Modcraft community

[Krysík]

I can understand that, but then there should be made a compromise, so people will have no problems with that concept

[Steff]

the most new posts hit on already spotted probems.

host will change the nexts weeks. modcraft.io is then the only main domain.

the version is a tast thing and depends on what you do.  rp servers or projects like  maruum that dont care about blizzlike working scripts are good on wod.  wotlk seams to be more stable then wod if you do a blizzlike server.

for me wod is the way to go.  and modcraft should also cover this 2 versions.

about tutorials .  yes it would be nice to have more good tutorials.  at this point the community is in charge.
i can not handle it alone to do all

creating a workgroup to rework or create new parts for the beginners guide in his given style would be a nice thing.

as written is an static content page planed to give informations to get better into the scene and easyer find informations.

[Method]

You can consider me a forum lurker here on Modcraft -- I also frequent Ownedcore and Ac-Web and have lurked and seldom contributed on those for several years, although I do experiment and make content in my freetiime myself, I rarely develop anything that's noteworthy due to my novice skill.

I posted this in another section originally, but here goes:

The problem with Modcraft is, I feel there are no serious compiled guides or tutorials for the brand new modder.  in one case when starting out --  I even had to pay for a private session on skype to learn some basics. So, let me explain why Modding is so caged and hard to get into right now:

A lot of the developers on Modcraft, Ownedcore and Ac-web that are actually REALLY good at what they develop by themselves rarely write any guides, tutorials or documentation for their work. I'm not saying that's true of "Every single" developer, but it happens a lot.

What I'm saying is; the vast majority of content posted here on Modcraft, Ownedcore or Ac-Web has very little context attached with it. I'd go as far as to say, A 'Release' is like a Code-dump on StackOverflow, it's a piece of content that people can use (steal) with no context attached.

And, How can you possibly effectively use and learn from content, nevermind, understand the context of content if none is given? You may say 'General programming/etc/etc knowledge' and that's fine, but for the majority of noob modders they don't have this same experience as some of the veterans on here.

The prime reason why Veteran Developers don't want to share content is because developers don't want noobs stealing their content and refactoring it. and that definitely happens, So let's analyse that problem logcially, we have a bunch of morons in the model swapping section of Ownedcore asking for free swaps. And you know what? I'm certain MOST of those people would simply VANISH or someone would APPEAR to post solutions for them if there actually were just 'a few' decent guides available that were kept up to date and kept up to current practice.

How can anyone seriously expect people to learn new things and try things out for themselves (even simple, basic things in an experts eyes) when there are no good entry point tutorials or guides? We are progressive, but nowhere near enough. Modcraft has plenty of worldbuilding guides, but not so much on cinematic creation, quest designing, mob pathing, custom models, DBC editing, porting or other important content creation.

--

The crux of my point here, is that, not every noob modder has the time to strip back WoW by themselves and figure it out by themselves, and logically, it doesn't even make sense for people to really do this in 2015, when the wheel has already been established for almost a decade. I'm not saying there should be an 'engine' but some serious wealth of textual walkthrough would seriously help our community as a whole, we'd get waves of new curious modders trying their own hand.

If I've learnt anything from the Modcraft community, it's that very skilled individuals will take and have took the time to learn to craft unique things, and these people are the pillars of our community, we have awesome stuff like Fallout models ported into WoW, water shaders in 3.3.5, backporting of everything from weapons to entire zones, custom world objects. but are there any guides, for any of this? Not really.

Tl;dr

To Conclude, There is no shared 'library' on Modding Sites there is no requirement nor incentive to document or post helpful guides, no common goal, no discouraging theft. Modcraft is composed of solo developers in their own corners doing their own thing and showing their albeit awesome custom content when they have the time, but they give zero context, and alas, people can't learn.

In short, we need LESS 'release' MORE 'guide & tutorial'

LESS  'hand out' and 'MORE 'learn it from me"

[spik96]

The problem with Modcraft is, I feel there are no serious compiled guides or tutorials for the brand new modder.  in one case when starting out --  I even had to pay for a private session on skype to learn some basics. So, let me explain why Modding is so caged and hard to get into right now:

And what did you learn ? What were the things you did not understand at first ? The type of files there is in the WoW client ? How to edit them ? How to make an MPQ to put them ingame ? That's really the most important information. It's kind of hard to put yourself at a lower level of knowledge because you tend to forget what were the things you did not know.

I think a lot of basic tutorials do exist. But when people come and see something cool, they look for a tutorial, and when they find it, if they can't understand it they are lost. I think a solution would be, on the top of every tutorial, indicate the list of required tutorials to know before starting this one.

[Method]

And what did you learn ? .

I was focusing on learning 1.12.1 content creation technique, mainly revolved around the addition of updated models, quests/cinematics and zones.

 most of the posters I found that posted 1.12.1 content frequently didn't really give helpful posts, despite a plethora of posters asking for their methodologies, and 3.3.5 posters seemed pretty established with guides and tutorials almost everywhere.

In short, I invested a lot of time into learning, and tools people were using were removed, guides were linear and only focused on the very basic creation technique. After months of effort I eventually made some edits which were buggy (since I was backporting Blood Elf's to 1.12.1), and nobody really had helpful solutions.

What were the things you did not understand at first ?.

When I started I was unfamiliar with WoW's file system, but that became incredibly simple within a few months, DBC edits I found challenging, but there were guides there for this and it got simplier. Things I still do not understand go beyond the basics, and nobody really has these in-depth guides I've been requesting. Like I've said before, everything from worldbuilding to level design, quest creation and 3d modeling, everything is vague and there's no serious guides out there.

That's really the most important information. It's kind of hard to put yourself at a lower level of knowledge because you tend to forget what were the things you did not know.

I think a lot of basic tutorials do exist. But when people come and see something cool, they look for a tutorial, and when they find it, if they can't understand it they are lost. I think a solution would be, on the top of every tutorial, indicate the list of required tutorials to know before starting this one

.

You're right.

And that's what I'm requesting. A "Tutorial Book" that EVERYONE contributes too, everyone helps design, and then we can all use it as a standard practice, and new modders can go directly to the book as a point of reference. Not scattered all over every WoW forum in existence.

[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]

As soon as someone sits down to write a tutorial, that time is better spent in just automating the task.

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]

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

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.

[Steff]

What i dont understand is. There IS a beginner tutorial here on Modcraft.
So waht do you miss ?

The prime reason why Veteran Developers don't want to share content is because developers don't want noobs stealing their content

Nope. The reason is that a good tutorial eats much time. And you have a life, frinds, other hobbys and work. So time is something youd dont have much if you grow up. During school time it is somethign other but later...

Also the problem is not that the pros dont write. The noobs freshly understand stuff often dont.
If every noob asking for stuff.. gett an answer.. would write something about it. We had no prlbems.

In documentation part. We have a noggit documentation wiki. 95% of ths stuff where done by me. Every noob worked some houres with noggit could read this and update. But ....

So my question now is. What beginner stuff is missing in the tutorial series?

[Valkryst]

What i dont understand is. There IS a beginner tutorial here on Modcraft.
So waht do you miss ?

The prime reason why Veteran Developers don't want to share content is because developers don't want noobs stealing their content

Nope. The reason is that a good tutorial eats much time. And you have a life, frinds, other hobbys and work. So time is something youd dont have much if you grow up. During school time it is somethign other but later...

Also the problem is not that the pros dont write. The noobs freshly understand stuff often dont.
If every noob asking for stuff.. gett an answer.. would write something about it. We had no prlbems.

In documentation part. We have a noggit documentation wiki. 95% of ths stuff where done by me. Every noob worked some houres with noggit could read this and update. But ....

So my question now is. What beginner stuff is missing in the tutorial series?

I've seen your tutorial series, and used a few parts of it, but I found it pretty difficult to understand some amount of your writing even when I knew what the overall tutorial was talking about. It's definitely there, but I don't consider it noob friendly if even I have trouble using it.

I'd suggest getting someone to go-over your tutorials and rewriting them a bit.  

[Steff]

viewtopic.php?f=78&t=3983

Thats what this thread is for. But if no one post what the probles are. I can´t clarify them

[Method]

What i dont understand is. There IS a beginner tutorial here on Modcraft.
So waht do you miss ?

You're right, we have your guide on Noggit creation, and it's good. It's a good guide, but Noggit is a small part of WoW modding. It only really equates to a percentage of the total modding done on Modcraft.

So my question now is. What beginner stuff is missing in the tutorial series?

We have plenty of information on Noggit thanks to your guide. Noggit is fine, it's fleshed out enough that a beginner can get a good starting point.

but we have so many other aspects to WoW modding, like everything I've already mentioned. Model swapping, npc pathing, cinematic creation, even basic addon creation, we have nothing near an adequate amount of information. In some areas we have NO or LITTLE information.

We just need MORE guides written by people that have the time and skill, obviously time is an issue, but a paid tutorial section is also a solution. We just need a way to organise files and gather information. Our forum shuld be structured more like StackOverflow.

[schlumpf]

Back in 2009 I tried taking "tutorial requests". It sadly didn't take off. I'd be happy with a place where people request information on a topic, as neutral and short as possible. As stated above, I don't exactly like tutorials. I'm not quite sure about what format is the right one though. Possibly something wiki-ish with commenting inline.