Talk:List of entities

Should this be a category?

Anyone else think that, if all of the entities are going to have an entry, that this should be changed to a category? I'm not gonna do it yet, but if the general opinion is that it should, then I'm sure someone will do it. --Charron 09:54, 29 Jun 2005 (PDT)

Few changes

I've made a few changes that I think will help:

• Sorted entites into true categories based on effect, not name. There's only a few differences and it makes more sense.
• Renamed each category to a 'friendly' description.
• Added an index with headings to make jumping around easier.

--Tom Edwards 11:02, 28 Jun 2005 (PDT)

Thanks, I could have done it, but I wasn't sure how Fragrag

List seems to suit better than a category, especially considering how many entities there are Zevensoft

I suggest making templates for the inputs/outputs on the entities Megiddo

Standardization

I think some standardised formatting for entities would be nice - I'm starting something here... -- Cargo Cult 14:38, 4 Jul 2005 (PDT)

Adding Entities

Anyone got a reason I shouldn't add env_tonemap_controller? Reasons may include: "It doesn't work!" and "It's already there." All I know is, it's in my unmodified .fgd, screaming for attention.

--Demented 11:13, 14 Sep 2005 (PDT)

There seem to be several missing entities. I'm adding them as I come across them. No one's objected yet. -shrug- —Maven ^(talk) 15:29, 18 Sep 2005 (PDT)

Purpose of this article

Is this article supposed to be a comprehensive list of entities? I.e., is it supposed to list every entity ever created in Source games (such as HL2, HL2 Ep1/2, DOD:S, CS:S, Portal, TF2, non-VALVe Source-based games) as well as Goldsource games (for the sake of information availability)?

I'm asking this because a lot of articles / categories devoted to entities in these various games already exist, and by the looks of it, this article might only be redundant information. Since I'm not aware of "the big picture" when it comes to full lists of entities (probably others might recognize at a glance what this list refers to), I might be wrong. But at least someone could specify the goal or philosophy behind this article, by describing what game(s) the list refers to.

The entities themselves contain the info about which games the entities are in, and the links at the bottom of the article link to other lists for specific entity lists for official VALVe Source games. Solokiller 09:27, 7 Jan 2008 (PST)

That still doesn't answer my question. I can see both the links for each entity and the "See also" ones :P Let me try again... For example, if I decide to create a mod, am I free to dump a list of the entities I create (as in, entities that didn't exist but I code in my mod) for my mod on this article? Or if I buy a license from VALVe to create a game using the Source Engine, can I extend this list with any additional entities I create?

I know this is a list, but what is this list about? The title itself is a bit on the vague side... (at least for me, being a new guy around these parts of the intrawebs) The person who created it, probably did it thinking: "This list is going to contain entities of games X, Y and Z." or "This list is going to contain every entity that anyone ever creates." or "This list is going to contain the base entities for the Source engine, plus HL2 entities, plus Ep1 and Ep2 entities." Which one is it? (Or am I seeing this wrong?) --Etset 10:14, 7 Jan 2008 (PST)

It contains only the entities from VALVe games, HL2, CS: S, Lost coast, EP 1, EP 2, TF2, Portal. Solokiller 12:23, 7 Jan 2008 (PST)

Roger that. Noted. Thank you :) Suggestion: perhaps that explanation could be given at the beginning of the article ("This article is comprised of a list of all the entities from VALVEs' games: HL2, CS:S, Lost Coast, EP1, EP2, TF2 and Portal", or something along those lines ... also, don't know if it's just Source or also Goldsource games). If it had that single line, everyone would understand what it's about! :) Once again, thank you. --Etset 12:30, 7 Jan 2008 (PST)

When was it last updated? It seems far from being a complete list ... --Beeswax 17:25, 6 Apr 2008 (PDT)

Where is the data from ? is it culled from all of Valve's FGD files? --Beeswax 17:25, 6 Apr 2008 (PDT)

The section-categories seem arbitrary. IMO a 'flat' alphabetical list would be more navigable. If each entity ref were preceded by a #, we would have a checksum which would help in maintaining such a huge list. --Beeswax 17:25, 6 Apr 2008 (PDT)

func_tank_combine_cannon

It's not on the list. That makes me sad. It's a really cool entity.

GUI panels?

Well i've been scouring the interweb to find any kind of documentation on how to make a GUI panel for a Half-Life 2 mod called Escape.

I'm thinking along the lines of the good old DOOM 3 GUI panels (a tutorial example of them [[1]]) where your weapon is put away allowing you to see the cursor on the GUI, and allowing you to interact with the gui via mouseclick (opposed to shooting the panel if the weapon were out). This has been done in Garrys-mod for the Wire system using lua scripting, but outside lua i can't find any way of encoding this in source.

Any help, or even an exact match of a such entity for HL2 mods would be ideal... --Komiyan 04:43, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Reformat

Okay, just reformatted the page a bit. I'll slowly fill in the descriptions (copy-pasting from the entities' page itself), anyone wanna help with that? Thoughts on the new layout? Neobenedict 20:21, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

Wow +15,375 bytes did not expect that. Neobenedict 20:26, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

I'm not sure I really like the images. Before when I'd come to this page it was nice to have a compact concise list of things I could glance at when I needed something quick and Hammer wasn't open. But now the images stretch the page vertically and add so much white space between each entity name. A Boojum Snark 16:32, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

I'd been constantly using this list to go through all the entities and find minor corrections to make. I much preferred the former version, for Snark's reasons. Thelonesoldier 00:52, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

I know you were trying to help everyone out but the list was much better as it used to be(in my opinion). There really is no need for the pictures outside of the specific entities page itself. Wazanator 4:44, 6 January 2011

At first I thought it was really cool but it is taking forever to scroll through and the entity names get lost in the soup. Good idea but I don't think it worked. -Mr. Happy 16:47, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

At this point, can we just revert to the previous version? Thelonesoldier 00:51, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

Standard for Entity Descriptions

We need to come to an agreement when it comes to the layout of entity pages. Some entity pages don't have an Entity description section. They just append the description to the end of the "x is a point entity for games x, y, z" bit. Most articles have this section though. Personally, I don't think this separate section is necessary, as the inline descriptions seem to work fine, and it's more compact. Either way, there is much work to be done to reform the entity pages to a standardized form of either having this section or removing it. —Mattshu 15:04, 26 December 2012 (PST)

Bump.—Mattshu 12:24, 6 January 2013 (PST)

Removal of this page

This page should not be removed. As you can see on this very page, discussion on relying on a category has taken place before (as far back as its inception, in fact), and it has stood the test of time and debate.

I would like to point out yet again to Pinsplash that acting as an administrator is undesirable and a source of unnecessary problems. Marking pages for deletion purely because you disagree with their existence does nothing but anger people who have to expend time and effort to undo the damage and waste time arguing. Only administrators can actually delete pages, and if an administrator were to review this they would certainly not delete it without prior discussion AND good cause. Solokiller (talk) 13:36, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

I shall say more then. Unlike Category:Entities, this list is currently not even half as complete, and from day 1 it was never close to being as complete as Category:Entities is to a 100% comprehensive list of entities. (I'm serious, first revision of this page had about 390 entities. Add the current numbers of entities listed in Category:Source Base Entities and Category:Half-Life 2 Entities and you get 527. Note the last number is lower than the actual count because there's still many undocumented entities.) The disparity between this page and Category:Entities has done nothing but grow in 13 years, because you have to manually update this page every time someone documents a new entity. Except that's not happened. There isn't a single Portal-related entity on this page, there aren't even Episode 2 entities. Meanwhile the entity article templates automatically add categories for entity pages. In conclusion this page is clearly an obsolete list of hl2 and base entities, and is not even deserving of the title "list of entities". Pinsplash (talk) 15:40, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

Then why didn't you start a new topic on this talk page to discuss how to handle this? Jumping straight to flagging for removal is why people take issue with what you do. I'm sure you're discussing this on your Discord server, but that server is not official and not where such discussions should take place. If you'd handled this the way others did on this very page, we could have discussed a proper way to handle this without having to deal with your overstepping of authority (again, i might add). The comments in the edit itself as well as the reason given are rather childish as well. "some of you are just goofy" is not exactly a good way to flag a page for deletion, and comes off as arrogant. This deletion should be discussed before flagging the page, and the same should go for other large scale changes you make. And to be clear, they should occur on this wiki, not your Discord server. I'd also like to note that this page is linked to from a fair number of pages on this wiki, and is probably linked to from other websites as well. Before flagging it for deletion, it should be made fully obsolete on this wiki (all references updated to point to the most appropriate replacement). Again, this should only be done after the decision to remove it has been made, not before or during.

Due to this i've contacted Jeff Lane asking him to find a solution for the problems that have been occurring these past few months. I've pointed out the situation regarding hackers, the case sensitivity issues with category pages as well as the fact that you took it upon yourself to write an Etiquette page that even states you should discuss major changes beforehand, and that also contradicts the guidelines that the deletion template specifies regarding removal of the notice. As i told him, users should not be dealing with administrative tasks such as these, and there is a need for community moderators to keep an eye on things, since the current administrators clearly don't have time to monitor this wiki. I have also stressed that these moderators should not be promoted out of the user-base to avoid issues with overstepping of authority. This is not meant to be an attack on anyone, this is an observation i've noted in many community moderated environments. I get that you're trying to clean things up, but this wiki has been around for a long time and making large scale changes now appears to many people to be an attempt to assert authority.

I would also like to point out that the sheer volume of changes you're making makes it hard to keep track of when changes are being discussed. It is simply not feasible for the average user to be aware of every change that you want to make, and if you are even seeking discussion beforehand it would be hard to notice. A good solution to that is to keep a centralized list of ongoing discussions, but such a thing should probably be handled by an administrator so as to make it more visible.

Do keep in mind that this is a fairly old wiki, and making such drastic changes now is seen by some as pointless if not disruptive. You are doing a lot of good work, but there is a need for things to be more transparent than they are now. Solokiller (talk) 16:23, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

Sorry. You're right, I did go out of line on this one. I should have explained more but personally thought the nature of this page would be generally agreed upon. Also we don't really discuss stuff like this on that discord server (it happens occasionally but we're all aware that that discord is not a real extension of the website which I make clear). Pinsplash (talk) 16:37, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

And I totally don't mean to act like I'm the boss around here but I guess that's what it looks like I think sometimes. Those help pages are of course open for anybody else to edit or raise concerns with. Before I make most major changes I do usually open a discussion on the talk page however usually no one else responds even when I try to bump the thread's position on the recent changes page. I've waited up to a week sometimes for a response but I usually get none so I assume that means nobody else had anything to say. Pinsplash (talk) 16:43, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

This page is probably older than you Pinsplash, and just because people don't reply, it doesn't mean its a good decision, especially when you keep making terrible significant changes to this wiki. JoshuaAshton (talk) 19:32, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

I'm adding the notice back because I have given my reasoning and you or anybody else has yet to give better reason to keep this page. Also go ahead and individually reason reverting all 2,773 of my edits or quit making up inflammatory lies. Pinsplash (talk) 20:08, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

Oh sorry oh mighty god of the VDC who has made more minor edits than me, therefore my opinion is wrong OH NO!!! JoshuaAshton (talk) 20:26, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

Eeeeeeexactly. Anyway does anybody have a reason to keep this page still? Pinsplash (talk) 20:49, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

This page clearly provides more separation and categories to entities and also people will have this bookmarked. There is no need to remove it, that would just inconvenience people. JoshuaAshton (talk) 22:32, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

• AI entities - Category:AI
• Filter entities - Category:Filters
• Item entities - Category:Items
• Light entities - Category:Lighting
• NPC entities - Category:Half-Life 2 NPCs
• Physics entities (just everything with phys_) - Category:Constraints
• Trigger entities - Category:Sensor Brush Entities
• Weapon entities - Category:Half-Life 2 Weapons
• "Game entities" is rather vague
• Misc. entities is kind of an indicator of bad categorization to be honest
• The rest aren't effective groupings because all they do is group by prefixes, for example Information entities which includes info_mass_center, info_null, and info_particle_system, all serving completely unrelated purposes.

We could redirect this to somewhere like Category:Entities or something so that people aren't just left with a blank page instead. There's still the issue of maintenance. This page is not up to date and it's more work to add pages to this than add an entity article to a category (which is conveniently done through templates). The title is also misleading because this list is only HL2 entities, not even including episodes. Pinsplash (talk) 23:10, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

I wanna stress the title as what's really bothering me here. Can we move it to a better title at least? Pinsplash (talk) 02:21, 1 September 2018 (UTC)

First of all, Josh, stop being a dick. There's no need to get offensive. And don't start another edit war by removing the notice only to have it added back. We've had enough of that already.

Second, there's a big difference between something bothering you and needing a change. If the list is out of date then yes, a solution is required. But moving pages around on a whim won't solve anything. A robust solution is what's needed here so there won't be a need to keep maintaining the page forever. Categories do automatically add pages to lists, but those lists don't group content the way this page does (logically instead of by name).

It would be nice if there were a way to specify custom grouping for categories, but i'm not aware of any functionality like that. There may be a Mediawiki plugin that can do that though. Ideally, the category page would specify a group, optionally with a description (e.g. func_ entities are brush entities etc), and the entities would specify a category with a group specifier added, something like [[Category:Entities:Lighting]]. The idea is to maintain a list of all entities, grouped by type for easy searching (CTRL+F) so one can rely on a single page. That's what this page was intended to be, so we should at least look for a solution first before making any changes. Solokiller (talk) 08:51, 1 September 2018 (UTC)

Well, we'd simply have to make more categories. You can make categories into subcategories under other categories. There's nothing the wiki has for adding descriptions to individual entries in a category anything could be put in the category's description. Pinsplash (talk) 16:21, 1 September 2018 (UTC)

Future of this page

What should this page even be? A list of entities in base Source? A list of all entities in all games? This page in it's current state is obviously kinda weird. Wisdurm (talk) 12:57, 28 May 2024 (PDT)

I was asking the same question. I think its a list of all entities in all games. --N0one (talk) 13:12, 28 May 2024 (PDT)