Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

So, lots of people have their futile attempts at being productive for this community and providing something which is inherently good, let me show you mine: I hereby announce that you are welcome to visit and use the Dominions 3 Wiki at

http://dom3.servegame.com/wiki/

A lot of people already know about this and some are even already fellow contributors, for the rest here's a brief introduction:

What is this?

You probably should know Wikipedia, which is an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit and contribute to. This is a Dominions-centered Wikipedia. The Dom3Wiki is meant to be collaborative community tool to track and document everything that you can think of regarding the Dominions game series. As far as I'm concerned, it is a culmination of over one year of work.

What is it for?

The aim is to provide structured, accurate and thorough information to you. Since this is impossible, it is a work in progress and never going to be finished. You're welcome to try and help to make it better, though. There's even a highscore table as an incentive. I dare you to try and beat my score.

How should I use it?

If you have a question about Dominions, you can go there and look if you can find an answer there. In case you found it, good. In case you can't find it but managed to get an answer by some other means, you could document it and add it where you didn't find it on the Wiki to help the next person who is looking for answers.

What is it not?

The Wiki isn't meant to be for discussion other than discussions about the articles on their talk pages. It's meant to be a place for facts and for answers, not questions. Although it could be one, it's not supposed to be a pure filesharing service for the community either. Uploads of images to help illustrate an article are very welcome, uploads of e.g. map and mod archive files unfortunately not (yet!).

Wait a minute, this doesn't look right...

Then please, by all means, fix it. All you need to edit the Wiki is to sign up. If you're smart enough to write an email or write a forum post, then you're smart enough to edit the Wiki, too. It's mostly just text and there's an "edit" button to everything. If you found a lapse somewhere, a slip of the pen, then you can correct it in an instant. No special education is required, just try it. If you found something grave, I have set up a bug tracker where you can report things. Please be aware that my time is limited and I'll probably ignore requests that take a sophisticated effort for an indefinite time.

Thanks

Thanks go to Illwinter for the Dominions game series, Shrapnel Games for publishing it and all the people that directly or indirectly contributed to the Wiki. Which for the latter is the whole Dom3 community. Further thanks go to the Wikimedia Foundation for MediaWiki and to OntoWeb for their work on Semantic MediaWiki which comes the closest to realizing one of my pipe dreams when I started the Wiki. Hopefully one day it'll be possible for me to harness the full power and potential that it offers. From the people that already directly contributed on the Wiki, I especially want to thank two of them: moderation for pushing me over the edge and getting me to start the Wiki when I half-jokingly said I'll do it if you ask me on the IRC channel. He said that he at least would be going to use it as a user and a contributor on a regular basis - lying, of course, because he is smarter than I am, but he was there and provided a lot of input in the crucial early steps. The Wiki's current main page for example is derived from his work. Then there was matryx with a lot of very constructive work, on the technical side with lots of Templates that are still in use at the Wiki right now and on the creative side with his awesome Dominions 3 AAR which can be found there and only there by now. That alone is justification enough for the existence of the Wiki. I'd like to write a short sentence about all the other people that helped as well, but then this paragraph would never finish. In case you feel that you should be mentioned, I hope you don't mind if your name didn't show here. Whatever you did to help should hopefully speak for itself.

Closing

You may now attempt to use the Wiki. I have a devil-may-care attitude about it: Don't be afraid of breaking anything. Please attempt to break the Wiki! If you found any kind of meaning in this post for yourself, you're free to keep it. Cheers! :)

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Wow. thanks lch. I never really though the thing would get to a usable state. Looks nice though.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Hasn't this been around for a year now? I thought you were hiding it from everyone but the IRC crowd for some reason.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Well, he wasn't ready to release it yet I suppose ;)

Still, great work. I've been using it for quite a while already (and noticed a few bugs, which have been already fixed, thankyou lch). And I recommend people to give it an effort. More users mean more (and better) content.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Yes, and no. I haven't been hiding it, I just wanted to wait until it's looking shiny to attract more attention. Since I've already seen a couple of links to it from this forum there are no reasons to retard its release, though. I didn't want to see the usage going down like the Dom3 section at the StrategyWiki because people don't know what to do with it and think it's awkward, plus legal concerns. A few people found use for it already, for the rest there's the announcement.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Congrats lch - this looks amazing.

I find it a great resource, especially since the manual has a fair amount of errors and lack of updated info to begin with, making your wiki the best place to quickly find current, accurate info.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

The whole concept is garbage.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

As soon as I found my guide in there I decided it was a great wiki!:D

What´s the point Sombre? I mean sure if I thought so I could post "this mod sucks" in one of your mod threads, but why? Perhaps there is some irony or hidden joke that I don´t see but if not I think you´re just throwing useless negativity about.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Why? To let me know that my mod sucks I guess. I'd love for people to be free to post things like that. I think currently the moderation would jump on them.

But yes, I'm just joking with lch. Don't get your panties in a twist.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Panties untwisted:p

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Hi lch,

Very useful wiki, great effort, great job!

Keeping up my own futile attempts at being useful to the community, I have added links from my online interface of the spell/forge database to your wiki. So a description off the spell/item is just one click away.

http://www2.onyx.nu/pb/dom3/spells.html

Something which really interests me is reading what other players think of the spells/items, how they use them and so on. Would you say that this is covered by the "What this is not" section above, or are you open to having a fuzzy area where users can leave hints/use cases for the items? In the main article? The discussion page? A new cool page for each article which you can hack together in no time?

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Thanks! Be aware that some spells have multiple versions which share the same name, but that shouldn't be much of a problem because the Wiki has disambiguation links/pages for that.

That's what the Wiki is for, users can and are encouraged to comment on the articles for the units, spells and items. At the moment, the articles for the items and spells are among the oldest code, there is no special "Notes" section for that yet. People can always add a new section to an article on their own, however. Eventually the item and spells articles will get redone so that they have a "Notes" section like all the unit articles have now, check e.g. Assassin and Lord of the Night for that. A couple of spells already have a "Short summary" section, like Doom, where the spell's effects are being explicitly stated, and all the globals have a section titled "A dire portent" which describes the messages that are being generated when the global is successfully cast, see e.g. Gift of Health. In principle, users can leave anything on the article pages. Here are two items pages where you can see what I had in mind: The inspiration sections on The Chalice and especially on The Ark.

Some people already started articles named Key item and Key spell which are linked to from the Main page to highlight important items and spells in the game. Another possibility would be to link to the articles directly from a nation's strategy guide. Basically, you can do what you want. The discussion pages should only be for discussions about the article's layout, not about the item/spell itself, though. The forums are more useful for discussions like that, I think.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

I'm sure I posted in this thread, but the Forum must have eaten it... Great, great job, Ich. Very nice work, particularly the unit descriptions. It's really helpful, and obvious that you put a lot of work into it. I especially appreciate how easy it is to copy the unit sprites. Makes modding 1000% easier.



I did notice that the listed units' equipment is often inaccurate. Natural weapons often seem to be duplicated, and manufactured weapons don't always appear.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

I'm not aware of that. Can you pinpoint some examples where this bug manifests itself? Then I'll add it to the bug tracker and try to fix it when I have time for that.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Here. And here (should be bite+claw, not claw+claw). And so on. You should visit IRC more lch, I could point this stuff out for you ;)

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

I'll just point to the bug tracker again: http://dom3.servegame.com/bugs/

Come on, hurt me. :)

P.S.: I can see it now, a typo on the database import. The data will be refreshed shortly.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Absolutely fabulous job on the Wiki lch. What more can be said other than awesome.


One potential mistake though. Are the siege mechanics in the Wiki correct? Since they appear to be following what is printed in the manual. Which I understand (and have observed) to be incorrect.

http://dom3.servegame.com/wiki/Siege


If the Wiki does have the wrong information on this, then I am surprised, since it was you who pointed out the error in the manual, and also supplied the correct siege mechanic formula :) Link to a brain refresh below ;)

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showt...ght=post685786

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Check the dates, the last time that the Wiki article was edited was half a year before I wrote that forum post. I did debug the game code prior to writing the forum post, so it's likely those are the correct formulas.

I dare you to fix the Wiki article... ;) There are likely more things not up to date.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

A small bug: All capital-only units and commanders are not listed in the "Units" section of nation description page...

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Excellent work lch.
By any chance did you create an import from Edi's spreadsheets for up-to-date core pages on some of these areas? The reason I ask is that if you ended up with a script to export the different sections to text files as a half-way point I could sure make use of that.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

This is great, thanks for all the hard work. I would love to add all my meager content to the site. I noticed that you already have the Jotunheim guide but if you'd like to use my magic path booster guide too, go for it. I'm not really sure where something like that would go though.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

I spent a good hour or two on the site today at work. Two unit entries I noticed were all messed up.

http://dom3.servegame.com/wiki/Davana
http://dom3.servegame.com/wiki/Mandaha

This is because the names of these units were changed in a patch (to Danava and Mandeha).

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Ich == winner!!

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Not a bug, but WAD. Those units are being granted via the national sites, they're not normal recruitables. The site data isn't in yet. DrPraetorius did start adding information about capital-only units by hand, but only for some of the nations in the Early Age, IIRC.

No, I did not use Edi's spreadsheets, in fact it was the other way around, I sent my findings to Edi so that he could update the data in those spreadsheets. Edi did help with recognizing and naming some unit abilities, though. I am reading the data from the game executable so that it will always be up-to-date with the upcoming patches. The downside is that first I have to find it and understand it, and rediscover the formulas that are being used in the game. One reason why the "real" prot and enc values aren't in there yet, they depend on the armor worn.

I can send you my text exports, if you want. The script that I am using is a gigantic mashup of Python code and you have to change the code by hand in order to make it generate the different text files. You'd have to learn Python in order to make use of it.

You can start working on it in your personal space, at User:Sector24/Magic_Path_booster_guide for example. The article can then be moved or linked to wherever it makes sense.

Thanks for the work, that's encouraging. I don't have much time for working on the Wiki anymore and intend to mostly work on the technical stuff, if at all, not on the content anymore. I wish I'd have time to train more people about editing Wikitext - it's not hard to do! - or start a tutorial about it.

I'll delete the stale unit articles, they're indeed leftovers from previous patch versions.

I am indeed even visiting the SMW Camp 2009 this weekend in order to find out how to make the Wiki better in regards to the use of Semantic MediaWiki, in fact. Let's see if that leads to some nice changes.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Thanks, but I have some of those. I was going to automate some of the files in www.dom3minions.com/docs so that I could repull the data after every patch. Since the first line is always the same, and there is usually an "end" marker of some sort for each section it wouldnt be hard (which is probably why it never got done).

Ahh no dont say that about Python. I always felt that one of the benefits was that you didnt have to learn it to use it, or even to modify. Just if you wanted to write from scratch. But once someone has done the hard part the code almost reads like english.

But thanks. I might ask for it later if I give up.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Thanks, I used your link to post the guide. I can see why you don't want to take an active role as the admin...it took me several hours to interlink the guide with the pages it refers to. :)

Another thing I noticed sitewide is that the summon spells don't link to the units that they summon. I manually added links to a lot of the path boosting commanders as part of the guide, but I was wondering if there was a way to programmatically link the unit ID to the spell that summons it.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Thank you, lch!

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Ich, is there a place for mod Nations in the wiki?

I was also wondering if you had any interest in listing/connecting the CBM stats and changes, in some form, along with the vanilla units?


And, does anyone know if the newest updates to the game have corrected the fuzzy sprite "fading" that occur with the basic installation of the game? That's all I have access to (and only for a few hours a week at that), and with the sprites being so clean in the wiki, I was hoping that that had been corrected at some point. If not, it seems like a possibility that it now could be.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Go ahead, put anything that's related to Dom3 into the Wiki. I generally want to encourage adding any kind of content, even if it's just a draft, and improving it with incremental updates. You could work on it in your user space until the articles become mature enough, same answer as I gave to Sector24.

Of course I do, in fact I even had that in mind when I started the Wiki, that you could switch to the CBM version data through a tab. That would require that I write a Dom3 mod file parser or rely on ongoing updates by hand, though, which both doesn't seem that feasible at this time.

I have no idea what you're talking about. Can you give an example with a graphic, maybe?

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

This is an issue with resolution I think. The graphics go fuzzy if you display low resolution settings in fullscreen mode. I had one issue where I couldn´t change the resolution at all on one of my installations, and that led to fuzzy graphics. A clean install solved it.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

One thing I missed in the wiki was regarding SP play. This was pretty much downplayed with a terrible AI. I've seen a couple of posts on this forum that give hints for improving the SP experience. It would be nice if those with the knowledge would fill in some blanks there.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Well done on the Wiki, it is really great and I am sure that it will become even better over time.

Also, that AAR is amazing, a true tour-de-force. I can not imagine how many hours went into it.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

There are some things in the FAQ regarding this, but the link in my sig to the Better Independents mod v2.1 should serve you well. It makes the AI much tougher by eliminating the chaff hordes as recruitables.

It started out as just an idea to see if SP could be improved and it was surprisingly successful. I personally never play SP without BI enabled anymore.

Read the thread, there are some good tips there on what makes for a tough opponent with that mod.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

As far as the sprite issue: A long time ago, when Dom3 first came out, there was talk that when the Devs had uploaded the sprites from Dom2, there was some kind of conflict that turned the uploaded sprites "fuzzy", which does seem to be the case, atleast when I copy certain posted sprites. So I'm wondering if that is, or was, true. If it wasn't, then I agree that it's probably resolution that's causing the problem.

What's an ideal resolution for the game, by the way?

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

very happy to see such a pretty wiki.

good job, ich !

any clever idea of how to use the wiki for different dom3 mods, i think about vanilla vs. conceptual balance mod at the nation overview pages.

list different units / effects on the same page in extra sections (like cbm mod) or start extra pages ? or use the category system ?

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Great great job ! Incredible and huge effort but very very helpful for noobie like me !!!
thanks ich

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Congrats, Ich. I was dreaming of this Wiki and you made it ! :clap:

I can now dream of something else. At least...

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Thank you lch, from a noob who was very disappointed in the strategy wiki. I should have the game mastered any minute now.:rolleyes:

In the meantime, I have a question about the heroic ability formulae. Specifically, I have Udum'ukinna in year five of my second SP game and he has plus 30 strength. By the formula, plus 30 is hundreds of turns away. Have I been incredibly lucky with a DRN, or am I missing something?

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

If he has the heroic strength ability, it grows very quickly. Additionally, the initial bonus is dependent on the base strength of the unit, so a unit with high base strength (like he has) gets to 30 pretty quickly.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

I can proudly announce that the Wiki now features every magic site that the game has to offer! It also gained semantic properties for these articles and a couple of others, so it is becoming a real database which you can run queries against later on, like "show me all sites which give a laboratory when found". (see this ugly preview for that - this is only a very raw interface to the data)

I suppose you're talking about http://dom3.servegame.com/wiki/Heroic_ability

All the information in there has been gained by debugging. I may have made some errors here and there. Just be lucky that your bonus is so high. :)

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Is it possible to have Dominions 3 wiki to have the "tab" plugins?

{{tabinclude>PATH}}

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

That plugin is for Dokuwiki, which is another Wiki software. I use Mediawiki.

I have activated the Header Tabs extension for you, which should provide similar functionality: You can create tabs with it. I have edited your Nosophorus user page to show how it can be used: Add some Level 1 headlines and one html tag, you're done.

For further info, check http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Header_Tabs

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Thanks! The way Mediawiki handles tabs seems way easier.


Thanks again. :)

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

BTW, how do you edit unit data ?
I tried with the Warden_of_Avalon whose cost is wrong, but I failed to find the procedure...

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Can someone please sticky this already? Considering I use it 15 times a day, and I'm not even playing the game, I'm tired of having to hunt for it (for some reason--maybe that I'm blind?--I always have trouble finding it, even though it's on the first page).

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

+1

A lot of cool stuff on the wiki.

I'll also recommend that if anyone have something to contribute to Dom3wiki, especially if they made a mod, to add them: http://dom3.servegame.com/wiki/Mod_nation

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

You don't. It's being auto-generated from a database. The reason why some values are wrong is because things like armors and weapons aren't taken into account yet.

I do hope to make the data more accessible and accurate to what you'd "expect", but it's not a trivial task and there's a trade-off between accessibility and flexibility.

Yes, your entries on the Nosophoros mod are coming along nicely, I'd say.



I can add one more slogan to promote the Dom3Wiki: We're even too original for Wikipedia! :rolleyes:

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

I dunno if this is the right place, but you seem to have a problem here.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Thanks, fixed.

Re: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki
 

Machaka also lists/links to the normal Sorceress, rather than the Machaka version.

And are you planning on listing the Capital Only Recruits/Commanders, and the National Heroes, with each Nation?