I'd like to share some brief thoughts on my intentions of how I am going to revise the ADOM manual (one of the last crowdfunding promises not yet tackled):
- I have wrestled for a long time with the question on whether it should be web-based, PDF, ASCII or several of these formats. I now have decided that it will remain ASCII because our recent UI/UX tests show that people would enjoy shorter in-game help texts in more places. As (a) ADOM can only display ASCII and PDF or HTML are impossible for ADOM and (b) we do not have the resources to support a variety of documents, ASCII makes most sense.
- I intend to break down the manual into smaller sections so that you e.g. can directly jump from the "Healing" skill to the healing skill description (and not just the whole skill section as of today).
- I intend to add links to the manual in more places (skills, spells).
- I will add more information to the manual. If you feel that some important information is missing please add that request in the comments section of this ticket here.
The technical side behind this plan requires writing a new manual parser and formatter to generate all the sections, links, etc. that we need internally in order to use the improved manual. Not a trivial task but I hope to get this done soon.
Thanks for listening!
Sounds nice! Never read much of it as it involved so much scrolling to find the relevant sections.
ReplyDeleteDoing more sophisticated formats it might be simple enough to later on export a full HTML copy of the manual using things like grep&sed from the sources (beside more elegant solutions). Might be a nice gimmick to read leisurely on the side or even homepage.
Alas nothing more than this.
Now to get some free time to play again after a long time!