AGCs for tutorials

AGCs for tutorials

Postby Tsar Hoikas » Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:26 pm

Aloys, this is primarily geared towards you.

Tutorial creation is pretty important for the GoW IMO -- it seems likely that there would be AGC positions to organize them (or at some point there will be). However, that brings up the question: Which main GC would those AGCs fall under? The best contenders I can think of are me (Tool Dev) and Aloys (Building). I've been trying to brainstorm what kind of assistance I might need, and short of a PyPRP AGC, I really don't see much more that I'd need immediately, whereas Building has a lot more potential for AGC recruitment. It would also be possible to split tutorial AGC positions over multiple Councilors... I.E. AGC of Blender Tutorials be under Aloys while the AGC of Plasma Studio Tutorials be under me.

This is just rambling to see what you all think. So, please, do add your comments.
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Re: AGCs for tutorials

Postby Aloys » Thu Jan 03, 2008 11:02 am

Clearly the tutorials are utterlly important.

I think the first thing we should do, before getting new people on board, should be to decide what we want to do with the tutorials. (although having more knowledgable people to help decide this would be welcome). This discussion has been going for a while, and as far as I can see no clear decision has been taken. (beside the important fact that we keep the Alcugs wiki). My opinion is that the tutorials are a very valuable ressource as they are but they needs some serious reorganizing, and we'd be better off to start again with a blank page. That may not be a popular idea but I think in the long run that'll be better.. (think of it as 'refactoring' the tutorials ;) ) That doesnt' mean we can't re-use most of the current stuff; but I think we shouldn't start doing anything before we have taken some key decisions.
For instance: I'm not sure yet how we should separate the Blender tutorials of the PyPRP tutorials; right now both are very much mixed. If we add a new "How to properly light your scences in Blender" tutorial, it's sure to overlap a lot with the current Lighting tutorial.. Technically people can find Blender tutorials on other sites; but whether we just provide links or actually write stuff ourselves we're sure to end up with a lot of duplicate stuff, which will just be confusing for end-users..

As I mentionned on Alcugs, I really think the wiki should become the "Uru Ages creation for Dummies" book. I know it's pretty ambitious and would need a lot of work, but I think this is what is needed if we want to make Age creation go further; because no one else will do it for us.

So in the near-future, once some keys decisions have been taken many things will need to be done, and although that may not require many people, we'll need motivated people. And it might as well be a good time to start seeing if people are interested to participate.. (even if we don't formally 'hire' anyone yet)

We need to talk about all this on the next meeting, saturday.
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Re: AGCs for tutorials

Postby Paradox » Thu Jan 03, 2008 1:58 pm

Some things that we might want to keep in mind:

Trylon is in the middle of a massive rewrite of the plugin that changes nearly everything and renders most of the tutorials on Alcugs deprecated. If we want to start completely from scratch, now is the time to do so.
We're going to have to make a decision soon as to whether we want to put tutorials here, or leave them at Alcugs. Technically, Alcugs owns the plugin, and most of the development notes and documentation exist there. All of the existing tutorials are owned by Alcugs and can't easily be copied onto another wiki. The advantage to starting our wiki is that we can skin it and change the interface, but overall I don't see any huge benefits to starting our own.

I think Alcugs should remain the primary development site for PyPRP, and PyPRP specific tutorials can remain on Alcugs. However, the ultimate choice will rest with the documenters and Almlys.

EDIT: I've heard some feedback from a few people stating that having everything here at GoW would be best, and keeping a common interface between them.
Dovahn wrote:I would imagine that for some people (certainly for me) it would be more reassuring to come across a tutorial database on the GoW website itself, because one is sure that it is timely. I mean, I know that the Alcugs tutorials are and have been updated, but it's not immediately apparent to me. Having it on our website, however, would prove to newcomers that it is the "new GoW" tutorial and information listing.
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Re: AGCs for tutorials

Postby Kato » Sun Jan 06, 2008 10:50 am

I personally have no opinion about where to put them (just tell me when to set up a wiki :D), but I do want to offer my abilities as far as rewriting tutorials goes (that is, when Trylon's released the new plugin). I generally write fairly easy-to-understand tutorials (I have written several Blender tutorials and I believe the original texturing tutorial on Alcugs).

-Kato
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Re: AGCs for tutorials

Postby Aloys » Mon Jan 07, 2008 5:04 pm

So we need to take two decisions :

1) Do we move the wiki on the GoW site?
2) Do we jump on the occasion to rewrite everything?

As I already said before my position is: Yes and Yes. let's start again from scratch, and let's do it here.

*HOWEVER*. I'm under the impression that Almlys might be disapointed by that, and doing it might jeopardize his possible collaboartion on future PyPRP updates (although he looks like he totally moved to his own project now). Is this correct? If it is, it was suggested before that the Alcugs wiki could still be used as the knowledge base for PyPRP development (kind of like the COBBS wiki way back); that might makegood use of it if we move the tutorials here.
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