openmw.org

I'm playtesting a boatload of mods, with an eye to updating the Mod Status wiki page. Also improved the Mod Installation page with additional info. And have been generating a few omwaddons to work around some issues, but need to test them more before making them public.

I'm also an 11-or-so year veteran of en.WIkipedia, and am a TemplateEditor there, among other quasi-admin roles. If you flag me as able to edit interface pages (at least specific ones that relate to displayed page appearance and behavior, like MediaWIki:Common.css and MediaWiki:Common.js), I can port useful templates (MediaWiki scripts) over from WP.

I also realize I'm new here, and that would be some serious trust to extend. I'll just keep at working on this stuff in the interim, and I can do quite a lot without that while I'm proving myself.

I guess quite a few of us have already noticed your activity on the wiki. It's always nice to see some updates there.

If you want to change the interface and stuff, our admin lgro is your contact. Oh, and I don't know what changes you have a mind but there also is my OpenMW wiki theme which still needs to be added (never mind, lgro ).

Great, welcome! That all will be super handy. We are trying to get certain portions put together into an official user manual as well. We're still working on exactly where those divisions between manual and wiki will be, but the mod testing status stuff will always reside on the wiki. So far this is what we have for mod installation in the user docs, so at some point the wiki version will be deprecated to avoid confusion: http://openmw.readthedocs.io/en/master/ ... stall.html
Give it a look-see and let us know in the Documentation forums if there's anything we can be more clear on. (I'm aware there's a couple formatting issues, so I'll try and get those fixed ASAP) You're welcome to help with the official docs as well if you ever feel inspired, but the mod status will probably keep you busy for as long as you want to be

Yeah, doing testing for mod status has consumed most of my participation time.

I find the GitHub content editing a bit "foreign" to me, though I just did a minor typo-and-formatting pull request. It may be helpful to continue development on the wiki version as a beta of sorts, and then integrate material from it into the GitHub version as final. The wiki one is much more detailed. A completely different model would be to use the wiki version as the "for dummies" expansion of the basic manual in GitHub; that would probably be best done by taking the GitHub text, porting it to the wiki, then expanding on it sectionally (i.e., including a paragraph from GitHub version, then integrating the extant wiki material that pertains to that bit as commentary on it; repeat for next GitHub paragraph).

A couple of requests/suggestions for the documentation on mod installation:

Please add coverage of bsa files. They aren't often included in mods, but the installation is sufficiently different that it's not obvious how to do it (unless you read the openmw.cfg file, which is rather long, and they are handled at the "other end" of it).

Consider adding esm files - as the method is identical to esp files, it's not essential, more a case of trying for completeness.

I'm concentrating on mod-compatibility at present - will address these myself later if nobody else tackles them.

Loriel

In my conversations with scrawl and psi, we pretty much decided that no actual documentation should reside in the wiki for two main reasons. The first, is the difficulty of keeping both in sync and updated so that when something changes, the two guides don't start contradicting each other. A subset of this reason is it's just better to not duplicate work since we have so few people working on it anyway. The second is so users don't have to keep guessing where they should be looking for information, making it harder to actually find.

This makes the "for dummies" suggestion kind of out of the question, but we've actually discussed your first suggestion. We realize that the whole markup language and github thing makes the point of entry a bit more technical, and we should be letting anyone help document. The reason I don't love it is because of the second point. If people find the help they're looking for on the wiki in one of our beta docs, they're going to be confused when it disappears and it distracts them from the official docs. However, I think we're still fans of the idea in general. Either we can set up a beta docs section that isn't linked to from elsewhere in the wiki, or we can use some other medium. I would be fine with other people writing the actual language and then sending it to me to put into proper markup and proofread before adding to the official docs. The official docs should be "for dummies" and also for experienced users.

Two other notes. I realize that most users typically think of going to the wiki to find answers to their problems. For any really common things (e.g. mod installation), we can have a brief blurb about it and then link to the appropriate section of the official docs. Things that are wiki appropriate are things that general users can/should be contributing to constantly e.g. mod compatibility and maybe even an FAQ.

Loriel - You're right, we do need to add the bsa stuff. I can't remember but the official docs might even say something inaccurate about it. Part of the problem with writing all of it myself is I actually have to know how to do everything lol. As for esm, the official docs do discuss this.

Find the official docs here: http://openmw.readthedocs.io/en/master/

Edit: I just looked through some of the docs and while they do discuss esm, I don't mention them as being used like plugins. I'll have to add a note that some mods use esms up in the Install section.

Ravenwing wrote: ↑11 Sep 2017, 19:29Loriel - You're right, we do need to add the bsa stuff. I can't remember but the official docs might even say something inaccurate about it. Part of the problem with writing all of it myself is I actually have to know how to do everything lol. As for esm, the official docs do discuss this.

Find the official docs here: http://openmw.readthedocs.io/en/master/

Edit: I just looked through some of the docs and while they do discuss esm, I don't mention them as being used like plugins. I'll have to add a note that some mods use esms up in the Install section.

I had already made a start on it - will probably read through it again then put in a PR tomorrow if nobody beats me to it. Current version is on github at loriel2/openmw/docs/source/reference/modding/mod-install.rst

Loriel