Vantha

The idea came from an age-old patch on Phabricator that let players cycle through the tips on the loading screen. We came to the conclusion that the loading screen was too laggy and often shown too short for this feature to be useful. So, I instead implemented a popup accessible from the main menu via 'Learn to Play' => 'Tips and Tricks' containing the (previously only) loading screen tips. There, players can take all their time to throughly read and browse through the tips. And I also enhanced its visuals by adding a new bullet point sprite, a subtle decoration below the title, and a new button style for the 'Next' and 'Previous' buttons. So far, maybe half a dozen people have seen the diff Phabricator, which is why I decided I'd make this post before porting the patch to Gitea. Here is a short video showcase: sceenrecording.mp4 Any feature ideas, any opinions on the design? Of course, the tips will continue to be shown on the loading screen as well (with the new design), but without the ability to scroll through them.

Thanks, I will take a look at it.

Hi there!

Should anything be initiated for an expanded tutorial, I am willing help with the technical side of things

I'm not an expert on marketing either, but I believe the official social media accounts could and should be more active. As Stan said, the follower numbers on various platforms are actually decent. A post every few weeks or so announcing a new feature, polling the players or asking a question could help a lot. Without assigning any blame, I find this community somewhat isolated. I've seen several people say the project of 0 A.D. is simply dead and given up on. Which is obviously totally wrong, but if they aren't checking the forums or play multiplayer they actually have no way to know. This at least could be solved by writing a social media post every now and then. Just my two cents.

At last, but not least, an article about crossbow designs: https://github.com/indoptogopt/GUI-page-for-0ads-encyclopedia/pull/3. The article also touches some of the Physics behind them. Is it understandable?

Thanks, just did so now

Here are two more articles on the topic of Seleucid cavalry: https://github.com/indoptogopt/GUI-page-for-0ads-encyclopedia/pull/2

On another note, I came across a series of articles that I wrote some time ago, but never actually added to the encyclopedia (mostly because their topcis were not directly related to 0 A.D.). I decided to at least put them up on a PR for a review before I forget about them again. Here are the first two (about arrowheads): https://github.com/indoptogopt/GUI-page-for-0ads-encyclopedia/pull/1

For anyone interested, I just opened a differential revision submitting the core pieces of code for encyclopedia page: https://code.wildfiregames.com/D5319

Welcome @whiteebony82! In regards to the encyclopedia GUI page, it is in stage of finalization already, so the necessary UI elements have already been created. And for doing that all by myself, I'm pretty happy with result. However, the design is not set into stone. And in fact, I'd appreciate if you could take a look at it, test it out and tell me what you think could be improved. We could also meet on platform of your choice to talk about the details. Feel free to PM me!

Yes, the basic concept and structure is similar. But I dislike how the selection is cramped into a list of dropdowns. And the division of the page into three sections in the last image feels a bit awkward. Just my personal opinion Although, I think the overall page looks a lot more coherent than ours.

Very clean UI for sure. But I'm not a fan of the layout.

ShadowOfHassen mentioned it already; it's about letting devs know we exist, what we do, for them to integrate that into their workflow, and to accept our patches. But that's probably achieved best by just getting the (big) stone rolling...

To continue the thought: In short, can we become the official "writers" for the project of 0 A.D.? The idea is, there are programmers, artists, playtesters, but no one responsible for creative writing tasks yet. Having dedicated people for that would not only help keeping the style consistent, but also ensure a certain level of writing across the game. And it would of course lift some things off other people's current workload. In practice it would mean improving current texts, writing new ones, and overseeing all other related matters. And when I say "texts" I'm referring to (the untranslated English version of) everything textual in the game - from tooltips to various descriptions to campaigns to encyclopedia articles.

Sorry for the confusion yesterday, I just found my answer in the code, everything's clear now . @ShadowOfHassen I can take care of making the encyclopedia translatable.

Sorry to bother you, but I'm not sure if I'm understanding it correctly. Are the strings extracted while the code is running?

Ok. And does the translating always need to be done in the init() function?

And what about texts in files other than XMLs? The articles are stored in JSON files at the moment, and from those templates aren't generated. The credits text are stored in JSONs as well, how are they being marked for translation? Or should we convert the articles' JSONs into XMLs and have them being treated just like the simulation template files?

I'm glad to hear that!

Turns out, the crashes were caused by some corrupted png files. I'm neither sure what exactly damaged the file structure nor why it would sometimes work regardless, however, I was able to fix them. Here is an updated mod: encyclopedia.zip

Thanks. Yeah, adding hotkeys for certain actions is definitely something I should (and will) be looking into in the future.

I will submit a diff for the encyclopedia page soon. And while it's getting reviewed, we will start with the process of "customizing" the articles - adding titles, subtitles, images, related articles, references to xml templates, and some formatting to the text contents itself. There is a ton to say about the features' implementation and what to pay attention to. I tried my best to lay out the information as logically as possible and I'm open to explaining it further, if anything is unclear:

Well, it's not too different from the current system, is it? What is it in particular that's bothering you? Yes, I know! That has been on my radar for quite some time. It is way better structured and more visually appealing than what we currently have. And I plan to implement it sooner or later.

Yes, exactly. The structure of the encyclopedia is not very hard change codewise. And as ShadowOfHassen said, we're more than open to suggestions!