Writing an ENIGMA guide.....Interactive or not?

[hpg678]

I've been mulling over the idea of creating a Beginners Guide to ENIGMA for quite a while now. I think one is really needed but I'm having trouble deciding how to go about it. Which is where you come in.

My ideas are as follows:

• Interactive.......where the user performs actions and  actions are performed.
• ebook form........pdf, or html with illustrations, etc
• series of videos......hosted on Youtube, Dailymotion.

I'd really like to hear you thoughts.

[Goombert]

It's funny you mentioned that because I was just cleaning up our documentation for a few days:
http://enigma-dev.org/docs/Wiki/Documentation

The Wiki has tutorials and stuff too but these here we consider the core documentation guide. Docs under documentation should provide about as much info as the GameMaker manual or the YoYoGames docs where applicable. Our Wiki has mainly 3 purposes and they are documenting the engine in a user-facing way (such as these pages on the Drag and Drop and events), documenting the technicalities of the engine, and documenting the technicalities of any related projects like IDEs.

Supplementary tutorials should go here:
http://enigma-dev.org/docs/Wiki/Tutorials

The difference is that the core concepts guides are discrete and the tutorials may address one or many core concepts at the same time. Of course, you don't have to contribute to this documentation, it's purely a suggestion. But for everything outside of Documentation, such as Tutorials, you are free to contribute even GameMaker-only tutorials (though offering equivalent ENIGMA codes is helpful obviously).

[HitCoder]

Hmm.. I've wanted to do some kind of youtube video for Enigma and my channel has been dead for a few months, so I would be willing to do a beginner's guide video or something if you have any specification.
But for the most part I'd likely just go over everything I possibly can. It sounds like something interesting to do though so I might record a mockup video and share it and any ideas I could implement later on.

It would however be nice to have an offline/local manual like GM did, for Enigma. But, I've started needing that less over time after getting back into using the programming language.

[Goombert]

Videos are welcome too, I haven't really created a particular place for them on the Wiki though, but under Tutorials should be fine. And yeah sorry about that HitCoder, the "Documentation" page does include the part about being able to export pages, but I know that's not very user friendly. I will try to get this issue addressed at a later date after some other things. There are some more pressing things than our whole website right now since the completion of ActionMaker.

YoYoGames makes their offline manual by compiling chm's I guess. I don't know what they are doing for GMS2 yet because I am not sure if you can open chm files on Linux, but I imagine there exists some free program. Ideally what I'd like is a bot that goes through our wiki and compiles it as a chm for download about once a week or manually when we tell it to.

One of these is what we probably need:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Publishing_from_MediaWiki#Extensions_to_help_with_exporting_data

[time-killer-games]

YoYoGames makes their offline manual by compiling chm's I guess. I don't know what they are doing for GMS2 yet because I am not sure if you can open chm files on Linux, but I imagine there exists some free program.

YoYoGames haven't made a Linux IDE for GMS 2, and Russell said they weren't planning on it.

Windows and Mac are the only platforms GMS 2 can or ever will run on.

[hpg678]

YoYoGames makes their offline manual by compiling chm's I guess. I don't know what they are doing for GMS2 yet because I am not sure if you can open chm files on Linux, but I imagine there exists some free program.

YoYoGames haven't made a Linux IDE for GMS 2, and Russell said they weren't planning on it.

Windows and Mac are the only platforms GMS 2 can or ever will run on.

Well that sucks!!!   

[HitCoder]

YoYoGames makes their offline manual by compiling chm's I guess. I don't know what they are doing for GMS2 yet because I am not sure if you can open chm files on Linux, but I imagine there exists some free program.

YoYoGames haven't made a Linux IDE for GMS 2, and Russell said they weren't planning on it.

Windows and Mac are the only platforms GMS 2 can or ever will run on.

Well that sucks!!!   

No big deal, we still have enigma and soon Enigma Studio .NET by me if I bother putting time into it

[hpg678]

ENIGMA STUDIO.Net.........sounds interesting.

[time-killer-games]

YoYoGames makes their offline manual by compiling chm's I guess. I don't know what they are doing for GMS2 yet because I am not sure if you can open chm files on Linux, but I imagine there exists some free program.

YoYoGames haven't made a Linux IDE for GMS 2, and Russell said they weren't planning on it.

Windows and Mac are the only platforms GMS 2 can or ever will run on.

Well that sucks!!!   

No big deal, we still have enigma and soon Enigma Studio .NET by me if I bother putting time into it

And don't you mouth off to me or I oughta slap you right in your penis.

[HitCoder]

ENIGMA STUDIO.Net.........sounds interesting.

.NET meaning C# .NET Frameworks, working on it in visual studio.

However, after reading some more documentation and thinking about it a bit more, I feel like I could achieve a more malleable result by making it in Enigma itself due to being able to make custom rendered graphics and interface.

REGARDLESS--- I've brought this thread quite off topic, so back on the topic; I think we should have a simplified index or something of all of the functions where each parameter is briefly explained to make everything clear yet not overwhelm the user. Though, I think this stuff is provided on the wiki's documentation anyway.