Visionaire homemade Documentation & Template problems: An Endless Story?

Hi ! First of all sorry for my bad English...
I'm a brand new user of Visionaire Editor, and I just started to explore all possibilities. What a nice software !

I must admit that the lack of documentation is something slightly off-putting, but I feel that there is still a small community animated by the desire to share his great knowledge.

I'll see later if I have a logical mind enough to get by with all the subtleties inherent in the development of an adventure game packed with puzzles... and how to code them !

I quite agree to think that Visionaire lacks the popularity of other engines, but it is not unknown for so many. Just browse some forums for noticing. It is just 'badly known'.

Anyway, I'm worried about something : I just learned a whole new editor would emerge within two months, so... will there be a compatibility problem with my current project ? Should I wait before I start, so as not to start from scratch ?

Thanks a lot for reading and answer !

@battlefox
Actually the latest news in the english area is from 29. November 2015. It's about the latest update.
When you find missing links please tell us. These files have been hosted by users of this community. Probably they moved the files. We can fix this.

Dandy_Anunu:
The new editor will be compatible. But it won't be released within 2 months. It might take a while longer

@Marvel: My native language is German so I looked up the news in German too. I prefer English for the forum though since more people can participate.

I already got a list with some broken links. Will send to u once I'm home.
Btw what about using the news area for something like "game of the week"? We have so many talented ppl here who made awesome games. Let them submit some text and screenshots to introduce their games. Maybe even with a demo link.

@Battlefox:
Sure, you want to bring some action into the news and community area? I'm pretty happy with that. Go ahead! Maybe you could be supported by 2 or 3 additional users...

@Marvel: Sounds like an idea. We just need a Plan how people can submit their text & screenshots. Maybe open up a special mailaacount for it and then we pick the games and post them as a news article?

How about Battlefox be in charge of community manager or assistant?

There are 4 demo game templates (include ved & all resource files) available under "visionaire > downloads" via the main menu.

As for the wiki... Sorry but I don't fancy having to run around editing & formatting what everyone submits. The wiki uses lots of custom classes besides the default mediawiki markup. If anyone wants to write up a tutorial or some documentation for something then please feel free to do so & send it to me in rtf / odt format & I'll gladly add it to the wiki when I have some spare time.

P.S: the old in-forum wiki was public & a lot of the time stupid bots would register, somehow edit my posts (not actually change anything, but submit them) & then I would end up having to waste time looking over them to see what if anything had been changed. It was bloody annoying to say the least.

“

stupid bots would register,

„

It would be better only devs who submitted authorised game can participate.

Me & the VS devs have rights over who can do what with the wiki. I actually disabled registration to the wiki. The only way to add new members is if we manually create new accounts ourselves.

@AFRLme: Jepp, bots are a really annoying thing. The only chance to keep them from spamming is to manually authorize every post in the wiki.

@DEshini: I don't think we need another community manager. As we can see, there is a working community here. As I said, I would offer my help in publishing articles for the news with showcases of user-submitted VS-games.
Cuz this is something, thats missing atm: news, and showcase of games made with VS to attract new users.

If I could, I would even write a documentation. But I can't. Why? Well I am far away from knowing every aspect of the engine to write a complete documentation. That's a thing, only someone can & should do who developed the engine. (That's also what I learned as a programmer) We already have a huge patchwork of tutorials which covers some parts of VS. That's not bad if you wanna dive into a special feature. But we have no official, complete reference.

@Marvel:
Here are the first broken links:

- Maniac Mansion Mania - Man stirbt nur zweimal... Halloween Special 2011
(Both downloadlinks broken)

- Karls Gral (Broken)

- "Monkey Island"-Style Template (Broken - Maybe the most important template)

- visplayer_linux.zip (in the WIKI) zip-File is broken. CRC-Error

+ Alot of the template stuff user nigec uploaded on the forum is also offline.

Nige hasn't been online in a while. I think he was self hosting. I may have some of the templates laying around on my hard drive somewhere though. No promises & I don't know how valid they will still be as they were created for 3.7.1 & before. A lot of those templates are really old.

By the way, there are a lot of templates available on my dropbox account, but again, they are old & VS has come a long way since then, as have I, so methods used in them may no longer be valid (editor / code wise) or outdated in terms of how I created them. These days I tend to focus heavily on the Lua side of the engine because it's much faster & more flexible for me to work with from a work-flow perspective - plus I hate having to click around all over the place to select action parts one by one. Why bother when I can write a line of code that takes 10 action parts.

* edit: haha... forgot to link my dropbox account!
Here you go: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/wgfa956ohxcfwya/pTb7QqpX9t