Updated Manual?

[Edi]

As someone who has done extensive documentation for Dominions 3, here is my opinion:

The manual is quite okay as manuals go. Some information has been outdated by patch changes. Some information was slightly incorrect to begin with, but for the most part even the incorrectly explained mechanics worked more or less in the direction the manual explanations pointed to.

You won't learn to play the game by reading the manual alone. For the most part you learn to play the game by actually playing the game and every now and then checking some little detail in the manual or some other thing for some generics.

There is a Strategy Index thread on this forum for a good reason, to give a handy reference to many of the resources provided by this community. Together with the existing game manual, the documentation resources here on this forum and lch's wiki and playing and experimenting by trial and error it's quite possible to learn the game and arguably do it more quickly than when it had just come out and large swathes of this documentation did not exist.

Writing good, user-proof documentation takes a LOT of time. When you have only a two man team, that documentation is going to be hard to get done thoroughly partly precisely because the developers know the code and the mechanics inside out closely enough that they won't be able to anticipate certain basic questions from completely new users. Never mind necessarily putting together a 1-2-3-A-B-C level of manual.

Never mind also that the documentation is required to be written in a non-native language. Knowing how to speak a foreign language and read and write in it is nowhere near the same as being able to write good technical documentation in that language. Not a trivial task when you combine it with all the other resource constraints here.

I originally found the unit stat listings too incomplete for my own requirements. So I made my own. That then ballooned into documenting other kinds of things that were amenable to listing so I'd have it all in one place. Thus the Dom3 DB.

Later I found the modding manual and the mapmaking manual unwieldy for my purposes. So I took the original documentation and rewrote it to better match what I needed. Funnily enough, those rewritten manuals are now the official documentation that comes with the game when you patch it.

The whole point of this is that I didn't sit around twiddling my thumbs and looking perplexed but instead took action.

So, in conclusion, if people want a completely updated, fully accurate manual, then they should write it themselves. If they can't be arsed, they had better learn to do with what they've got, which at this point in time is a considerable amount.

Would it be hard work? Yes. Would it cut into your available playing time? Yes. Would it require actually learning the game in order to accomplish it? Yes, though for non-newbies here this question is irrelevant. If all the effort spent on demanding improved documentation for x, y and z in Dominions had been spent on actually making that documentation, we'd probably already have an improved manual.

Illwinter is currently involved with a new project, with Dominions 3 support more of a sideshow, since it works "well enough" by now. That and everything I said above establishes the baseline circumstances surrounding this issue. If anyone has a problem with that, well, it'll stay as their problem until they do something about it on their own.

[Gandalf Parker]

@EDI
I was hoping you would show up. I had a thought (plug in the mandatory groans here)

Since it was brought up that CBM is so popular, and changes the game so much, have you felt a need for a cbm version of the DB? Not that Im suggesting that its you that needs to do one but I thought you might have looked into it and had a semi-neutral feel for how much difference there was.

[Edi]

Originally Posted by Gandalf Parker

@EDI
I was hoping you would show up. I had a thought (plug in the mandatory groans here)

Since it was brought up that CBM is so popular, and changes the game so much, have you felt a need for a cbm version of the DB? Not that Im suggesting that its you that needs to do one but I thought you might have looked into it and had a semi-neutral feel for how much difference there was.

I have no objection if someone does a CBM version as long as I'm credited with the base work of the original DB in it.

The changes in and of themselves would not be hard, especially if it was automated. The only things you need to change in the DB document are the BaseU (units), BaseW (weapons) and BaseA (armor) tables. Everything on the display pages for units, weapons and armor is automatically taken care of by the spreadsheet functions in the full (non-static) DB spreadsheet file. A static version can then be made by copy-pasting the display page data contents and paste-specialing only numbers/text over it and saving the file with a different name.

Any new units, weapons and armor would have to be entered manually (or the entry automated if someone feels like writing the code) into the tables.

Any changes to existing weapons, armor and units could be automated by having a program that reads the mod file (since mod syntax dictates what stat goes where in the tables and is caused by what command). The program would then write the values of those commands directly into the corresponding column on the row related to that monster. Some things like the domsummons etc would probably be best to enter by hand, because they are the iffiest part of the DB documentation. Unlike lch's data dumps, they were not extracted from the game but extrapolated since the information was not directly visible from the game UI.

I know there are several competent programmers here, so if anyone feels up to it, go right ahead. I know quite specifically what needs to be done on the general level, but my coding skills are not up to the task. Hello World I can do, but ask me much beyond that and it starts getting hairy.

[SciencePro]

So this thread discussion petered out a couple months ago but i was flipping through old forum posts and saw something that caught my eye:

Originally Posted by Edi

Illwinter is currently involved with a new project, with Dominions 3 support more of a sideshow, since it works "well enough" by now. That and everything I said above establishes the baseline circumstances surrounding this issue. If anyone has a problem with that, well, it'll stay as their problem until they do something about it on their own.

Has any information been released about this new project?

And I did want to weigh in my 2 cents on the question of whether illwinter should spend time updating the manual. My answer is "no." The community should do that with a wiki and if people have questions they can always use this forum. The devs time, I think, is better spent on a new project for us to enjoy.

Ich's wiki at http://dom3.servegame.com/wiki/ is coming along quite nicely. But it is having technical problems at the moment.