GuildWiki talk:Style and formatting/Armor/Art gallery

Size of image
I find that 150 px is a little big, I'm thinking of resizing to 125px maybe even lower. With 2 full gallery with headgear it gets a really big.&mdash; ├ A ratak ┤  16:27, 25 January 2007 (CST)
 * I'm not against this idea. Users can always click on the images to see a bigger view. If you change it I'll keep an eye out for ones that aren't on template. - BeXoR  [[Image:Bexor.png]] 22:50, 25 January 2007 (CST)
 * If you look at my sandbox you will see a exemple of each size. I find 100px to be nice but was wondering if people find it to small.&mdash; ├ A ratak ┤  10:10, 26 January 2007 (CST)
 * That actually looks much better. Hopefully other people will share their opinions too! - BeXoR  [[Image:Bexor.png]] 10:26, 26 January 2007 (CST)
 * 100px looks okay to me. :) --Glynnis   18:05, 26 January 2007 (CST)

Vabbian Paragon F
It's checked off as green, but no earring shot. Do the earrings change color, and is there a need to switch it to ? Craw   14:11, 3 February 2007 (CST)
 * I don't consider earring to be that important. They are only there for completness.  So in my opinion it should be consider done.&mdash; ├ A ratak ┤  15:27, 3 February 2007 (CST)

Armor Poses
There's been a recent tendency to take screenshots of armor in some "at attention" pose. While this does take a lot of work to do and it does create uniformity, please consider the following. In a clothing store, they often pose the clothing on a mannequin to create a loose, fashionable feel. It's true that if the poses were stiff and uptight, it wouldn't appeal to the eye as much. Every piece of armor that is posed in this "/attention" emote is suddenly rendered dry and undesirable.

I'm all for uniformity, but it is my opinion that, if we are to start posing the armors the same, we could probably choose a better pose. And that's just my personal opinion. I'd be more than willing to help on the alternative to this. --Cyann 17:07, 15 February 2007 (CST)
 * See User_talk:Bexor/1 for previous discussion. -  B e X or [[Image:Bexor.png]]  01:15, 16 February 2007 (CST)

Syntax
In the Syntax section, why is the grey headgear section missing entirely? I don't think it's missing from the actual template, but it's not on this page, it was taken out a few edits ago for whatever reason. The comment was "this is definitely not right" or something along those lines. WHY? O_O RoseOfKali 08:47, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

Category:Armor gallery screenshots
Since when? I've never heard of this before and I've been doing armor galleries for quite a while now. A "Screenshot" category is enough, there's no need to categorize them further. I mean, WHY? Do you have any idea how long it would take to re-categorize all the armor gallery screenshots? RoseOfKali 17:43, 9 August 2008 (UTC)


 * You don't need to recat them, but we have a couple thousand images and it's quite hard to sort through them as nearly none of them have cats. So I thought it'd be nice to, you know, get going on the new und uncatted ones. To cat the old ones is a bot task, but there's no hurry. --◄mendel► 23:42, 9 August 2008 (UTC)


 * I see. RoseOfKali [[Image:RoseOfKaliSIG.jpg]] 00:39, 10 August 2008 (UTC)


 * "uncatted" is sleepy for "unlicensed", as in "when we add a license, we can add that category at the same time". --◄mendel► 18:53, 10 August 2008 (UTC)


 * But I don't type in the license, I use the drop down. :P I can never remember what to type for the cat, you need to create a one-word template for that (or something equally short and easy to remember). ;) RoseOfKali [[Image:RoseOfKaliSIG.jpg]] 20:32, 10 August 2008 (UTC)


 * That was easy: type or  in the upload summary (ag is short for armor gallery). Short enough? --◄mendel► 06:03, 11 August 2008 (UTC)


 * That's better. Now let's see if I remember it next time. :P  RoseOfKali [[Image:RoseOfKaliSIG.jpg]] 17:24, 11 August 2008 (UTC)


 * We could put that into MediaWiki:Licenses to make it even easier to use, I just can't think of how to word the description. &mdash;Dr Ishmael [[Image:Diablo_the_chicken.gif]] 18:22, 11 August 2008 (UTC)


 * That would be the best if you could do that. I mean, if you really wanna get fancy, you could do armor screenshot, item screenshot, monster/NPC screenshot, other screenshot, or something like that...  RoseOfKali [[Image:RoseOfKaliSIG.jpg]] 17:06, 12 August 2008 (UTC)


 * GWW has lots of image categories, we could try to set up a cat tree similar to that to better organize our... what was it, 14,000 screenshots? &mdash;Dr Ishmael [[Image:Diablo_the_chicken.gif]] 17:42, 12 August 2008 (UTC)
 * 21000 screenshots. --◄mendel► 06:28, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

Isle of Solitude
I'd appreciate it if I could get some comments on the Isle of Solitude lighting - I think it's pretty neutral as well. It is possible to place people at teh top of a stair (the "other" base works well) to have only sky as the background. I have also been using Texmod to create a white wall and floor to take pictures in front of. Comments? --◄mendel► 06:21, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

Mesmer Elite Kurzick armor/Female Mask problems....
it is tagged for higher standards on the mask,can't see why.... There are good quality, neutrally lit frontals in both undyed and color, and a side view for a mask this low profile is somewhat useless at best. If someone can discern what needs to be improved, I have the mask, just post and tell me what's needed, Or drop me a pm in game, "Mender of Bad soles" is the character I will likely be on. Bad soles 04:21, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
 * No, they are not neutrally lit - the undyed image is in an area with a reddish light, and the dyed image is in an area with very "shiny" light. The dyed image is also very low quality, probably due to a high jpg compression ratio.  The section titled "Image quality expectations" on this guide has a number of pointers on how to get better images, specifically our standards for "neutral" lighting and optimal graphics settings.  I'd also recommend using a color other than green for the dyed image, it's too close to gray on mesmer masks - try red or purple instead.  &mdash;Dr Ishmael [[Image:Diablo_the_chicken.gif]] 05:31, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

Gah, not sure how I didn't see that before, but my gal's hair cover's part of the mask, might not be a good idea for me to take the shots.... Bad soles 05:42, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

Low Rez Armor...
&larr; Moved from User talk:Dr ishmael I've been eyeballing some of the low resolution armor screenshots (I'm giving special attention to the Mesmer Obsidian armor/Female at the moment, but Warrior Tyrian armor/Female and Paragon Elonian armor/Male are more examples), which are so low resolution that much of the detail present on the armor is severly degraded or missing (eg, the chain-link pattern on the warrior armor and the patterns present on the paragon dye areas, although the chunks of obsidian on the mesmer armor are almost completely missing). Do you think there would be strong objection if I were to replace some images of this nature with something that includes a little more of the detail? Yamagawa 05:08, 8 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Go right ahead. Bigger and better armor images are always appreciated.  &mdash;Dr Ishmael [[Image:Diablo_the_chicken.gif]] 05:49, 8 February 2009 (UTC)
 * So noted. I will consider these fair game for updates.  If I replace a perfectly good set of images with a higher resolution set without stating what detail I intended to reveal/improve, I will consider it fair game for reversion.  Yamagawa 19:41, 8 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Usually just comparing the new image to the previous should make it quite obvious, so don't worry about it too much. A lot of these need a larger size (around 200x500px or so, instead of 120x300), and better jpg compression (i.e. NOT MSPaint), as well as higher Anti-aliasing.  All of these points have been discussed many times before, and I think you are familiar with them.  If you think you're improving it, do it.  If something is "wrong" with your new version, we will comment on it and let you know how it can be improved.  If you are not sure, you can do one gallery as a start and ask for input.  If people like it, you can do more the same way.  RoseOfKali [[Image:RoseOfKaliSIG.png]] 21:23, 8 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I would prefer to state the improvement anyway. Otherwise, someone else might think that 'Bigger has got to be better' and use it as an excuse to start replacing decent pictures with crappy (but high rez) pictures of their own.  Rather than let that start happening, I'd like to leave a clear precedent of not replacing things *just* for the higher resolution.  (If resolution is an issue, then please add it to Style_and_formatting/Armor/Art_gallery as a suggested minimum standard.)  If in your judgment some armor needs new screenshots then tag it for replacement, and if I run across such a tag, I'll gladly replace the images (If I have access to the armor and time).  Absent such tags, then I fully intend to state the reason for the replacement, and absent such reasons I'm counting on you to make at least some noise to me about 'replaced for no cause'.  I don't expect you to need to make such noise to me.  I just want the precedent in place, giving you something to point to if someone starts loading poor quality images and then points to me saying they are improving the resolution same as I do.  Yamagawa 22:31, 8 February 2009 (UTC)
 * You raise a good point about the S&F. I think there should be a "suggested" image size at the very least.  And improving the resolution is not acceptable if the new image violates the current S&F requirements as opposed to the previous version, so a revert would absolutely be warranted in that case.  I think 200x500px is a reasonable ballpark size, which will vary with different characters proportions (a Female Sin vs a Male Monk, for example).  Basically, the part where it says "Click the images to see a zoomed in version" or something along that, it should hold true, and the images should be at least about 25%-30% larger than standard gallery size to reveal details.  If you replace an image simply for resolution, a comment like "higher quality" would suffice and imply that the new version is compliant with the standards, but not give implicit reasoning for someone to put up their crappy high-resolution shots, since "quality" refers to not just resolution, but the overall standard compliance.  RoseOfKali [[Image:RoseOfKaliSIG.png]] 01:41, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

Settings for quality etc
Might well be worth noting that simply dragging the graphics bar from whatever it was on to highest in guild wars will NOT touch the anti-aliasing setting at all - anti aliasing settings have to be set manually. As well, simply dragging the bar will set post-processing effetcs on (desirable to have it off, with a few exceptions). Easiest way to set everything up for screenshots is set anti-aliasing to 4x (max), drag the bar to max then untick post processing (then set shadows to medium if you don't want high-qual character shadows turning up on screenshots - they will show as jagged versions of high qual. shadows and let your position relative to the light source but will screen as a gray spot under your feet).

Also of note is that some objects use transparent textures that have edges that are not generally anti-aliased with standard GW anti-aliasing settings, eg. especially noticable on a Frog Scepter. I've had an NVIDIA card recently and I know you can force anti-aliasing of transparent textures etc. from the NVIDIA control panel; they are not enabled by default. It will fix AA problems for those items but the setting is off by default because it's resource intensive (consider this if you don't exactly have the best card). If you have a terrible, lower-end graphics card which cannot run GW smoothly on decent graphics settings, you may not be able to get good results with anti-aliasing no matter how high you set it, resulting in jagged edges.

As well, I've been told NVIDIA and ATI cards handle anti-aliasing differently - and so far, ATI's methods are superior. I don't purport to really understand much of why this may/may not be the case. I do, however, notice that I often get artefacts from anti-aliasing with this NVIDIA card and these drivers - white lines and white pixels along anti-aliased edges which shouldn't be there and which annoy me to no end, which no driver updates have fixed. I don't know whether this also happens with ATI cards and I'm not exactly in a position to splurge and find out. Jennalee 15:33, October 7, 2009 (UTC)