Introduction
Although I mentioned my work on the DBP documentation briefly in another thread, I would like to announce this request more publicly.
I am in the process of rewriting the DBP documentation which will be included with the new release of PureGDK 2.0. Yes, you heard me.
New and
improved documentation! Documentation that's helpful, a quick reference, and concise.
The new documentation is aimed to be much clearer, searchable, easier to navigate with multiple hierarchical indices, cross references, library summaries, many commands will be rearranged into more obvious categories, and additional documentation for libraries such as Advanced Terrain, 3D Cloth & Particles, and Game FX commands will also be included.
This documentation, albeit for PureGDK, will still be very applicable to both DarkBasic Professional and DarkGDK users. It will be freely available to everyone in a very convenient .chm file as well as portable html files.
For this effort I've written a complete documentation parser which builds all of the html files from easy to edit and easy to maintain text files. This will allow for seamless documentation generation and, in the case of PureGDK, for all supported languages within seconds (with anticipated support for PureBasic, C, C++, and more).
Everything will be cleanly formatted, links will be checked (no dead links!), and changes will propagate automatically throughout the rest of the documentation.
All of the documentation tools I use will be provided in the PureGDK SDK so you're welcome to use it in your own projects and even contribute to the official documentation by providing updated entries to the templates.
I hope to attract a wide variety of users from all different languages to DBP through PureGDK and I want to provide the most professional first impression as possible. This will require documentation that is clear, helpful, and easy to navigate (a far cry from its current state).
How you can help
I am already taking care rewriting the original documentation. What I would like to invite you to do is to help create articles which describe how to use fundamental components of the engine such as collision, lighting, effects, shaders, BSP, terrain, and so forth.
Code snippets showing off special effects are welcome but what I would really like to see are explanations describing how a particular function or set of functions from a library works.
For example, a good article would describe how to use the built in light mapping commands by explaining what each important function does in relation to the desired effect. Or an article describing how to use the limb commands, what is means to link vs glue something, and provide illustrations, screenshots, or working code to provide an example.
You can find some examples of how to write a simple article or tutorial by looking at some of the great stickies on this forum. There are also some examples on TGC website here:
http://developer.thegamecreators.com/?f=dbpro_tutorials
I also welcome screenshots of games or demos that you've created that can be included to show off some of the capabilities of the DBP engine.
Code you provide here should be written in DarkBasic Professional. Unless commands exclusive to PureGDK or DarkGDK are used, it should not be written in PureBasic or C++. I'll take care of converting anything to the correct languages as necessary.
If you use any media in your tutorial or demo please provide it with the understanding that this media may be provided with the documentation for others to use and should be under an unrestricted license.
I hope we can all work together to improve the resources available to DarkBasic Professional, DarkGDK, DarkGDK.NET, and PureGDK users so we can all build bigger and better applications.
