Talk:Mousezilla

Experimenting with a new layout

This is a "sandbox" page for us to experiment with a new layout (e.g. tabs) for Species information.

Above-tab information

Since the descriptive text comes from the species' Journal article, it should probably be moved inside the tab so that each game can have its own blurb. --FeralKitty 16:10, 14 May 2008 (EDT)

I was originally thinking that we should keep a generic description and picture above the tabs, but I could see where keeping those items platform-specific might be useful. --Jimmcq 16:36, 14 May 2008 (EDT)

Species Infobox

The Infobox will need a bit of work to support the new features (e.g. tricks, three wildcards). I'm thinking at this point that we could still use one template, and just omit parameters as needed, to only show what's relevant for each tab.

My only "concern" at this point is the length of the Infobox. On some existing species article, it currently takes up more vertical space than the text to the left of it. While we might be able to use the side-by-side variant pics approach for 3 (very small) thumbnail WC pics, is there a point where it just becomes too long? --FeralKitty 16:10, 14 May 2008 (EDT)

I like the idea of a single extensible species template. Maybe we could move some information (like wild-card info) into the main contents rather than in the infobox? --Jimmcq 16:36, 14 May 2008 (EDT)

Appear video and arctic pics

• Added to the Infobox: Normal arctic pic, and appear video.
• Added to the variant table: arctic variant methods/colors and pics. The items are apparently the same, but the colors are different?
• Added to the wildcard table: arctic wildcard pics.
• Removed from the wildcard table: Description of "how" to get each trait.

Do we want the Infobox to be even longer than it is already, with the addition of one pic and/or one video? It's already needing lots of whitespace to clear it on some pages (e.g., Pretztail). One possibility is to move to a collapsed video section within the Infobox, so the pages can render faster, and visually be shorter.

Do we need to show arctic pics at all, either for the normal arctic, variant arctics, or wildcard arctics? It's great to see how different an arctic looks from its non-arctic cousin, but do we want the pics to be taking up space on the page, and/or slowing down the load/render time even further?

I've got mixed feelings about this. It's nice to be the be-all/end-all for species details, but at what point does the article get bloated, or justify further slowdowns to download more and more image and video content? --FeralKitty (talk) 16:54, 13 September 2008 (UTC)