The Old Improbable Island Wiki

These are the links shown on the left-hand side of the page.

• The player should never encounter a page where a link appears at the top of the navigation section. All nav sections should begin with a header.
• Where technically possible, a hotkey that does a particular thing on one page should do the same thing on all pages (IE 'V' for 'Return to the Outpost')

• The correct term for a settlement is “Outpost.” The word “Village” is a holdover from LotGD, and shouldn't be used.
• Capitalisation should be consistent (“Implant,” “Requisition” etc)
• Improbable Island's language is British English (“Armour,” “Defence” etc)
• Dialogue should always be in double quotation marks, not single. Single quotes are used when the programmer is too lazy to escape his double quotes.

• Colour codes for individual characters should be consistent.
• Colour codes shouldn't be used for whole pages (IE using orange text in Improbable Central is a bit daft). Pages should default to black, and use colour codes only where appropriate (IE important information, unusual status messages (`4 (red) for bad, `2 (green) for good, standard black (`0) for indifferent).
• Dialogue that is colour-coded should be coded within the quotation marks (IE “`&My quotation marks are black!`0”)
• Colour codes should not be used in nav links.
• Colour is spelled with a “u” (see above section).
• All colours should be easily readable.

These can be checked by viewing the page's source code, finding the dialogue, and making sure that the CSS class matches what's displayed here. Alternatively, use the FireBug or ColorZilla FireFox plugins.

• Character - appoencode - css class
• The Watcher (dialogue) - `& - colLtWhite
• The Watcher (name) - `$ - colLtRed
• Player (dialogue) - `# - colLtCyan
• Maiko - `% - colLtMagenta
• Gate guard (aka Bill Bailey) - `6 - colDkYellow
• Corporal Punishment - `2 - colDkGreen
• Other characters - coming soon.
• All other characters - don't really mind, as long as each character sticks to their colour.

• Plurals should always be rendered as plurals - none of this “You've taken %s point(s) of damage” malarkey. It's relatively straightforward to do the extra code so that the output switches between the singular and the plural.
• Slashes shouldn't be present in outputted text - they're there because someone forgot to use stripslashes().
• Colour codes shouldn't be visible either.
• Single line breaks should not normally be used - when starting a new paragraph, switching between character dialogue, or for any other reason a writer would press “enter”, there should be a clear line between the two lines of text.
• I'll think of other stuff, I'm sure.