IsmAvatar
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Posted on: May 13, 2013, 04:05:51 pm |
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LateralGM Developer
Location: Pennsylvania/USA Joined: Apr 2008
Posts: 877
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I'm starting this topic to discuss viable solutions for the ever-looming non-functional Manual/Help button in LateralGM.
Obviously, the problem is that LateralGM doesn't ship with a manual, so there's not much to open. This could be a temporary thing - maybe some day we'll have a manual to ship with. It could be a permanent thing - the concept of a flat-file manual may be obsolete. Obviously, people still want a button to link to help, although it may not necessarily have to be the traditional Official LGM Manual.pdf/chm.
I think there's a general agreement that an official LGM manual.pdf/chm (offline file) will not be happening anytime soon. It would require a significant community effort to pull it off, and frankly, it's not high priority compared to some of the better uses a community effort could be put towards.
One very attractive option is to somehow link it to the Wiki. I really like this idea, but it does disadvantage our users who work offline. Realize that "working offline" isn't a dinosaur concept - when you take your laptop on a trip, it's not unlikely that you will have long times of being offline, and if you can't figure out the exact specifics of function X, you can't make any progress on a significant aspect of your game. The other question about this is how will it be displayed? In the default browser? In our own little browser window? (Probably the prior - just launch the default web browser) A lot of the wiki follows a fairly standard convention, making it parsable so that we could potentially present it in whatever way we want (for reference, see EnigmaBot on the IRC, ask him to "!get show_message" or whatever function and he actually fetches and parses the description from the wiki)
Another attractive option is to allow the user to launch their own manual. Many users download a copy of the official GM manual and bring it with them. This comes in a few different flavors (html, cfm, pdf). Plus, some day there may be a similar option for an LGM manual. This is a nice modular idea, but difficult to implement because of all the different possible ways a manual can be represented. Do we just give the user an arbitrary textbox for "execute this command" that gets executed when they click the Manual button?
Of course, you're probably thinking "Couldn't we do both? Wiki for online users, launch for offline". Or some variation of that. Of course, then we'd need to flesh out the details for BOTH options, AND figure out how to decide which one to execute. To give you an idea, when we do the wiki option as the default, we launch firefox (or whatever browser) and it's out of our hands. Firefox launches, goes "oh, gee, I don't have internet. Here, have a nice NO INTERNET page" and that's the end of it - LateralGM doesn't know whether it worked or not. To fix this, we could do a network connection test - send a network ping or something to the wiki, and if that doesn't work, use the offline version.
So yeah, just a couple ideas I wanted to throw out there and see what you guys think. It'd be great if you could come up with some mock-up designs of any UI adjustments (e.g. Settings Panel) that would need to be done to make it a reality. Or maybe just a description of how exactly you'd want it to work.
Opening this to the Public Forum.
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Goombert
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Reply #1 Posted on: May 13, 2013, 04:10:07 pm |
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Location: Cappuccino, CA Joined: Jan 2013
Posts: 2993
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First of all I can't believe this post is what you had me wait so long for. Ism how bout all three? The Wiki I can easily run through a document processor and provide a downloadable version for offline people, and there should still be the preference as some people may want to open their own manuals. I don't know why though, I go to great lengths to document everything on our Wiki.
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I think it was Leonardo da Vinci who once said something along the lines of "If you build the robots, they will make games." or something to that effect.
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Goombert
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Reply #3 Posted on: May 14, 2013, 02:42:45 am |
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Location: Cappuccino, CA Joined: Jan 2013
Posts: 2993
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Yeah Deus, your saying the exact same thing I said to Josh, but he has decided he don't like Doxygen for all the functions. My original purpose was for the doxygen to provide "Quick tips" when typing out functions in the IDE and the Wiki would be more like the manual. Something like Doxygen as Josh said is more useful when you don't already have documentation and we already have a more documented Wiki and better organized one than YYG. It'd be much easier to document process all the Wiki pages from an xml dump with AWB and stuff than to document them twice in Doxygen. Not to mention doxygen not only takes up space when we upload the docs to the server but also bloats the heck out of our code. So I agree more now with Josh on this, but I do still want to doxygen to provide the "Quicktips" in the IDE.
Now as far as setting your own manual in the preferences panel and making the button open it, that's a piece of cake, and I am more in favor of HTML than PDF, because everything can be cached and PDF's are a pain the arse when you put them online. Now however as far as querying the Wiki for documentation that would require and online connection and both options should exist really, Visual Studio allows you to select an option where you can cache the documentation files for offline viewing when your connected or you can download it all at once and then select the option to turn off online querying. Which I think is a great idea and, although I hate %99 of what Microsoft does, I think it is a good idea.
Plus I'd also like to mention some people, myself included, take pride in editing and cleaning up Wiki's, don't ask why, we just do. Nobody really feels the same way about editing thousands of doxygen comments or making html docs. And anybody can contribute to the Wiki, that is what is so great about it, not to mention I can provide custom themeing and stuff for everything, I have removed all the inline CSS, and it's very easy to theme the Wiki now.
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« Last Edit: May 14, 2013, 02:48:04 am by Robert B Colton »
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I think it was Leonardo da Vinci who once said something along the lines of "If you build the robots, they will make games." or something to that effect.
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forthevin
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Reply #4 Posted on: May 17, 2013, 05:53:19 am |
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Joined: Jun 2012
Posts: 167
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I agree about providing both an online and an offline version of the manual. In regards to the form, I think the Wiki both has a lot of good content and is quite open for modification. One issue is that the Wiki contains both documentation for the development of ENIGMA, LateralGM and others, as well as documentation for using ENIGMA and the other tools for creating games. While this is not a big issue, it can make it more difficult for users to get the right search results when using the Wiki. Another issue with the Wiki is that it currently doesn't have a general overview for the different pages, as some of the previous GM manuals had. While GM:Studio has preserved some of this structure, they have decided to alphabetize the ordering of some of their content, meaning that the previous and meaningful order was lost. For an example of what I am talking about, there is this page for the manual for GM 7.0: http://gamemaker.info/en/manual. The section on GML has a good order, with basic parts first, and more advanced or niche parts later. I think both of these issues can be alleviated somewhat, by creating a Wiki page that contains an overview of all the user documentation, possibly with an format inspired by the GM 7.0 manual page, and then let the manual UI item in LateralGM link to that specific page. As for the handling of the offline version, I think having a cached version is an interesting idea. I would like to suggest that an offline version is also bundled together with the editor, such that the user always have some sort of documentation available, even if it is somewhat outdated. One potential reason for having a differently supplied manual is that we may or may not provide compatibility versions for old GM versions, which would be useful for games created for old GM versions. And in those cases, the manual for the given GM version would be useful to have. As for launching the given manual, I would suggest that we let the user specify a folder for documentation instead of launching a specific manual. That way, the user can put all their manuals and documentation in that folder, and we can just let the user/system choose which application to use to view the given documentation.
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Goombert
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Reply #5 Posted on: May 17, 2013, 08:17:22 am |
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Location: Cappuccino, CA Joined: Jan 2013
Posts: 2993
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.... We do, forthevin whens the last time you were on the Wiki? http://enigma-dev.org/docs/Wiki/DocumentationBecause I certainly provide overviews of everything. And the Wiki supports XML dumping, so you just make a large xml dump and run it through a document processor to convert the pages into a format for the IDE. We also want to do this for the auto complete window to proivde quick tip descriptions. But yes I encourage you to create overview pages of various aspects on the Wiki, but I just want everything organized, everything should be findable without having to search, there should be an overall top to bottom structure of the thing. In other words, every article, should lead you somewhere else. Except of cours function/action pages.
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I think it was Leonardo da Vinci who once said something along the lines of "If you build the robots, they will make games." or something to that effect.
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forthevin
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Reply #6 Posted on: May 17, 2013, 10:10:05 am |
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Joined: Jun 2012
Posts: 167
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...whoops, I actually looked at that page earlier when checking that there indeed was no overview, guess I skimmed through it a bit too quickly .
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Goombert
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Reply #7 Posted on: May 18, 2013, 02:23:24 pm |
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Location: Cappuccino, CA Joined: Jan 2013
Posts: 2993
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Is ok forthevin Anyway I came up with a basic solution for now in the latest LGM beta in the announcements you can set the manual path in the preferences panel. If you set it to a path include "http://" LGM assumes you want a website so it tells the systems default browser on all platforms to open the url. Otherwise it assumes it is a regular local file on the hard drive and tells the system to find the relative program and open it.
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I think it was Leonardo da Vinci who once said something along the lines of "If you build the robots, they will make games." or something to that effect.
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