OpenCS Development: The Non-Coding Part

[Zini]

As some of you might have noticed we are now getting into trouble regarding the part of OpenCS development that does not involve coding, namely the icons and the manual.

We had various attempts at the icons, but so far nothing usable came from it. That is hardly the fault of the people who tried to do work on icons.

It seems we need someone to take over the management of OpenCS icon and manual development. The task involves the following:

- keep track of missing icons
- coordinate with artists and make sure that we have a consistent style
- (optional) integrate the icons into OpenCS (does not require coding skills; just the ability to build OpenCS and some basic git)
- keep track of missing/outdated manual parts
- coordinate with manual writers and make sure that we have a consistent writing style

Ideally this person would work as manual writer or icon creator too, but that is not a requirement.

Do we have any volunteers?

[sirherrbatka]

I can only support Zini in this. Although it was me who started to work on the manual, i must admit that nowdays i want to spend my time elsewhere (and to be honest I'm terrible at explaining things alltogether). Any effort putted into the manual will be very helpfull (especially if writer has some real expirence with mod creation).

[Sload]

Hello, I would be interested in doing this. I've not been very involved in this project before, but I've been following it for some time. I'm a member of the Tamriel Rebuilt project and very interested in advancing the OpenCS project. I've read the initial design threads for the OpenCS, what other information would I want to accumulate to organize this?

Last time I tried to open OpenCS (installed from the 0.30.0 PPA) I kept getting a segfault. I'll see if that's still a problem.

[sirherrbatka]

Hmmm, opencs should not segfault. At least it does not segfault for me.

Anyway: this task involves writing documentation, and as it seems you will have to undertand how to use OpenCS on your own (we don't have manual, right?). I guess that it would be all I can tell. We don't have a lot besides of the code.

[Zini]

Your primary source of information should be the editor development forum. You will have to follow that one closely.

You also need to keep track of the editor either via self-building or nightly builds available on the forum (do we have nightly builds for Linux?).

If you have any questions beyond that you can either ask on the forum (again editor development section) or PM me.

Then you need to maintain lists of missing/outdated manual sections and missing icons (with enough information for artists to start working on them). You should be able to compile these lists based on these two sources. I am not entirely sure how to best maintain these lists. They should definitely be public. I guess a wiki page would work. I thought about using the bug tracker, but that is probably overkill.

Your initial list of missing icons contains the icons for camera and lightning modes. @sirherrbatka Do we also need icons for the dialogue subviews?

As for the manual, I have no idea what is currently missing. You will have to read through it and then compare it with a current build of OpenCS.

[sirherrbatka]

I think that describing the dialog panel would be a good start.

[Zini]

Actually compiling a list of what is missing or outdated would be a good start. We are at a point where getting organised should take precedence over getting work done.
But yeah, the dialogue subviews will feature prominently on that list.

[Sload]

Built OpenMW from the latest snapshot (no longer the case I think), OpenCS is working fine now. Also reading the manual. I will try to be up to speed by the end of the weekend.

I agree that the first task will be some sort of hierarchically sorted list of what is needed compared to what exists and how best to move from here to there.

I'm also not seeing any icons in the OpenCS, is it correct that no icons are implemented right now?

[Zini]

We have the record type and the modification state icons. You can see them in tables and the former while doing drag and drop.

[Sload]

Made pages in the Wiki for each:

https://wiki.openmw.org/index.php?title=OpenCS_Manual
https://wiki.openmw.org/index.php?title=OpenCS_Icons

On the subject of icons: I will try to go back & read old threads to generate a list of specific additional icons than are needed, but these threads are rather hard to follow after-the-fact. It may be more productive to just have a thread for icon requests. Only for icon requests, not for effort at fulfulling those requests, that effort should be segregated from the request.

Also, icons seem to have been a bit of a bikeshed problem.

On the subject of the manual: I'm going to rewrite and restructure it in a manner which I think is more consistent with how I would expect these manuals to be written. The three high level body sections will be: how to create & open .omwgame/.omwaddon files; how to interact with the basic structure of the interface; and how to actually make edits to game content (how to use the dialog subviews, how to use the cell editing tools, how to create new referenceables, et cetera). Elements of this final section are mixed into the sections which are titled to suggest they would cover the subjects of the middle section, and I'll separate those out.