it should be possible to just say "Redguard" once, and it would automatically figure out which category to put it in. I know, the categories are plural. (I have only myself to blame for that I guess, since I set them up originally - a mistake I deliberately avoided when doing the Morrowind race categories.) Seems to me, if we're going to redo all the NPC pages with this template, we should take this opportunity to move and rename the categories so they all use the singular form of the race name. That way you can just use one entry in the template, which will work for both Morrowind and Oblivion, and save you a line of redundancy. --TheRealLurlock Talk 23:26, 7 March 2007 (EST)
Hehehe. In my opinnion the difference between races is much bigger than the difference between two NPCs of same race and different gender - as a whole. It took me some time to learn the different races, but now I couldn't mix them up even if I was asleep. ;-) If you see a picture of an NPC, how do you tell his/her gender? Especially, more easily than the race. Remember, visual is more important although this is blurred by the fact that most NPCs feel obligated to say something on sight. I am talking about the Elder Scrolls world then. :D Otherwise gender issues are also blown out of proportion usually. --FMan | Talk (contribs) 23:28, 7 March 2007 (EST)
I'd love to implement the template on the pages. I play on 360, so I'd have to leave a few places blank, but hopefully that would at least make it easier on whoever would be willing to tackle that, just filling in the blank spaces. The latest version looks great! --GuildKnight 23:44, 7 March 2007 (EST)
That's very nice! The more labor available the better. :D I would like to questionalize the inclusion of the invisible Responsibility and Aggression numbers. The Responsibility rating of the NPCs bears little meaning - except for thieves or other unlawfuls wanting to exploit it being low - if at all possible even. Aggression then is almost always 5 for friendly NPCs and a significant deviation from that might be better described in detail. --FMan | Talk (contribs) 00:01, 8 March 2007 (EST)
Looks just about perfect to me. I don't have any preference, as to whether sex or race need to come first, so Nephele's reasoning for keeping and class together makes sense to me.
What I want to know is what Nephele means by "doing an info-dump from the construction set". Would that involve an impossibly huge amount of manual lookup and typing, or do you know of a way to extract the information automatically? If it's the former, is that really necessary? When I started reading this discussion, I had assumed that we'd just look up the information on each person that we're doing ourselves. -- JustTheBast 00:11, 8 March 2007 (EST)

Answers, answers....

  • Race given twice. The main reason is me thinking ahead to a few oddball NPCs I know exist, who need to go into the Oblivion-Other_Races category. Having two separate race entries will make it easier to deal with those cases
  • Responsibility and aggression can definitely be discussed more. Responsibility affects a few things (will the NPC report a crime? Will a merchant fence goods), which probably need to be documented better. I haven't figured out too many details of how Aggression affects gameplay, so I'll let Jadrax defend its usefulness ;)
  • My main idea for how to avoid duplicating work dovetails with my idea on how to prevent editors wasting their time doing stuff that a computer can do much more easily: I can dump pre-formatted data to User:Nephele/Sandbox/4 (using scripts to pull the numbers out of the Oblivion.esm file and automatically assemble all the info; no manual typing involved). If someone wants to tackle a NPC, they grab the relevant data and delete the entry in the sandbox. As long as everybody only works on NPCs listed in my sandbox, no overlaps.

Feedback on how to make the data dump work more efficiently is welcome (as is feedback on most other topics). --Nephele 00:16, 8 March 2007 (EST)

Aggression is used by the AI to determine what Disposition level will trigger hostility (effectively, start combat). Maybe each NPC that has a special activity follow from his/her Responsibility level would have it documented otherwise (state this NPC is a Fence) etc. Alternatively, instead of reporting the number directly the result could be given as in "This NPC will report crimes directly". Of course some sort of a shorter method would be used but a categorization might be better than (only) the number. I'm just throwing ideas and my thoughts here - I don't really care how you do this. ;-) Unless we read the data directly from the Oblivion.esm file with a custom program, there is no way to automate extraction of data from the game. Is the information so far in the NPC pages reliable or will a part of this project involve verifying the existing data? --FMan | Talk (contribs) 00:50, 8 March 2007 (EST)
Replying to FMan:
  • Since I am extracting this data with some custom tools, it is really easy for me to pull those numbers out and print them... aggression and disposition are two of the easiest ones for me to get. So difficulty of digging them out shouldn't be a factor in deciding whether to add them to the page.
  • I'm assuming most of the existing data on the NPC pages is accurate (although I'm sure there are occasional mistakes). But on the other hand, any basic info that I can dump directly from the Oblivion.esm file is sure to be accurate (the following section describes where my info gets limited in accuracy). So I don't know that verification is really needed as part of the process, but probably some info will be replaced by more accurate information along the way.
Random details and questions about the data I'm dumping:
  • Factions: What I'm listing right now is the full name of each faction, after deleting the "Faction" part (just to save redundancy). That works well for some factions, but gets screwy for others. For example the full name of FirstEditionFaction is "Faction for First Edition NPCs", which with this system it gets truncated to "for First Edition NPCs". So should I
    • leave "Faction" in for all factions?
    • leave "Faction" in for messed up cases like FirstEditionFaction?
    • use the editor ID instead of the full name?
  • Available: This is the trickiest bit of info to extract. For some NPCs it's trivial, because they have a well-defined time period when they offer services. For others, they by default offer services, but then there are a whole list of exceptions, time periods when they don't do that default behaviour. So it's the info that's most prone to errors, and the main one that I still need to spend time figuring out before dumping out thousands of NPCs. (Although it's one that won't be provided at all for NPCs who don't provide services).
  • Buys/Sells: I'm providing an automatic entry for "buys" because that's the easiest to figure out from the Oblivion.esm file. Probably in a lot of cases, what the NPC "buys" is pretty similar to what he/she "sells". But I know there are cases where what is sold is more limited (i.e., Rohssan's page says she only sells blade weapons; I haven't confirmed that yet). Pulling that out of the Oblivion.esm file automatically is more trouble than I think it's worth
  • City and Store/House: Another case where automating it is more trouble than it's worth; this info should be pretty easy to cut and paste off the existing page.
  • Essential: All I'm doing right now is checking whether the NPC is essential at the start of the game; most of these "Always" entries need to be changed to "Sometimes" based on what's said on the Essential NPCs page.
  • Follower: I don't even know how this option is coded into the construction set (if someone knows an easy way to get this from the construction set, I could look into automating it). But in the meantime, I figure it's something that needs to be entered manually from the Followers page.
  • Health/Magicka: For now I'm just going to be dumping NPCs with fixed health/magicka, i.e. NPCs who have a fixed level. I know all the equations now for health/magicka of variable-level NPCs, but I haven't spent any time trying to figure out an easy way to summarize those equations. So I'll leave that bit of head-scratching until we're running out of other NPCs to update.
-Nephele 01:13, 8 March 2007 (EST)
I'd say, unless it's really easy to handle special cases, always remove "Faction" and trust that the editors who make use of your data are intelligent enough to correct it where needed.
A NPC is a Follower, if their AI includes an "accompany" or "follow" package that targets the player.
-- JustTheBast 03:58, 8 March 2007 (EST)
As for the Essential/Follower things, I'd say that should be optional. Characters who are not essential or followers (i.e. most of them) should not have that show up at all. (Plus, that gives the option to not have these fields show on Morrowind pages, where they function differently. It should be worth noting however, that Morrowind DOES have essential NPCs. But unlike Oblivion, you can kill them like anybody else. Instead of them getting back up, you'll just ruin your game and make it impossible to finish the Main Quest instead - which means it's actually MORE important to know who is essential, also in part because you can't tell within the game if somebody is essential until you kill them, by which point it's too late.) But anyhow, I'd favor just having the Essential and/or Follower tags appear on the NPCs they apply to, and be absent for everyone else. You could even have the field display the quest(s) during which they are essential/followers, possibly.
Oh, "Available" should also be optional - it doesn't apply at all to Morrowind NPCs, who are always available (in the exact same place) 24 hours a day. --TheRealLurlock Talk 09:48, 8 March 2007 (EST)
Feedback:
  • Race vs Gender. Based on gameplay, I think a case can be made that race is more important than gender, since it is relevant in several quests (e.g., Hermaeus Mora's); I can't think offhand of any quests where knowing the gender of NPCs is important.
  • Thanks for the advice JustTheBast... I tweaked a couple obvious faction name problems but left the rest as is.
Updates:
  • Essential, follower, and available are all now optional in the template
  • The data dump in my sandbox is correctly filling in essential and follower now (for those NPCs where it's appropriate), including quest links to the relevant quest for followers.
  • I think the data in my sandbox is ready to be used if anyone wants to give it a shot ;) Given that a few people have expressed interest in starting to update NPC pages, I'm hoping to not be doing too much of that myself. But everyone is very welcome to mess with my sandbox: copy, edit, delete, whatever.
--Nephele 17:53, 8 March 2007 (EST)
I certainly intend to take on some of the work - but not now, since it's half past twelve, locally, and I'm going to bed. Maybe I'll do some tomorrow morning at work, while nobody's looking. ^_~ -- JustTheBast 18:23, 8 March 2007 (EST)
Hmmm.... I just ambitiously tried to add information for a few hundred NPCs to my sandbox, and as a result created a hideously large page (300+ kB), which is very slow to process. Since I've got to run right now, I'm going to leave it as is. But let me know if I should do subpages letter-by-letter or something like that. --Nephele 11:37, 9 March 2007 (EST)

Just tested out the NPC Summary template on a Morrowind NPC to see how compatible it would be. See Morrowind:Lorbumol gro-Aglakh. There's a couple problems:

  • Morrowind uses the Morrowind People category, not Category:Morrowind-NPCs. I suppose this could be changed if the template is going to be used on every page, but it could be a hassle. Personally, I think it would be easier to change Oblivion's categories, since both Tribunal and Bloodmoon also use "People" instead of "NPCs".
  • Morrowind race categories are singular, rather than plural. Personally, I think the Oblivion categories should be changed to this as well. It would (as I mentioned above) eliminate the need to mention the race twice in the template. As for those "oddball" races, there's about 3 Dremora in Oblivion, and a couple more in Morrowind, plus 1 Dwarf. Those are pretty much the only exceptions. I think for those cases, maybe just having an optional field to cover them would take care of it? Or they don't have to use the template as such. Just subst: it and change the fields manually on those rarte cases.
  • I'm pretty sure that Mercantile skill is irrelevant for merchants in Morrowind. This field should be optional somehow.
  • Aggression and Responsibility do exist in Morrowind, I've realized, only they're called "Fight" and "Alarm" instead. Can these be added as options?
  • Service providing NPCs exist in places that aren't stores. The above example lives at the Fighters Guild. There's also quite a few NPCs in Morrowind (and Oblivion as well, though not as many) who do not live in cities. This field should maybe be changed to accommodate them.
  • Some features need to be added to Morrowind to make this fully compatible. For example, there's a link to Morrowind:Commerce, which does not exist, as well as a category for Category:Morrowind-Merchants. These are not problems with the template per se, but it does mean that some features should be added, to prevent red-links.
  • A major problem will arise when this template is used on Tribunal or Bloodmoon NPCs. Since it's set to automatically use the page's namespace for all its links, these will all end up pointing at non-existant pages. I suppose the easiest thing to do would be to create redirects in the Tribunal and Bloodmoon namespaces that point to the equivalent Morrowind pages.

Anyhow, these are just a few things I ran into, I'll let you decide how they can be dealt with. --TheRealLurlock Talk 12:09, 10 March 2007 (EST)

Hmm... the problem with making people think you can work miracles with templates is that then you're asked to come up with more and more miracles ;) What I've done for now:
  • For Oblivion, the category is Oblivion-NPCs; for any other namespace it is now NAMESPACE-People. Once the majority of Oblivion pages are changed over to use the new summary, it will be easy to change Oblivion to Oblivion-People for consistency, but guessing that it might take a while to get that point, I figured for now it's better to continue to use the existing category name.
  • Races are now (in theory) changed... it may take me some more testing to make it really work. So what should happen is:
    • If you provide just |race=Altmer (and no |racecat=x) it will fill in the Race box with a link to the Altmer page (i.e., change "Altmer" to "Altmer"), and use Altmer to create the category.
    • If you provide for example |race=Akaviri and |racecat=Other_Races, it will fill in the Race box with the provided link and use Other_Races to create the category.
  • Merc is optional... if you don't provide merc, then gold will expand to fill that whole line. Just to be less inconsistent, I then decided to flip the locations of merc and gold (so no matter what, gold is always on the left side of the box).
  • alarm/fight can now be used instead of resp/aggress
  • I think the new |loc=Location tag could be used for any case where the NPC is somewhere other than a store or house; I made sure to position it after city, so you could provide both |city=City and |loc=Location.
  • The Oblivion-Merchants category is a new one that I added with this template (and Oblivion-Spell Merchants, Oblivion-Trainers); I figure it seems like a useful category, for Morrowind, too, so I've left in that those new categories are automatically being created.
  • I've left the Morrowind:Commerce link in for now since it sounds (to me) like you might want to set up that page. If you'd prefer to have it made a non-link for Morrowind, I could do that instead.
  • I've created a new |namesp= parameter to use for Tribunal and Bloodmoon (and presumably for Shivering in a few weeks, too). Set it to |namesp=Morrowind and it will override the local namespace in a handful of places (links to races, health, magicka, commerce, mercantile) but will still use the local namespace for categories, bread crumbs. That might still need some finetuning to get it used exactly where it's needed, but it should address the general issue.
Now I just have to hit save on this updated version and hope that I don't break every page in the process ;) --Nephele 13:00, 10 March 2007 (EST)
Much appreciated. I made a minor correction, in that the template colors were still using "racecat" instead of "race", so it all went grey if racecat was not defined. I'm also in the process of moving Category:Morrowind People to Category:Morrowind-People (using dashes is more consistant to the site.) It didn't occur to me that after this template has been added to all the Oblivion NPCs, you can move the categories simply by editing the template. That's definitely cool. So we can work towards site consistancy after the fact. I think if we make all the category changes, (using People instead of NPCs, and making the races singular instead of plural), then the template can probably be somewhat streamlined. I wish I'd thought this far ahead when I originally created those categories, as it would save a bit of hassle now, but once it's all moved over, it should be relatively simple to change, definitely good news. --TheRealLurlock Talk 13:37, 10 March 2007 (EST)

Summarizing NPC Health

While tackling NPC pages, I encountered a question that also has relevance to other pages (e.g. Dremora): what is the best way to summarize the health of NPCs who level-up? For comparison, we have reasonably short equations for calculating health of creatures, such as ogres: 26 x (lvl-3), min=406. But the equations for NPC health are much messier; even for a NPC of known race, gender, and class, it's still about three lines of equations to calculate the health for all levels. What I'd like to decide upon is a relatively short equation that's accurate, but also contains enough information so someone who really wants to can infer the full set of equations.

What I'm leaning towards right now is a formula such as (using Viranus Donton for an example):

(eqn1): 43 + (5+2.6)x(PC-2), PC=6-20

This will accurately provide Viranus' health for player character levels 6 to 20. The reason for using (5+2.6) instead of just 7.6 is that it allows the high-level equation to be easily figured out, in this case

(eqn2): 100 + 5x(PC-2)
[For those who are curious about all the ugly details, Viranus' health at PC=1-2 is 17 (43*0.4). The equation for PC=2-5 is
(eqn3): (43 + 7.6x(PC-2)) x LevelFactor
It's basically just (eqn1) but scaled by LevelFactor, which is an ugly fudge factor described on Oblivion:NPCs#Health. The high-level equation (eqn2) doesn't kick in at level 21, because there's a funky intermediate stage (levels 21-29) where the health is:
(eqn4): 70 + 6.1x(PC-2)
Then from levels 30 and up, the high-level equation (eqn2) can be used. The one bit that can't be quickly inferred from the proposed (eqn1) is the details of (eqn4), such as what level it goes to and what the per-level health increase is. But you won't be too far off using either (eqn1) or (eqn2)].

So, how does something like (eqn1) look to people who haven't memorized the contents of Oblivion:NPCs? Without reading any of the extra info, would you be able to figure out basically what it's saying? And realize that it's not going to work at PC=1 or PC=30? Or would it be too intimidating to even contemplate using? Any suggestions in that case on how to make it more user friendly? --Nephele 04:15, 9 March 2007 (EST)

My suggestion would be to list the separate equations on multiple lines, as necessary. (Oh, and make the spacing around operators consistent.) To use your example:
PC=1-2: 17 (fixed)
PC=3-5: (43 + 7.6 x (PC - 2)) x LevelFactor
PC=6-20: 43 + 7.6 x (PC - 2)
PC=21-29: 43 + 6.1 x (PC - 2)
PC=30+: 43 + 5 x (PC - 2)
It's gonna be a bit messy no matter how you do it, but doing it as a mini-table allows a person to quickly locate the correct equation for their level and apply the formula without any clutter. --Robin Hood 00:31, 4 August 2007 (EDT)
I agree with Robin Hood. Until I happened across this conversation, I had no idea what that jumble of numbers on the NPC pages stood for or how they were applied, but the little table he/she posted above is very intuitive and makes perfect sense. You could even link the word "LevelFactor" in the table to the explanation at Oblivion:NPCs#Health. --GuildKnight (Talk) contribs 00:12, 5 August 2007 (EDT)
BTW, it just occured to me that this might be a job for NepheleBot, or am I misunderstanding what the Bot can do? --GuildKnight (Talk) contribs 00:17, 5 August 2007 (EDT)
Personally, I don't think there's room on the NPC articles to write out all the equations, nor do I think it's needed. Just the one equation that's being provided right now is cramped. That one equation will cover the majority of the cases, because it provides the NPC's health completely accurately at intermediate levels. For some NPCs, that one equation works from NPC level to 4 to 50 or even in a few cases from level 1 to 80 (in particular for mage-type NPCs). Finally, providing the five equations listed by RobinHood still won't provide all of the info that a reader might want: LevelFactor in particular isn't explained, so the reader still has to go to another article to interpret the equations.
I'd prefer to provide a single writeup at Oblivion:NPCs#Health or Oblivion:Health that explains how to interpret the NPC health info. That example could provide a few examples and spell them out in detail: show how to take the one equation and use it to figure out the NPC's health at levels outside the stated range. It seems to me that would answer questions for readers who care about the details, without inundating every single reader with all those details. --NepheleTalk 00:50, 5 August 2007 (EDT)
I don't think room would be much of a problem, as the boxes will expand as necessary to fit the equations. I tried it on one with 5 lines, and it would've looked reasonable had I been able to figure out how to get it not to wrap lines when I didn't want it to. (I don't imagine there's all THAT many with more than 4 or 5 lines, are there?) Besides, if someone's checking the health for some reason, chances are they're interested in knowing it, and don't want to have to "decrypt" the equation. As GuildKnight said, the LevelFactor could be linked, so anyone looking for that info would jump right to it. Anyway, those're just my thoughts...personally, I'm not all that concerned about the health of the NPCs. If I can't kill 'em when I need to, or if they're dying on me when I don't want them to, I'll tweak down the difficulty slider, and their health will no longer be an issue. :) --Robin Hood 01:25, 5 August 2007 (EDT)
Oh...alternately, you could make the equation in the Health box short, and for intermediate levels, then put a Full Health Details section in the NPC text...maybe even do it as a "real" table. (Or if you're feeling insanely ambitious, you could not only do it as a real table, but put a separate entry for each level from, say, 1 to 50...but that would be an insane amount of work, and I can't see any special reason to take it that far.) --Robin Hood 01:28, 5 August 2007 (EDT)

Good point, Nephele. I didn't know how to figure out the numbers before, but I didn't try to because it didn't matter to me. If most NPCs have as many different equations as Viranus Donton, I can see how it would be a little much. I still like the PC=6-20: 43+(5+2.6)x(PC-2) better than the 43+(5+2.6)x(PC-2), PC=6-20, though it still doesn't really make a difference to me. Just my two cents. --GuildKnight (Talk) contribs 01:36, 5 August 2007 (EDT)

I have a novel suggestion. How hard would it be to make a mini-calculator applet that can fit into the box on the template? You'd just have 2 boxes, one with level in a drop-down list or user-entered field, and the other with the health for that level. That way, the user wouldn't even have to think about the equations. Just punch in their current level and see what it comes out to. I'm pretty sure that creating such a feature wouldn't be that hard - though implementing it on every NPC page would be a real pain. What do you think? Possible or pipe-dream? --TheRealLurlock Talk 01:45, 5 August 2007 (EDT)
Oops, I thought I posted this half an hour ago, but it got frozen in an edit conflict :) And then another conflict... So this is more followup to my previous comments than a response to everything that's happened since. Once I get this posted for real, I'll read through the new info...
Or, another option that I'd find preferable to adding four equations to every NPC's page would be to create a NPC calculator, that's linked to from each autocalc NPC's infobox. For example, you could select a NPC's name and the calculator would show you the NPC's health and magicka at every level. Or you could also select your character's level, and it could give you all of the NPC stats (health, magicka, fatigue, attributes, skills) at that level. I've already got all of the equations to do this coded up. All that would be needed is the javascripting to make it interactive. It wouldn't be too much more work for me than setting up the bot to add the equations to every NPC's page. --NepheleTalk 01:48, 5 August 2007 (EDT)
OK, now I think I'm caught up. The calculator can't be inline on the NPC pages, because it will require javascripting and there's no straightforward way to embed javascripting into wiki text. It would be easier to have a standalone html page (somewhat like the alchemy calculator, but this would be much simpler than that, and purely javascript: no submitting or ajax required) that's got all the info set up there. --NepheleTalk 01:53, 5 August 2007 (EDT)
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