Official Barotrauma Wiki:Guidelines

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Revision as of 15:55, 9 April 2021 by Dynamoon (talk | contribs)
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Hello and welcome to editing the official Barotrauma wiki! If you’d like to suggest edits to this page, please leave a comment in the page discussion or get in touch with the wiki actives directly on the official Discord – they can also offer information that might be missing here, so don’t hesitate to talk to them.

Getting started

Once you have created an account, you are able to edit almost everything on this wiki. If you decide to make huge-scale changes to existing content, other editors would appreciate a heads-up, but smaller operations are free to be carried out at will. These include things like...

  • Supplementing missing information in existing articles
  • Expanding on stub articles
  • Correcting typos
  • Creating new articles where something is missing entirely
  • Updating outdated information as new versions of the game are released.

Every correction, big or small, is a step towards a better wiki, and greatly appreciated!

As you edit the wiki, please be extra careful with a few things in particular:

  • Reliability. Is the information you’re adding correct and objective? We’ll list our preferred sources further down.
  • Language and style. Is the information you’re adding presented in a way that another Barotrauma player can be expected to understand it without trouble? Are you writing good, neat English? It’s not an academic writing contest, but please write with care.
  • Please remember to be kind and respectful. Most of the content here is provided by players – volunteers like you. If you disagree with something, please be kind in pointing it out. If you wish to change something someone else has done, please do so while respecting the work the other person has put in. Please do not war or deliberately hurt this wiki, the old wiki, or your fellow editors.

Editing and Creating Content

Page structure

Wikitext may look daunting at first, so here are a few of the most common things you should recognize and use to make our wiki pages nice to read.

Headers

== Headers == are used to organize a page visually and generate the table of contents at the top of the page. 1 to 5 equal signs "=" can be used to create different headers:

=Very Big Header=
==Big Header==
===medium header===
====small header====
=====very small header=====

To make your header a proper header, it must be the only thing on that line, as in the examples above.

Table of contents

The size of the headers is used to determine subsections in the table of contents, __TOC__. For example, if you had the following headings:

=Section=
==Subsection==
===Subsection 2===
==Subsection 3==

Then the table of contents would be as follows:

1 Section
    1.1 Subsection
        1.1.1 Subsection 2
    1.2 Subsection 3

To place the table of contents in the page, simply write __TOC__ under the summary at the top of the page.

Hyperlinks

[[Hyperlinks]] are used to link to another page on this wiki. Simply make sure said page exists and type its name carefully to link to it:

[[Crawler]]
[[Any Page Name Case Sensitive]]
[[pagename|alternative text]] 

Please use hyperlinks generously (but not excessively – first mention is usually enough. Common sense!) to help readers make full use of the wiki.

Lists

Bulleted lists

*Starting several successive lines with an asterisk will turn them into bullet points.
**Additional asterisks will make for "sub bullet points" with indentation.

Numbered lists

#Replacing the asterisks with hashtags will produce numbered lists.

More details here.

Galleries

Many articles have a gallery section, usually at the bottom of the page, to gather relevant screenshots or gifs. They are presented as follows:

<gallery heights="450px" widths="900px">
File:Imagename.png|Description shown under the image
File:Imagename2.png|Description shown under the image
</gallery>

Note that gifs won't play unless the gallery's height and width exactly fits the gifs'. In other words, gifs won't play if they are resized.

Adding media

Besides text, a wiki needs images and sometimes also audio.

If you’re about to upload a new file, please start by making sure that file doesn't already exist – if you spotted a red link that is supposed to be an icon, for example, it’s possible that the link to that icon has been incorrectly typed or that its name was inadvertently changed during the wiki migration. So, before uploading a new file, please search this list of files.

If the file does exist: Please fix any red links by simply editing them to point to the proper file's name.

If the file doesn’t exist: Please upload a new image or audio file! Click on "Upload File" to the bottom of the left panel and follow the instructions, or use the batch uploader, also found in the editor window itself, to upload files in bulk.

There are a few rules about files and how to name them. Please follow these:

  • Prefer .png files for images.
  • When possible, source sprites from game files, not screenshots.
  • When a new submarine or creature is being added to the wiki, consider using the `wikiimage_sub` and `wikiimage_character` commands respectively; this should generate an image that is suitable for illustrating the new addition.
  • Always name audio files exactly as they are named in the game files.
  • Affliction icons are named "Affliction_[affliction_name].png"
  • Items that have both an in-game sprite and an inventory icon: in-game sprites are named "[item_name]_sprite.png" and inventory icons are named "[item_name].png".

Note that any regular space will be automatically replaced by an underscore "_", so both can be used in all cases for the same purpose and effect, whether it is when uploading or when linking to a file or page.

Once your file is uploaded, simply link to it where needed.

Templates

To maintain consistency across the wiki, we use various templates. Please see this full list of templates.

Simply put, a template is a reusable, customizable page element, such as the infobox on every creature’s article or the navigation box at the bottom of every page. By using templates, editors don’t need to copy over the entire definition of these recurring elements; instead, simply use the relevant template in your text.

In more technical terms, a template is a list of parameters, each separated by pipes ( | ) and all surrounded by double braces {{ }}:

{{template name | parameter 1 | parameter 2 | etc.}}

The parameters are determined on the template page, and most template pages include documentation about how that template is used. For example:

Template:Hyperlink
Template:Creatures_infobox

Or, see this example of a more complex template:

Template:Items_infobox

When editing template parameters, just like with all editing, you can and should preview your changes (“Show Preview”) to see if and where your change takes place before actually applying the change.

Sources and references

The changelog, found e.g. in the main menu of the game, is a good place to find recent changes that might need to be applied on the wiki. Blog texts posted on barotraumagame.com and official news posts in Barotrauma’s Steam news hub may also be used as sources where applicable. Empirical experiments may yield useful information too, but it’s usually best to mark these as speculation or double check them from a better source.

Precise values such as damage values, prices or skills are most reliably sourced in Barotrauma’s local files. Locate the appropriate .xml file and open it with any text editor – using a rich-text editor such as Notepad++ or Sublime Text will make the file easier to read thanks to syntax highlighting options.

N.B. Some of the even more specific game mechanics may only be found on Github and require reading C#. We won’t cover that in more detail here.

Finding and reading .xml files

Let's say you want to find the Revolver's ammo capacity. This information is found in "...\Barotrauma\Content\Items\Weapons\weapons.xml". The Revolver's data is found at lines 184 to 242 (at the time of writing). Lines 237-239 are the following:

	<ItemContainer capacity="1" maxstacksize="6" hideitems="true" containedstateindicatorstyle="bullet">
  	<Containable items="revolverammo" />
	</ItemContainer>

This means that the Revolver has 1 inventory slot, which can contain 6 items of the type "revolverammo".

Now let's say you want to know how much damage it deals; for that, you'll need to check the revolver round data, found just above the revolver, still in weapons.xml - lines 154 to 182. lines 170-174 is the following:

  	<Attack structuredamage="5" targetforce="10" itemdamage="20" severlimbsprobability="0.1">
    	<Affliction identifier="bleeding" strength="40" />
    	<Affliction identifier="gunshotwound" strength="30" />
    	<Affliction identifier="stun" strength="0.4" />
  	</Attack>

This means that 1 revolver round will deal 5 damage to structures (submarine, outpost or ruin walls...), or 40 bleeding, 30 gunshot wound and 0.4 seconds of stun to any creature or human. "targetforce" is the knockback inflicted.

Some other relatively large files that are subject to frequent changes are, for example, afflictions.xml ("...\Barotrauma\Content\Afflictions.xml"), or medical.xml ("...\Barotrauma\Content\Items\Medical\medical.xml"). Many items, installations or creatures data are spread out in individual files, however.

Referencing

Source references are not required in most cases, when writing about Barotrauma. However, if you would like to provide a list of sources or further reading at the end of an article, or just jot them down in the page discussion for other editors to find more easily, please do!

When you make statements that don’t pertain to Barotrauma, for example a comment about game development practices, references to external sources are appreciated.

Language and Style

For the time being, this wiki only exists in English, as creating and maintaining localized versions would take more effort than we can commit. Thus, please write in your clearest, simplest, smartest English – something like the contents of this page, for example. To supplement this rule of thumb and the guidelines laid out in the previous sections, you can look to the Wikipedia manual of style for additional wiki writing best practices.

Copyright, licences and permissions

This wiki is owned by the Barotrauma developer team but largely maintained by volunteers. If you have a question about the wiki, please get in touch with either the editor actives or the developers.

About to reuse some of the content of this wiki? You may. The texts of the wiki are available under a Creative Commons licence, specifically Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported, and you may redistribute them accordingly. The licence is not, however, applied to all images on the wiki, as images taken from the game typically fall under the game’s copyright. Therefore if you reuse our images, please mark them as copyrighted:

Content is available under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 unless otherwise noted.
Game content and materials are copyright of Undertow Games, FakeFish Ltd. and Daedalic Entertainment GmbH. All rights reserved.
This wiki is hosted by the developer but maintained by the Barotrauma community.

Further questions?

Please use the discussion section of the page your question concerns and the official Discord if you have any questions not answered here. The Discord may be a faster way of getting in touch with other editors as well as developers whereas the page discussions are better for keeping information organized and easily findable later.