Creating basic character information boxes for all species.

(I apologize in advance for the size of this post, but I felt that completeness was warranted in this case. Even so, there is at least one character that isn't in this table, because he isn't a member of any of these races.)

So, if you have looked at one of the character descriptions on the wiki (if not then look here), you will have seen the box that contains basic information about each character. I noticed that while each character has different information in the box, the fields in the box are the same for characters of the same species.

My idea is simple: lets create boxes for every single species. All the boxes seem to contain about 7 fields: name, species, sex (gender), height (length), hair, eyes, and then one species specific field that describes something that is unique to their species. This is the field we care about, something that should be unique for each species but still vary from member to member of that species.

Here is a list of all the species in the Wiki, and their what their field is, for those species that have characters in the wiki. What should the other species field be, or are there any fields that you think should be included for all characters? I for one thing that "age" should be a field for every character.

How to read this table: the leftmost column contains the names off all the races in Felarya, and their sub-races. The next column over contains a character's name (if there is a character of that species in the wiki) and the "Most common field", which is just an easy way to keep track of what field is most common amongst characters of that race. The rightmost column is the special fields each character has.
I am so glad I wrote a program to do most of the table layout for me, I would have gone insane trying to do it by hand.

Species with a green background are ones who have already been "updated".
[/tr]

Species and sub-species	Character name	The special field(s) they have
Angels	Most common field is	Wing color
	Markie	wing colour
Purifer Angels	Most common field is	?
Defiler Angels	Most common field is	?
Centaurs	Most common field is	?
Zebra Centaurs	Most common field is	?
Deerataurs	Most common field is	?
Chlaenas	Most common field is	?
Cecaelias	Most common field is	?
Kraken Caelias	Most common field is	?
Vetaelas	Most common field is	?
Nihlmarreths	Most common field is	?
Cepias	Most common field is	?
Glass Caelias	Most common field is	?
Dridders	Most common field is	Abdomen color
	Violet	Abdomen colour
Gerridis	Most common field is	?
Trapdoor Dridders	Most common field is	?
Bolas Dridders	Most common field is	?
	Alestor	None
Naxyla Dridders	Most common field is	Skin color
	Artemia	skin colour
Argyrones	Most common field is	?
Dryads	Most common field is	Age
	Drayla	age
	Cypress	age
Bramble Dryads	Most common field is	?
Shadow Dryad	Most common field is	?
Faebanes	Most common field is	?
Swamp Dryads	Most common field is	?
Mycodryads	Most common field is	?
Cactus Dryad	Most common field is	?
Alguanes	Most common field is	?
Snow Dryads	Most common field is	?
Domesticated Dryads	Most common field is	?
Elementals	Most common field is	?
Nature Elemental	Most common field is	?
Wood Elemental	Most common field is	?
Flora Elementals	Most common field is	?
Water Elemental	Most common field is	?
Vapor Elementals	Most common field is	?
Air Elemental	Most common field is	?
Darkness Elementals	Most common field is	Body
	Déméchrelle	body
Earth Elementals	Most common field is	?
Fire Elementals	Most common field is	?
Lava Elementals	Most common field is	?
	King Trazix	None
Lightning Elementals	Most common field is	?
Elves	Most common field is	?
Scarlet Elves	Most common field is	?
Phantom Elves	Most common field is	?
Mist Elves	Most common field is	Age, Skin color
	Kahla	skin colour, age
Fairies	Most common field is	Wings
	Melany	wings, other characteristics
	Temi	wings, other characteristics
	Alvar	Wing style
	Lily	wings
	Aya	wings, other distinguishing features
	Lucilya	None
Water Sprites	Most common field is	?
Crimson Maidens	Most common field is	Wings
	Kiki	wings
Mist Fairies	Most common field is	?
Canopy Fairies	Most common field is	Wings, Other characteristics
	Subeta	Wings, Other characteristics
Storm Sprites	Most common field is	?
Dusk Nymphs	Most common field is	?
Frost Sprites	Most common field is	?
Harpies	Most common field is	Color of feathers
	Erica	skin colour, colour of feathers
	Belletia	colour of feathers
Demon Harpies	Most common field is	?
Rock Harpies	Most common field is	?
Golden Harpies	Most common field is	?
Seagull Harpies	Most common field is	?
Wrath Maidens	Most common field is	?
Lamina Harpies	Most common field is	?
Trochili	Most common field is	?
Banshees	Most common field is	?
Sledgewyvers	Most common field is	?
Humans	Most common field is	Age
	Léa	other characteristics
	Gunther	None
	Rev	None
	Marken	None
	Seliky	Skin
	Telekline	None
	Captain Pal Sebrit	age
	Manda Kugi	None
	Lady Lesona	age
Mermaids	Most common field is	Tail
	Anko	Skin colour
	Sophie	Color of fins & tail
	Mina	tail
Leviathan Mermaids	Most common field is	?
River Mermaids	Most common field is	?
Crystal Mermaids	Most common field is	?
Estuarine Mermaids	Most common field is	?
Selachis	Most common field is	?
Meiramines	Most common field is	?
Nagas	Most common field is	Color of scales
	Crisis	scale colour
	Namesta	Skin color, Color of scales
	Terra	Color of scales
	Rin	Skin color
	Anna	age, colour of scales
	Masumi	colour of scales, colour of undebelly scales
	Aurora	age, colour of scales
	Garnet	age, colour of scales, colour of underbelly scales
	Vivian	Skin color, Colour of scales
	Saya	Age, Scales
	Fiona	colour of scales, colour of underbelly scales
	Katrika	colour of tail, colour of underbelly scales
	Malika	Skin, Scales
	Jissy	colour of scales
	Monty	None
	Ajab	None
Hydranagas	Most common field is	?
Diamond Nagas	Most common field is	?
Pit Nagas	Most common field is	?
Gorgons	Most common field is	?
Oceanic Nagas	Most common field is	?
Sea Krait Nagas	Most common field is	?
Nekos	Most common field is	Fur
	Aimi	Fur (on legs, tail and forearms)
	Voidfingers	other characteristics
	Sonya	Color of fur, Color of ears
Citas	Most common field is	?
Slug Girls	Most common field is	Skin color, color of slug body
	Velvet	Skin colour, Colour of slug body
Lucicamps	Most common field is	?
Sphinxes	Most common field is	?
Blue Sphinxes	Most common field is	?
Sphinx Sentinels	Most common field is	?
Canopy Pantaurs	Most common field is	?
Stone Sphinxes	Most common field is	?
Succubi	Most common field is	Age, Skin color, Color of topscales, Color of bellyscales
	Kallisti	age, skin colour, colour of topscales, colour of bellyscales
Fire Succubi	Most common field is	Age
	Menyssan	age
Frost Succubi	Most common field is	Age, Skin color
	Arale	age, skin colour
Silver Succubi	Most common field is	Skin color
	Iridan	skin colour
Tinies	Most common field is	?
Neeras	Most common field is	?
Efrii	Most common field is	?
Ariformids	Most common field is	?
Tomthumbs	Most common field is	?
Nemesises	Most common field is	?
Demi-Chimeras	Most common field is	?
Slimoids	Most common field is	?
Ghosts	Most common field is	?
Chilotaurs	Most common field is	?
	Nix	None
Genies	Most common field is	?
Titans	Most common field is	?
Giants and Giantesses	Most common field is	?
	Elle	clothes
	Jade	other characteristics
	Jora	age
	Milly	skin
Vampires	Most common field is	Hair color
	Tanya	Hair color
Miaxi	Most common field is	?
Gyspas	Most common field is	?
Squamataurs	Most common field is	?
Gekkotas	Most common field is	?
Jotuns	Most common field is	?
Mantoids	Most common field is	?
Lemurians	Most common field is	?
Ichthys	Most common field is	?
Demons	Most common field is	Skin
	Terror	Skin
Scorpisaïs	Most common field is	?
Razias	Most common field is	?

I can't really see the point for this, what would it be used for?
Also, wouldn't it get really big and unwieldy?
This is a good idea.

Some races are going to need more than others to be honest. Fairy wings for example and the fact that fairies should have 3 different size blocks (min, max, and common)

It's an interesting idea, but I'm not convinced it's needed. When I created the character boxes, I merely included what the creator of each character had found relevent. This thread (and the table you've made) could be useful as a reference point; for instance, reminding the creators of fairy characters to mention the colour and/or form of their wings. But I'm not certain it's necessary to create standard boxes for each species.

Though if you want to do so, I see no harm in it either, of course.

I do agree that creating box for each species and - sub species may seem like overkill ^^;

But I think this can be uselful for some of the most used races, like nagas, who have all pretty much the same fields
And thank you for your great ( and patient ! ) work on that

Anime-Junkie wrote:

I can't really see the point for this, what would it be used for? Also, wouldn't it get really big and unwieldy?

The point would be to create some unifying standards, as well as providing a generic species specific template for future use.

asaenvolk wrote:

Some races are going to need more than others to be honest. Fairy wings for example and the fact that fairies should have 3 different size blocks (min, max, and common)

Yeah, I figured that some species would require more fields than others.

French snack wrote:

It's an interesting idea, but I'm not convinced it's needed. When I created the character boxes, I merely included what the creator of each character had found relevent. This thread (and the table you've made) could be useful as a reference point; for instance, reminding the creators of fairy characters to mention the colour and/or form of their wings. But I'm not certain it's necessary to create standard boxes for each species. Though if you want to do so, I see no harm in it either, of course.

I'm all about stadardification and the creation of reusable things (it's a programmer thing, I think). (This is just a part of what I really want to do, because I don't think it's possible to do my real idea without custom javascript and/or a special program, and it would a be a *lot* of work.)

Karbo wrote:

I do agree that creating box for each species and - sub species may seem like overkill ^^; But I think this can be uselful for some of the most used races, like nagas, who have all pretty much the same fields And thank you for your great ( and patient ! ) work on that

Yeah, I deliberately included as much as I could, because it's always easy to get rid of stuff in the future. For example, I suspect that all the fairy sub-species will get the same template as the regular ones, since there are not any important differences between them. Probably the same will happen with the nagas.

Anime-Junkie wrote:

Maybe we could integrate it with the Heavy edition Flash Wiki?

The question I have is: "How"? Have a button that leads to the general template for that particular species?

In the spirit of Be Bold, here are some changes I am suggesting.

First, I am proposing that all characters have the following three fields added to their templates: "Age", "Skin Colour", and "Other Characteristics".

• Age - This is the character's actual age, with their apparent age (if applicable) in parenthesis.
  
• Skin Colour - This is the color of their skin, or whatever they have that passes for it. In the case of humanoids (AKA: nagas, dridders, centaurs, etc.) this will describe the color of their human half.
  
• Other Characteristics - This is a catch-all field for information that people should know, but that doesn't fit in any other field.
  

This will affect all characters currently in the wiki, and all templates.

This means that the generic non-species specific template will look like this:

Name

Species

Age

Sex

Height (head to ground)

Hair Colour

Eye Colour

Other Characteristics

Third, I am proposing that all fairies and sub-species of fairies (that would be: Fairies, Water Sprites, Crimson Maidens, Mist Fairies, Canopy Fairies, Storm Sprites, Dusk Nymphs, and Frost Sprites) all use a single template (because there doesn't appear to be any significant difference between them), and that this template have the following four fields added:

• Wing Style - This is the field in which to describe their wings, since that seems to vary from character to character.
  
• Maximum Height* - This is the maximum size the character can grow to.
  
• Common Height* - This is the size that the character is most commonly found at.
  
• Minimum Height* - This is the smallest size the character can shrink to.
  

And the following field removed: Height(head to ground)

• Height - I suggest removal because this field doesn't make much sense for a fairy, as they can change sizes at will.
  

* - The fairy can choose to be any size in between these as well. Also, I'm not certain how strict of a limit the maximum and minimum heights are. if , and under what conditions, they can be exceeded. I don't think that it really matters.


This means that the generic fairy template will look like this:

Name

Species

Age

Sex

Maximum Height

Common Height

Minimum Height

Hair Colour

Eye Colour

Wing Style

Other Characteristics

Fourth, since it is highly likely that many of the fields will not be known, either to us, or perhaps even to the character creators (or they might not want to reveal it for various reasons), I suggest that any field with unknown information have a question mark placed in it.




So, what do you think of my suggested changes?

The downside is that we'll have boxes with question marks in them. I'm not certain what benefit that would have. Other than that, however, standardisation may be quite useful.

Slug girls, automatically labeled:

Sex: Female/Male

Wow, so few people have no opinion on this subject matter? Does that mean I can proceed with the changes I have outlined?

I'am fine with it but that will be quite a lot of work ^^;
But indeed it carries interesting informations and will force me to get off from my lazy ass and think a bit more about them XD ( on age and size for example )

This would be extremely useful in getting consistent amounts of information for the unofficial character bios in the Flash wiki.
If we can set out a template for each species I think that it will greatly streamline the process of submission.

Anyway, I agree with your changes, they would be for the better.

Okay, the fairy template has been uploaded, and all fairy characters have been updated with it. Check them out and tell me if you see something you don't like.

Hmmmm, a thought occurred to me, the non-species specific template is missing an important field: skin color, though I'm not really sure what terms should be used in this field. After all, a "white" person isn't really white, but the term "Caucasian" doesn't really make sense on a world that doesn't have the Caucasus region. Same for "black" people; they're not really black, but saying that they're African doesn't make sense on a world without the continent of Africa. I don't even know where to start with someone like Vivian, whose skin is "light purple".



...great, I've brought political correctness to Felarya... ^^;






Well, whatever the terminology ends up being, I suggest that skin color be added to the basic template, and thus to every other template by extension. After all, most/all of the species have skins, don't they?
This means that the generic non-species specific template will now look like this:

Name

Species

Age

Sex

Height (head to ground)

Skin colour

Hair colour

Eye colour

Other characteristics

mhh i see what you mean.. maybe we could use some mid descriptions : like : pale ,pale pinkish, tan, mocha etc.. ^^

I agree with Karbo here. There aren't fairytales that go "she was a caucasian female". Usually, skin colors are: fair, tan, swarthy, dark, chocolate, ebony, milky white... no one in the wiki's been described as black so far. Except Demechrélle.

Oldman40k2003 wrote:

Hmmmm, a thought occurred to me, the non-species specific template is missing an important field: skin color, though I'm not really sure what terms should be used in this field. After all, a "white" person isn't really white, but the term "Caucasian" doesn't really make sense on a world that doesn't have the Caucasus region. Same for "black" people; they're not really black, but saying that they're African doesn't make sense on a world without the continent of Africa. I don't even know where to start with someone like Vivian, whose skin is "light purple".

...great, I've brought political correctness to Felarya... ^^;

I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with "white" and "black". Crisis, Anna, Katrika, Jissy and many others are white ; Enita and a few others are black ; Vivian is light purple, Anko is blue, Serimela is grey and Shaan is green. Milly is métisse (a term which, interestingly, has no exact equivalent in English); she has brown skin. I agree that it's best to be specific when possible, but I don't find the terms "white" and "black" to be offensive or misleading.

Quote :

Well, whatever the terminology ends up being, I suggest that skin color be added to the basic template, and thus to every other template by extension.

Agreed.

For nagas, I would also suggest distinguishing between their dorsal and ventral scales.


Edit: I've filled in the infobox for Lucilya, since it's there. I hope that's ok. I won't add any information about her to the article itself until it's been "canonised" by Karbo.

By the way, I don't think it's necessary to specify that heights are "(head to ground)" in fairies' infoboxes. That makes sense for nagas, dridders and slug girls, but not really for fairies, nekos, humans, tinies, elves or giantesses.

Karbo wrote:

mhh i see what you mean.. maybe we could use some mid descriptions : like : pale ,pale pinkish, tan, mocha etc.. ^^

I some of those terms, they don't have (to my knowledge), any overtones.

Stabs wrote:

I agree with Karbo here. There aren't fairytales that go "she was a caucasian female". Usually, skin colors are: fair, tan, swarthy, dark, chocolate, ebony, milky white... no one in the wiki's been described as black so far. Except Demechrélle.

I like some of these terms too.

French snack wrote:

I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with "white" and "black". Crisis, Anna, Katrika, Jissy and many others are white ; Enita and a few others are black ; Vivian is light purple, Anko is blue, Serimela is grey and Shaan is green. Milly is métisse (a term which, interestingly, has no exact equivalent in English); she has brown skin. I agree that it's best to be specific when possible, but I don't find the terms "white" and "black" to be offensive or misleading.

Hmmm, I suppose you are correct in that there is nothing inherently wrong with those terms. (Also, métisse is an English word (though I had to look it up), though it doesn't have any color association. See here.)

I propose that words used to describe skin color can any of the ones that have been mentioned, plus others, as the character creators see fit. If someone would rather have their character be "fair-skinned" instead of "white", or felt that "swarthy" fits their character's "feel" better than "brown", that would be fine.





Or we could go straight to RGB triplets.
(A RGB triplet, for those of you who don't know, is a way to use numbers to define all human visible colors. While quite useful, they're not very pronounceable. I mean really, how do you pronounce RGB(255,227,187)(█), RGB(125,80,59)(█), or RGB(0,146,146)(█)?)
/joking

French snack wrote:

By the way, I don't think it's necessary to specify that heights are "(head to ground)" in fairies' infoboxes. That makes sense for nagas, dridders and slug girls, but not really for fairies, nekos, humans, tinies, elves or giantesses.

You're probably right, for species that don't have tails or other long extensions to their body, there isn't really another possible definition of height. The tailed ones though, probably need two defintions; one for head to ground height, and one for total length (head to tail-tip). I haven't given the tailed species enough thought yet to propose any changes right now though.





At this point I'm going to keep track of other people's suggestions for changes to the various species, so that I don't lose track of them.

French snack wrote:

For nagas, I would also suggest distinguishing between their dorsal and ventral scales.

/Fish/ wrote:

Slug girls, automatically labeled:
Sex: Female/Male

Okay, the various templates has been updated on the wiki. As usual, let me know if something is off.




I've done some thinking, and I think I know what I want to do for the various Harpy species: feather color and wingspan, since both of these are distinctive characteristics that are easily visible from a distance.

This means that the harpy specific template would look like this:

Name

Species

Age

Sex

Height

Wingspan

Skin colour

Feather colour

Hair colour

Eye colour

Other characteristics

So, what do you guys think, and what changes would you make, if any?

Good work. For the harpies' wingspan, we'd need some sort of norm, though. I.e., what is the "normal" wingspan for an adult harpy from each subspecies?

Need any help updating the template on each character page?

French snack wrote:

Good work. For the harpies' wingspan, we'd need some sort of norm, though. I.e., what is the "normal" wingspan for an adult harpy from each subspecies?

Need any help updating the template on each character page?

Hmmm, I suppose a list of "normal" wingspans could be useful for character creators. I was just going to be lazy and leave it entirely up to the authors.

There are several images of harpies on the harpy page, so I took them and measured (as best I could because the images are not good images for measuring such things... twisted bodies and important stuff being off-screen) their wingspan and their height, in pixels, then found the ratio of wingspan to height (IE: W/H).
As I expected, this ratio is all over the place.

In RMSephy's picture I measured two of the three harpies, and got W/H ratios of 1.319 and 1.569. In Gamera1985's picture I got a W/H ratio of 1.658. In Zephrania's picture I measured/guesstimated (since so much of the only usable wing is off screen) a W/H of 3.239. The harpy chick has W/H of 0.723.


What this means is that there seems to be a slight consensus on a wingspan to height ratio of ~1.5. I personally think that's too small, but Zephrania's ratio of 3.2 might be a little too big.

For reference, at a ratio of 1.5, the 98 foot tall Erica has a wingspan of 147 feet.



At this point in time, I don't need help updating the templates on each character page. I've purposefully only updated the characters whose species we have "finished", I have also purposefully avoided giving each character the "standard template" until their species has been processed, and I have purposefully avoid some species thus far.

The reason I have avoided giving each character the "standard template" is because I am trying to avoid having to keep track of who has what template, in case the standard template changes, like what happened when it gained the skin color field.
I have avoid some species thus far *cough*nagas*cough* because there are a lot of them, so I would rather work out any bugs or missing fields on other species with fewer characters, so that when I do get around to those species the changes only have to be made once per character.

Well, let's look at earth birds: the ratio between wingspan and length.

Golden Eagle: 2:1

Bald Eagle: 5:2

Red-tailed Hawk: 12:5

Harris Hawk: 3:1

(Citation: http://www.seaworld.org/just-for-teachers/classroom-activities/4-8/pdf/Raptor%20Ratios.pdf)

So, Harpies are bird-people of prey. Therefore, the above being a decent enough selection of "normal" earth birds of prey, we should probably use them for reference.

Rock Harpies are pretty common, let's go with them. They are most similar to Harris Hawks in habitat and a little bit in color. So lets assume a wingspan ratio of about

Rock Harpies: 3:1

So... The length of Erica and Belletia together should give us about the average. 89 Feet, rounded up to 90 feet. 90 X 3 = 270 feet.

So the average wingspan of a Rock Harpy might be around 270 feet.

Ask a question about birds, I will take it as a challenge. Malahite, how are you going to deconstruct this one?

I haven't forgotten this thread (just a little busy at the moment), but I would like to make note of an edit I made to one of my earlier posts.


I was notified that there was a little confusion about what the three height fields in fairy character's infoboxes means, so I added an explanation.

The gist of the explanation was: "
Maximum Height - This is the maximum size the character can grow to.*
Common Height - This is the size that the character is most commonly found at.*
Minimum Height - This is the smallest size the character can shrink to.*

* - The fairy can choose to be any size in between these as well. Also, I'm not certain how strict of a limit the maximum and minimum heights are. if , and under what conditions, they can be exceeded. I don't think that it really matters."

I'm not any less busy than I was in my previous post, but this stuff isn't going to do itself.



Okay, the harpy template has been uploaded, and all harpy characters have been updated with it. Check them out and tell me if you see something you don't like.