Doing an actual Oolite Manual

[KZ9999]

All the feed back is greatly received.

I now realise that it both foolish and imposable to create a bible for the game. The Ooniverse is just to big and too organic to be cut down to a pithy little book. As you say Disembodied, I should just concentrate on the key essentials and not get too caught up on the background science of it. It's mainly my fault on that part, being a hard core SF nerd I feel the need to make sure everything actually works. However there is a lot of existing history that I have to make sure it fits in to... when I say that the Fuel Scoop was invented by someone, I have to double check that those people haven't been named by someone else. It's not a case of wanting to edit history or trample over other peoples work, I respect their work and want to insure that I am true to it.

Believe me Commander Mclane, I don't want to write a 300+ page manual. It won't be a 10 page manual either. The original Elite manual was 60 pages in length and Oolite is so much more than the original. I'm actually aiming at 80-100 pages at most and I am trying to fit it in to 50 pages, including pictures and screen shots. The effort involved is not so much knowing what to put in, as what to leave out. There is already so much information generated about the game on the BBS alone it would fill book the size of a programming manual (which are notoriously big.)

As for editing the wiki, it was very much self mocking statement. I might have a go at the various subs that litter it at the moment.

I will still plug away at it. I want it to be nothing more than to be the guide to help the beginning player over the steep'ish learning curve of the game we love. To encourage them to become part its development as I want to be.

[Selezen]

I tried the manual writing once, and hit pretty much the same block that you've just hit. It's a lot harder than one would think...

[MKG]

Hmmm - running before walking, maybe?

@KX9999 - have you got an outline prepared? Just a list of proposed chapters would be good, which can be fleshed out in a very basic manner before you get into any technical detail. Otherwise (and, believe me, I know) you'll end up going around in circles.

Mike

[KZ9999]

I've been working on the Oolite Reference Sheet over the last couple of weeks so the manual has been sitting on the back burner.

The RS has turned in to a micro manual in it's own right. Within it's 6 pages there is enough to get you going in the game. On the good side is that it helping sort out some of the issues on how the manual should be formatted.

So I'll post a link to it here as well as the in the Discussion sub-board when it's finalised.