Caves of Qud Wiki:Style Guide

The Official Caves of Qud Wiki Style Guide is a standard of editing practices and formatting styles for article contribution. The situation may call for breaks from these guidelines, it is best to follow these as close as possible. This is heavily based on Gamepedia's own Manual of Style.

Article Layout

Infoboxes

Infoboxes, boxes which summarize data relating to the article, should appear at the top-right corner of the article content. Item tooltips are also "infoboxes".

Infoboxes should generally summarize available information; speculation, as well as "unknown" or "n/a" rows, should be avoided. Most information required in infoboxes will be in ObjectBlueprints.xml.

Prerelease Content

All content that has requires prerelease content to be enabled must be prefaced with Template:Prerelease Content.

Book Layout

All books will have an Template:Item and is autogenerated by Qud Blueprint Explorer. Details should not be directly altered, including the category that is below the template. They must be there in order for QBE to function correctly. A section titled 'Contents' will contain the actual contents of the book, and will be formatted using {{Book Page|(your text here)}) for each "page", with no extraneous whitespace inside of the text part of the template, i.e., none that isn't present in the actual page.

NPC Layout

All NPCs will use Template:Character and is autogenerated by Qud Blueprint Explorer. Details should not be directly altered, including the category that is below the template. They must be there in order for QBE to function correctly.

Writing

Categories

Categories will be named in their plural form, ex Category:Artifacts. All words will be capitalized.

Reliability

To make sure that all information on this wiki is up to date, make sure to use Template:As Of Patch on the top of pages.

To make sure that information is correct in the first place, if it is in a difficult to find area (a cs file that is NOT the ID specified in the page's infobox) be sure to note which cs file you found it in by using the <ref></ref> tags. The expected format is XRL.(file path).cs (method name if cs file is very large).

Formality

Unless it is a guide, writing in the second person (referring to the reader directly with 'you') is highly discouraged against. It should be referred to as the Player character, to distinguish between the actual player themselves.

Avoid writing recommendations and personal opinions in the main text, and separate them into their own section so readers are able to discern what is factual and what is personal opinion.

Terminology

Avoid protagonist bias as well: many other creatures are fully capable of using objects and mutations the same way as the player does. Avoid mentioning the player character when "this creature" is more accurate to describe the possible users.

• Do not refer to the NPCs of this game as "monsters"; they are creatures.
• A parasang is made of 9 connected zones.
• "Pounds" is discouraged as referring to weight and Template:Pounds is preferred.
• Surround all complicated dice logic with Template:Dice tooltip.
• The currency is drams or $.
• A global ingame turn at (a turn at 100 quickness) is referred to as a Game tick, but a player based turn counter that does not depend on quickness can be referred to as an ingame turn.

Formatting

Color

The wiki already has a template for the main colors found inside Caves of Qud. Do not directly format the text with html;Template:Color has all hexcodes as well as way to quickly format a line with a single color.

Colored Names

Item names such as Stopsvalinn have multicolor names in game. For ease of use, call Template:Qud text instead of manually changing each letter using the Color Template. If referring to an item or character in its page, use Template:name to automatically make the colored version of the item. If referring to other items and characters with a link, use Template:favilink.

Quoting In Game Descriptions

When pasting descriptions from objectblueprints, call Template:Qud quote instead of Template:Quote to parse color strings and preserve single line breaks.

Wikitext

For more specific help on wikitext, check Wikepedia's own Help article. For fancier functions, check Wikipedia's Magic Words.

Sprite Uploading

Capturing High-Quality Screenshots

In Steam:

• Go to View > Settings > In-Game and enable Save an uncompressed copy for screenshots.
• Define a working folder with the Screenshot Folder button.

In Caves of Qud:

• Set your render resolution to 1280x800 windowed.
• Go to Options > General and disable Display Vignette and Display Scanlines.

You are now ready to capture screenshots which preserve the defined edges and aspect ratios of sprites. When capturing, ensure particles and the chat log do not overlap with your subjects.

Wishing for "1" will take you to an empty map, wishing for "calm" will pacify all creatures, and then wishing for individual creatures/items by name can yield many subjects per screenshot.

Editing Screenshots with GIMP2

I will be using GIMP2 for the remainder of this guide. We will require a few specific settings.

• Go to Edit > Preferences > Default Grid set the Width to 160 and Height to 240 pixels.
• Set Line style to Solid.

This will allow you to quickly select a whole sprite and preserve their size in relation to each other.

• Open your uncompressed screenshot and use the Rectangle Select Tool R to select only the visible map, not the UI or border. I recommend zooming in for pixel accuracy.
• Press alt+i>c to quickly Crop to Selection.
• In the Layers - Brushes list, right-click your layer and select Add Alpha Channel.
• Use the Select by Color Tool shift+o and click on the background.
• Press delete and now you will have only sprites and transparency.
• Press alt+i>s to open Scale Image, then set your Interpolation to None and scale the image x10 (this should result in 12800x6000 pixels).
  • A dialog will popup to warn you about the file size, click Scale.

Here I recommend going to File > Overwrite screenshotname.png to overwrite the original screenshot, in case you need to come back and fix a botched/missed sprite.

• Press alt+v>h and alt+v>p to activate the Show Grid and Snap to Grid options.
• Use the Rectangle Select Tool R and following the borders, select one sprite.
• Press alt+i>c then ctrl+shift+e to crop and export the lone sprite as a .png.
  • Name the file to match the in-game name and replace the spaces with _ underscores.
• Press ctrl+z until you return to the full image, and select another sprite.

Uploading Finished Sprites

• With your completed 160x240 sprites go to Special:Upload.
  • If you have multiple files, you can upload them all at once using the Yes radio button above the browse button. This option may not appear until you refresh the page.