User-submitted tutorials / How-To's

[gumby]

Gumby, you might be more familiar with what is on SCI info that should be salvaged and what is good info for development. Feel free to add anything you think should be there.

It seems to all be relevant, I'd vote to just add it all.  I'm not sure how to proceed, however.  It looks to be about 50+ pages, indexed & linked together (previous/next).  The good news is that it can be copied without violating the copyright.

I guess we could just make a new separate 'how-to' section and throw it in there.  For anyone interested, go to http://freesci.linuxgames.com/scihtml/book1.html to see the table of contents (it's pretty lengthy).

Thoughts?

[Collector]

We can probably dump the section on Free SCI. The rest can be added as is into, perhaps an SCI specification section? After that, anything in it can be copied/modified into the how-tos. We should probably start thinking about some kind of structure. Perhaps general, scripting with sub groups of general scripting and parser scripting, GUI handling, Resource handling, etc.

[MusicallyInspired]

I think that Brian's original tutorials and the advanced tutorials should also be present here as well. This could really be a great thing for SCI development. I don't know what Cloudee thinks either, but either way I think a Wiki should be kept somewhere.

[Cloudee1]

My thoughts are that if we use our available resources, well move to new server. Fill it up. As for specs and freesci stuff, I've been thinking a technical section would help with tool/ studio development. I'm not going to have time to do much over the next couple of weeks, but I'm game for changes and additions.

[Collector]

I think that Brian's original tutorials and the advanced tutorials should also be present here as well. This could really be a great thing for SCI development. I don't know what Cloudee thinks either, but either way I think a Wiki should be kept somewhere.

I agree. We should put everything on it. Not in lieu of, but in addition. Things have a way of disappearing on the internet. Having information duplicated on different sites is a good thing, but the Wiki could bring it all together in one place for convenience's sake. I am plugging away at it, setting up the frame work, but I don't want to get too much work invested in it if it is to be hosted elsewhere and all of my efforts would have to be duplicated.

[gumby]

I'm here for any work that needs to be done.  Should I start by copying the structure from the FreeSCI docs verbatim over to your test wiki page Collector - or here?  Anyone know how to do this in an intelligent way (i.e. not brute force, copy-paste, etc) to get all that info duplicated in a usable format?

I like the idea of a wiki.  It's more structured than free-form posting & can be reorganized at any point.  And I feel like I keep coming back to the same issues & sharing new info, which isn't always best presented in a thread.

[Collector]

The test Wiki with only a few pages is currently approaching 50MB not counting the database. Adding any images or other files will make this grow. I imagine that the database will also quickly grow. Even if this test Wiki is not to be the Wiki, it can let us to continue to set it up. I'll look into how possible it is to export the database. I suppose that even if things have to be copied over manually, it will already be in the Wiki format, so little to no editing would need to be done for a second copy and paste.

As far as copying the Free SCI stuff over, you can't do a straight copy and paste. Any line that begins with a space gets interpreted as code and a single line break will not be recognized as a line break. It does not recognize BB code. It uses its own code for formatting. Links are handled different. See the following for more.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Formatting

It does accept some HTML tags, like br and pre. You can hit the edit tab on a page to see how I've started to enter the Free SCI docs. You can create a link before you create the page. The link will be red. If you click on a red link, you will be given a link to create that page. It probably makes more sense to do an intermediate copy and paste into a text editor where you have a search and replace function to speed up the reformatting. Let me know if you need any more help.

[gumby]

Okay, I'll start working on the FreeSCI pages soon...

EDIT:  In progress.  Will take some time, but coming along.  Haven't figured out the footnotes, 'sublinks' within a page & the TOC stuff, etc. 

[Collector]

In the Navigation box, click on the "SCI Specifications". You can start pasting in pages for the red links. I still need to sort out how to do the Wiki foot notes.

[gumby]

Wow... someone has been busy.  Hope I didn't cause any problems with the little that I did with the FreeSCI stuff.

[Collector]

No, it helped. The only thing that I noticed was that you didn't put closing tags on your tables. I've started to mark what need to be done in red, like links and footnotes. You can use the span tag for certain things such as font color. I'm working on the "The SCI Virtual Machine" section. I still have to format the last half of it, yet.

[Collector]

I have the Kernel functions section entered. It was a formatting headache. Could look it over to check it out? Just need that "SCI in action" section done, now.

[Omni]

This wiki is awesome, one of the best things to happen with this community in while I think. Also I have some server space(a Linux server at godaddy) I pay for monthly and do not use if it can be of use.

This helps get the information into all one source, as currently a lot of the old sources are dying and The Way Back Machine only does so much.

[MusicallyInspired]

The last piece of the puzzle and the icing on the cake would be all the SCI content archived at Mega-Tokyo. I really hope someone has that stuff. Even if it isn't the latest stuff, we need the archived stuff from the past 7 years or whatever.

[Collector]

This wiki is awesome, one of the best things to happen with this community in while I think. Also I have some server space(a Linux server at godaddy) I pay for monthly and do not use if it can be of use.

This helps get the information into all one source, as currently a lot of the old sources are dying and The Way Back Machine only does so much.

Cloudee wants it to be all under one roof, but it does eat up space. I'll host the Wiki until he's ready for it. Server space is not an issue for me, as I essentially have unlimited space and don't even come close to my monthly allotment of bandwidth. I feel that is is important to save what we can as soon as possible. If we had had the foresight to save the MT content before it disappeared we could have have all of it. I'll probably keep an archive of the Wiki on SHP as a backup after Cloudee sets it up here.

If anyone can think of anything else that should go in the Wiki, feel free to have at it. Should Brian's tutorial be duplicated in the Wiki? It might be handy. How about some general information about developmental resources, including Omni's SourceForge project? Or adding the fan games to the SCI game list in the Free SCI documentation?