Difference between revisions of "The new HexWiki"

Revision as of 17:16, 21 August 2015

Welcome

Welcome back to HexWiki! The original wiki went offline in 2013. The admin was kind enough to send us (Scrampy and Tommah) a backup of the original site; that backup has been loaded onto this new site. The contents of the site should be the same as they were as of April 2013.

User accounts

All the user accounts from the old wiki are present here too. If you have forgotten your password over the past two years, you can change it here. Let us know if the emails do not arrive; we had some trouble getting that working.

Board diagrams

The bundle that we received from the former admin had almost everything we needed to build the new site. One piece was missing, though -- the code to display the board diagrams. Before we received the backups, we were operating under the notion that we would have to copy content over from z's archive of the old wiki, which he luckily saved from the Internet Archive while the pages were still available. Unaware of how the boards were represented, I designed a simple format for this purpose (see New board diagrams).

When we got the backup, we saw how the boards were represented on the old site. The format is documented at Help:Hex. I spent some time building support for that format into my code, so that all the diagrams will still show up. However, I (Tommah) recommend using the new format going forward. This is for a few reasons:

• The old format is very complex, and some of the features seen at Help:Hex are not supported by my parser. These include borders around the board and automatically restarting numbering.

• The old format has several ways of performing the same task, and the logic is difficult to get right; many of the commands interact with each other in complex ways.

• We have begun building a tool to include board diagrams graphically, and it uses the new board format. You can see its current state at http://hexwiki.amecy.com/board_gui.html. You can build a position there, and the page generates markup that you can paste into your wiki article. Eventually, you will be able to click on a board diagram to edit it in the GUI.

Ideas for improvements

Board images

The boards are displayed in your browser by loading each cell as its own image and then arranging those cells into a table. As you can imagine, it takes some trickery to get the hexagonal arrangement to work. (Until I saw it in action, I would never have believed it would actually work!) In the future, however, we would like to generate each board diagram as a single image. This would be done with code that runs on the server, converting a board representation into an image. Such a method will allow some features that we do not presently support, including shading cells and showing partial boards. (Cell shading seems to be particularly desired; see e.g. Edge templates everybody should know. Diagrams that look like that are actually PNG files.)

Standardize terminology

Players are referred to in various ways: Red/Black/vertical, Blue/White/horizontal. We should standardize on one pair of names (probably Red and Blue, since that is how the pieces appear in diagrams).

There are other examples of multiple terms being used where one could be used (e.g. piece vs. stone, in Edge templates with two adjacent pieces and Edge templates with one stone).

New content

The following would be nice to have.

• Some content targeted at absolute beginners
• More puzzles of varying difficulty. We could consider having a "puzzle of the week" that is contributed by different users every week.

Conclusion

HexWiki lives! The current contents of the site come from a backup of the old HexWiki, taken right before the site went down. Everything seems to work. Let me know if something is amiss. I have checked many pages to ensure that they display correctly, but I may have missed something here or there.

Enjoy the site!