Are There Plans to Make Ren'Py More User-Friendly?

[Nova Alamak]

personally, I'm with the others who are saying this needs to be explained better. If these things were as easy to understand as you say, we wouldn't be coming here making a new topic for every basic question and complaining so frequently about the documentation. I think the original poster and those who chimed in here are making a great point about how disconnected the information is and that just basic EXAMPLES would help a lot in the long run. I know you think that isn't necessary because you figured it out on your own, but I'm a year in with Ren'py and it's really not so simple as searching the forum. I frequently can't find a solution and have to forgo whatever I was trying to do. And when I do get responses, I often don't know what people are saying and it's really intimidating to be told you aren't trying hard enough when you're doing everything you can for hours and hours. Lots of us aren't programmers at heart because Ren'py is a lot simpler than other engines so I don't think alienating us on the basis of having insufficient programming experience is really fair. If we're sticking with it long enough to ask questions here at all, I think we're dedicating ourselves to the task. Lots of the Cookbook tutorials are out there, but the things people often need help with are more simple than those.

My point being, I think it would be worthwhile to make the documentation more comprehensive. For the more complicated things that require Python knowledge, it might be fair to direct people to separate resources and practice, but 80% of the time, for me at least, I need help with one basic thing I thought I understood but find out I don't thanks to an incomplete explanation. That isn't event the fault of Ren'py, it's just a fact of the learning curve and if it were adjusted, I think a lot more people would use the thing.

[trooper6]

On the other hand some of the things people say need to be in the documentation with examples...*are* in the documentation with examples. So...

[Nova Alamak]

It seems more like a case of not believing people when they say there isn't an example for something. Also listening to the content of their question and not assuming they skipped all of the relevant material will help narrow down what is and isn't abusive. I can never get a non-condescending answer to anything here because everyone assumes I haven't done my homework, but I've been setting aside 3 eight-hour sessions of Ren'Py work every week since last August and I'm still having these kinds of troubles. I thought maybe I could get a little help every now and then and not feel like I was intruding. The documentation is always the first place I go, then tutorial blogs, and then the forums as a last resort. If I don't have at least SOME examples in front of me, I won't know where to begin in the editor. Someone further up said something similar.

[Onishion]

I feel you on that stuff, although I've found the community to be very helpful with a lot of my problems, and the ones where they haven't I assume it's because nobody else knows how to do it either.

I also need concrete examples of how a bit of coding is meant to work before I can really understand how I can adapt it to my needs, and sometimes those examples aren't available. Just explain what you do know about the element you're working with, and then where you can't figure it out as best you can, and hopefully someone will be willing and able to work you through it.

[ChesStrategy]

If anyone is interested in my 2 cents:

To be fair; I think the community (pyTom, trooper, xela, and others) have been helpful in the forums and have helped me (and others) answer some of the questions we have.

However, that being said, it would be nice to have updated documentation on more advanced things (let those that scare easily, be scared away; rest of us brave souls would benefit from the advanced documentation)

I've had to scour through many old posts (otherwise) via repeated forum searches (unless there is a way to save searches that I'm not aware of), on topics such as:

1. Interactions and how they (at a high-level) work/interact with CDD/UDDs and the CDD's related event calls.
2. Jumping to contexts, creating nested contexts, what is persisted to the next context, what is reset when jumping out of one.
3. Better understanding of how constant skipping (i.e. holding down the skip key) affects in-flight/playing transitions, transforms, music, and interactions.

I'm sure some of the questions above assume incorrect things; but my incomplete understanding is exactly the reason why such updated docs would be helpful.

I'm not demanding a full complete API like that of unity (see example here); this would take way too much time for the devs... but anytime something is updated in the changelogs that would depreciate some old documentation, it would be nice if someone was able to clean it up or re-clarify.

EDIT: Maybe a stickied post on relinked old forum posts about advanced topics can drastically reduce the repeated searches and time for each search.

Regards,
Ches

[xela]

EDIT: Maybe a stickied post on relinked old forum posts about advanced topics can drastically reduce the repeated searches and time for each search.

Not a bad idea, but there are no moderators on lemma forums (in a sense of picking active members of specific forum sections as moderators), just the four admins. I do not really see this happening and being well maintained unless this policy changes.

[philat]

Another thing to consider is simply a link to working games that are public -- either cookbook examples or full games whose creators have shared the code/script (Analogue: A Hate Story's script is public, if I'm not mistaken). There are a lot of working examples, just not directly in the documentation.