The Sonic Center
Welcome Center => Information Kiosk => Non-Sonic Site Discussion => Topic started by: Rolken on April 13, 2007, 10:10:24 pm
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So subsites have reached a baseline of functionality. RPG, Thorn and MK have adminship of The Unofficial Sonic Center, and Shadow Jacky, sonicam and magnum12 of The MegaMan Center. Any other sites will be created when they work out a plan of attack, and in particular, ks8 needs to pick one of his plethora to start with.
Here I'll explain how the subsite administration tools work. There's several things that you'll have to go through me or maybe SM for at the moment, in particular working out forums, creating skins, writing content pages and altering the menu and directory structure; most of these will eventually be directly alterable.
If you have adminship, you'll see an extra set of links below Site Info.
Ranking creation tools-
Rank Items - Create the various structure of the game (games, categories, levels, divisions)
Rank Charts - Identify which combinations of G/C/L/D are actual ranking charts and how they work
Rank Links - Create connections between charts to generate automatic totals and points
General management-
Rules - Record the competition rules
Updates - Create 'Site Updates' that appear on the front page and under Recent Updates
Dirgen - Refresh the site directory structure after creating/renaming stuff
Source haxing tools (you probably won't need these)-
Function - Run an arbitrary function
Source Check - Determine which files have been edited since the last time you checked
So if you want to rank a game with a TSC-style setup, work as follows.
Go to Rank Items.
- Create the game, eg. "Sonic 1" / "S1" / after "None"
- Create the general categories necessary if they don't exist, ie. "Time" / "Times", and always an "Overall" / "Overall". General categories are site-wide.
- Select your game, and create the game categories; game categories are indications of how a sitewide category applies in one game. Weight is how much each rank counts towards points totals, and absent is how much is piled on for missing stats (or 0 for no total), eg. "Times" / "1.0" / "60000"
- Create each level, ordering them appropriately. Levels are game-wide. You'll also want a "Total" level at the beginning (order after "None") and an "Overall" level at the end. There'll be multiple level processing soon, but for now you have to do them one-by-one :(
- Select each category, and create the respective divisions, which are per game category. For Times, we might have "Sonic" and "Tails", again with "Total" always at the beginning.
- For the special case of "Overall", create the one division of "Overall".
Done with Rank Items, so on to Rank Charts. This is where charts are processed in bulk. Pick a game/category, then specify the chart properties and checkbox every division/level combination that applies. What they do is as follows-
Format: how the stat is displayed.
- Score: straight number
- Second Time: xx:xx
- Centisecond Time: xx:xx:xx
- Millisecond Time: xx:xx:xxx
- Rings: oxxx
- Overall Points: special leadership/championship category
Creation: how the stat is obtained.
- User Submission: The majority of stats; plug it in thru submissions.
- Direct Submission: Stats that are trucked in directly from the game. Nothing uses this yet.
- Automatic Total: self-explanatory
- Automatic Overall: leadership/championships
Now, you'll want to run through the matrix of checkboxes a few times for every combination of various stats. If we were doing SADX times, you'd do stuff like so:
- "Centisecond Time"/"User Submission"/"Asc" and check all the submitted times but Gamma and submit
- "Centisecond Time"/"User Submission"/"Desc" and check Gamma's and submit
- "Centisecond Time"/"Automatic Totals"/"Asc" and check the Total level under Total and every character but Gamma and submit
- "Centisecond Time"/"Automatic Totals"/"Desc" and check Gamma's total only and submit
- "Overall Points"/"Automatic Overall"/"Asc" and check Overall level / Total division only for the leadership
- Repeat similarly for the other categories
- For the Overall category, hit "Overall Points"/"Automatic Overall"/"Asc" check Overall/Overall and submit.
Now that that's done, time for Rank Links to tie together the totals/overalls. Pick a game and a category, and an array of buttons will appear. What those buttons do is as follows-
- Link Level Total: Connect all of a level's charts with the level's total. Only ever used on SSR thus far, and won't work without selecting a level.
- Link Division Total: Connect a division's chart with the division total. Almost always used; you need to pick a division.
- Link Category Total: Connect the level or division totals into the category-wide total. Run after first connecting the divisions, and you don't need this if there's only one division in the category.
- Link Category Points: Connect everything in the selected division into the category leadership.
- Link Game Points: Connect everything in the selected division into the gamewide championship.
So to fully connect everything, you'll want to select each division and hit DivTotal, CatPoints and Game Points, and then CatTotal once for the whole category. You don't have to do anything with the Total divisions, and bear in mind that occasionally you won't want to link up everything, eg. Gamma in SADX.
If you get backtalk trying to link stuff up, that's a sign that you missed something while making rank charts, so go back and make sure all the appropriate totals and overalls actually exist. Once it's linked, write up whatever rules apply and hit dirgen and the game should be ready for business. Submissions require no intervention except to kick out shady users, which CodeGirl handles in IRC for now.
This is all revision 1 stuff, so not all the corners are fully rounded yet. In particular, you'll run into trouble if you go about doubleclicking buttons and not filling in datafields properly or mistakenly adding stuff willynilly. This'll be remedied in the near future, but for now head to chat for help.
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I'm getting a weird error when I click on the rank items, rank charts, and rules sections that won't let me update anything. Fatal error: Call to undefined method skin::form_start() in /home/tsc/htdocs/source/admin/rankmgmt.php on line 19
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You need to change your skin to "FMan CSS" first
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Rank Charts is updated. Existing classes are colored silver; you can check them to change the order/format/creation if you mess it up.
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Excellent.
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Thanks for the dedication. :P
But seriously, I've been confused as to what to do next so I'll be sure to read what you have to say here.
edit: FYI, Party Game first then Blinx. But PG may take a lot of work so maybe Blinx first...
edit: how do I go about using the tools? I'm really confused as to how to get started..
edit: Started to do some HTML for my front page as a test-through. Will see how it goes... And Rolken, do I have permission from you to add SatSR and Shuffle mini-games as it doesn't seem like they'll be getting added any time soon (if at all). You mind? I know it should stay with TSC but considering the circumstances...