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Valkryst:
A Tutorial Book is a good idea, but in most cases that I can think of, it would turn out horribly. If I've learned anything from my experiences, it's that most of the people who seem to be writing tutorials (at-least the ones I've read) have done a piss-poor job at explaining things. Although this is mainly because most of them aren't native English speakers/typers, I assume.

If something like that was going to be done, then get people who can type it up in a solid and easy to understand way which covers most bases. It'd be pointless to type up anything when half of the tutorial is going to be a jumbled, confusing, mess that's hardly readable causing the reader to go through hours or experimentation to essentially re-discover what the tutorial was actually trying to teach.

Even I'm pretty bad at typing up my tutorials, but I can at-least write them in a way that most people, from what I've heard, can understand them and learn what the tutorial teaches.

/rant

schlumpf:
A tutorial will always be tied to the one single goal of the tutorial and will rarely give insight into what is actually happening. They rarely focus on important stuff but rather list completely absurd things, emphasize on wrong parts, and that is far from a modcraft issue. What you seek is not tutorials but documentation. The good part: the documentation on file formats is pretty extensive, even though I still feel pretty alone with doing it and a lot of people don't document their findings. The bad part: while we need documentation, we need semantic documentation. That part exists next to not at all. There is implicit knowledge all around, also in tutorials. I guess that is what people would need most. The other issue is that people always think there are good tools, while there aren't. On the model swap example: that task can be 100% automated, and back in 2009 I did. Most tutorials can be automated. The weird backporting havkery? Automate-able, with less bugs even. As soon as someone sits down to write a tutorial, that time is better spent in just automating the task. This does not work for creative tasks of course, but those aren't really tutorials to begin with. There is no real reason to upload multiple gigabytes of models "ported" to some version instead of just the tool used for it. Even more, the tool used is probably bugged and the whole bunch of data is just worthless due to some shitty bug.

I'm not entirely sure what I'm typing up here, and I'm even sober, but I guess the gist is: less tutorials, more documentation, more semantic documentation, more tools/technical write ups instead of releases and tutorials. Also, technical documentation often trumps blabbering people in shitty YouTube videos. Please, stop with the god damn videos, unless you're painting or whatever. Don't, just please don't. Write your 5 minute video in a clearly structured paragraph of text.

Tldr: be precise, write up stuff, don't write tutorials, prefer automating and sharing tools to zipping up gigabytes of releases.

Uploading blizzards files is not a release btw.

spik96:

--- Quote from: "schlumpf" ---As soon as someone sits down to write a tutorial, that time is better spent in just automating the task.
--- End quote ---

The truth has been spoked. I slightly disagree about the releases of Blizzard files that spawn around because they allow me to get files without downloading every WoW client, but I get your point and I fully agree with everything else.

But there is a problem : who can automate tasks today ?
010 editor scripts can automate file editing routines, that's nice but not enough because as you said we could automate entire repetitive procedures, but it requires programming. Now, who ? How many developers are here ? How many people know C or C++ or whatever useful language ?
It seems to me that the tasks that could be automated are not because no dev is interested in it.
And Modcraft is of course not the place to learn programming.

Method:
[paragraph:k961ck9q]You guys say automation is better than tutorial. And in many ways I completely agree with that logic. Simplifying the task and automating it for the masses would solve the immediate problem, and it would allow people to successfully do what they set out to do. But then, we have other issues:[/paragraph:k961ck9q]

1) We have a tool, but no documentation.

Without documentation:

This leads to issues if/when that tool breaks, or if the tool isn't that great to begin with we don't really have an immediate fix, since we don't have access to the problem.

With documentation:

We have more possibility as a community of having the ability to maintain that tool and to update and improve that tool as a community when a dev gives up or can't be bothered, we have their knowledge documented.

2) We don't have a tool at all.

Without documentation:

We're assuming that the person that understands how the process works also has the knowledge to:

* automate the process
* automate it efficently
* automate it correctly
* automate it in it's entirety.  
Some if not all of these aren't always true, and certainly haven't been in the past.

With documentation:

short-term:
we have the individual able to post their tutorial, have a solution that everyone can read and perform themselves.
long-term:
Tens of modders may read the documentation and attempt to automate it, increasing potential by x%



3) We don't have people actually learning anything

Without documentation:

This means we have less people interested in modding as a whole, or experimenting, or doing things better. We might get three seperate fragmented tools instead of one tool that handles everything for instance, and then one of those tools stops working, then what.

With documentation:
We may have the knowledge as a community to integrate, update and repair programs, which may even lead to frameworks.

Method:

--- Quote from: "Valkryst" ---
Even I'm pretty bad at typing up my tutorials, but I can at-least write them in a way that most people, from what I've heard, can understand them and learn what the tutorial teaches.

/rant
--- End quote ---

As someone who's used your site before, yep, you are decent at writing up tutorails.

And if your collection of tutorials was more extensive, simplified, and way more populated with small tutorials adding to the ones you already have then we might see way more developers come out of the woodwork and try to develop 'something'

Like I've said, we can't expect you or anyone else to write up every single tutorial, for every single section, we need a public tutorial section, which are curated by native english speakers, tutorials that all follow a standard pre-defined format, then we might get somewhere.

For those who want to actually learn, and not steal, I'm sure some WILL check it out.

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