Bug - Not A Bug Some Bad ASCII Art => Bad ASCII Art

He can't help it. I'm sure he gets cold shakes every time he looks at the big list of names of locations to adventure. (It's not called the Giant's Castle!! It's the Castle in the Clouds in the Sky!!)

By now you should know that it is common for players of this game to be fussy about details.

I'm changing the tag to "Bug - Not a Bug"
 
Does it matter in terms of faxed monsters? That's the note on the move, so as long as mafia is aware that a faxed Bad ASCII Art has the same stats as "Some Bad ASCII Art" it shouldn't be an issue we care about.
 
Mafia does not care what you faxed in. When you ask for a fax, it tells you what you got. It is up to YOU to decide if you like it.
 
That has always worked. I'm not sure what "faxed" has to do with it; the monster is seen in fight.php, regardless of how you got to the fight.
 
Just to confirm the obvious:

Looking at a photocopied monster: "This is a sheet of copier paper with a grainy, blurry likeness of a Bad ASCII Art on it."
When I "use" it, I am redirected into a fight: "You're fighting Some Bad ASCII Art"
When I look at the photocopiedMonster setting and want to turn it into a monster in ASH:

> ash to_monster( "Bad ASCII Art" )

Returned: Some Bad ASCII Art
Click to expand...

What we have in monsters.txt is either exactly what we see bolded on fight.php or is the same with articles ("the" or "a" or "an" - sorry, "some" is not, grammatically speaking, an "article") removed. We also tend to capitalize the words in the monster in our data file, whether or not they are capitalized on fight.php. No matter; we do case-insensitive matching. Whether or not we strip off the "article" in monsters.txt is somewhat random. Some we intentionally leave. For example, "The Man" needs the article, otherwise, you'd see Encounter: Man in your CLI and session log.

I could not care less what the Wiki thinks is the "correct" monster name. What matters to me is whether it looks reasonable in the session log and whether the user can use the monster name easily in ASH. As demonstrated above, that works just fine.

This is SO not a bug.
 
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Sounds good. I haven't actually used any faxes yet, so I wasn't sure how mafia's parsing of it works. Since it gives the stripped monster title, as you demonstrated, it properly figures out which monster to parse. That's all I was curious on. And I do strongly agree that disbelieving the wiki does make for a good start towards improving things... or at least, deciding what not to break.
 
Unless one of the following happens, I can't find any reason to justify being picky about such things one way or the other.

1) Two distinct monsters exist, which differ only by article. In this case, only the relevant monsters would really need to be "correct."

2) KoL issues a "definitive" guide to "official" monster names vs. monsters-with-articles, in a way that can be easily checked. Even then, it would probably be done for completeness' sake, but wouldn't actually be necessary.

Even as a non-developer, it's a bit irksome to see such an "issue" labeled as a bug. Also, it's worth pointing out that the coldfront wiki is not the definitive source for info on KoL. Only the staff of Asymmetric, Inc. can be considered as such. If Jick were to mention on the radio that he considered "Some" to be article-like, and not part of the actual monster name, it would be understandable, perhaps, to make such a Feature Request. Even then, it would be a bit of a stretch. But in the current situation... no, just no.
 
Actually, it turns out you can tell from the game's html source if something is just a "fancy article" (like the Some in this case) or part of the name proper. There's an extra space in the html source code if it's not part of the article. Or so I'm told by a dev. It was specifically at his request and evidence that I moved the wiki pages.
 
Fred Nefler said:
Actually, it turns out you can tell from the game's html source if something is just a "fancy article" (like the Some in this case) or part of the name proper. There's an extra space in the html source code if it's not part of the article. Or so I'm told by a dev. It was specifically at his request and evidence that I moved the wiki pages.
Click to expand...
The HTML from fighting a photocopied ASCII Art:

Code: 
<span id='monname'>Some Bad ASCII Art</span>
No extra space. Here's one which, you'd think, surely includes the article:

Code: 
<span id='monname'>The Twig and Berries</span>
No extra space. Here's one which, you'd think, surely does NOT include the article (if for no other reason than it being in lower case):

Code: 
<span id='monname'>an Orcish Frat Boy</span>
No extra space.

I think you were misinformed. My rule of thumb: if the "article" is capitalized, it's part of the name.
 
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Veracity said:
The HTML from fighting a photocopied ASCII Art:

Code: 
<span id='monname'>Some Bad ASCII Art</span>
No extra space. Here's one which, you'd think, surely includes the article:

Code: 
<span id='monname'>The Twig and Berries</span>
No extra space. Here's one which, you'd think, surely does NOT include the article (if for no other reason than it being in lower case):

Code: 
<span id='monname'>an Orcish Frat Boy</span>
No extra space.

I think you were misinformed. My rule of thumb: if the "article" is capitalized, it's part of the name.
Click to expand...

Turns out: I was correctly informed.

Also turns out: those examples are all articles in-game. Even the "The" in "The Twig and Berries". On the other hand:
Code: 
You're fighting <span id='monname'> Racecar Bob</span>
Extra space! Because there's no in-game article for it. That's when the extra space shows up: when there's no in-game article. Maybe I mis-said that last time. Anyway, yeah, totally valid way to figure out what's just an "article" and what's part of the "true" monster name.

Olfaction will also reveal what is and isn't an article, for monsters that can be trailed. Similarly for photocopies (which has buggy articles, I think, so it always uses just 'a', maybe also 'an').
 
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