Will the manual for construct 3 be feature complete&detailed

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  • We intend for the content to work like this:

    Manual - essentially a detailed description of what individual feature does (but with some overviews/other content, e.g. a summary of keyboard shortcuts)

    Tutorials - how to bring together sets of features to achieve useful results

    I don't think tutorial-type content belongs in the manual.

    Then I think you could include links to "example" tutorials from the manual for people to get more "hands-on". I have had this type in the Help back in time in Visual Basic for example and I loved them.

    Now I am not a beginner anymore, but it is a big help for me for example as I am more "visual" than just reading theory, so getting actual working example is super helpful. So maybe add links?

    Or maybe create a Wiki type (or other user-editable) format where selected people could team up with making a combined type of manual and examples.

  • Hello again, Miss ! Your attitude is far from that of those, so many, wich don't even bother to consult the documentation, available resources, dissect capx, or even start a search via a search engine or forums. I believe that this third type of person there is the worst and that it would be necessary to create a pop-up tutorial just and only in an effort for them to learn to be a little more autonomous, which seems absolutely not to be your case, like I suppose nobody here!

    Here one of my secret weapon, it allowed me to learn a lot and still today:

    I just type on Google "scirra" followed by "all desired keywords I need".

    I even sometimes combine with the term "capx" if I'm looking for sources.

    Okay, it sometimes takes lot of work but with patience = guaranteed results.

    In fact, I think we are all in the same boat, cause in game design, nothing seems ever won and obstacles still to be overcome, which can indeed and in the end, some days, be quite discouraging or even depressing, especially during first steps, not to mention our life to manage in this sick world of money, money, money. It is also, unfortunately, one of the way of cross that we have all freely chosen by launching ourselves into a so exciting and fascinating adventure, no matter the slogan.

    Slogan that may need to be improved:

    No Programming Required! (*)

    * But it's better if you have a coder logic (**)

    ** And if you don't have it, you'll learn to have it (***)

    *** Etc, etc, lol!

    That said, and as underlined here, there is also a truly friendly and supportive community, often busy, sometimes silent as a wall, but ready to help when topics and difficulties are well posed. Why, and in the case of your mathematical example, not just create a function to achieve what you want to improve? At least, the case is filed!

    To tell you the truth, I know perhaps how to code (although this does not mean anything any more today, given the increasing number of new languages ??and technologies every day - it's for me a sort of trendy recruiters fantasy), but if you knew how many days and nights I have spent working on ridiculous features that in my imagination and on paper were so simple and drawn in minutes. This actually does completely lose the head, especially with fatigue and sometimes a feeling of loneliness. In short, I always feel like starting from scratch, even though I have necessarily made progress, like all of us, and at the cost of many efforts.

    Besides and frankly, whenever I use Construct2, I have the feeling to code, but with hands attached, this creates a form of frustration because if this model was unbridled, I will have an incredible saving of time and logic. In my wildest dreams, it might be necessary to implement a mode to be able to switch from a graphical view to a pure code view (in both directions), with a system of verification of the syntax and validation as precise as it is with the event sheets and as we know it today, and also create an accessible language for everyone, and for all levels. New slogan: Learn to code with C3! A sort of "gamification" aspect of the things. I'm sure they've already thought about it and it's possible cause Scirra's products are so thought and patterns very respectful of standards, which in the end always impressed me cause I didn't know initially how it was the case.

    It's a little bit the problem exposed here, but reversed, and my new very special query for you and this year, Ashley!

    Nice helena your idea of ??wiki, an official one, why not with a reliable system, well standardized and known like MediaWiki (the famous engine of Wikipedia) to which all certified users could participate. This would also make it easier to update contents and to translate into several languages. It may be a beginning of solution, there are certainly others... But what a supplementary colossal task!

    After all I don't know, but I think Ashley, Tom and the others may burnout these days, because many of us, me the first, are a bit nervous and/or so demanding with our requests, even the most legitimate ones like your one, are so many, so I hope that it's not them that we are going to push in self-destruction mode, otherwise we would look very uncomfortable without our favorite tool and their parents!

    Sorry, it was a bit long, I hope my frog eater prose is sufficiently digestible.

    NB: I hate, like most French, eat poor frogs, still another myth. Croak and peace!

  • I also feel the need for improved documentation.

    Ashley's design (manual + tutorials) is logical in it sway, but not sufficient for a great new and intermediate user experience. (specific UX critique: new users need example code in the manual, either inline or referenced/linked, to each entry, as Microsoft and most developers do. There's too few tutorials and they're recipes for particular games, not generalizable examples and they're too often out of date. The forums have good content and solutions, but I can't find them easily enough. The forum search function is bad - sever-based search form means 10-second typical cycle in trying a search time - way too slow and annoying. Can't sort results by recent; have to redo search. also posts don't use consistent search terms that are clear to beginners. Agreed that the google solution ("scirra problem description") is the best I found but not sufficient.)

    A good solution will REDUCE the workload on Ashley and Scirra crew, so they can focus in building awesome new features, not support.

    How can Scirra get us intermediate/advanced user to shoulder the burden of improving documentation? I will propose a solution in a separate post. Please, everyone on this thread, critique it there and/or propose your own ideas.

  • This thread is almost 3 years old.

    I for one find the documentation quite excellent and it is one of the main reasons I liked Construct to begin with. The manual is very precise and doesn't need to be bloated with examples everywhere. Plugins, behaviours, and expressions are flexible and able to serve many tasks. It would be ridiculous to try to cover all use cases with examples. And if not, then you run into the same problem where what you're specifically looking for might not have an example, as if you were searching on the forums or tutorials.

    Certain new features or plugins might not be immediately documented, but those get entries pretty quickly, not to mention blog posts that explore the new features.

    I wouldn't mind a method for centralizing the location of information. Sometimes I recall reading something useful and I can't remember if it came from a blog post, forum post, or tutorial.

  • there's always room for improvement. Its tired trope that programmers don't want to write documentation. I've been coding since 1995 so I've seen my fair share.

    I've gone to the doc MANY times only to find a half of a sentence of information. Other times information is just missing. Other times the info is satisfactory - but it's always extremely brief. I always end up figuring my question out, from the forum or my own testing, but if the doc was a little more detailed I would probably spend a lot less time trying to figure things out.

    I also know because I used to HAVE to write tech doc for things I wrote... and I hated it. In fact times, my doc was also half sentences...until I got yelled at to fix it!

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  • jobel hit that one on the nail : )

    Sebastien

    Thanks for that interesting perspective of a individual person learning and figuring out style

    I would enjoy very much and would much prefer a simplified and much much more elaborate manual

    that shows solutions to the obvious problems and prehaps abit more because who wants to sit in the unknown spamming google too find an answer if they can avoid it with better manual I'm not expecting a complete handhold but enough handholding that anyone can figure out the rest of the problems using their own mind , emotion,etc for the most part 99.999% of the time preferably and ideally, this I feel is my real issue with the current situation of tech manuals in general unfortunately in some cases including construct 3's manual sorry.

  • How can Scirra get us intermediate/advanced user to shoulder the burden of improving documentation?

    Users can submit tutorials. There are well over 1000 tutorials there.

  • oosyrag

    I wouldn't mind a method for centralizing the location of information. Sometimes I recall reading something useful and I can't remember if it came from a blog post, forum post, or tutorial.

    I wish there was a Construct Wiki that users could contribute to...

    for example... I would love this response from fisholith in a wiki!

    construct.net/en/forum/construct-2/how-do-i-18/help-object-blend-modes-121928

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