Forum:Rethinking image revision naming

A follow-up to Forum:Supporting old versions in Inventory slot. Should we change the naming of images that represent different historic appearances of game features? The current format uses JEx and BEy where x and y are simple numbers denoting the order of introduction (e. g. second in Java Edition history, first in Bedrock Edition history). However, if some other variant is discovered in between already-known versions (which MarkusRost claimed in the linked forum post to have been a case for Indev), this will require renumbering files. Therefore I instead suggest naming files by actual versions (more specifically by releases, or by development builds if different from release) where the specific appearance was introduced. This would also be more obvious. Implementing support in Inventory slot would be tricky though. — BabylonAS 08:09, 1 June 2025 (UTC)

I agree that chronological numbering can be problematic for the reasons stated in F:Changing Indev and Infdev naming scheme, which is having to re-number everything when intermediary versions get discovered later. We already switched from the basic Revision 2 format to JE2 BE1 because the editions don't always use the same textures at the same time (and one edition is a lot older). However that is also the reason why I'm not sure your proposed solution will do any better. You would need to have both the Java Edition and Bedrock Edition versions in the file name, that gets confusing fast especially with how long version names can get and how often their format changed. For example File:Stone JE2 BE1.png would need to be called File:Stone JE pre-Classic rd-160052 PE Pre-release.png per your proposal. This while being more exact, seems a lot more complicated than the current format for comparatively little gain.

You also suggested to sometimes use full release names and sometimes development versions, this would just add inconsistency to the format and get even more confusing. It also opens you up to the issue you want to fix again, with intermediary versions being discovered that might cause a name change to be necessary.

Ultimately, while our current format isn't perfect, I don't think your proposed change is as simple as you imagined. -- 👁 Image
MarkusRost (talk) 17:16, 1 June 2025 (UTC)

Agree with Markus. I didn't see a concise way to do this better.  Nixinova   T   C   02:18, 8 June 2025 (UTC)