E-Manual?

[kgsan]

Thanks for the responses. I had not red the FAQ until I saw Edi’s message, so I did not realize that Illwinter/Shrapnel only puts out their manual in hardcopy.

To the one responder who implied that there was something sinister about my asking, I can only say that it seems like a perfectly valid question to me. Today many PC game companies provide a copy of their manual in electronic format and are willing to post and/or allow dissemination of their manuals (e.g. AGEOD for its strategy war games on the American Revolutionary and Civil wars and Matrixgames for at least some of their games), so I don't think there was anything inherently suspicious in asking about an e-copy of the manual. However, Illwinter/Shrapnel prefer to take another course, fair enough. As for it seeming strange that I haven't received my copy of the game yet, I agree, perhaps someone at Illwinter will quickly get that set to right.

[Sensori]

I fink it's Shrapnel that wanted the manual to be only in book-form. If you download the demo for Dominions 1, you will find that it has a manual in PDF form (or at least had). If you really wanna read a manual of some kind, you could read that... Although the grimoire and most of the information there just don't apply to D3. ;p

[Tichy]

If there isn't going to be a retail release of an updated version of Dom3, it might make sense to rethink the no-.pdf policy and have one that incorporates changes due to bug fixes/balance and the new nations.

Less costly than producing a new booklet, but accurate to the game as it now exists, or as it will exist after the next stunningly sweet patch or two...

[Wokeye]

I think its a fair question. Think of the trees! lol.

As Tichy said, makes it much easier to update. And if my daughter gets to it (as she has done to some other, far less important game manuals) then I'll be stuck.

[kgsan]

Well the point made by Tichy above raises a question I hadn't considered. If there have been substantial patches and changes since the original manual was printed, does the manual being sent to new purchasers of the game contain updated rules and information?

[Edi]

The new manuals going out are of a new edition with a lot of the typos reported earlier having been fixed, though not all. The new nations etc are also not included there. I suppose somebody might take it upon themselves to write up the kind of manual entries for the changed stuff, but unless someone like that steps forth and gets cracking, it's not likely to happen. Writing manuals can be bloody boring and when you also have to format them to boot, it's not a small task.

Currently it'd be more important to get an updated modding manual and mapediting manual out, since the ones that come as PDFs with the game are pretty outdated and have some pretty severe errors and omissions in some places. Arralen and I are working on those, glacial as the pace has been due to other considerations.

Generally there is always demand for free stuff, but the demand doesn't magically create that stuff, somebody actually has to sit his arse down and produce it.

Illwinter is just two people and they've produced the game and patched it out the wazoo so that 3.10 is so much superior to 3.00 that it isn't even funny. Shrapnel Games staff (the actual Shrapnel employees / admins) has its hands busy managing the company and taking care of all the projects with the various developers and their games. None of them have the time to write addendums to the manual.

There is also only so much that a few dedicated people among the fandom and moderators can do. The Dom3 DB, the Bug Shortlist and the Dom3 FAQ did not write themselves or spring fully formed from nothing by magic. The Dom3 DB took several months of work to put together, the Bug Shortlist several weeks. The FAQ was a work of several hours to few days all told. Be a cold day in hell before I start piling any more stuff on my plate that I don't even get paid for. They actually made me the bug reporting mod because I was fairly outspoken on the issue and made some rather public and unflattering noises about how I thought its handling at the time sucked. Next thing I knew, I was being made an offer I could not in good conscience refuse and I've never regretted accepting it despite all the work involved.

On another note, when one looks at the mapmaking/modding subforum, none of those mods, especially the more extensive ones, wrote themselves nor did their new sprites doodle each other into existence. All of that took work too, to say nothing of the various programs and scripts that community members have made. SemiRanDom and the other programs required extensive coding and testing and while *some* of them were trivial for the people who made them due to doing similar stuff at work, the results certainly are not trivial for the rest of us. Then there are the extensive documentation efforts into spell modding and analysis, most of that by DrPraetorious, without whose work spell modding would be rudimentary and hit and miss at best.

The one thing in common with all of these fan projects has been that the people who did them saw a need for their project in the community, rolled up their sleeves and got to it. Another thing in common with all of those things is that all of the projects have been geared toward the particular needs and interests of their makers. If it falls outside that range of interests or runs up against the lack of technical expertise (e.g. with coding stuff), it tends to be ignored and does not get done.

I also have one final say about documentation: It is always playing catchup with patches, fixes, additions, changes and tweaks and its own organization or lack thereof. Keeping it all up to date is a major hassle. Simply updating the Dom3 DB with every patch is a pain in the arse and then some, never mind spit-and-shine polishing the official documentation to the same point when you have to worry about everything being added to the right place, the changes made to the right place etc and then formatting the whole shebang to boot. The Dom3 manual is in its current state quite adequate to the task, since the mechanics sections are, with one exception, correct. The data sections are subject to statfixes and changes at the drop of the hat, so they cannot realistically be maintained in printed form and it'd be a full time job to maintain it even in PDF form. In that respect, if it's not listed in the manual, it's listed either in the Dom3 DB or Sunray's unit list, which is similar and complementary (the Dom3 DB lacks unit organization by nation that simultaneously shows the unit data for those units).

This turned into quite a bit longer ramble than I had originally intended, but I want people to understand why some things get done and why some don't. IW has two people with RL obligations and full time jobs and I'm an unpaid volunteer also with RL obligations and a full time job AND interests outside Dom3. If you feel something is missing and there is a need for it, go ahead and produce it, because we can't, we're already stretched thin enough.

[S.R. Krol]

kgsan said:
To the one responder who implied that there was something sinister about my asking, I can only say that it seems like a perfectly valid question to me.

It is a valid query. The reason it can raise red flags though is it seems like about every other week someone comes on the forum who has obviously pirated the game and is looking for a manual, so people can be sensitive to that.

kgsan said:
If there have been substantial patches and changes since the original manual was printed, does the manual being sent to new purchasers of the game contain updated rules and information?

No, but as Edi mentioned the core information is correct and no computer game ever receives a reprint due to post-release changes such as patches or mods. Even games that are released in purely digital form, with e-manuals, never seem to change.

[Wikd Thots]

Its a valid query BUT Scrapnel and Ilwinter have already said that it will not happen.

THere are plenty of computer file docs for this game. The ones that came with the game in the /doc directory, Edis database, and Gandolfs help files, and other stuff (mostly in the MOD forum)