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Over the Hump


Josh

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All difficult technical challenges for the completion of Leadwerks3D are solved. This includes navmesh pathfinding, cross-platform support, Lua and C# integration, OpenGLES rendering, the abstract driver model, etc., etc., etc. Basically, all the scary stuff is done, and the only thing that remains is hard work. I'll be turning my attention back to the editor shortly, but first I wanted to address a different kind of challenge: Documentation and the website.

 

The present appearance of the website took a long time to develop, and is the result of four or five different people's work. It was difficult to find him, but I finally came across the one who is the master of the forum software and CMS we use. He was able to fix a few small issues I had, but he did not design the site. Now he has bee recruited to create a new website theme using the good elements of our current design, in a Web 2.0-ish style. We're also planning on an improved image and video gallery, and a better display for community articles. Professional web design services will be used to create product pages for Leadwerks3D that truly reflect how awesome the software is. I'm not a web designer, and I am happily surrendering that responsibility to someone who has instructions to develop Web 2,0-style product pages with my content.

 

Last summer we launched a lot of new website features including a chat bar, video gallery, and embedded documentation. The first two were a success that I feel really add to the site experience. The third I consider somewhat of a failure. The documentation search is not very good, the pages take too long to load, and the organization is too categorical. I installed a temporary Wiki where I have been jotting down docs and ideas, but I wasn't committed to the idea of using it for the Leadwerks3D documentation. Then I found the documentation system we're going to use.

 

Leadwerks3D documentation will be available in a two-panel searchable HTML page, which is pretty standard. However, the same docs can also be exported in PDF and even EPub format, which is what iBooks uses:

blogentry-1-0-69197500-1323831926_thumb.jpg

 

So, with the documentation system decided and web design out of my hands, I now turn back to the Leadwerks3D editor...

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Great news !

 

The books format is a good idea if we can do a search !

But if we want to have a fast view on some different stuff sometimes a simple scrolling bar is lot more faster on PDF format than having to do a search

or instaed of haing to clik to turn the pages of the book format.

 

For documentation , tutorials , code , we had some good ideas for the forum with some people , you can check it here if you have some time !

Off Topick thread on documentation

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I hope there's more than 32 pages!

 

OK, so seriously, I'm glad you are putting a big emphasis on Documentation. I didn't really understand the history behind the poor documentation of LeadWerks 2, but you gave the hint that you were not satisfied.

 

This is good. :)

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I know you are not really into .NET, but it would be _really_ great if you could also add XML Documentation Comments to the C# headers. I guess it would be quite a bit of work to copy the documentation and format it correctly, but in my honor opinion the xml documentation comments are one of the best features of Visual C#. It's basically an IDE-integrated, easy-to-work-with version of doxygen.

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I know you are not really into .NET, but it would be _really_ great if you could also add XML Documentation Comments to the C# headers. I guess it would be quite a bit of work to copy the documentation and format it correctly, but in my honor opinion the xml documentation comments are one of the best features of Visual C#. It's basically an IDE-integrated, easy-to-work-with version of doxygen.

 

I'll make them, if Josh agrees on the maintainability aspect.

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Great that you got somebody to help with web design. Good call.

 

Good that you put eye on documentation too, it's important.

I like the book formats.

 

Looking good :)

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Guest Red Ocktober

Posted

yes... definitely good news to hear that the core stuff is solid...

 

eagerly anticipating the beta...

 

(oh yeah... josh, if you haven't already settled on how you 're gonna approach it, this might be of interest to you as far as a workable ocean water solution project grid ocean )

 

--Mike

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