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Archive 15

The Game engine field should be put back in. The Main Reason it was deleted (curtsy of User:Masem):

"I've seen many cases where the engine is not known that users attempt to fill this in with something. If the engine the game uses is notable, it should be in the development section, but it is not a factor that people need to know "at a glance" at the box."

a. Vaguely citing "many" cases isn't an argument.

b. Some videogames don't have enough information on the development to warrant creating a development section.

c. Yes, the software that makes up a videogameis important.

d. Another argument (and presumably the reason all of those revisions were made was because the the box was getting to big. There is a solution to that: Have some of the fields in spoiler tags.

e. Finally I've noticed no one has gone through every single videogame page and transferred all the game engine information down to their development sections. If there is no motivation to do so, then there is no reason to delete this field. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Brightgalrs (talk • contribs) 03:02, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

• Every game article should strive to have a development section; it is a key aspect of a game article; if all it contains is the game engine, that's better than nothing. Also, note that "deleting" the field from the infobox template does not delete the info from the article, it just isn't shown. --MASEM (t) 03:14, 21 September 2010 (UTC)
• Yes the software that makes up the video game is important, but it is not really essential info. Even if there is no or a stunted development info the essential info on what the engine does can be gleamed from the "gamplay" section. Knowing a specific name here doesn't help most readers in almost every case.陣内_Jinnai 03:36, 21 September 2010 (UTC)
• I was neutral before on this field and I guess nothing has really changed. Everything should be in prose, infobox is just a neat overview. Ideally there would be a development section, otherwise gameplay section. Besides, there needs to be a reference for most cases. —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 09:02, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

• Just to address some of the arguments brought up here: a) I have come across many, many console video game articles where people "forced" an unnamed engine on the infobox – enough to consider these cases equally numerous to when the field was properly used. b) As per the guidelines: If the material for a development section is not sufficient, other things like reception or legacy can be joined with it in a "History" section. e) I have manually updated lots of console video game articles in the recent past. If you find obsolete infobox fields, delete them and salvage references if they are included in them (maybe AutoWikiBrowser could be used to delete these unused fields automatically if they do not contain refs). Prime Blue (talk) 16:42, 22 September 2010 (UTC)

Arbitrary break

• Support reinstatement - Coincidentally, I also sought to have this parameter reinstated and originally included it as part of my new section below. I view the removal of the engine parameter as rather unfortunate, because there are at least two specific instances in my mind in which the parameter intrigued me and provided unique insight that would have been otherwise intangible. I realize that misuse has been a real problem, but I think that removal is a non-solution.   — C M B J   09:08, 24 September 2010 (UTC)

• Support - I believe that the field should be reinstated. Since it's been a good period of time with no oppositions, should an admin be called to reinstate it in the template? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Gamerzworld (talk • contribs) 01:45, October 14, 2010
  • So the comments above the (unnecessary) Arbitrary break and the previous discussion do not count? I for one am still waiting for proof that this field is more useful than pointless in most cases.—  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 13:12, 14 October 2010 (UTC)
• Oppose - Haven't seen an argument here that makes a good enough case for reinstatement. - X201 (talk) 13:48, 14 October 2010 (UTC)
• Oppose the arguments here have not made any good reason why it's essential info nor how it would be prevented from being abused. For almost every article knowing the engine is not essential to understanding and for those few, it can be mentioned in the development section.陣内_Jinnai 14:43, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

Though meaningless to casual readers, the 'media', 'cabinet', 'arcade system', 'cpu', 'sound', and 'display' parameters may be of substantial informational value to some readers. The same is true of 'game engine', which is not unlike a PC equivalent of the aforementioned parameters. Speaking from personal experience, I did not even realize that games shared a common engine until I learned about them through infoboxes. In fact, I once did not buy a game simply because of the limitations imposed by its game engine at the time, of which I learned solely about via an infobox here. Moreover, based on personal experiences, it seems to me that through no other single descriptor can you learn so many unrelated details about a PC game:

• Is this game like one I've played before?
• Is this game a console port?
• Is this game far more (or less) hardware intensive than it looks like it should be?
• Does this game use familiar key mappings?
• Does this game undesirably limit how many players can play on a multiplayer server simultaneously?
• Will this game be vulnerable to common software exploits or security vulnerabilities?

These details are of equal or greater importance than those provided by the 'distributor', 'distribution', 'designer', 'programmer', 'artist', 'writer', or 'composer' parameters. And though it can be argued that any one of these parameters could or should be left to prose, we retain them because they are of a reasonable value to some readers--and the same should be true of 'game engine'. Lastly, as for addressing abuse potential, the degree of actual harm was not so severe as to warrant removal. Other important parameters, such as 'requirements', face the very same dilemma. I further move to reinstate 'game engine' as a parameter.   — C M B J   18:05, 16 October 2010 (UTC)

First off, the way you are describing an engine is improper. Whether you chose to base your buying habits on an engine is up to you, but by saying there is an engine and believing by the very nature that engine X = good or engine Y = bad because of what it did in game A is fallacy.

So what you are doing is actually biasing a reader with possibly faulty info (sometimes those engines are changed enough they are renamed and that isn't always documented well so people just "assume" it must be the older, poorer one),

Also while we do try to present many items to a reader there comes a point where 1> Too much infomation is harmful because it creates information overload and 2> limitations of the table either due to hitting a barrier in the amount of coding it will accept (i don't think we're in danger of that here, but I have known it to cause problems) or it exponentially increases loading times for every page for each new parameter there is. True 1 new paramenter doesn't hurt much, but neither does another and another and another...

To take your points on each:

• That info is better described in the prose. Knowing the engine adds little to that knowledge. You can make a chess game from the DOOM engines. Knowing its the Quake engine won't help you know the chess game is like an FPS.
• That info is already described elsewhere in the infobox.
• Possibly the only valid item here, but we already have a software requirements and not enough on its own to warrant.
• Again key mappings can change depending on the game. A chess game made from an FPS isn't going to have the same key mappings. It's also not Wikipedia's purpose to inform players whether it has the same keymappings. If they can figure that out, more power to them, but that shouldn't be a reason for inclusion.
• This one assumes a biased opinion on the engine based on previous games and thus could actually in the very way you phrase it be construed as WP:NPOV if engine Y = bad is used in the infobox to help support a negative tone of the game inspite positive reviews. As i mentioned before that an engine for one game used in another is not the same it means that saying engine Y = bad and engine X = good is at least in the grey area for NPOV if even here you are already thinking in those terms.
• Again see previous statement. It doesn't mean that just because their was a problem with the original that exploit wasn't fixed and there's no way to note that in the infobox.陣内_Jinnai 05:48, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

Before I answer any of your points related to this infobox, I want to first respond to the claim that I have in some way done something improper here. Neutrality is one of my very highest priorities as a contributor here. Yes, I spoke candidly from the subjective perspective of a reader. But that was exactly what I was trying to do: provide a real world example. That's precisely why I disclaimed my evaluation as a biased personal opinion, rather than presenting it as objective fact—and there's nothing objectionable about that at all.

With that said, I'd like to address the point of this parameter adding unnecessary clutter in this infobox. Currently, we have five parameters to describe the technical details of arcade games, but we only have one for PC games. I contest the notion that reinstatement of this single parameter is tantamount to the proliferation of trivial details in the infobox. This parameter was already a part of the infobox for years, and it was only removed as a result of a very brief cleanup discussion. We are not talking about going hog wild with a disproportionate number of new parameters.

As for similarities between games, consider Empire Earth and Empires: Dawn of the Modern World for example. Both of these games use the Titan Engine, 1.X and 2.X respectively, and are very much alike. They share remarkable similarities in interfaces, functionality, rendering, security, and even hotkeys. And while it is true that this should be described in the prose, not every reader wishes to stop and read paragraphs of text to ascertain something that may be apparent at-a-glance. If it is a chess game made with the Doom engine, then they will know to expect stark differences in most respects.

Another point which you addressed was that of security vulnerabilities. This issue is perhaps best illustrated by the Unreal Engine. As one of the most widely used engines, it is also one of the first to have exploits go public. What do Unreal Tournament 2003, Unreal Tournament 2004, Postal 2, Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield, and SWAT4 all have in common? They can all compromise a user's system because of the same buffer overflow problem. This does not mean that the Unreal Engine is bad in any way, it just means that a reader may need to take additional precaution if the game is being played in a mission-critical environment, such as a forward operating base. (And yes, people do play video games to unwind in these environments). Sure, patches will sometimes exist, but a person in a position with this sort of concern and responsibility should be able to determine that with additional research.

The next point is that of platform ports. No, that is not true—the infobox currently does nothing to tell you if a game was developed natively or ported from another platform. This leads us back to my subjective example presented in the aforementioned response: the Battlefield series. In this series, the oldest two games, Battlefield 1942 and Battlefield Vietnam, both are virtually identical in their gameplay, graphics, interface, and hotkeys. With the release of Battlefield 2, the Battlefield engine had evolved considerably but still retained the vast majority of its original features and functionality. Then came Battlefield 2142—an even further evolution of its predecessors—which still maintained the same core set of features as the original game. To the end-user, every one of these four games had a familiar look and feel. Meanwhile, the Frostbite Engine was being developed for Battlefield: Bad Company, a console-exclusive game. This meant that a new feature set—one with roots in the console platform, rather than PC platform—was born. By the time of Battlefield 1943 and Battlefield: Bad Company 2, version 1.5 of this console game engine had been successfully ported to Windows, which ushered in an entirely new look and feel as compared to the four predecessors in the PC series, as well as a number of new features. This brings us to our next point: player limitations. With the addition of an interactive (as opposed to innate) environment in the Frostbite Engine games—a good thing—the developer decided that it was technically necessary in 2009 to limit Battlefield 1943 to 24 (as opposed to 64) players in order to compensate for the new effects. In the 2010 release of Battlefield: Bad Company 2, this number was increased to 40. So even though this is/was a limitation of the Frostbite Engine in versions 1.0-1.5, it may not be a limitation by the time version 2.0 is released with Battlefield 3.

The moral of the story here is not that any particular game engine is inherently good or bad, rather that each game engine is fundamentally unique in its own way, and games based on a common engine are likely to have common features, characteristics, vulnerabilities, and/or technical limitations that may be of interest (or even vital importance) to the reader. And with the continuation of this parameter, we stand to inform and educate users in a way that would otherwise not be possible.   — C M B J   01:17, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

No, you did not do anything improper. It would have been better had you contested this before it was removed, but there is nothing wrong with contesting something after it is removed and you've not done anything improper during this process (ie you've kept things from devolving into name calling and flinging accusations) so there's no issue with you bringing up your grievance.

As for the arcade issue, we are trying to clean up the infoxbox and therfore with regard to having more infoboxes for arcade games you might have an easier chance at reducing the number than increasing it for PC games.

First I'll address the porting issue. The infobox addresses porting by release dates. The first release date is assumed to be the native system. If it isn't an inline footnote can be added next to it (and I've seen it done) to clarify, but the situation is so rare that it is enough to say chronological order is enough to demonstrate what a system was ported from. If there is concurrent releases, then its best explained in the prose how those systems relate and differ and modding they had to do with each engine.

As for the others, again, it biases the reader into thinking that if an engine exists for X then it will have all the same problems and flaws as Y. Readers won't assume if they see there is an Unreal engine that any patches have been made to address the buffer overflow issue. They'll assume Unreal=guaranteed overflow issue no matter what. They won't read into the prose, if what you said is true, that it gives them a snapshot overview and if it doesn't than its of no help.

Finally there is difficulty in sourcing many of the engines and its a problem because when there is no reliable sources (or sometimes when there is) people just put whatever they feel the engine should be. Given what you've said about engines being able to give the kind of info they can this is something then that would need to be worried about. This is why we have severly restricted some fields to assigned outputs, like |modes=.

The bottom line is that in a theoretical model where the engine was changed at all for any game then noting an engine might be fine. However, as almost every game modifies the engine to meet its needs and there are attempts to fix problems, it can give just as much relevant info as it can false info because, if what you claim is true (which i would agree), people assume one thing just on the name.陣内_Jinnai 16:13, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

Empires: Dawn of the Modern World is a featured-class article and it only mentions the Titan Engine in one sentence of its prose. The reality is that the prose of a game article is never really going to go into vivid detail about its game engine, let alone obscurities like buffer overflows and DoS attacks. And even with a casual reference to Titan Engine in the game article, it is still improbable that any useful knowledge is being communicated to the average reader at all, because few people are going to read an article in its entirety. However, in an infobox, it is likely that an interested reader will stop to examine and learn about a given game engine by clicking the link.   — C M B J   18:39, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

it's a 2006 FA - It likely needs to be reviewed as standards were tightened in 2007 signifigantly. It may be now that without that kind of info it wouldn't be a FA. I will not say one way or the other though, but that is far from the best example.陣内_Jinnai 21:50, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

That's true, but it still doesn't really mean much. The problem is widespread and evident in much of the general corpus:

• Battlefield: Bad Company (1 sentence)
• Battlefield 1943 (1 sentence)
• Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (2 sentences)
• Medal of Honor (1 sentence)
• Empire Earth (absent, despite being origin of respective engine)
• Caesar IV (absent)
• Immortal Cities: Children of the Nile (absent)

Besides, there is no real point in verbosely describing the uniform characteristics of the same engine in a dozen different articles. It is unforeseeable that this approach would be considered preferable in terms of WP:FACR, which requires that an article's content be concise.   — C M B J   05:25, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

Well first none of those are GA, let alone FA articles. Second, maybe that means the engine really isn't that essential to understanding the game as you make it out to be.陣内_Jinnai 17:33, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

If the game shares common characteristics with all other games using the same engine, then it is just as essential to understanding the mechanics of the game as if the characteristics deviated from that of the game engine. The only difference is that shared similarities do not need to be reiterated as content forks of varying qualities throughout the project, whereas unique conditions must be explored and described on an individual basis.   — C M B J   20:34, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

It has now been almost a month. Can we move forward with this?   — C M B J   21:42, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

What forward action is necessary besides archiving the thread by someone uninvolved? As far as I can see there is no consensus /or road support to reinstate the field as is. I, personally, would support the field if a new proposal was made that it may only contain a notable engine, with its own article linked. —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 22:29, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

Based on the aforementioned discussion(s), I remain unconvinced of the premise that a licensing parameter is so problematic that its very existence in an infobox must depend on restriction. With that said, however, I do favor the idea of standardization and uniformity, so I present the following rectified proposal for consideration:

Zdroj:https://en.wikipedia.org?pojem=Template_talk:Infobox_video_game/Archive_11
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Description	Parameter input	Parameter output 1	Parameter output 2	Example article	Default category
Games that are strictly sold on a commercial, for-profit basis	license=proprietary	License:	Proprietary	Starcraft II	Category:Proprietary video games, a new subcategory within Category:Proprietary software
Proprietary games provided to an end-user at no cost	license=freeware	License:	Freeware	SubSpace	Category:Freeware games
Proprietary games provided to an end-user at no cost, but which also encourage redistribution and limit functionality in some way	license=shareware	License:	Shareware	World Empire	Category:Shareware
Proprietary ad-supported games that are provided free of cost to an end-user	license=adware	License:	Adware	Zwinky	Category:Adware
Games released under licenses that are uncommon, complex, novel, or otherwise require human input	otherlicense=%userdefined%	License:	%userdefined%	N/A	N/A
Open source games of an unknown or unique license that complies with the definitions set forth by the Free Software Foundation or Open Source Initiative	freelicense=opensource	Free license:	Open source	N/A	Category:Free, open source video games
Open source games explicitly licensed under one or more versions of the GNU General Public License	freelicense=GPL	Free license:	GPL	Micropolis	Category:Free, open source video games
Open source games explicitly licensed under one or more versions of the GNU Lesser General Public License	freelicense=LGPL	Free license:	LGPL	BZFlag	Category:Free, open source video games
Open source games explicitly licensed under one or more versions of the BSD License	freelicense=BSD	Free license:	BSD	Microwar	Category:Free, open source video games
Open source games explicitly licensed under one or more versions of the Mozilla Public License	freelicense=MPL	Free license:	MPL