In-Game Manual (Or In-Game Encyclopaedia)

[Mythos_Ruler]

What do you think of the possibility of using an online Wiki that is pulled in by the game? That way we can continually update and revise it.

[asmartgoat]

It would need some sort of fall back mechanism to the offline. but isn't that what version updates are for as well? I agree it's a nice idea though.

Edited March 4, 2011 by asmartgoat

[feneur]

It certainly seems like an easier way to edit it, but I assume the in-game manual would have to support most, if not all, things the wiki would support. And that might be complicating things a bit too much. I do think the wiki is a good place to have a more in-depth manual while the game is being developed at the very least though, and have started creating one here: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/0adManual

Btw, I do think this topic belongs in the Development and Technical discussion forum, but I'll leave that to you as you have the powers to move it and might have a good reason to keep it here that I just don't see

[Ykkrosh]

I expect we'll really want some kind of auto-update mechanism for the game content (small patches to fix bugs, improve balance, etc), so we could use a similar thing to push updates to the manual, and we could do updates every few weeks without irritating players too much. If we had that, would you still see a benefit in having the manual support continual updates (which I assume means downloading it from the web every time you run the game)?

I think the main drawbacks are the performance impact (players would have to wait for the manual pages to download, or at least to check their cached copy is up to date), and the lack of quality control, and the effort needed to keep translations into other languages up to date, and (if anyone can edit the wiki) the likelihood of spam being seen by players.

Even without the game using an online manual, it would be possible to use the wiki as the development area for the manual, and then check it and copy it into SVN before each new release (with a tool that converts syntax and copies embedded images etc) - would that be a better editing environment than directly using SVN and a text editor? (and enough better to be worth the effort of implementing a conversion tool (which is probably not terribly high but is non-zero)?)