User talk:DoctorePothole

Last Prism and more

Hey there! I saw your user page edit and reckoned it was at least in part brought about by my recent actions, so I felt like a proper talk page post (instead of just indirect communication via edit summaries) was in order. First of all: thank you, sincerely, for your contributions. The wiki would've probably been shut down a long time ago if it weren't for editors like yourself who consistently aim to improve its quality.

As for the Last Prism edit: One of the basic principles that I have when editing is to make the article as reader-friendly as possible. I often find myself struggling to balance this with other important principles, like avoiding duplication of information and being as precise and comprehensive as possible. In the case of the Last Prism, my thought process might start similarly to yours maybe, along the lines of "all the important basic information should be presented in the article introduction", but then I'm thinking, "Wait, someone who has no idea whatsoever what the Last Prism is probably doesn't care whether the beams take 3.365 or 4 seconds to converge. They might come from the Moon Lord article and are just clicking through each of his drops for some quick info." That leads me to think, "A summary of the item in the first paragraph would be good here, and the details can be dealt with further down or in a separate Notes section. Hm, that does mean that we're stating some things twice, though... Okay, it's fine here because it's such an iconic item and thus a popular article." ... or something like that. Unfortunately, I can't put all that in the edit summary, so I try to get it across in the limited space I'm given. I'm aware that I don't always succeed at that and that it may make me sound dismissive, so please feel free to ask me to clarify or elaborate on an edit of mine.

Most of all, though, I think I have a slight tendency to be conservative (in the sense of favoring the existing version of a page/guideline/whatever in large parts). Occasionally I catch myself thinking, "The people before us knew what they were doing, so let's keep it the way it is." Obviously this isn't always a great mindset to have (just like in real life), but sometimes I don't realize it. In that case I do appreciate a pointer.

One last thing: I know that it may be a bit hard to believe at times, but every one of the more seasoned editors was new once. We all started out without a clue at some point, so don't hesitate to reach out if something seems unclear or unfair or plain stupid. Glad to have you on board!

--Rye Greenwood (talk) 01:06, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

Unnecessary file naming

Hey, I know you have been uploading enemy gif files on the wiki, and I appreciated the work you're doing but when uploading gif files, I think it would be better off to just call the file to something like "Clown.gif" instead of "Clown (new).gif" for example. Putting a word in parentheses is not practically needed and seems very unnecessary. Angrybirdgamer (talk) 02:32, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

Redirect links

Hello, what is the reason for your numerous recent edits that only consist of changing some links from redirecting ones to non-redirecting ones (such as 906517, 906515, 906513, 906511)? --Rye Greenwood (talk) 17:10, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

I'll be honest when I say that I'm not entirely sure, but I guess a lot of it stemmed from trying to format weapons and enemy pages with some kind of uniformity. I'm not really sure why but I felt peeved that a lot of pages had some inconsistencies in redirects (like some had Target Dummies and others had Target Dummy|Target Dummies in weapon demos), so I guess I tried to make sure that every page followed a specific format, and that led me to believe that the issue stemmed from redirects. As I kept trying to remove or avoid redirects, I guess I kinda devolved into this flow state of making a slew of edits you're talking about now. Thank you for calling attention to this issue now because I'm kinda realizing there's no big issue with using redirects, it's just a minor method but I felt that this deviated from the uniformity I felt that the wiki's pages should have. Feel free to undo the redirect edits if you need to. I'll stop making more of these unnecessary edits and add better contributions to this wiki elsewhere. --DoctorePothole (talk) 20:40, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

Santa-NK1 revert

Hello, in your recent edit you partially reverted my previous changes without providing any reason at all. I believe my changes to be legitimate and would like to know why you think otherwise. --Rye Greenwood (talk) 10:57, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

Hey, sorry for reverting your edit.

Hi! I deeply apologize for not giving a reason for reverting your edit sooner, that was just a really stupid and neglectful thing for me to do. I feel like your change was legitimate but I guess at that moment I believed that the capitalization on Santa-NK1's projectiles was unnecessary on the behavior page, now that the projectile images were moved to its infobox. I know now that giving a reason for my revert was completely necessary and I thank you for calling out my somewhat careless approach to editing these past few days.

Editing this wiki has become more important to me nowadays but this doesn't justify me listing off many edits as "minor" but changing a lot of content or not giving any summaries for why I edit. I know it's difficult for me to sound honest while writing this, but I hope that you understand that I'm not doing this out of spite towards you or other editors. But I also know that it's selfish of me to think that recent edits I've made were "inconsequential" and thus weren't worth explanation. So in the future, I promise I will try to limit the amount of time I spend on the wiki, and make sure to write a summary for every edit I make when I do feel edits are necessary. I want you to know that I respect your contributions and wish that we can both make this wiki the best it can be.--18:29, 15 April 2024 (UTC)DoctorePothole (talk)

Alright, thanks for the explanation! I was more concerned with the plural/singular part of it, but now that I understand that that wasn't your focus, I'll change it back.

I'm certainly not asking you to spend less time on the wiki, I want to make that clear (provided it doesn't negatively impact your mental health, of course – but only you can be the judge of that). Especially in times like these where being the top result in search engines is no longer a guarantee for us, efforts to improve quality are appreciated, and I'm happy to hear you're enjoying your time. I understand that when getting into the flow of things it's easy to avoid documenting your work. It can seem annoying or like a burden sometimes, but remember that you're part of a species who unfortunately have to rely on language and communication in order to achieve their common goals because shockingly they cannot, in fact, read each others' minds! Joking aside, just try to put your intent and thought process into words every now and then. It'll be beneficial not just for other editors but also yourself in a year's time or so, when you come back to something and go "What the hell was I thinking there?" That has happened to myself more times than I can count. Your recent edits to enemy drop sections are a good example: What seems like a random and arbitrary reordering of items makes a lot more sense with the explanation that that's the order in the game. Keep that up! :) --Rye Greenwood (talk) 03:00, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

How do you create NPC gifs and images?

I have recently started getting into resource packs and was wondering how I could preview what an NPC with multiple sprite files would look like in game when put together. An example of this is the gif of the Moon Lord that you created. My first thought was that these are handmade by putting the individual sprites into an image editing program, but I don't know for sure if that is the best way there is to do it currently or if some type of tool exists to make the process easier. I've looked online a bit for documentation on this process, but I was not able to find any, so I came here to ask instead. If you you have any tips, advice, or suggestions, please let me know. Suspiciousstewlol (talk) 22:04, 30 April 2024 (UTC)

Hii, I don't personally know if there's a tool that allows you to preview sprite files like what you described, but I'm pretty sure you can ask for help from the more experienced editors like Rye Greenwood or Eraloiz.

And the other thing, I use Terraria local files from Steam (click on the gear button in the Terraria library page and Browse local files) and then go to Content, where I then use an XNB converter and extract the files in order to convert them into png images. This is where I found all the game's sprite sheets and it was how I made a lot of the animated NPC GIFs. The only technical thing I know how to do well is extracting sprite sheets from the game files, most of the tools I use are websites such as this one where you can make sprite sheets into GIFs. When I combine multiple GIFs I also use an external website to put them together. I combine Gifs and PNGs with Photopea, but I still have no idea how to add other kinds of particle effects or shaders to sprites (such as the gradient technique for Queen Slime which I'm still struggling to figure out). This is the extent of my ability to make GIFs and stuff so far, but I hope what I say is helpful to you. --DoctorePothole (talk) 23:18, 2 May 2024 (UTC)