http://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/viewto ... 806#p51806
I don't want to keep getting off-topic from the initial topic on the first post, so I'll continue here.
As PyTom mentioned, Ren'Py is aimed to:
- programmers to make a custom and cool VN by giving them the necessary developers tools to do so
and
- non-rpogrammer people who wants to make a VN, by giving them examples and simple code that's enough to make a nice looking VN.
Now, there seems to be no middle ground between the easy Web Tutorial and things on the Reference Manual, so people that are not-programmers but are willing to learn some of it in order to make a more unique game are pretty much lost.
I understand is complicated to make the wiki more friendly, basically because you need to know how to program to undesrrand many of the functions that work with Ren'Py.
So I'm humbly making a call to anybody that understands programming and have a little free time to make it a bit more friendly, either by adding more examples, simplifying the examples provided, adding a friendly explanation to not-so-complicated functions (without getting rid of the technical one), and adding screnshots for the examples that have an on-screen effect.
I'm also asking people that find the wiki complicated in any way to provide feedback in what exactly is causing you trouble, where and what would you feel would be needed to make it more understandable.
I firmly believe that knowledge is a gift that's meant to be shared, so I hope I'm not being annoying in doing this. I just want to learn and help other people like me to learn as well.
----------------------------
Now for my feedback that I hope it's useful to anybody willing to make the wiki more friendly (because right now I can't do it myself).
I was browsing through the Ren'Py Wiki for the last hour and I found that the things that confused me the most were the techical explanations of things and that the code examples were pretty clarifying. 90% of the time I'd just skip the technical explanations for being too complicated and look at the example only... then if I didn't understand what the example was trying to exemplify, I'd look at the explanation for more info and I'd try to "decode" it (the tech language).
I looked at the first five items of the Reference Manual and made a little review... I hope it's not too annoying or I'm too dense for things that should be easy to understand... sometimes english not being my first language doens't help much.
"The Ren'Py Language"
"Syntax Constructs" It's really hard to understand. Probably it's programmers-only oriented.
"Statements" Examples were great to understand things, while the explanations were pretty complicated and not very useful.
Defining Characters
is easy until I get to
That's a really long list of arguments, but I don't understand most of them because of this sort of "language barrier" being the more technical language. Little examples or links to examples for the most important/useful/used would be really nice, as right now just looks like a never-ending list of complicated things.Keyword Arguments. In addition to name, Character takes keyword arguments that control its behavior.
(.........)
The copy method on Characters takes the same arguments as the funcref Character constructor, with the exception that the name argument is optional. This method returns a new Character object, one that is created by combining the arguments of the original constructor and this method, with the arguments provided by this method taking precedence.
Text
The "Interpolation" bit is really hard to understand, and the link provided to get more info is equally confusing.
The text tags example provided starts like this:
Code: Select all
init:
$ definition = Character(None, window_yfill=True, window_xmargin=20,
window_ymargin=20, window_background=Solid((0, 0, 0, 192)))
Displayables
Most functions are linked to its own little page with an example, which is really helpful, but I think it'd be even more helpful if it also showed a screenshot with the effect of the example on-screen, rgather thanletting the reader test it and see for themselves.