Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-5596770-20131110231601

Having completed the Infobox_train migration, I would like to begin work on the wagons. My first thought is to condense all wagon types into one template. While this will increase the complexity, I am certainly up for the challenge, and I think it would make the end goal, easy data entry, more succesfful.

Before I begin, I wanted to collect any ideas that people had at the outset, so start your brain engines, and give me your thoughts.

I'm thinking I'd like to start with two template parameters: 'wagon_type1' and 'wagon_type2'

These parameters would be used to define what type of wagon you were dealing with. The question is, how do I abbreviate every resource and mail and passengers and experience into one x-letter acronym? At two letters, mail and marble look exactly the same, without doing some weird abbreviation that noone will remember.

The question is, do you prefer 3-letter or 4-letter? I see no reason to have to type in every name fully, but it will still work if someone chooses to. I'm leaning towards 4-letter, because it makes a lot of the resources look better {wood, nail, fuel, wire, mail, pass}. Even at four letters, shorter acronyms could be used as alternatives {pax, exp, XP, etc.}, but I would want to keep variations to a minimum.

The next hurdle is expressing the % bonus. For cargo wagons, it is capacity. For mail/passenger wagons, it is profit. For specialty wagons, it is bonus. Rather than have 3 different input parameters, which all express the same thing, we should come up with a common parameter for everything. Perhaps just 'percentage'?

As before, I will be demoing the work through the KittyLitter template, with progress updates as things go along. The first is a demo of what the working acronyms might look like. Sample code is provided, and then the results.

 