Images

Before you upload an image, please take note:

Image tips

Avoid duplication

Please take a look at Basic Procedures and UnrealEd Interface – try and reuse some of the images on those pages if possible.

File Names

New interface screenies to be called:

interface-Ed3-{something descriptive}

For tutorials:

{name of tutorial page}-{description or number}

(we're using dash (-) as a separator because:

Mychaeel dislikes the use of dots to separate parts of a file name; they are, in his opinion, reserved for the file extension. (and fair enough )
underscores look ugly, especially because they're disproportionally wide in most proportional fonts. They're also a pain to type because they're shifted.)

File Sizes

"800x600" Landscape.

Rough style notes

Tarquin: I'm slowly working on new screenies of the interface. rough notes for common style:

font: Arial 16 plain

Problems

Ugly PNGs in IE

Some Wikipedia logo PNG images on the site are made with an alpha channel. This is so they blend with different colour backgrounds.

Unfortunately, IE does not support PNG alpha channels correctly. Instead of the page background colour, you'll see grey (or some other colour from your Windows appearance settings). So unless you change browsers, you'll get "ugly but functional".

Image Deletion by Rude Bots

Downloading bots and spiders often manage to delete all our images by dumbly following every link (see Offline Wiki). We believe the situation has been fixed (but bots are still not welcome, for the load they put on the server). The deletion links are now "hidden" in regular view; to display them, users need to check "Show image management controls" at the bottom of the page and click "Show." That will hopefully keep even the most misbehaved bots out.

Should the problem occur again, check the image uploader log later to find out whether it was a spider again. Restoring images is more of an annoyance than a problem now. (If Mych ever happens to meet somebody responsible for such a "feature" like "following" POST forms, he'll personally slap him or her with a large trout. One with spikes.)

Renaming (admin only)

Tarquin: I'm planning on hacking the wiki script to do regular search & replace, so renaming images should be easier.

Mychaeel: Warning. Abuse of such a feature has the potential to wreck the entire site if it's publicly available. – We could also update the image uploader to enforce certain syntactical rules for image names.

Tarquin: I meant for admin-only: I'll tack it into the page-renaming utility, since it does a S&R itself to update links.

Tarquin: If I rename image files via FTP access, will that upset anything?

Mychaeel: You should rename the previous versions in the "deleted" subdirectory accordingly too, or they'll be "detached" from the current version in the main image directory. Otherwise, nothing bad can happen.

Image Management

EntropicLqd: Is there any way of viewing all of the images that have been uploaded to the web site? I'll be needing to upload a bunch of images for the tutorials I'm going to be doing, but don't want to needlessly duplicate images if I don't have to.

Tarquin: The image uploader page lists them all. I can put up a 2nd version of that page that loads all the images too, as thumbnails, but it'll be a long load.

EntropicLqd: That's OK - I have a big pipe . It would be useful. Unless you can think of another way of searching for images.

Tarquin: I have a cigar. I'll fiddle with the cgi, see if it's as simple as I hope it is

Tarquin: ok, try http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/cgi-bin/imageupload.cgi/wiki-ext/imageupload_thumb.htt

EntropicLqd: Thanks m8. I'll give it a go when I get home (don't want to try it from here it might get the site blocked). I assume that fairly long filenames are OK - it means I can prefix the images with the tutorial they relate to.

Tarquin: I think a lot of the ones that have generic-sounding names aren't very good, eg "Texture Browser" includes the actor browser in shot (which is irrelevant), and is a jpeg (bad quality; use gif for simple colours). There's one somewhere I made of the surface flags which I hope is generic enough: I positioed the window so the button that opens it would be in-shot too .. (neat or wot?).

It seems we have a lot of dross:

What the hell is the Nikon pic? it was a camera , deleted
the spinning "email" logo? gah? it goes, IMO deleted
who is Picf0019 ? dunno, deleted

Mychaeel: I agree about the generic names (like "Fig_A"). Some images should be deleted too since they're Wiki-unrelated. Fortunately the image referrer check prevents that sort of abuse.

http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/images/icesig – forum signature image. deleted
http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/images/Picf0019 – some private wedding picture. deleted (poor photographing skills btw. )

If you want to replace a poor JPEG-encoded user interface screenshot by a better GIF or PNG one, use the image uploader's "Replace image" functionality.

It seems we have a lot of dross:

loads of stuff that's too dark
too big
personal map screenshots: which ones are used in tutes, which ones are just "here's a map I made"?

And the "what the hell are these" bucket:

(bucket is empty )

Mychaeel: Delete 'em. And I'll add a note to the image uploader that remote linking isn't possible.

Mychaeel: Done.

Wormbo: Having the name of the user who uploaded (maybe also deleted) an image like on Recent Changes would be nice.

ZxAnPhOrIaN: Or a column in the image uploading area that says who uploaded the picture.

Mychaeel: That'd mean I'd have to keep track of that in an extra database file. Right now everything is saved in and by the file system. We do have the IPs/hostnames of the people that uploaded those files though.

ZxAnPhOrIaN: Ok

Wormbo: That's what I meant. Is there any reason why the pictures above shouldn't be deleted?

Tarquin: Nope. kill 'em!

Wormbo: Deleted the pics.

ZxAnPhOrIaN: Got rid of those red x's.

Requests

EntropicLqd: The two images I need right now are the "static mesh browser" button, and the "add volume" button.

Tarquin: They're already in. See Add a volume and Static mesh browser

CH3Z: requested on Wiki Development Header: "Game Logo Smileys"

ut.png, ut2003.png, devastation.png and so on.

16x16- alpha-channelled- without an antialiased edge.

Tarquin: Um. I thought you said you'd do these? nm, I can do the UT & UT2003 ones at least. Mych? Any idea for filenames?

CH3Z: I was afraid I might have taken the discussion down prematurely. I said I would make them when they were going to be gifs. But I don't have experience with png's. Those are the file names Mych asked for with different extensions now. I see you figured out that the full discussion is in revision 184 of Wiki Development and I saw your notes. Gotcha, I'll get a better feel for this.

Tarquin: I'm doing: U1, UT, UT2003, Devastation.