In discussing the resolution to my own post, “RenderTarget2d, ‘Parameter is incorrect’ Error”, I suggested some of us develop a new FAQ\Reference for MonoGame since so many people who are learning this framework (and the many others available) seem to ask questions that have been answered many times over by the more experieneced game developers.
I suggested that some fo us should get together and develop either a FAQ, as Jjagg has suggested, or even possibly a separate support site that would allow all of us to collate our expe4rience and resolutions to issues that would be made far easier if basic documentation existed.
If anyone has any suggestions\questions, please make them here…
I will look into what I am able to achieve and will be willing to purchase and manage a domain name for it too.
I like the idea of being able to download a PDF/CHM or equivalent file for offline purposes too, obviously these would be static, but an updated variant could possibly be processed daily/weekly by the server for anyone to download of all database entries.
That file could also be a single HTML document with all data with linked grouping or such, though the site itself will likely take on an hierarchal approach, Section, sub-section, etc…
I think this would be viable come January on my end, if not sooner. listing wise that is…
Contributor accounts may have to be manually managed i think as the number of users will likely be minimal… or I can utilise a managed submission process to reduce complexity, or simply a post submission with instant addition, allowing for some form of feedback looks, or if the submissions are the final…
Sorry got to rush out but basically there needs to be a discussion of the depth of the data presented and submitted and if there should be any social communication, I could utilise perhaps a Facebook interaction per post type thing… for users to post requests or further questions, as the forum linked posts will likely be locked by that point…
I shall come back and further my exploration on the topic later and begin managing a feature wish list of sorts…
Anything to help the MG team focus on MG, and help the community is something I am happy to set some time aside for, where feasible.
Discuss!
And as to Security, I will follow strict protocols where possible. any help on identifying loopholes would be most welcome.
IMO it would be best to have it on this site, so people can easily find it and know it’s official. There is actually a FAQ page in the docs, but it’s almost empty and I think it’s meant to be FAQ just for setting up MG: http://www.monogame.net/documentation/?page=MonoGame_FAQ
For a general troubleshooting FAQ that’s probably not the best place to have it for discoverability (it’s under ‘Introduction’). Maybe it should just be in the root of the docs and we can have a sticky post that links to it?
I would tend to agree with you on this item but we don’t have access to the FAQ page or any of the other pages in order to make modifications and additions. And I am not sure that the MonoGame Development Group would want to provide many people with such access as it could land up harming the site overall.
However, we may want to consider a compromise where the MonoGame site will support a Community Wiki site, which is devoted to FAQs and Reference materials. The MonoGame Development Group will of course have complete administration rights to either correct or add new information along with the rest of the community who would have the normal read\write permissions.
Administration rights can also be provided to all community members that want to actively support either the site’s development or contribute to it on a regular basis.
Over the years Wikis have fallen out of favor as newer technologies have come to the forefront. However, a Wiki appears to be the most flexible concept for a reference site since it was designed with such a concept in mind. As a result, Wikis are much more capable in providing information than a mere FAQ page.
It took me a bit of research but I have found two links that you and Mr. Valentine may be interested in reviewing…
ScrewTurn Wiki was for many years a very popular piece of software for this type of site. It is based upon ASP.NET WebForms, which in my view is far easier to develop with than the currently, popular ASP.NET MVC paradigm. I have developed with both paradigms and in 2010 did extensive work with the ASP.NET MVC platform in one of the then largest MVC projects in the United States. Though, my colleagues and I got everything working based on the client’s specifications and requirements, the MVC development paradigm was overly complex and time consuming whereas WebForms would have offered far more efficiency and still offers the best paradigm for Rapid Application Development of web sites.
If we could get the approval of the MonoGame Development Group, we could simply have them add this new site as a link to their Documentation page, which would then be immediately accessible to the entire community. Such an addition should be a minimal piece of work. I use this linking concept in my own business site, which has a link to my technical blog site.
To make the new site known to everyone, an announcement could be provided in the Home\News page as well as the Community Forum page…
It is very easy to set up a pull request to add/modify the MG Documentation as explained on GitHub: https://github.com/MonoGame/MonoGame/blob/develop/Documentation/README.md#getting-started
This way all additions can be curated and verified by MG contributors/maintainers, pretty much guaranteeing correctness. I think pull requests are a great system for a FAQ page. Also, MarkDown is IMO very flexible and easy to use.
@Jjagg integrating that requires as much development as starting from scratch, frankly, from scratch suits the purpose… less baggage of pointless features that will never get used, My personal view is for it to be efficient, to the point and flexible…
I don’t mind maintaining an independent project as I have already planned for it the more the merrier, as options are always more favourable [lol at the NVIDIA / AMD battle reference if you got it]
Mine will have a core focus on UWP / Windows 10 development so… Yeah, let’s see where this thread leads…
I was just making a suggestion… And two the Wiki software I looked at is already built. The most we would have to do is recompile it and modify it. Hosting it on a service would be rather straightforward.
It also makes no sense to re-write it for UWP as a web-site can be accessed from anywhere, though in this case it may not appear too well on mobile devices if doesn’t have recently updated CSS for such equipment…
In any event, Jjagg you have a point. If we can modify the Documentation page to include a hierarchical section in which we can place our own documentation that would be fine…
It is primarily an editing langauge. For example, when you enter a comment in this forum and you want to make a word bold, the editor uses markdown syntax to allow the parser to understand how the text is to appear in its final form.
Markdig - A .NET library which follows the CommonMark specifications, and has a large collection of extensions with the ability for the user to create their own.
Hmm, interesting but would still rather create my own parser… relying on a third party is not my thing though yeah, it looks good though… albeit overly complicated…
Frankly this would put load on the server that can be handled on the user side for efficiency
Looking at the performance data and the fact these projects are well, projects… take it into consideration…
https://api.jquery.com/jQuery.parseHTML/
Something that can be applied to the HTML side of things for less complexity… [Admittedly it adds a degree of vulnerability]
Ignore my stern typing this is good debate of viewpoints, for and against points are essential.
If you can build an efficient markdown parser, kudos to you.
However, where the parser exists is really not going to make much of a difference in terms of performance. The parser will not be using any disk access (or at least I am not familiar with one that does) so it will be entirely memory-based. As a result, if the server infrastructure you are planning to use is configured well, than you should really consider leaving such processes on the server.
Though “fat clients” appear to be in vogue currently, especially with web page design, it really hasn’t born out the expectations of its promoters.
One of the reason’s “fat clients” came to the fore again is mostly due to the fact that technical managers were not implementing server-side designs properly, which takes into account varying levels of concurrency. In short, they became very lazy since it was easier to dump everything on an application server,including the database storage without splitting the latter into OLTP and OLAP implementations.
Younger generations of developers have come to the conclusion that if you can offload server-side processes to the client it would make processes more efficient. But in the end it really doesn’t and just presents an entirely new set of issues for developers to deal with.
“Thin clients”, in reality, are still the best design implementation. Servers are designed to do the heavy lifting…
No, I just meant removing the parsing of visual presentation… Key information should always be parsed on server side, though presentation such as code mark-up can be done client side as it would result in page updates and data transmission being faster… anyway…
It is still early days, we have not yet discussed what functionality would be useful, what content needs to be presented and in what categorisation…
I think that would be a step forward in the discussion to then formulate any form of planning…
The Microsoft Catalog site for XBox appears to be one created by Microsoft and not something based on an existing framework. However, I’ll try to find something similar…
the more the merrier, as options are always more favourable [lol at the NVIDIA / AMD battle reference if you got it]
I will focus my documentation for those platforms…