So I’ve been thinking. And this is just a suggestion. It would be a great thing, I think, to have a directed help wiki for i7.
The documentation in the IDE is awesome, but is undirected. That is, the headings focus on topics : Things, Kinds, Text, Rulebook…etc… and this is brilliant and necessary - but it makes it hard to, when you don’t know how to do something, work out exactly where you need to look for the answer. I want to stop printing a paragraph about an NPC. Do I look at the Other Characters recipe book section? Do I look at the Rulebooks section? Do I look at the Advanced Text section?
There has been an attempt to create a help forum, which didn’t take off and has been archived.
My suggestion is for a directed I7 help wiki. That is, the vast majority of people using I7 are writing Interactive Fiction. So the wiki would look like:
I want to:
Create a room
Create an object
Change the room description
Stop the banner text from printing
Create an NPC
- Have the NPC follow me about
- Have the NPC respond to basic commands
etc…directed…not focussed on abstractions like ‘kind’ or ‘thing’
There is a commonality for a lot of the problems newbies (and experienced) developers have, and it feels like willing members of the community could contribute example code, text, and help to a wiki in a directed form based on questions posed in this and other forums,
This is just a thought…what is the general feeling?
Maybe such a thing exists and I don’t know about it!
Have you looked at Jim Aikin’s Inform Handbook? It seems like it has a more “here’s what you might want to do, here’s how you do it” style which might be helpful to you here. Like, if you want an NPC that follows you about, look in the table of contents and Chapter 5 is “Creating Characters” and p. 314 is “Characters that follow you.” (Though in this case the built-in docs don’t seem to do so badly–chapter 7 of the Recipe Book is “Other characters” and then it’s in the “Traveling characters” section.)
The thing is that in order to be useful this would have to focus on common questions–otherwise, as Emily said in the other thread, you’re just adding more hay to the haystack. The one that sticks out in your list is “stop the banner text from printing,” which is the thing you had trouble with, and which doesn’t seem like a very frequently asked question–a resource that answered that would answer every question, basically. Then you’re looking at something like the IFAnswers site, which didn’t have enough oomph to keep going–either your question isn’t answered and you have to ask it and wait for someone to answer it, which is what happens on the forum, or it’s probably hard to find anyway.