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There is a huge amount of knowledge and information on this forum.
What do people think about the possibility of condensing all this information (the best of it) into a few volumes of a reference manual for all things Dark Basic?

I stumbled across NickyDude's attempt to create something similar: DBProGuide.pdf
While this is a nice collection of some good tutorials I am thinking of something more expansive.

Aside from a heap of tutorials to harvest from, we also have a lot of information strewn across hundreds of threads that could be condensed into organised topics.

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to point newbies to a page in a pdf file or even an entire section of it for a broader reference? Searching the forum doesn't always return the most useful results and gems from the past can be lost too easily.

If you think this is a good idea and want to help then here is my plan of action:


0. Gathering information

What are we looking for? — Beginner level information will be the easiest to find and will answer the most common questions, so I think we should start by searching the forum for the best answers to frequently asked questions.

Classification — We must organize the writings into broad subjects, such as geometry, input/output, memblocks, whatever you think is appropriate; many examples will cover several topics at once. These vague categorisations will be guides for how to organize the codex and divide it into sections.

Accreditation — It's important to give credit where it's due, not only as a mark of respect to those who have given their time to help others, but also because we may want to clarify or expand upon their writings and their input could be invaluable.


1. Editing (I haven't devised standards for this yet)

Style — There must be a consistent aesthetic style throughout the codex. All code must be formatted the same way; bold, italics, underlining and other formatting elements must be used in a consistent manner to emphasise distinct elements of the text, and therefore this distinction becomes intuitive to the reader.

Content — Where text or code can be made more concise I would encourage it, but a copy of the original must be kept in tact, and preferably a record of where edits have been made in the edited version.

Generic Problems — The problems included should be made as generic as possible.

I completely agree with what you are saying.



Rather than try and fit everything into one document, what about some sort of DBPro wiki? There's so much really great information on the forums that gets buried and a wiki could be an easy to expand way to record that information. I feel like it's impossible to fit everything into a single document. I'm sure a wiki has been tried, though. In my opinion the only way a dbpro wiki would actually survive over time is if TGC hosted it on a subdomain of their website - maybe that already exists? I don't know.

This is the best I could find: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/DarkBASIC_Programming

I personally prefer the idea of having something that can be used offline. A wiki is a good idea though, hmm.

I think making a web page would be best. You can use CSS to ensure that every page looks the same. Additionally, the webpage could be hosted on a server for online viewing, and also could be downloaded and linked into DBPro's own help system. For example, here (still uploading, might take awhile) is my replacement "home" page for when I hit F1 in the DarkBasic Editor.

I think that every article should link to where it was discussed. I would imagine most would link to threads on these forums.

I would like to help if possible. The way to keep DBPro alive is to continue to build on it. Were you thinking just basic How-To type things, or possibly rebuilding the help file system as well? The help files are OK, but many are outdated and some of the examples are shared between several commands, many of which are not even featured in the example, so they offer little help.

GIDustin, I really like your help files - that's such a good idea! Maybe we could do something like what you've done - create a new set of web pages for the help system. It would obviously be great to extend the existing documentation to better explain the commands.

What I believe Libervurto is talking about creating a compilation of more advanced knowledge not directly related to dbpro syntax, but often times more conceptual. There are a lot of tutorials written down about simple dbpro topics but very few on the more advanced issues. I'd like to know everyone else's opinion, but I would be a big fan of continuing what you've done with the help files. We could completely overhaul the "Technical Documents" section to include tutorials and technical documents based on subject, i.e. a section on networking, a section on shaders, and so on. Looking at the HTML code for those pages, it's very simple so it would be easy to write up tutorials in any word processor and then just copy and paste them into a HTML file. I'm excited about the idea of creating a replacement for dbpro's default help - after all, those files don't give the language a very good first impression to people so it would be nice if we could help improve them.

Yeah, I could see that at the start of his post. The thing is, you are going to be posting examples of how shaders work, and it would be best if those tutorials could link back to the help files that explain the commands you use, and those help files need help themselves. That is why I think the help files need a quick boost at the same time. I think it would be great to have a help system that states "Here are the commands" and "Now here is what you can do with them!".

I have been programming with DarkBasic for over 5 years now, and all of my projects use the 2D commands. I have put off the 3D commands because I hate that point where you start something new, so everything looks like garbage until you can fully grasp the concepts. I think some in-depth tutorials might help to skip that frustrating learning curve and really kick-start some neat projects.

@Libervurto:

How were you planning to handle plugins? There are several plugins out there that offer some really handy commands that could be featured in their own separate sections, but some (Matrix) are used so often that you might consider working them in from the start.

Ohw, I like this idea! There should be an online section (linked in the default (official) off-line dbp documentation everybody has. The main page could have a link in the navigation to 'online documentation', 'advanced documentation' or to make clear it's maintained by community it could be called 'community documentation'.

However, it should be online, preferably in the style of the official documentation and linked like it's part of the official documentations.

Just my two cents. Hope this really goes somewhere!

If there any way I can help let me know.
renny

I spent some time putting a framework together for something like this. You can view it here.

The basic idea is that every page follows the same theme, and are all inter-linked. For example, if you view the source of that page, a javascript function is run on the code snippet section, which formats the example code using CodeSurge default theming, and also adds hyperlinks to all commands inside the example, which lead to the help page for those commands. Initially, only the default DBPro commands will be linked, but eventually I would like to link these same example boxes to the help files for particular plugins as well.

The link above was created in just 4-5 hours, while waiting for the turkey to finish cooking. When (not if) we make the entire thing downloadable, the syntax highlighting will not be done by javascript, but instead hard-coded to reduce server pains.

This would be a massive undertaking. It would basically involve creating brand new help files for every command, updating them to how they work today since several are lacking behind in updates. Not sure I want to tackle this myself though.


Apart from re-writing the entire help system, I do think that a reference guide such as what was originally posted by Libervurto, would be a really good idea. I was just thinking that a revamp of the help files would really help to support the guide system.

it's examples.

https://forumfiles.thegamecreators.com/download/2498313