Oolite Manual

BlunderBuss Carrotcat II · Wed Oct 26, 2005 3:58 pm

Sorry, got carried away...

Selezen · Post by **Selezen** » Wed Oct 26, 2005 4:28 pm

Rxke wrote:
Bit of a tangent maybe, but in the manual, when you describe equipment, will there be pics? (yessss please)

... and when those pics are done, could they come into Oolite's shipyard?

Ok, here's a test of what illustrations could look like - I came up with the idea of doing them in Wings, cos then they could be easily imported into Oolite as meshes for the equipment screen...

Lance & Ferman Military Laser

The box is the power converter - there is a lot of cabling that would connect to the back of the emitter unit, through the converter and on to the energy cells located in the engineering section.

aegidian · Post by **aegidian** » Wed Oct 26, 2005 4:55 pm

Selezen wrote:
Ok, here's a test of what illustrations could look like - I came up with the idea of doing them in Wings, cos then they could be easily imported into Oolite as meshes for the equipment screen...

Oh, I like the way you think!

Rxke · Post by **Rxke** » Wed Oct 26, 2005 8:59 pm

Great, Sel!

Murgh · Post by **Murgh** » Thu Oct 27, 2005 8:32 am

looking cool, Selz.
that's a lot of abstract gizmos to visualize. do you have concepts for all of them?
of course, there's absolutely no reason to underestimate how deeply you've thought about these things.

gauging all this passion, does it mean the TGY is on the backburner?

Selezen · Post by **Selezen** » Thu Oct 27, 2005 8:56 am

With the abject failure to get the AI working properly, the TGY dev has been on the back burner whilst I try and sort out the issue with the patrol ships continually crashing into thier waypoints.

Hmm...actually, maybe I'll change the waypoints so that they aren't the actual beacons. Maybe 1000 units to one side of each one.

Mind you, the damn things just crash into whatever else is in the way. Nudge, nudge, nudge, bang!

If anyone else feels like taking a look at the AI for a while, feel free.

Also, I need to wait for the 1.57a conversion to PC before I can get the station to launch Lancets. I'll put a post up on the TOGY topic in a bit to explain a few things.

As far as the manual goes, and concept ideas for equipment designs, yes, I have a few ideas - remember I've been thinking about this stuff for over a decade. I actually wrote a Cobra User's Manual in about 1990 with pencil drawings of the equipment used, plus sketches of the general internal layout of the ship. I'm not going to go into that much detail though. I just wish I could find the bloody folder - some of that stuff was damn good!

Rxke · Post by **Rxke** » Thu Oct 27, 2005 11:45 am

Selezen wrote:
....pencil drawings of the equipment used, plus sketches of the general internal layout of the ship. I'm not going to go into that much detail though. I just wish I could find the bloody folder - some of that stuff was damn good!

That'd be great to use! "preliminary sketches" or "original leaked document"; "napkin drawings" (add coffestains) ... To give it a bit of 'historical' development backstory...

Selezen · Post by **Selezen** » Thu Oct 27, 2005 8:38 pm

I know it's irrelevant, but I'm annoyed. I left my frelling memory stick at work, and it is my only copy of the frelling manuals AND my updated TOGY stuff.

Oh well, it's an excuse to draw some equipment, I suppose.

Post by **dajt** » Sun Oct 30, 2005 10:59 pm

Yes, great idea being able to use the pictures in-game as well as for the manual.

Selezen · Post by **Selezen** » Mon Oct 31, 2005 11:06 am

Good stuff. Well, got three piccies done, and the manual is proceeding apace.

I'm currently writing it in MS Word, and I will convert it to PDF. Any particular page size preference? It's A4 at the moment, but I was thinking about reducing to A5.

It's quiet on the ole forums so far today!!

aegidian · Post by **aegidian** » Mon Oct 31, 2005 11:11 am

I like A5.

Selezen · Post by **Selezen** » Mon Oct 31, 2005 11:21 am

A5 it is then.

Here's a screenie of the document just for those who are 1: curious or 2: not believing that I'm doing anything...

Post by **winston** » Mon Oct 31, 2005 12:29 pm

Quick question - what's the documentation done in - is it something like HTML? Just wondering if I can make generation of the final PDFs (for the Autopackage/tarball et al.) part of the build process.

In any case, I'm going to rearrange the source tree some time this week to make it a bit tidier. At this point, a 'doc' directory will appear in SVN.

The final plan is to have:

Code: Select all

trunk
    |----- src
    |----- doc
    |----- dependencies
    |----- data
    |
    README.TXT

Eventually I'd like to make a top level Makefile that builds everything.
(This structure will also mean people can just pull doc/data from SVN if they don't want the dependency pack too).

Selezen · Post by **Selezen** » Mon Oct 31, 2005 12:42 pm

I'm doing it in Micro$oft Word. I can extract the file to HTML from this format, but it's a bit messy. It might make up a nice PDF though, due to the fact that the formatting is fairly detailed.

Alternatively I can export the file to PDF.

Post by **winston** » Mon Oct 31, 2005 1:10 pm

Erk :/ I was hoping for something that could automatically be built into PDFs (since that would mean no manual maintenance of keeping PDF files in sync with their source). HTML was an idea since there is a portable, automatic tool (htmldoc) that can generate indexed PDF files from html source, so the Makefile could just build the PDF output for the installer - you wouldn't need to remember to load OpenOffice and export as PDF each time you did a new build that included updated documentation.

[google grovel]
http://www.bezirksreiter.de/PyOpenOffice.htm

Ah. There are automated command line tools to at least convert OpenOffice SXW documents to PDF. Perhaps when you're done with the documentation, they can be converted to OpenOffice for storage in SVN which will be tidier and more self-contained than HTML files (and editable with a word processor).

Unfortunately, there are no equivalents for MS Word documents (that are cross-platform and open source - they are all Windows-only shareware by the looks of it).