Manual & Icons

[Zini]

Wow. There is actually progress on the manual. Didn't expect that to happen.

So we have two pull requests. I don't have the time to properly review them now, but I promise I will get to it later today.

What I see at a glance:
- There is indeed an overlap. It is possible to resolve this, but we should try to avoid this situation. In the future please coordinate.
- It seems in the Cramal PR we have substantial sections that are flagged as changed but aren't actually changed (for example files_and_directories, see the Files changed tab of the PR). This is a problem. Not sure what caused it, but a common reason are inconsistent line endings, which in turn may be caused by an incorrectly configured git client.

I think we should keep tutorials out of the manual. The current idea is to do them as YouTube videos (we already have a volunteer for that). We may also utilise written tutorials (on the wiki maybe), but we need to discuss that first. Opinions, anyone?

[Cramal]

Thanks for the feedback

i will check the configuration of my git client and my latex editor to find the cause of these wrongly flagged sections

I think i will anyway make these smalls mods to check i understand how evrything is working.

I'm not sure what place is the best, but i think having this as a exercice somewhere can be usefull

[Zini]

I merged the PR from Bodillium.

Seems our manual is partially broken. I was able to create a pdf document, but got a lot of error messages. I presume that's what Cramal meant with the "debugging of latex code" in his PR.

Unfortunately this PR is a no go. I suggest you fix the git problem, keep a copy of the modified text and then start fresh with the current master branch (integrating the text from the copy, which should mostly just be a copy & paste). Also, if you make multiple changes the manual, consider adding each as a separate commit.

I noticed that we don't have a section for the manual in the authors file. So I added one. But I probably forgot some people. If anyone has contributed to the manual and is not listed, please throw me a PM.

[Cramal]

After many adventures and 18 download of fresh source from master branch, i think i managed to do my commit in the right way

I will now be able to spend time one the file and not on the git config

[Zini]

Great.

btw. the manual is still on the old naming convention for references and referenceables (instead of instances and objects). That needs to be fixed before the manual becomes usable again.

[Cramal]

Before modifying the manual, i'd like to check the definition :
- object : thing with a number of gamplay parameter defined (weigth, value, health....)
- instance : apparence of an object in the game world (all instances of an object will have the same value for gameplay parameter)


Second question, is it ok to keep references about morrowind in the manual? do we have to go only with generic "gameworld", "gamefile"...?

[DocClox]

I think we should keep tutorials out of the manual. The current idea is to do them as YouTube videos (we already have a volunteer for that). We may also utilise written tutorials (on the wiki maybe), but we need to discuss that first. Opinions, anyone?

Can I just say that I absolutely hate working from video tutorials. They're slow, lack a proper search feature, you can't skim them to get an overview, or easily skip ahead to the part in which you're interested ... they just drive me nuts.

I've refused to learn packages before now (*cough*RAGS*cough*) because the only documentation was in video format.

I mean I understand that some people process things more easily as video than they do text and pictures, but not everyone is wired that way. Personally I'd say that video tutorials should supplement text ones rather than replace them entirely. I know I'm not the only one who feels this way about the matter.

Sorry. Bit of a rant there. It's something I feel strongly about, I'm afraid.

[wareya]

Seconding Clox. Any and every tutorial video needs at least a transcription.

[Cramal]

I know that in openMW what think the biggest number of fan/player has not a supreme value.
But maybe some kind of large scale pool could be usefull to decide if it's better to put written tutorial or viedo tutorial.

But even is we do written tutorial, the don't have to be in the manual, they can be in the wiki or in a another pdf document

[Zini]

Before modifying the manual, i'd like to check the definition :
- object : thing with a number of gamplay parameter defined (weigth, value, health....)
- instance : apparence of an object in the game world (all instances of an object will have the same value for gameplay parameter)


Second question, is it ok to keep references about morrowind in the manual? do we have to go only with generic "gameworld", "gamefile"...?

Object, Instance: Correct.

References to Morrowind: That is a good question. Personally I am slightly in favour for the generic approach, since the scope of OpenMW definitely goes beyond Morrowind.esm. I would like to hear opinions about this from more people.