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PDF. I hate paper.

Good old paper book so I can thumb through it on the train.

I don't care both ways are fine with me.

WME documentation is enough for me.

I don't care about any books. I got here while looking for two-headed squirrels.

[metamorphium]

Dear muties,

In the past couple of months I worked on a project, which is slowly growing to a bigger-than-I-originally-thought proportions. This project is a wme developers guide which I'd like to finish and then decide what to do with it. As I was overwhelmed with GitS in the past few months, I didn't have time to work much on it, but now I'll focus again on the book much more.

The aim of the book is not to replace wme documentation, which is btw. very good, but rather to approach wme coding in "tutorial" way with chapters covering different aspects of WME game creation in a beginner-friendly way.

Right now I have many assorted chapters and I'm working on more of them, with different focus ranging from basic scripting to advanced concepts.

My question and the poll is targeted at a couple of questions:

1, will there be any interest at all in this thing?
2, will there be an interest in the printed copy of the book (published or self published)?
3, any specific requests for the advanced stuff?

Thanks

[odnorf]

Hm... the best option for me would be a pdf file. The good is that it will be easily updateable, the bad thing is that it's harder to read & try wme at the same time unless you have 2 monitors.

A published book is a nice idea but I'm not sure if you'll ever get your money back.

In either case, if you need a designer to.... design your book don't forget me

PS. I didn't vote since there is no option for both.

EDIT: 1. Yes, 2. Yes, 3. Not yet

[jlinam]

Sounds like a great idea. I've noticed that there are tons of useful tips and bits of information scattered throughout this forum, but finding the relevant information can be difficult. Since the wiki seem to be under-utilized, a doc like you propose would go a long way towards answering all those recurring 'newbie' type questions.

[metamorphium]

actually from the chapters I've already written it's more methodic. It should bring you from knowledge 0 about WME or scripting to reasonable knowledge of WME. It's basically targeted to people, who find starting with wme documentation / tutorial projects too confusing.

odnorf: I take it as promised!

[Nihil]

Not that I hate paper, but I agree with odnorf (and that scares me ;-) ), printing it could get rather expensive. And people with only one monitor are ... well .... uhm ... I forgot what I wanted to say ;-)

But in general a book like that is a brilliant idea - the more learning sources, the better!

[Mnemonic]

A book

I agree with nihil, not that anyone would hate paper, but I'm afraid the target audience is not large enough to justify a printed publication.
I was intending to write a "create-a-wme-game-from-scratch" tutorial myself, but I didn't yet get to is, as usual...

[mateomat]

Hi everyone,

I'm new to WME (and this forum), which makes me your ideal client
As long as it's written in english and reasonably priced I'd be happy to buy it.

Personally I would prefer a printed book, but pdf would be nice too.

I understand that there's always some risk involved when it comes to investing money in printed edition, but you could consider quick digital printing on demand, which allows you to collect pre-orders before you actually print.
There are lots of affordable offers out there, so maybe it's worth trying.

Anyway, no matter which option you'll choose it's a great idea. As I already wrote I just started to learn WME, but it's obvious for me that it is splendid software and it definately deserves a book focusing on it.

Developers and docs writers, thanks for your efforts.

[Maxim]

Hi, Metamorphium!

Paper, of course is the best material for books, but it make some hardness to buy it (especially for me, because I'm from Ukraine), so it will be really nice to have 2 variants: pdf and printed.

[metamorphium]

Okay. So the bottom line is, that there will be PDF and maybe, if there was way more people interested, I'll think about a custom printed version. The preorder of the printed version sounds like a neat idea whilst the digital download would be of course instant.

Thanks for your inputs, there is still much more to write though.

[pem]

Make it up as a PDF (you can use Open Office to do this as it publishes to PDF) and then make it available as a downloadable PDF or for purchase as a physical book via Lulu http://www.lulu.com/

I haven't tried the service but it looks like a good alternative to printing a bunch of books and having to inventory them.

[MikeHart]

I prefer PDF as it will be cheaper.

[warmblood]

My first post on the WME forums, and I'm using it to ask the status of this project. It would be very useful if it comes soon.

[Mnemonic]

meta is currently on vacation but as far as I know he's working on the book whenever he has a chance to.

[Drax]

I would like to have a printed book of WME programming in my bookshelf.
But the pdf is a "more rational" solution.

Regarding the speed Mnemonic adds new features and releases new versions
(and that's very impressive )
the printed book will be obsolete in short period of time. 

It will already be a hard task to keep the pdf actual.
Maybe for beginner-topics it wouldn't be that stressful, but for advanced
concerns i'm shure it's time-consuming to be up to date. So keep you motivation!

DraX

[metamorphium]

warmblood: Welcome to the forums. Yes, the book is well on the way and thanks to invaluable help from nihil, who provided sample graphics for the little game you're going to create as a byproduct of learning WME I was able to progress significantly. Unfortunately some very personal matters delayed the progress a bit, but now I'm well on the way again.

DraX: yes. I'm going to use PDF. It indeed is a neverending task with all those features added, but on the other hand this book is NOT a substitution of a WME documentation. I'd find this highly redundant. This book walks you through various aspects of WME development including detailed explanation of tools, guide to scripting, going through the logic how WME works to understand how to use common principles to create puzzles etc. From chapter 8 you're creating a little game and most of the stuff is practically explained on this little game. Together with PDF you'll get the resource pack, where for each chapter all necessary music/sound/graphics is included so you can slip through the book in the tutorial-like way. But don't hold your breath just yet, it's still far from finished. I even thought of splitting the book into 2 parts as it's too much to cover and maybe some beginners eager to start with WME would not need to wait for topics they're not going to use for quite some time. This idea was triggered by this recent post:

http://forum.dead-code.org/index.php?topic=2240.0

Your thoughts?