Summary of post for the MTV generation:
Really really cool project, expanding BadDog's excellent idea.
Need as many of the BuF-Ed gang on board as possible!
Read on, all will be revealed!
First of all, hats off to BadDog for taking on such an ambitious project.
I don't want to be a harbinger of doom... but I do foresee certain problems that are not unsurmountable, but a drain of time.
I've actually been pondering for some time the following facts:
It sounds like you're well on the way to getting your material in... that's #1 sorted. Are you pulling in the material from the existing helpfiles?
You then have a problem: you either edit & crunch together tutorials that overlap, or you throw them all in. The first is a LOT of work, and the end result may be patchy, hard to read and bruise the egos of the writers. The second will result in a very bloated file that will be hard to navigate & find useful information in.
Now as I said I am not trying to cast doom on the project.
And like I also said, I've been pondering an idea for some time.
Many months ago, when trying to get information on some UT actor or other, I started thinking: why not bring ALL tutes that are out there into ONE giant umbrella site, where they could be categorized. Ideally, it would bring the authors on board, and they could gradually re-edit the material to make it more of a coherent whole.
And since most tutorial authors are mappers, they could all get subsites to host their own maps.
I haven't brought it up till now, basically because I wasn't sure it would be possible, & I haven't felt like taking on such a huge project.
Two things have happened since: the first is BadDog's announcement, showing that I'm not the only lunatic with impossibly idealistic plans
Second, is something I stumbled on a couple of days ago:
http://www.wikipedia.com/
and more importantly:
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/What_is_a_wiki
Now if we brought all the stuff together on a server using a wiki, we could all gradually shake it down into a coherent whole -- which THEN could be released as a compiled helpfile.
This could be chaotic at first... but it would be fun, and I think the end result could be something to be very proud of.
More important than that:
The new Unreal engine is coming this year. There is going to be a whole heap of new stuff to deal with. (prefabs, skeletal animation, behaviour scripts, terrain... to name a few).
We are once again going to be faced with patchy information (and MISinformation) dotted all over the place.
With the U1/UT project as a practice run, we'd be ready to pool knowledge when Unreal2 is released.
Well, that's about it, for those of you still reading
I kinda thought a name like the Academy of something, or United Unreal doodad would be neat...
Really really cool project, expanding BadDog's excellent idea.
Need as many of the BuF-Ed gang on board as possible!
Read on, all will be revealed!
First of all, hats off to BadDog for taking on such an ambitious project.
I don't want to be a harbinger of doom... but I do foresee certain problems that are not unsurmountable, but a drain of time.
I've actually been pondering for some time the following facts:
- The are tutorials scattered all over the web
- There are at least two UEd helpfiles out there
- a lot of the information in tutorials of documentation contradicts information in other documents
- there's also a lot of overlap
- a lot of the stuff out there applies only to UnrealI but isn't clearly marked as such
It sounds like you're well on the way to getting your material in... that's #1 sorted. Are you pulling in the material from the existing helpfiles?
You then have a problem: you either edit & crunch together tutorials that overlap, or you throw them all in. The first is a LOT of work, and the end result may be patchy, hard to read and bruise the egos of the writers. The second will result in a very bloated file that will be hard to navigate & find useful information in.
Now as I said I am not trying to cast doom on the project.
And like I also said, I've been pondering an idea for some time.
Many months ago, when trying to get information on some UT actor or other, I started thinking: why not bring ALL tutes that are out there into ONE giant umbrella site, where they could be categorized. Ideally, it would bring the authors on board, and they could gradually re-edit the material to make it more of a coherent whole.
And since most tutorial authors are mappers, they could all get subsites to host their own maps.
I haven't brought it up till now, basically because I wasn't sure it would be possible, & I haven't felt like taking on such a huge project.
Two things have happened since: the first is BadDog's announcement, showing that I'm not the only lunatic with impossibly idealistic plans
Second, is something I stumbled on a couple of days ago:
http://www.wikipedia.com/
and more importantly:
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/What_is_a_wiki
A wiki is a collection of interlinked web pages, each of which can be visited and edited by anyone.
Now if we brought all the stuff together on a server using a wiki, we could all gradually shake it down into a coherent whole -- which THEN could be released as a compiled helpfile.
This could be chaotic at first... but it would be fun, and I think the end result could be something to be very proud of.
More important than that:
The new Unreal engine is coming this year. There is going to be a whole heap of new stuff to deal with. (prefabs, skeletal animation, behaviour scripts, terrain... to name a few).
We are once again going to be faced with patchy information (and MISinformation) dotted all over the place.
With the U1/UT project as a practice run, we'd be ready to pool knowledge when Unreal2 is released.
Well, that's about it, for those of you still reading
I kinda thought a name like the Academy of something, or United Unreal doodad would be neat...
Last edited: