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AGS Development => Site & Forum Reports => Topic started by: Hobbes on Mon 31/05/2021 13:05:04

Title: Broken links, etc. on AGS website
Post by: Hobbes on Mon 31/05/2021 13:05:04
As an initial clean-up, I thought it might help to collect all broken links on the AGS website as they've been reported by Babar, with perhaps some more added in as we browse through together. This could be step 1 in cleaning up the site before exploring a potential redesign as discussed here. (https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=59176.0)

Some of my suggestions might be quite brutal, but I really think from a new-person perspective, if the first "Help and Support" links you find after downloading the editor don't work/are broken/are outdated, then that's a massive barrier to entry.

The main menubar AGS page (here (https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/ags/))

Help and Support
The menubar on the right, under Getting Started, Help/FAQs, Art Tutorials & For Developers:


Now as cat said in the other thread I mentioned, AGS is a do-ology. I am MORE than willing to do these "move to Wiki" suggestions made above. I just want to make sure with AGA (or whoever needs to agree with this) that this will then mean the links on that page get edited/removed. Otherwise, it'll be a couple of hours wasted. So if whoever's in charge can give me the green light, I'll get the Wiki pages setup. And we can take it from there, update tutorials, etc.

Screenshots and Features on the same page
Simple suggestion, but could we add a Lightbox module? Right now, clicking on the screenshots opens them as bare pictures in a separate window.

Develop AGS
The only link there (the readme) takes you to Github. Perhaps just best to direct to Github anyway and make it clear that AGS is hosted there. I would "advertise" here as well that AGS falls under the Artistic License 2.0.

Resources
I question the need for this whole section on this page. It should live in the Wiki in its entirety. But not all of it, probably...

The reason I keep saying Wiki-wiki-wiki should probably be clear by now. Community do-ology, it enables people who want to help out to help out. And we can easily take things further there together without it being a one-man responsibility when for all of us, time is precious.
Title: Re: Broken links, etc. on AGS website
Post by: eri0o on Mon 31/05/2021 13:14:36
https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags-manual

A lot of what you mention has simply being updated elsewhere in a different wiki. Just login on GitHub and you can Edit. I recommend first navigating to get familiar with the formatting.

Sure some can be ported back to the website, but it may need a different connection to pull the data.

The AGS website wiki page on fonts OTH though has been maintained by Monsieur OUXX, check that page history. https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/wiki/Fonts

And there are things like the above that may not make sense in the manual but are still needed resources. I suggest you start cleansing the wiki and then start writing the skeletons of what you think makes sense there.

I think it would be useful to add HOW-TOs. See:
(https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/2244442/55597476-2902cf80-5724-11e9-944c-863f2eb33470.png)

Some content can be lifted from forums for the wiki:
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=43629.0
Title: Re: Broken links, etc. on AGS website
Post by: Crimson Wizard on Mon 31/05/2021 16:10:43
IDK what were the video tutorials in the past, but these are Densming's ones which we use to recommend to the new users:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ml_DR76Cl4&list=PL21DB402CB4DAEAEF (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ml_DR76Cl4&list=PL21DB402CB4DAEAEF)
Title: Re: Broken links, etc. on AGS website
Post by: Snarky on Mon 31/05/2021 20:31:03
On the other hand, I think we should add some kind of link to the AGS Discord. (Not sure exactly how to do that with the way Discord uses "invites" instead of links, but I've seen it in other places.)

Quote from: Hobbes on Mon 31/05/2021 13:05:04

  • AGS Engine Plugin API - Last updated 2009. Move to Wiki where it can be updated.
  • AGS Editor Plugin API - Can't see when this was updated... but again, let's move to the Wiki.

These, I feel, properly belong in the manual (they can be hidden away pretty far down), or perhaps somewhere on the AGS github. (It includes, among other things, a sample project to build.)
And it's not necessarily a problem that something was last updated in 2009 if there hasn't been a need to update it. As of a couple of years ago, at least, it still worked. In any case, I don't think the AGS Wiki is the right place.

Some tutorials could also be considered for inclusion in the manual.
Title: Re: Broken links, etc. on AGS website
Post by: Crimson Wizard on Mon 31/05/2021 20:33:24
I started transferring plugin API pages to the manual:
https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags-manual/issues/134

Editor API is almost there, but for Engine API one would have to invest some time, because the markdown format we are using as a manual source currently is too different from html, and Engine API page has too many various formatting styles. I was not sure if it supposed to be copied as close as possible, or a new formatting made only copying the text.

The engine API was changed only once since, and it was my own change as noted in the changelog here:
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=58969.0