Talk:ToX - Jude Mathis: Lilium Orb

Liliale Orb testing, thoughts?

 * The following is a discussion that took place originally on User talk:JoeTang. All posts related to this subject have been moved here from that page. Please continue any further discussions here.

Liliale Orb
The Liliale Orb allows characters to invest Growth Points (GP) earned from leveling into gaining stats and unlocking skills. The Liliale Orb consists of six branches with nodes, one branch for each main stat, and areas that are unlocked when all the surrounding nodes have growth points invested. 

Jude 1st Orb
An area consists of the nodes directly above it, below it, and to its upper right and lower right, blah blah blah

I think I need to redraw the nodes at 6~9, so instead of rowspan=2 on some columns, they're just in their respective Area row. I would love to be able to stagger the areas so the nodes actually touch the correct ones so it's easily visible what the requirements are i.e. anything surrounding a certain area is required to unlock that area, but the table code doesn't want to cooperate. It's a miracle this doesn't look like even more of a cluster-fuck. Maybe using the same colour code that in-game uses for each stat and having a table would look better? I hate this font.


 * This looks like a good start, but I don't know what the L. Orb is supposed to look like. If there are colors that are used in the game itself, it is better to use those for clarity, similar to the way I set up the Swordian Device pages for each character. You may also want to look at this page for an alternative method of display, but I find it unworkable due to the way the code has to be distributed - the information within the code becomes discontiguous.


 * How many levels exist within the L. Orb? I keep hearing of a second level through which the arcane artes of each character are learned, and I assume there must be more, so the entire chart will end up becoming quite massive, like the Soma Build pages for Hearts which were never completed. With that in mind, I'm going to have the L. Orb page become split into one for every character on the template, since it makes no sense to dump such a large amount of info on a single page. Skill descriptions will likely have to remain separate and on the same per-char organization that exists presently.


 * If you need to squeeze some details a bit more, the tag will cause the text font to decrease. Other than that, the only other thing that can be done is to set the table to a fixed width and force people to make use of the horizontal scrollbar that should appear... and likely won't when using Wikia's awful "new look" skin, so tough luck for those people. Anyway, I'd like to see what it is you have in mind with the formatting, since this draft apparently does not show information accurately because of the lack of staggered cells.


 * Byakuren Hijiri (talk) 01:10, September 20, 2011 (UTC)


 * The Liliale Orb is a giant hexagon shape. http://hey-hey-listen.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Tales-of-Xillia-Growth-System_1.jpg Each dot connected by a line is one of the nodes listed, and each area has a dot inside indicating the skill/arte learned. You need to use 1 GP per dot to learn it, and you can only invest GP into an adjacent dot.
 * The layout I was thinking of looked similar to the Swordian Device table in terms of having a bunch of staggered boxes with different colouration, though I want them to have equal-width appearance. For example, Magic Guard requires Node 1 and 2's DEX and AGI points invested to learn. I wanted to have Magic Guard staggered so exactly half of it was underneath the DEX branch, and the other half was underneath the AGI branch. This is simple enough, but when it comes down to working with the 9th node, or even the 4th node, the wiki formatting causes some of the cells to be different width sizes for some reason, and on some instances ignored the colspans altogether, aligning a colspan="4" column with a colspan="5" column. I have it divided up such that the total colspan of each large column is 12, and Node 9 uses colspan="3" since that's the lowest common denominator to divide them up into 4ths while being able to have 3rds higher up, but if I want to stagger them, I'd have to divide it into 24ths.


 * This is currently the entire 1st orb for Jude. There only exists a 2nd orb, and each character's is different such that they'll require a separate link alongside their Artes and Skills in the bottom thingy. At the start, you have up to Node 4 visible. You have to unlock the asterisked skill (I'll have a different indicator if I colour things), and two others in Area 3 to access Area 4 and Node 5, and so forth. Then, the 2nd orb has an identical appearance to the 1st orb after you unlock it, but with greater stat bonuses and more skills and artes.


 * The only thing I'm worried about for colouring, other than accurate colour reproduction, is that Mind (Magic Defense) uses a shade of green and so does SP (Skill Points), and I always thought they looked too similar in-game. Could be my monitor though. Wish I had a capture card so I could just sample each colour accurately :3


 * So, compared to the JP Wiki's orb table that we have referenced for each page, this feels a lot more intuitive (as well as being more complete at the moment). You should be able to tell (or at least with a short note) that a Skill in an Area (as opposed to the occassional +stat that I had to bump down, because that's just the way they surround the areas later on) requires all those nodes that surround it, including the corners. I shortened the +Stat on the left, and made one of the columns in Node 7 larger, looks better that way and easier to tell you require the corners for those areas. I think the ones above Node 6 still need to be staggered, since things in Area 1 for example, don't require the top left and bottom left corners. A bit more touch-up to make it look nicer, and I can start making pages and copying out the other characters. Just wondering though, is the width too big? How do I get a fixed width for the entire table to get a scroll bar again? <____< I don't have problems seeing the entire thing, but I'm on a 1920x1080 using the old, non-shitty Wikia layout.


 * I can also continue getting preliminary stats for artes if I have time, mainly hits, TP, aerial/knockdown, but given they get bonuses based on usage, some may be inaccurate, and I'm not confident in catching each change as they occur. Hopefully, this didn't occur with Milla's artes.
 * JoeTang 03:06, September 20, 2011 (UTC)


 * Thank you for all of that info. We really should maintain the staggered effect to be completely accurate, which will require those 24 columns and possibly a very extended table width. I can see everything on my 1280x800 screen, admittedly with wordwrapping for many of the stat boxes, but anything smaller than that likely has extremely broken formatting. To force a fixed width, add  , setting the point value to whatever will work best, to the first line of the table code as follows:


 * {| cellpadding="5" cellspacing="0" border="1" style="background:#f9f9f9; width=1200pt;"


 * Don't worry too much about width being too big, though any width mitigation will help the people who view the page. I'd rather have large widths to show everything with accuracy and detail, than lose something along the way. The latter setup looks a lot more efficient, especially since you mention that skills/artes require everything that surrounds them. However, I think the "Node/Area #" labels are redundant, and it might look more unified if only "Node #" is labeled, spanning both rows. It reintegrates the stat boosts that you bumped into the current "Area" rows, and I don't think it's a loss to remove the "Area" labels since those apply only to skills/artes anyway.


 * And I know this will add a lot more weight to the table, but I want to have the kana/kanji for the artes and skills displayed, following the usual bold with links/JP text/parentheses setup. I don't mind being the one to do it after you get the pages uploaded, if you want to focus on getting the information published before dealing with the frills. If it looks bad, I will reconsider, but I want to have it like that if at all possible. The stat boxes actually look nice if they are wordwrapped, and this way, horizontal whitespace in the skill/arte boxes can be filled and reduce width issues to some degree.


 * Also, if you don't mind, can we move this discussion onto the talk page for Jude's Liliale Orb page? Or just copy/paste if you want the same discussion to stay here on your own talk page as well. I want to have the info available more readily on a page it directly relates to, and I am likely to forget that we talked about this here if we don't move it.


 * Byakuren Hijiri (talk) 04:46, September 20, 2011 (UTC)


 * Yeah, you can go ahead and move it. I just tossed up the table here since I needed somewhere to sandbox this. It shouldn't be a problem to add the kana/kanji, though three lines might be a bit tall. I should be able to finish this up sometime tomorrow though.
 * JoeTang 05:15, September 20, 2011 (UTC)