Wowpedia talk:WoW Icons

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 * Past discussions from User talk: Tusva and User talk: Adys:

Icons
Hey there. My plan for the icons was two-fold. First part is to go through the main raw list of icons and figure out which ones had been previously uploaded to WoWWiki, and which ones were absent. The mixture of .JPG and .PNG is a result of using the uploads that previous WoWWiki contributors had submitted to complete the list and uploading the missing ones myself. In cases of duplicates, I selected the icon that was higher quality (normally the .PNG if it has the background transparency).

The Felheart pants are still not changed as I had not reached Pants yet in my list. As I go down the list, if I see that two different versions of the same icon (PNG/JPG) are used in different articles, I select one to be the "real" one and modify the files accordingly (as I document here).

Once the list is complete and organized through the cateogories, I plan to go through and update the icons for quality where possible (as some have the ugly cyan background around the edges). I'll be resuming my organizing work shortly, but feel free to lend a hand! --Tusva 09:17, 19 September 2006 (EDT)


 * Aye, the plan is to have a master list, both in a tree (Template:WoW Icons Directory work in progress) and through categories (Category:WoW_Icons) that editors can browse through to find the Icon their looking for. This way, we're not getting duplicate uploads and whatnot. --Tusva 14:10, 19 September 2006 (EDT)


 * You may want to link your stuff to Icon. Seems like at least one of the places where people might look for a list. -- Fandyllic (talk) 4:52 PM PDT 20 Sep 2006

In the end, it's probably best to have all the in-game icons be one file format, which should be .PNG. This way, we can eventually have them all with transparency, which results in a better look. I've done a few transitions, but we should start replacing all the current .JPG with .PNG versions, putting them in the correct icon category, adjusting any articles the .JPGs are linked to, and marking the .JPGs for deletion. Feel free to start doing this on your end, as I will also start looking through the categories and transitioning them to .PNG where I can. Cheers, --Tusva 02:19, 25 September 2006 (EDT)


 * You may want to check out BLPConverter. It's a command line tool that can work with wildcards, so you just do e.g.  in a directory with extracted BLPs and tadaa! Lots of nice transparent PNGs.   -- Mikk  (T) 07:53, 25 September 2006 (EDT)

Deleting icons
You may want to correlate with User:Tusva, who is currently trying to organize ALL our icons. -- Mikk (T) 11:48, 20 September 2006 (EDT)
 * ''From User talk:Mikk:
 * All the ones putted in speedy were basically having a wrong name. For a fast check, most icons (except very rares exception) will start their name with either "Ability", "Spell", "INV" or "Trade". For a complete check of whether the name exists, Tusva made a full Raw list. Good luck getting that sorted out hehe Adys 11:56, 20 September 2006 (EDT)
 * Yep, these look good to delete. Only thing I would double-check though, is that they aren't linked off of any current articles. Seems a habit of contributors is to first upload the icon they're going to use on their article, without really checking first. If they are used, then I'd either upload the correct one if it isn't done yet or wait until we get to that icon in the list. Nice work in tagging these, though! --Tusva 13:56, 20 September 2006 (EDT)
 * No real worry about getting them off articles, the simplest way to tag these is to get them from Unused Files page. Ill check on and tag the few I find left with a name off, I let you sort the png/jpg things :p --Adys 14:40, 20 September 2006 (EDT)

Icon Cleaning
Hey Tusva! I was browsing WoWWiki the other day and came across a collection of icons that do not have the transparent background but instead they have black corners, which in my opinion look horrible on the Wiki, admittedly these corners can also be seen in-game on some buffs, but I would still like to eliminate them. I was thinking that I could go through all the icons that have this black background on it and make them transparent, not sure how long it will take, whether it would interfere with what you are doing, or whether you are allready doing this with the PNG process... Just wanted to get your opinion on it, thanks in advance.
 * I am doing the JPG -> PNG transfer at the moment (Even tho I couldnt last few days because of Internet down><). Tbh I dont think the Black corner removing is necessary, it sometimes get removed by Blizz in certain patches, and it would be too much of a hassle to go through them all one by one. Not even speaking of the future expansion icons (over 2000 will get added eventually). Check my user page for more infos :) --Adys 08:09, 30 October 2006 (EST)


 * Aye, I would wait until Adys is done doing all of the transfers before you start replacing any icons. I personally don't think it's such a bad idea, however, like Adys said, there's gonna be a lot to replace and even more to edit come the expansion. As long as you can keep the same size dimensions and keep the .PNG format, I say go for it. Maybe you can post a few examples before doing hundreds of them? --Tusva 08:42, 30 October 2006 (EST)


 * Okay, then I will leave it, thanks for the replies. --Bull3t 13:53, 30 October 2006 (EST)


 * }

Allakhazam's Allakha-usefulness
I've found that the item icon images on Allakhazam match the in-game filenames that we're trying to mirror here, e.g. INV_Chest_01.png. It may be worth mentioning on the page that checking the names of those images then searching for them here can speed up the sometimes fruitless hunting for an icon hidden in some Misc category. Socrates200X 11:11, 18 October 2006 (EDT)


 * Same with Thottbot and probably all other DB sites -- we're all using the in-game icon names.  -- Mikk  (T) 16:15, 18 October 2006 (EDT)

Different icon styles
I noticed that there are different icon styles currently present in the wiki: Personally, I think that the last icon format is best for the wiki. Should we just upload a corrected version if we see icons of type 1 and 2? --Teomyr 09:38, 31 October 2006 (EST)
 * 1) [[Image:Spell_Holy_AshesToAshes.png]] Image:Spell_Holy_AshesToAshes.png: Old (?) border
 * 2) [[Image:Ability Parry.png]] Image:Ability Parry.png: New border, unmodified (except for transparency)
 * 3) [[Image:INV_Misc_Book_07.png]] Image:INV_Misc_Book_07.png: Post-processed image with smooth shadows
 * Well, the first two are straight out of the WoW client, the varying borders being how Blizzard created them. As for the third with the smooth shadows, they tend to take extra space tend to bloat some pages, as well as not degrade gracefully. Just my 2 copper. --Tusva 09:53, 31 October 2006 (EST)

Things to do?
Is there any reason this article is still in the category "Things to do"? It was added in 2006, and reading through it looks like it has been pretty well fleshed out at this point... if there are no objections, I'd move for taking it out of the todo list. -- Wige  ( Talk -  Contribs ) 17:43, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Adding new sub-categories
Would it be possible to add some guidelines for determining when a new sub-category is needed? I created one Iyyokuk because there were a couple dozen -- and quite unique -- ability icons added for that patch 5.4 fight alone, but I wish the project page didn't leave so much to guessing on this matter. -- Alayea (talk / contrib) 01:45, 5 August 2013 (UTC)


 * It's unclear why the filename-based category tree is of any use in the first place; it seems like we could just dump everything into Category:WoW Icons and call it a day. — foxlit (talk) 16:10, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

WoW Icons
I believe that the WoW Icons Filename Directory could use a short explanation. What we should want to get across to the user is that not every sub-category is displayed, to check the main category if a sub-category cannot be found on the list, and perhaps a guideline or two on when a new sub-category may need to be created. What I have so far is this: "While an effort has been made to include much of what is commonly used, the list is not intended to be exhaustive. For example, not all the sub-categories under Category:WoW Icons: Ability are displayed here."

And while we're talking about sub-categories for WoW Icons... {| style="margin: 2em; font-size:smaller" Past discussion from Alayea and Coobra:

WoW Icons: Achievement Boss
Just so you know, I was going along with the other sub-categories that there are under "Achievement Boss" (and their file names definitely don't have the instance in their name). -- Alayea (talk / contrib) 03:43, 5 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Hmm, didn't see A'noob did that... well... I don't plan to undo all of that, so I suppose that's ok for this particular category. 03:46, 5 August 2013 (UTC)


 * }

Should an exception be kept for this particular category? If so, then it ought to be specifically mentioned in the explanation as well. -- Alayea (talk / contrib) 20:03, 5 August 2013 (UTC)