Hard Light Productions Forums
Community Projects => The FreeSpace Wiki Project => Topic started by: Shade on April 13, 2006, 06:05:37 pm
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http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Portal:FRED
The wiki needs some FRED loving, and this is an attempt at giving it some. Long term I'd like this portal to be the entry point to pretty much all information that a mission designer might find useful, from FRED inner workings and known problems, over fredding tips & tricks, to such things as the FS2 ship reference.
Done so far & plans for the future:
1) Existing FRED articles have had more specific categories added, and those categories are linked from the portal.
2) Appropriate canon FS2 universe reference pieces have been linked to.
3) Info on learning FRED is now prominently placed as newbies are unlikely to go digging deep for what they need.
4) Prepared two sexp reference lists, one for retail and one for new scp sexps, and started to fill them in. Currently these just list the sexp name and link to an empty sexp detail page, but eventually each sexp page can be fleshed out with needed and optional arguments, what they do, and a few examples of how they can be used creatively. Going to make a SEXP sub-category for the individual SEXP detail pages, as they would clutter the general FRED category too much if linked there.
5) New features exclusive to Fred_Open each have, or will get, an article off the main portal page, for ease of transition from retail FRED and ease of learning for newbies.
6) Want to eventually add a category, in addition to fred tips and common fred mistakes, with examples of how to pull off some of the more quirky things that can be done in FRED. There's lots of ingenious and inspired fredding out there that others could learn a lot from.
Oh, and I'd also like to eventually put up a picture of FRED in action on the main portal page, to make it look a bit less bland. Anyway, the general principle I've been working from is to make as much information as possible directly accessible while keeping the page neat and well ordered. With that in mind, every article can now be reached with a maximum of two clicks, and those I expect to be of most use, such as the reference material, with just one click.
Comments, ideas, suggestions are all welcome. All I really want is for this portal to be as informative and accessible as possible, and it's unlikely that every decision I made is optimal for that :) Oh, and by all means add stuff. Even if you don't know where to put it right now just drop it into the general FRED category and it will get worked into the general scheme eventually.
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I fully support this idea :)
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I'd say "support by contributing", but I already know you will :nod: Still, for anyone else who might read this, support by contributing.
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I suck at FRED, I have nothing to contribute, however, I fully apreciate this idea.
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You can still contribute, if you want to. Post about things you would like to see, FRED and mission design questions you would like answered, problems you would like to see the solution to, etc. Just because you can't answer all the questions, doesn't mean you can't ask them for someone else to answer :)
One of the main goals of this, after all, is for it to be a resource for those who are not masters of FRED.
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Edit: Meh. Its been done already, nm.
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Almost through with adding the list of retail sexps now. The SCP only sexps should be somewhat less mindnumbingly boring as a) there are fewer, b) one can just copy/paste as fs_open can output the sexps.
What I'm thinking for the scp sexp page is to have only sexps that are added by the SCP, were modified/fixed by the SCP, or were moved to a different category. Modified/fixed sexps should link to and be linked from the original version. Sexps that were simply moved can just link to the same article as the retail sexps, as they're really only on the scp page to make the wiki sexp categories fit with what one sees in fred.
Also on the scp sexp page, I'm thinking of putting a section at the very top for the 5 or so most recently added sexps, to call attention to any new functionality that has been put in. Otherwise they might just (as they do now) get lost in the heap of other sexps with naught but a few aware of their existance. So whenever a new sexp is created, a person with knowledge of it can go to the wiki, put it in the '5 most recent' section at the top of the scp sexp page, move the least recent down to it's proper category (just a cut/paste job), and there we have a system for giving new sexps some attention.
Opinions? Better ideas? Actually one idea I thought about was to have the '5 most recent' list on the main portal page instead, somewhere near the bottom. I like that better in fact, but then whoever adds them would need to edit two pages to update instead of just one. Maybe it would be possible to link them up somehow, and simply pull the appropriate section from the scp sexp page and display it on the portal? I don't know if mediawiki supports this, but it does seem kinda similar to just having a permanently featured article.
[Edit] Of course, it didn't occur to me to check the FRED walkthrough until after I'd added the whole bunch manually... and of course it has all of them listed in a nice, copy friendly format. I lose :p
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Ouch. :)
Sounds like a decent idea. I like the idea of the 5 most recent SEXPs bit. Stick to keeping it on the SEXP page unless we make a 5 most recently added features bit on the main portal too (Not that it would be a bad thing).
Be warned that quite a few SEXPs have actually been altered.
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Given that the portal page currently has about 20cm of empty screen space (on my monitor anyway), we could probably have both recent sexps and recent features there with room to spare. Still depends on whether there's a way to do it neatly though, I'd really prefer it if one would only have to update one page. If it gets too cumbersome, we'll just end up with a situation where we have the announcement system but nobody bothers to use it.
I know there have been a lot of changes to existing sexps, quite a few of which I probably don't even know about yet. Actually that's the main reason I went with both a retail and an SCP sexp catagory, instead of just lumping it all together. Too much risk of confusion if one ended up looking at the wrong version of a sexp, and this avoids it... though it's obviously more work to get it all listed this way. But at least, it's one-time work, and something that can be done a little at a time.
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Forgot this before: Also added some of the individual sexp pages to show how the 'base' page could look. It's basically just a copy/paste job from the sexp info window in FRED, formatted to fit the wiki (by replacing tabs with spaces & adding a space before each line to keep original formatting).
Like So (http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Has-arrived-delay).
In addition to this info, which is the baseline, I'm thinking that we could have comments on how, when and when not to use the sexp, sorta in the style of the veteran comments found on the various ship pages, but less verbose. Example (http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Do-nothing).
Adding the base info is something that can be done by anyone, regardless of FRED knowledge, if they feel like contributing. Just open FRED, go into the events editor, find the sexp you want to add an article for and copy the contents of the info box. Then format it as mentioned above, add [[Category:Retail SEXPs]] or [[Category:SCP SEXPs]] as appropriate, and save the page. Or if adding an SCP sexp, just copy/paste from the sexp output instead of using FRED to save time.
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Um, I highly recommend keeping all the sexps on the same page, and simply using bookmarks to move to them. That offers several advantages, most primarily avoiding the need to create dozens of really short pages (which might have implications for the database; I dunno) but also because it's more convenient. Not only is there no need to wait for the page to load, but you can also browse through the sexps easily. Putting each sexp on its own page offers no advantages that I can think of.
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Good points (and at last some real feedback, I was beginning to feel like a dictator doing all that stuff with noone agreeing or disagreeing), I'll give it a try tomorrow and see how it works out :) Doubt the database will fret over it though, given that every ship and weapon already has a seperate page with no problems, but the other points are sound enough assuming I can keep it from getting too cumbersome to browse.
Reason I went with this was simply to have room to add comments on using the SEXPs without ending up with a page that's 57 screens long once all the sexps are added. The example I linked is a short one, some of the more complicated sexps might well end up with a fair bit of associated text once (and if) people start adding it. But a single page is certainly worth a shot.
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Fill this up quickly, and I wont need to ask anymore questions :D
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Actually, ask the questions... we can't know about everything that people want answered if you don't ;) Feel free to use this thread to ask about anything FRED you'd like to see the answers for in the wiki.
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Um, I highly recommend keeping all the sexps on the same page, and simply using bookmarks to move to them. That offers several advantages, most primarily avoiding the need to create dozens of really short pages (which might have implications for the database; I dunno) but also because it's more convenient. Not only is there no need to wait for the page to load, but you can also browse through the sexps easily. Putting each sexp on its own page offers no advantages that I can think of.
I'd suggest a page for each category (and subcategory of change) instead. Putting them all on one page means you end up with a huge page making it harder to find the individual SEXP you're searching for.
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Seems like that might be a good compromise. Then could also add a navigation template at the bottom with links to the other categories to make browsing between them quicker. And might be less work than individual pages... less work is good ;) Gotta figure out how to integrate it though, don't think I can just adapt the existing pages.
[Edit] Another option could be to keep the current layout but improve navigation with links to other sexps in the same category as well as back to the index page, using a template as mentioned above. I dunno. It just still seems to me that when just the sexp index, without any description text, takes up about 4 screens worth of space, it's going to be too much if we add descriptions and comments too even after they're broken into categories. The change category itself is a page and a half without any descriptions. I'll go with the majority opinion though.
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Oh, one comment about the FRED Portal.
The links for articles that have been created and haven't been created are the same colour. So you don't know if you're clicking a link to something that hasn't been created yet or not.
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They are different. Just not by much. Links to non existant articles are a little bit brighter. I agree it could be better, but it's a general wiki issue and not specific to the FRED portal, so not going to try and change that. Sorry.
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Back to the sexp references. Made a demo page with the only sexp category I'd filled out so far: http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Retail_Objectives_SEXP_Reference - Not too bad, actually, but not real suited for lengthy comments. And really, it's still not my preference.
Truth be told, I wouldn't mind just doing both - Can use the reference list pages as a sort of master index, and from there people can go either to individual sexp pages for detailed comments or jump to a category for quickly browsing through several sexps. I just need to make links out of the section headlines on the two main reference pages and we get both systems at once.
And seeing as it took all of two minutes to make that page with all the sexps in the category already individually listed and formatted, it's very little extra work. Any objections to this 'best of both worlds' approach?
[Edit] http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Retail_SEXP_Reference updated to show what I mean. For now the individual sexp pages do seem redundant, but they won't be once comments are added for them.
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http://fs2source.warpcore.org/temp/sexps.html
Been a feature of fs2_open for months.
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And many thanks for that :) Without the sexp output, I might have gone crazy already. Anyway, tried my hand at a navigation template to make browsing between sexp categories more convenient. Can see it at the bottom of the Objectives (http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Retail_Objectives_SEXP_Reference) and Time (http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Retail_Time_SEXP_Reference) SEXP pages so far (only ones I've completed as yet).
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Instead of 'most recent sexp' and 'most recent feature', to save real estate I just went with 'most recent additions' which can be anything, sexps or some other improvement. Made a template for it (Link (http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Template:Recent_FRED_Additions)) which I will call from the portal. Reason I went with a template is so when making an update, one doesn't have to dig through a whole page of code to find the proper place to insert it. This way it's fairly simple and I even added a comment to show where :) Also included an edit link on the template, so to update it just click that little blue link in the top right corner.
So now there's a place to tell people about new additions to FRED, sexps or other. My thinking was to just use headlines. If there's also an article about it, make the headline a link to it, but if there isn't someone else (like me) can do that at a later date once there is. It's simply a way to avoid the situation we have now where stuff gets added and 2 months later someone like me still doesn't have a clue it exists ;) As long as we stick with headlines, there should be no need to delete old ones either, I'll just check it occasionally to see if it's getting too long and get rid of the older ones if it is. Really does needs to be quick and easy or noone will bother to update it.
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The reason why I suggested having both is because SEXPs are added at a very quick rate so the new features section will almost always be pointing at new SEXPs.
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True, you do have a point. It's easily changed at least, we can just split the block into two lists, sexps and features, a horizontal rule between then and good to go :) Will get that taken care of shortly.