Talk:HOWTO

Mike: Why was the Portugese documentation removed?

Bob: I have no idea why that person deleted it. I added it back.

how do I add my article on faking weather?It keep gettin an error screen.

error error does not compute

BattleBlaze: I can't add anything!? how does this work? I cant find a help file. I wrote an article on Faking weather but I keep getting an error message

Bob: Can you describe the error message?

Database error From OHRRPGCE-Wiki A database query syntax error has occurred. This may indicate a bug in the software. The last attempted database query was: (SQL query hidden) from within function "SearchMySQL4::update". MySQL returned error "1062: Duplicate entry 'w' for key 3 (localhost)". Retrieved from "http://gilgamesh.HamsterRepublic.com/wiki/ohrrpgce/index.php/Creating_and_implementing_weather_animation_on_a_map"

Bob: Ooh, yeah, I have seen that one before. not sure what causes it. Anyway, try again. I was able to create an empty test page, so hopefully you can edit that with no problems.

BB-Still gettint the error

BattleBlaze: Still aint working hamsterman. The preview button works.Bu not the save page button. :/

Mike: It looks like you managed to get the content in. However, I got the error myself. James, try running a REPAIR on the sql table, see if that fixes it.

Bob: I ran REPAIR on all the tables that support repair (about half don't because they are InnoDB type rather than MyISAM)

Mike: Hmm... Either there's an error in an InnoDB table, or that's not the problem... Since I can't see the query, that's about all I can help you with :\

Works Now

BattleBlaze:Well my simple weather article is up and running now > I dunno what happened but I tip my hat.

Plotscripts

Yoshiboy: I think we should add a link to the plotscript tutor at the end of the HOWTO chapters list, just so people know where to go next, because, it's basically the next step up from the rest.

The Mad Cacti: A fair suggestion. "Added "next step" see also links"

Moved Page

Turned the Weather HOWTO into a FAQ,

Footer?

Yoshiboy: When you made the footer as the list HOWTO Main page for the HOWTO chapters, i personally don't like it much. I liked it better when it was a verticle list, because it was easier to read and see the chapters, as well as it matched the other lists on the screen. What do you think? But when I say that, I only mean it for main HOWTO page, it still looks good at the bottom of the HOWTOchapters!

Mike C. James, I hate to break this to you, but the box is not pretty. It fails because it's physically seperating the content (the list of chapters) from the header.

Edit: ... ok, that works.

Tags are not Variables

Bob the Hamster: I removed the article title Variables. It contained no information about variables, and only some confusing stuff about tags. If you want to learn about variables, read the existing F.A.Q. article What is a variable?. I do think that the existing How to use NPCs and Tags article is not very good, and needs work-- possibly to be broken into separate articles about NPCs and Tags.

Yoshiboy: In what way? the NPC and Tags HOWTO seems ok to me.

Is this Possible?

QRS_III: Is it possible to make an attack that would wait until the enemy has chosen their attack, and then do something based on what it is?

Bob the Hamster: Nope. Sorry :(

Flash

James Paige: I wonder, is anybody feeling ambitious enough to try recording some flash movies demonstrating some of these HOWTOs? Anonymous: Why don't you try? :D

Question

Greenwado: Ok so I've been adding some info, trying to help with the HOWTO, but what do you mean by "Playing with the menu"?

Bob the Hamster: I don't know either. I don't remember who added that one. It might mean "Customizing the main menu", but I am just guessing.

Reorganization

Bob the Hamster: This page currently has a mixture of articles about how to use standard features and articles about how to use plotscripting to fake features that don't exist yet. I would like the HOWTO page to become just a place for articles about standard features. Articles about simulating new features using plotscripting should be grouped elsewhere. We already have Category:Example Scripts, which might be good enough for that purpose.

embedding video

Bob the Hamster: I added the EmbedVideo mediawiki extension, so we can embed videos on youtube (or other video services) directly into articles.

More Reorganisation

The Mad Cacti: This page had become a horrible mess, so I've separated the chapters into two categories: those that teach all the basics which one should go through in progression, as I fondly recall doing 9 years ago, and the more specialised articles to pick and choose from. I also agree fully with James' comment two up.

I admit that I haven't looked at the articles too closely, changes may be appropriate. But right now the HOWTO is such a mess that I think it's more important to organise by importance rather than by quality of article. But I did leave all of the original articles where they are, because I don't have time to read through all of them and check that it would break the progression to remove any that are less important (Vehicles).

Msw188(not logged in): why is the 'ways to refer to a hero in a plotscript' considered unfinished? It seems to me to be good enough to put in the 'advanced' part of the footer.

The Mad Cacti: You're right, that's just about the best written article on the whole wiki!

I think we should have a section for introductory plotscripting HOWTO articles such as that one, which follow on from the Plotscript Tutorial (the tutorial could be the first article). Right now it might be a very short list, but people have expressed the desire to write such articles before. Maybe the article list should live on the Plotscripting page, though.

Bob the Hamster (talk) 09:57, 8 May 2013 (PDT): I am thinking I would like for the HOWTO to simply become the index page for all of our finished tutorials.

BMR How's that?

New HOWTO proposals (Sword)

1. Reduce words (brevity!) Condense information (succinct!). Remove needless images or choose better ones Format it nicely (left, right and centre. Boxes, Bullets, Bold, Headers, Align)

2. How many guides should there be? I think a quick-start and an in-depth would work well Would not need to do much writing, just some re-ordering

3. Changing the flow of entries. Organising wiki articles

Would anyone like to discuss these points?

• TMC (talk) 17:14, 22 April 2017 (PDT): I generally hate redundancy, but it seems that a single HOWTO can't accomplish all goals. The old HOWTO used to explain nearly everything (in certain editors), but the engine has gotten a lot bigger since then! The new HOWTO still tries to explain everything, and is definitely the complete opposite of a quick start guide; it aims to be a manual. The first thing it does is explain everything in General Game Settings! So a quick start guide could be a good idea: then we make sure it's short and covers the basics, and we can put all the detailed chapters, like all the new HOWTO chapters about drawing graphics and creating bosses, in a separate MANUAL/HOWTO which you can skip around. I don't want to have to brutally delete 50% of the stuff in the new HOWTO. But TacoBot has actually been doing a good job shortening it and that can continue.

An idea:

• Quick Start Tutorial
  • Succinct
  • If you follow through, you end up with a playable simple game
  • Gets you to a playable game as fast as possible. In fact, just skip drawing walkabouts until the end; the OHR has defaults! Don't make the user create lots of graphics before doing anything
  • Unlike the new and old HOWTOs, should NOT try to explain all the options and keys in every menu you visit, only the important ones (should still explain some useful ones the guide doesn't use, because you don't have to follow the guide to the letter!)
  • It can skip back and forth between different editors, explaining them gradually
  • Should instead link to more detailed pages elsewhere on the wiki
  • Organised into chapters, and generally lets you skip over any chapters you don't want. Provides .rpg files at the beginning of chapters, to help you skip
  • No scripting (that's the Plotscripting Tutorial)

• HOWTO
  • Well organised, so you know where to look
  • Each chapter should serve as its own article which can be read separately and serves as a reference for part of the engine
  • Each chapter is named something like "NPCs", "Map Layers", "Drawing Hero Graphics". Not like "Chapter 7 - Making a Hero"
  • Can still be written like a HOWTO, with example .rpg files.
  • Incorporate all the existing tutorials and chapters we have
  • Might include chapters and information on scripting

Just, please, don't start writing a third HOWTO from scratch; I think the old HOWTO is already close to what we want. Move unimportant chapters like Vehicle Use and Stun, Regen, Poison, and Mute to the new HOWTO. Add chapters on the basics of menus and zones.

We should discuss this on the forums, so more people will see it. BMR and TacoBot have done basically all the work on the new HOWTO. (BTW, sign your comments with ~~~~)

---

Sword (talk) 01:35, 23 April 2017 (PDT)Sword Right-o. I pm'ed BMR already...

P.S. Please lets use nice alignment of images and text. We can talk about it.

I think the chapters can be drastically condensed. There should basically be one sentence for each action, not several paragraphs and images! All the stuff I'm about to suggest is already there, but just needs to be streamlined. Most stuff can be figured out even by the mildly curious... For a quick-start guide, we can ignore sprite-editing...

Textboxes are most important for new players, since one can script a game basically through them alone... The map tile drawer is different though. That should come beforehand. Then NPC stuff, and voila: a working game world.

1: Making a Map

• • go to edit maptiles - create wall + floor
  • set default passability. use cut and paste to create copies of tiles
  • go to map editor - make a simple map with these

2: NPC Interaction

• • go to textbox editor. make some fancy example textboxes to show what CUSTOM can do

 ** textbox 1 : item, party, shop (functional)
 ** textbox 2 : invisible textbox, show backdrop and/or portrait (cinematic) and flip some tags!
 ** textbox 3 : battle activated if a tag is set

• • edit NPCs in the (map editor>NPC editor) to use movement and conditional appearance
  • place NPCs with the textboxes on the map

From here, a person can basically make a game... Then we can explain the next steps: Battle

3: Battle stuff

• • create hero and enemy by assigning stats. an attack already exists. assign it to the enemy.
  • make a formation, have it called by textbox and foemap
  • test battle! It should work

4: Items, Attacks

• • Items/Equipment (create a few items. show tags, equipment, usable)
  • Attacks (create a bunch of attacks. show chains, healing, status, cost, tags)

5: Sprite stuff

• • Sprite Editor, Import/Export
  • Allude to font, box graphics, UI colors, Global Text Strings
  • Anima7. Furtherted Tiles... candle flicker, water tile

Have them test out battles, now with graphics and items!

Next steps: 6. Advanced

• • Menu Editor (make a custom menu. emphasise versatility. teach them to use shops)
  • Zones (place zones. assign extra data.
  • Plotscript (first plotscript should be "show value (zone extra data at hero x/y) and do something with it, such as spawning npc)
  • General Game Data

7. Further

• • Slices and scripts... the only way to use slices is through scripting, so might as well do it like that.
  • have them place slices on an npc, hero etc... a "halo" will do
  • show them to use mouse click to activate NPCs
  • have an info slice appear somewhere, and possibly interactable

---

TMC (talk) 05:03, 23 April 2017 (PDT): I actually agree about starting by drawing some tiles and then creating a map, followed by placing NPCs and textboxes (and tags), while skipping over drawing walkabout graphics. I was going to suggest exactly the same progression. Most of the rest, I really don't know about. But I don't see how you can use item, party, shop and battle conditions before you've created any of those things. Or do you mean shops should be covered at that point? Maybe shops and items could be covered early; I don't know.

What do you mean by "nice alignment of images and text"?

I'm feeling more than ever that what we want is very similar to the old HOWTO. I still hate to set up parallel a Quick Guide and HOWTO with a lot of redundancy between them. How can it be reduced? Maybe they should be sort of combined with lots of cross linking. But if you look at the page in the new HOWTO, for example, it really is close to what I have in mind for the tutorial. It doesn't make sense to keep that article and have a separate "Quick Start" one, because overlap would be 80+%. One of the only things here that goes into detail is the toolbox and undo. And in a quick start tutorial the tile animation stuff should clearly be explained at a later point instead. So I suggest just splitting it up into 2-3 pieces and shortening. Maybe the draw tools and additions like importing can become a 'detailed' chapter with information about the editor (which links to the tutorial to explain the basics), and the rest is part of the quick-start tutorial. So splitting apart material instead of duplicating.

When it comes to battle and other graphics maybe we could give the reader the choice: go to this chapter to learn how to draw graphics, or (the default), follow these instructions to import some graphics. Also, when the new animation system is done, I hope that animations become a core part of the engine, deserving good treatment in a tutorial.

What do you mean by "an attack already exists"? The blank one? It's crazy, but I guess that works! Still, I would cover attacks before items. But not so much detail at once. I think the guide should be goal orientated, for example one chapter could be creating a boss fight, during which you learn about elements (for weaknesses), "die without boss", spawning, and maybe even transmogrification. Cover battle stuff over several chapters in that way, not one chapter for attacks and one for enemies.

PROPOSED QUICK-START OUTLINE (Sword)

- Graphical

 - Drawing sprites
 - Drawing tiles
 - Import/Export

- Battle

 - Heroes, Equipment, Weapons
 - Enemies, Formations, Triggering battles
 - Attacks

- Creating a world (NPC, Maps)

 - Making a Map (layers, passability)
 - Placing NPCs

- Changing the world

 - Using textbox functions
 - Using tags

Quick-Start: Maps Quick-Start: Textboxes

This should go in, like, reverse order almost. Teaching users about textboxes is the most important thing!

GAME DESIGN THEORY

Sword (talk) 11:54, 19 April 2018 (PDT) puzzle dependency charts a page in game design maybe with links to resources, such as youtube channels, patreons, and free articles such as Rinku's guide, Cerny method etc., There are quite a lot of expensive academic books as well. I think it's worth breaking down into aspects like - sound/music design. - visual design. like Film Directing or Painting, with scene and composition. - gameplay design. Maybe if someone has the time.

and another page... time management. or scheduling. maybe just put stuff in game design maybe another page game production dealing with publishing, contests/jams, public relations, etc., if someone has time. Maybe in the future, if we establish it as a thing?

TMC (talk) 02:30, 25 April 2018 (PDT): Back when we had webzines like HamsterSpeak, that was the ideal place to publish a discussion of game design hints. The editor for the publication would enforce a certain minimum standard. These days, that stuff can go on the wiki. Maybe create a page like Game design advice for such hints. BTW we have Category:Advice for such pages.