User blog comment:MDF infin/Mugen Wiki Commentary: The Blog That Was Past Due/@comment-5702923-20140823231940/@comment-24796436-20140828062517

In response to HM:

Plas has responded to most of this post already. I wanted to respond to a few specific things before too much more time passes by.

On animations: "Some moves like that cannot be described proper with a gif"

You're statement only applies to the FFC/FFU/FF3 method of extracting and uploading images. I noticed that you don't really have a criticism for animation use in general. That seems to be a good sign in my eyes. As far as collision boxes go, my personal opinion is that those are inappropriate for this wiki. I agree that that level of detail is helpful, but it fits in much better with MugenLab. There's not really a reason to cram all the info we can here. My point that I haven't expressed enough is that, we need to find a level of 'satisfactory sufficiency', so that we have enough information, but we shouldn't make the mistake of chasing the impractical and unnecessary task of this all encompassing data. If we were to attempt such a thing, I can almost guarantee you that we will continue to suffer from a low article completion ratio. I think that's the beauty of having a separate wiki for that purpose. MugenLab (knock on wood) doesn't have any vandals. The level of complexity on that wiki seems to filter out many would be contributors already. This is actually a good thing as the quality of work will be better and you will see all of those details. We have in effect compartmentalized our work stations so that mugen wiki can provide my oft mentioned 'breadth' and the lab for the 'depth'. That doesn't mean we won't be going deep here. It just means that there is no practical reason to come close to that level of depth.

About:  "there is in fact a definition for a command move"...

Just a quick fact: I did link to a spewgen article here, that links to that very same page and I have read it prior to my blog post.

The problem with it is that it says this: "USUALLY performed with a simple combination of joystick and button action", and "USUALLY enjoy special properties ". Do you see the problem with these "definitions" from wikipedia? They aren't even definite here, and they are based on the assumption that the source game identifies them as such. We aren't working with any source games; we are working with an engine. As such, there is no reason to apply that definition unless we "grandfather" in the definition for characters that have command normals from the source game and they are a direct port of some sort. It actually takes away from our credibility to group all those as "command normals" again as Plas has rightfully pointed out, if the ENGINE itself does not make special accommodations to identify these for us.

About: " so far the only surefire to know wether it was worth it or not is to download it"

The moment you said 'surefire', you essentially muddied that whole point you were making. This will never change, although we can hope to inform people more so that they have a better idea of what to expect. That is correct.

About: "And there are those who come to MUGEN as complete newcomers"

These are people of the minority. I'm not saying that they should be ignored, but let's be serious. If you want a real fighting game and are afraid to take the leap of faith and purchase one, why start with MUGEN of all things instead of an emulator? If they have never played a fighting game before honestly, MUGEN is a terrible place to start without an experienced fighting gamer present to provide a guide. Remember, the fighting games came before MUGEN. They should start with Street Fighter II or something. If allowing a gamer to learn all the moves is such a high priority, then we should be helping mugen developers put together more comprehensive readme instead of trying to document it all here. Not everyone who downloads mugen characters are going to come here. However, we do know that if we get the readmes inside the character folders, they have access to it.

Just thinking about it reminds me of the absurdity of someone going through the trouble of configuring a multitude of text files, as well as  downloading and extracting each character and stage file for their first ever fighting game experience.

Anyhow, thank you for reading the blog post and posting a response Heartlessmushroom.

Sincerely,