User talk:Cattwister
Minis Identification
First of all, nice to meet you! I'm a new member of this wiki, still learning how things work. I hope to help improve it without doing too much errors.
- And welcome to the wiki! You're doing great. Cattwister 10:49, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
- Sorry for the error creating my talk page and thanks for your fix, I didn't know that wiki is case sensitive --ErioL 23:45, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
- And welcome to the wiki! You're doing great. Cattwister 10:49, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
Second... Good news!:
- I have discovered the identity of one of your unknown minis! the 4th in the gallery on your page is Narg the torturer, by Hasslefree Miniatures. It looks like a wrestler, so I googled wrestler miniature and ...found! Seems like it is not indexed in this wiki, so you can add it. Something strange I noticed: whilst other photos of this mini show a slotta tab, yours has a flat base, can it possibly be a different edition?
- Well done! I should trust Google and use my words more. I was searching for "Executioner" and never "Torturer" or "Wrestler". Thanks! The slotta/solid base issue is strange and the Hasslefree page only shows a clipped version mounted on a base (it looks like). Cattwister 09:55, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
- I have a hint for the lizardman, don't know if this can really be helpful. I was looking at this pictures of Base_Markings_(Archive) and I was thinking, can it be that under your lizard warrior is not written M or W, but "(C)77" the year of production? I've tried looking in the only Archive catalogue I could find, lizard warrior number 751 is similar to yours, but I don't think it's a match. --ErioL 01:17, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
- I've uploaded a better image with the base. The weapon does look like the that Archive figure but my lizard is otherwise unclothed and doesn't have a dinosaur crest-ridge on its head: the head is more like that of a tortoise. Thanks though - closer than I've got! Cattwister 09:55, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
- I can see from the new photo that it's clearly a letter, I vote for a "W" given the orientation of the copyright mark --ErioL 23:45, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
- I've uploaded a better image with the base. The weapon does look like the that Archive figure but my lizard is otherwise unclothed and doesn't have a dinosaur crest-ridge on its head: the head is more like that of a tortoise. Thanks though - closer than I've got! Cattwister 09:55, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
Resculpting & Alt Images on Image Pages
You mentioned you were cutting out extraneous pics... just wanted to warn you that MEGA did some resculpting on some of the Metal Magic pieces, so maybe keep the Mega pics as Alts until I dig up the email from Johnny L. that told me which figs were modified. Mirliton also did some resculpting on the old Grenadiers they inherited, so maybe keep those Mirliton pics as well as Alts. Once we've determined a sculpt has been modified, we can always bring it out to the galleries to stand beside the originals for comparison, labelled as a remake. I'll certainly want to do that in the Topicals.--Mysticat 12:08, 16 April 2015 (UTC)
- There are two that I am aware of - there was actually a new figure created for the adventurer's cart and I believe on the same model the axle was redesigned. It would be good to know of any others. No rush though. Are you aware that Johnny Lauck used Kickstarter last month to fund Dungeon Decor 2? It includes several Metal Magic figures that he still has the moulds for. I was a backer. :-D And he is actively talking about Dungeon Decor 3 (both produced under his new company - not Mega Minis) Cattwister 22:18, 16 April 2015 (UTC)
- Yes, one I remember was the peasant cart - remade for ease in casting (less pieces). Knew about the kickstarter and his new company. Hope the dog doesn't eat his funding this time around. Put the email lookup on my to do list.--Mysticat 23:03, 16 April 2015 (UTC)
Lateral Navigation
Paste this as the top of the C1002 Clerics page and see what you think. Seems like it would be nice to have lateral navigation across the Metal Magic subranges. If the format seems good, I can wrap this up in a macro so that all the boilerplate cruft doesn't have to be duplicated on every page. --Thegrouch 09:59, 3 July 2014 (BST)
<div style="color:#969696;margin-top: -15px; margin-bottom: 5px; max-width:638px"> <span style="float:right">{{smgl|C1003 Wizards (Metal Magic)|C1003 Wizards}} ▶</span> <span style="float:left"> ◀ {{smgl|C1001 Fighters (Metal Magic)|C1001 Fighters}}</span> <center>{{smg|{{clink|Fantasy 'C' (Metal Magic)|Metal Magic Fantasy 'C' Series}}}}</center> </div>
- Oh, very nice. I like. I was thinking about manually doing this. How will the 'macro' work? I'm vaguely aware that Wiki sites can use 'Templates' that allow you to parametrize markup macros - something like
{{template-name|param1|param2}}
and then that gets preprocessed as a code-snippet like your bit above. So... here we would have something like:{{lat-nav|link-left|title-left|title-middle|link-right|title-right}}
? --Cattwister 10:25, 3 July 2014 (BST)- Yes, that is exactly right. Template is the proper term in the wiki nomenclature, and they are basically just parameterized text substitutions. I'll try to add this today. --Thegrouch 20:48, 3 July 2014 (BST)
- Template added Template:NavLRC. Needed separate templates for the first and last pages (i.e. one without a left link, and one without a right one). --Thegrouch 04:00, 4 July 2014 (BST)
- Oh, very nice. I like. I was thinking about manually doing this. How will the 'macro' work? I'm vaguely aware that Wiki sites can use 'Templates' that allow you to parametrize markup macros - something like
{{NavLRC|C1001 Fighters (Metal Magic)|C1001 Fighters|C1003 Wizards (Metal Magic)|C1003 Wizards| Fantasy 'C' (Metal Magic)|Metal Magic Fantasy 'C' Series}}
{{NavRC|C1002 Clerics (Metal Magic)|C1001 Clerics|Fantasy 'C' (Metal Magic)|Metal Magic Fantasy 'C' Series}}
{{NavLC|C1002 Clerics (Metal Magic)|C1001 Clerics|Fantasy 'C' (Metal Magic)|Metal Magic Fantasy 'C' Series}}
Good work! I've added the Templates to some of the 'C' series pages and will do the rest today but I have noticed that on the NavRC and NavLC pages the text in the middle is not centering properly. So I've hacked around in the HTML (using Firebug on Firefox) and think the solution is to avoid using that float (I've also avoided using <small> and <span> but the float was the problem). The NavLRC (I suspect) only works because the left hand link and the right hand link are there to balance it and are of the same size. The rendered HTML should end up like this (it works in Firefox at least!):--Cattwister 12:11, 4 July 2014 (BST)
It would also be nice if the width was a parameter as well - on pages with the logos at the top I have used a <div style="width:652px"> and I think you have chosen max-width:638px to stop the right-hand link always going as far right as possible. Can you have default parameters on Templates? So the width is 638 unless you specify a final parameter when calling the template... Otherwise I will switch to 638 or the template can switch to 652. Why did you chose 638? 652 is simply a copy-and-paste choice: other pages on the site were already using this. No idea why, I just copied it.--Cattwister 12:11, 4 July 2014 (BST)
- Good catch. Thanks for chasing down a workable alternative, I've made some changes and it should look better now. The only downside to this new approach that I can see is that the text for the three different parts won't flow around each other if the window size is very narrow (if there isn't enough space they just lay out on top of each other in a jumble). To prevent that from happening I changed the 'max-width' to be just a 'width' which means that the nav bar won't try to shrink in a narrow window (which isn't that big a deal since the image galleries are the dominant feature on most of these sorts of pages and they are of a fixed width also).
- The 638px value lines up with the width of the image galleries (full width ones with at least four images). I can't say exactly where the 652 value came from (though it probably was me), I've been blindly copying it around for quite a while myself. I suspect that it was originally used on category pages like here Folio Works to get a result similar to the width of the gallery dominated pages. Why I would have picked a width slightly larger than the galleries ... drawing a blank. I went ahead and added a width override to the NavXYZ templates (yes, the last parameter(s) can have default values) but in this case I would probably just have the image banner divs use the same 638 value. --Thegrouch 23:36, 4 July 2014 (BST)
- As a level of indirection, I just added a CSS style for divs called 'navwidth' sets the width to 638px. Use this for the image logo banners rather than an explicit size, then if we decided to adjust the size we don't need to fixup all the pages. Browsers seem to more aggressively cache the .css files, it it doesn't seem to work then try Ctrl-F5 to force a reload of everything (at least that works in IE). --Thegrouch 23:56, 4 July 2014 (BST)
Base Markings
I added a 'basemark' template giving a more terse form of your image gallery base markings. e.g. {{basemark|"HP 95 BO"}} will produce Base: "HP 95 BO".
I do have some reservations about how widely this should be used though. Those annotations look fine on the Metal Magic figures because the markings are so uniform/concise, but I think that it would be pretty messy on something like the Ral Partha personalities range if all the figures were marked (as an arbitrary example). In the past I've recorded based markings on the image pages themselves, Image:G-flbp-116b.jpg and Image:Simtac-NLR-005b.jpg as examples. That isn't terribly obvious, and was at least partially just a way of recording the data somewhere without having to figure out a better way to embody it elsewhere. Note that there should be quite a few of the Metal Magic image pages with the base markings recorded on them in that style. --Thegrouch 08:43, 6 July 2014 (BST)
- Thanks. I will use that. I had spotted some images with the base marks noted on the image upload data. It *is* somewhere to note the information but I (would suspect) it is prone to being overwritten if someone uploads another image that doesn't include the basemarking data in the upload comment. Maybe? The base marking idea came from Mysticat (I think) - I just nabbed it from the help pages. It's useful in dating the miniatures (Metal Magic codes anyway). But I have been moving towards keeping the base mark out of the gallery cells where I can: see C1040 Female Chaos Fighters (Metal Magic) and the newer table format that I've started using (see C3701 Adventurers (Metal Magic)) even moves the basecode away from the gallery completely and into the table (again where the majority of codes are known). You've commented before on trying to keep the gallery cells cleaner - instead of the over-the-top format suggested here: Images. I can see your point. :-D Anyway - all good.--Cattwister 09:07, 6 July 2014 (BST)
- RE: Is content on image pages overwritten if you upload a new version of an image?
- Nope, that isn't the case. The content of the image page is set to match the upload comment only the first time an image is loaded. The content of the image page isn't modified at all when you later upload a new version of the image. Note that this means that you need to manually fixup any image source annotations (image courtesy of whomever type things) that might be in play when you overwrite an image. --Thegrouch 04:46, 7 July 2014 (BST)
- Eek! "this means that you need to manually fixup any image source annotations" - did not know that. I don't *think* I've made that mistake but good to know. --Cattwister 09:28, 7 July 2014 (BST)
- This isn't as big of an issue as it might seem, consider:
- Image is originally uploaded with a comment of 'courtesy of AAA'. That messages shows up both on the image page content under the image and in the 'File history' section down below.
- Somebody else comes along later, uploads a new version with a comment of 'courtesy of BBB'. At this point the page content is unchanged and still refers to 'AAA'. The file history now has two entries, the top one which refers to 'BBB'.
- At this point you should manually edit the page and update the content to match and refer to 'BBB'. However, even if you forget to do so it is still pretty obvious where the image originated from because it is in the comment for the topmost (most recent) entry in the 'File history' section. In other words, as long as you always put the image attribution in the upload comment then nothing is lost and it is always possible to figure out which attribution is correct. For admins, the situation is a bit more tricky and care needs to be taken to keep the attributions correct when deleting old revisions of images. But for normal users, no data is ever lost, and there isn't any reason to worry overmuch about it. --Thegrouch 21:36, 7 July 2014 (BST)
- This isn't as big of an issue as it might seem, consider:
- Re: "keep the gallery cells cleaner - instead of the over-the-top format suggested here: Images" It was necessarily over the top and written long ago to a) show what has been done, b) what could be done and c) elicit a uniform style from Colin (the main reason, but he seems reticent to stifle our creativity :D). Don't want you guys thinking I like all that stuff on the cells... and where I've put lots of it in a cell (as in the MM changeovers to Mega and the Grenadiers to Mirliton, it's for lack of anywhere else to put it at the time - always figured I'd find another way to record it all, and looks like Cattwister has the answer.--Mysticat 23:18, 16 April 2015 (UTC)
Alt Images
What's your take on "Alt" images? I've been occasionally uploading painted minis but I prefer unpainted - when I have done this I've tried to keep the images separate: i.e. (existing) imageX.jpg, (new) imageX-painted.jpg. I notice that with this (an image uploaded today) that you've used the same filename to overlay an unpainted image on top of the old (much smaller) but painted picture. The older painted version isn't lost as it exists in the history. If it was the other way around (unpainted first, painted second and most recent)... then is there a way to selectively bump up the older image (unpainted) to be the preferred picture for that filename? (if you see what I mean...)--Cattwister 09:28, 7 July 2014 (BST)
- This raises a number of issues, I'll respond to this in depth later. --Thegrouch 21:36, 7 July 2014 (BST)
Small
Chrome and IE render font-size:x-small quite a bit smaller than what <small> was producing before, borderline too small. I experimented a bit and the only way that I found to get the same effective size as before, but without using a small tag (for these two browsers), was font-size:83%. I'm not in any position to tell what the effect is on Safari though. Test page here User:Thegrouch/Test2. --Thegrouch 10:17, 16 July 2014 (BST)
- I'm looking at it now. It was on my iPad that the issue was showing up for the C9999 Promos (Metal Magic) page with the <small> tags - the second link on the left was quite a bit smaller than the top link on the left. But what I have noticed now with your test page is that on Firefox, "x-small" is almost the exact same size as "smaller" (9.9px vs 10px) but on Safari (and from what you say Chrome and IE) "x-small" is smaller than "smaller" - which is what I would have expected. I think that it is Firefox that is the anomaly here - and my main browser. And given that "font-size:smaller" is the same as the original <small> tag (9.9px), (at least that is what I am seeing) swtiching to font-size:smaller instead of x-small would seem to be the answer? My choice of x-small over smaller was random given that Firefox renders both almost exactly the same. I'll change the Template:Nav's to "font-size:smaller" if we are agreed?--Cattwister 10:41, 16 July 2014 (BST)
- On IE, smaller and x-small come out the same (at least at 100% scale, if you fiddle with that they drift apart), and it seems too small. Playing with this a bit more, just setting it to 10.5px actually seems to give the best result across browsers. For IE and Chrome 10.5 produces the same result as what <small> was giving, and that stays consistent across scale/zoom factors. It is a tad larger than what you were getting before on Firefox, but looks acceptable to my eye. See what 10.5px looks like to you, if that is livable, then I would say go with that. --Thegrouch 11:45, 16 July 2014 (BST)
- Looks fine. Good that we use templates to do this. Changes implemented.--Cattwister 12:56, 16 July 2014 (BST)
- As a bonus question - how do we find the list of all templates available on the Wiki? Or (as I suspect) do we have to manage a Category:Template page to group our templates logically together?--Cattwister 13:09, 16 July 2014 (BST)
- Cool. To see all the templates: 'Special Pages' (on the left) / 'Prefix Index' / Pick templates namespace. Note that there is some old crap in there that isn't used. --Thegrouch 22:02, 16 July 2014 (BST)
- On IE, smaller and x-small come out the same (at least at 100% scale, if you fiddle with that they drift apart), and it seems too small. Playing with this a bit more, just setting it to 10.5px actually seems to give the best result across browsers. For IE and Chrome 10.5 produces the same result as what <small> was giving, and that stays consistent across scale/zoom factors. It is a tad larger than what you were getting before on Firefox, but looks acceptable to my eye. See what 10.5px looks like to you, if that is livable, then I would say go with that. --Thegrouch 11:45, 16 July 2014 (BST)
Sanderson Stygia range to replace Monarch Miniatures range?
Hi - I've been updating the Sanderson pages, and in the Stygia range I have a listing picture that identifies the Varl, Human and Vampyr range currently under Monarch miniatures as Sanderson. You can see the listing picture here: http://www.miniatures-workshop.com/lostminiswiki/index.php?title=Image:Sanderson-stygia-snip.jpg
Can I suggest we remove the Monarch miniatures range entries?
Have a think and let me know!
- I've removed the link to the Monarch page from the "Sanderson Miniatures" page. The Monarch page still needs to exist as the Monarch version of "Stygia" didn't just include those figures... however I have changed the filenames on the Monarch Stygia page to match those on the new Sanderson Stygia page - so if we upload a picture of the actual image on one page it will appear on the other. "Sanderson Miniatures" is a bit weird - did they even exist? Or were they ever only a "brand" under Greenwood & Ball? It's almost like we are grouping miniatures by the sculptor here instead of miniatures by a company... - Cattwister 09:07, 13 March 2020 (GMT)
- It's also great to see these figures despite the subject matter - the 1970s was a strange place - I'm glad you've added them. - Cattwister 09:09, 13 March 2020 (GMT)
[User:Cattwister]
- I think there was a lot of crossover between Sanderson and Monarch, and I am still trying to unpick it (unsuccessfully!). You are right though, we need to maintain the links by company. With that in mind - can I make the following suggestions:
Re this page - Monarch Miniatures (Range)
The Arabian Night section AS-1 The Forlorn Pasha should link to Image:Sanderson-harem-02.jpg AS-2 Harem girl, lying on rug should link to Image:Sanderson-harem-07.jpg AS-3 Kneeling nude girl, arm raised offering goblet should link to Image:Sanderson-harem-04.jpg
54mm Stygian Fantasy section
Dwarves section MS100 The Lusty Dwarf should link to Image:Sanderson-woodland-01.jpg MS101 Woodland Flasher should link to Image:Sanderson-woodland-04.jpg MS102 The Delighted Dwarf should link to Image:Sanderson-woodland-02.jpg
My take is that these are the same figures, but with different names according to company - the exceptions being the Dwarves, where the Woodland Fantasy series is definitely 75mm, whilst the Monarch section suggests a 54mm variant. Not impossible, of course - but I'd be very surprised if they were different figures.
Have a think and let me know!
Coopuk
- That all seems reasonable. I've updated the page. - Cattwister 20:41, 1 May 2020 (BST)
Sanderson-Cameo Personalities page - create new page for Cameo Miniatures, and have it as a sub-page?
Hi, I am wondering if we could/should do the following:
1. Create a new page for Cameo Miniatures
2. Move the entire Sanderson-Cameo Personalities page (http://www.miniatures-workshop.com/lostminiswiki/index.php?title=Sanderson-Cameo_Personalities) as a sub-page under the new Cameo Miniatures page
3. Update the Sanderson link so that it refers to Cameo as well as Hinchcliffe, Greenwood and Ball, etc.
This fits in with the Wiki listed by manufacturer rather than by sculptor.
Please have a think and let me know! coopuk 14:25, 29 Oct 2020 (GMT)
- Interesting! I hadn't considered "Cameo" to be anything other than a range name for Sanderson. Are there other "Cameo" ranges? Do you have any information on the company? As a bare minimum, I like to know the country of origin and at least the decade when the first appeared. I've no objection to creating the company page but having some (and in this case "any") information first would be good! :-) I've asked an eBay seller for some more details about the Luftwaffe Pilot in this series - hopefully an address, at least. - Cattwister 15:38, 29 October 2020 (GMT)
- Alas, no more details from that eBay seller but I did get some pictures. - Cattwister 16:39, 29 October 2020 (GMT)