I need your feedback on the new Eureka Doom Editor manual

We have a new manual for Eureka Doom Editor , it is still a work in progress. If anyone has time and interest to browse through it, I would welcome any constructive feedback.

Manual URL: http://eureka.rtfd.io/

Are you one of the developers? I use Eureka so I will check it out :)

11 hours ago, therektafire said:

Are you one of the developers? I use Eureka so I will check it out :)

I am just a Eureka user who wanted to make a guide to using the editor :)

I'm also a user and I'll look at the manual, too. How long have you been working on it?

A few months ago, I had proposed that group of us users put together a manual and the idea got a bit of support, but it never went anywhere. I'm glad to see that someone picked up the project of writing a manual.

well @Pegleg your feedback is welcome, this is as much a community project as you intended :)

It took me about 8 days spread over a 2-week period. Of course there is a lot that can be added, especially in the "cookbook" section, which was the motivating factor for starting this project.

7 hours ago, beast said:

well @Pegleg your feedback is welcome, this is as much a community project as you intended :)

 

It took me about 8 days spread over a 2-week period. Of course there is a lot that can be added, especially in the "cookbook" section, which was the motivating factor for starting this project.

I commend you for beginning the undertaking and I think it's a great start. I like the cookbook section, as well.

I have a thought. In the real world, I've become involved with writing and revising standards documents. Those professional organizations operate by people with other jobs volunteering their time to work on these documents that will be used by manufacturers and test labs around the world (sound familiar?). Often, particularly for a large undertaking (such as rewriting a 20-year old outdated standard), there will be sets of individuals working together on different sections. Those sections are then compiled into the final document. That may be far more involved than you were looking for, but what do you think about the idea of various Eureka users (you, @therektafire, @ETTiNGRiNDER, @jerk-o, me, any others that use Eureka and want to participate) combining forces on this manual?

That is a great idea @Pegleg. The manual is written in restructured text, a human readable format geared for technical documentation, it allows for multiple people to work on different sections at once.        You can see the files here.

We will need a "contributing" page to show how to get started. Naturally not everyone is familiar or inclined to use git, for those cases I am happy to step in to merge any work into the manual.

Hm, how far advanced do you think we should go? I was thinking about writing some stuff about adding information for things like texture groups and Decorate actors (and the thing specials associated with those actors) by adding their important attributes to the hardcoded thing/special/texture definition files (like zdoom.ugh and hexen_specials.ugh and doom_tex.ugh) since eureka doesn't have support for Decorate or a nice front end for adding new texture/thing groups at the moment so I feel like it would be a good idea to have that info for people who want it for the time being until that stuff gets added

edit: ummmmm, what the hell, found a really weird bug... apparently, even doing so much as SAVING a definition file without doing ANY edits causes Eureka to crash on load. WTF? Hm, I wonder if it has something to do with the file being written and formatted on a Linux system, I do remember there being some differences between dos-compliant and unix compliant text formatting, maybe that is causing an obscure bug with the text parser because whenever I try to load eureka it gives me an error saying that the first line of the file is an "unknown directive" when it should be a comment line...

edit2: figured out the issue, it is indeed Notepad screwing with the newline formatting which causes the text parser to not recognize the comment properly because it doesn't understand dos compliant new line formatting :/ So if you are going to edit these particular files on Windows it would be best to use a more advanced editor that preserves the original text format like Notepad++

Found an error on the Doors page. 

Quote

Since the door raises into the ceiling, we set the Front Ceiling textures to the ICKDOOR1 texture.

Should be "front upper sidedef texture", not ceiling.

16 hours ago, therektafire said:

Hm, how far advanced do you think we should go? I was thinking about writing some stuff about adding information for things like texture groups and Decorate actors (and the thing specials associated with those actors) by adding their important attributes to the hardcoded thing/special/texture definition files (like zdoom.ugh and hexen_specials.ugh and doom_tex.ugh) since eureka doesn't have support for Decorate or a nice front end for adding new texture/thing groups at the moment so I feel like it would be a good idea to have that info for people who want it for the time being until that stuff gets added

I am not familiar with decorate actors, but if it is something that users can learn from to add to their maps, then we can write about it.

16 hours ago, therektafire said:

edit2: figured out the issue, it is indeed Notepad screwing with the newline formatting which causes the text parser to not recognize the comment properly because it doesn't understand dos compliant new line formatting :/ So if you are going to edit these particular files on Windows it would be best to use a more advanced editor that preserves the original text format like Notepad++

Not entirely sure what file you are editing, I assume this file was to add decorate actors?

13 hours ago, therektafire said:

Found an error on the Doors page. 

Should be "front upper sidedef texture", not ceiling.

Thanks! I will fix that :)

Just now, beast said:

 

I am not familiar with decorate actors, but if it is something that users can learn from to add to their maps, then we can write about it.

 

 

Not entirely sure what file you are editing, I assume this file was to add decorate actors?

 

 

Thanks! I will fix that :)

I was editing the *.ugh files in the /common and /ports directories which are the port and game config files. I was trying to see if you could compromise on not having decorate implemented directly by writing in the pertinent info for each one directly in the config file so it would show up in the editor since it won't do so otherwise since that isn't something that eureka supports right now.

I guess I will write up some stuff on 3d floors first then I guess I will get to that later

edit: is there a restructured text language file for notepad++?

9 hours ago, therektafire said:

I was editing the *.ugh files in the /common and /ports directories which are the port and game config files. I was trying to see if you could compromise on not having decorate implemented directly by writing in the pertinent info for each one directly in the config file so it would show up in the editor since it won't do so otherwise since that isn't something that eureka supports right now.

 

I guess I will write up some stuff on 3d floors first then I guess I will get to that later

 

edit: is there a restructured text language file for notepad++?

I want to focus on documenting features that exist, first. In order of priority I see:

1) document Eureka features

2) add tutorials how to use Eureka

There are a couple rst syntax files on the web, try this page. The beauty of rst is it is so simple you don't need syntax highlighting :)

Hi folks. Here is an update on the latest changes in the Eureka manual. Most notably, there is a new page on creating different kinds of traps, and I created a printable cheat sheet (You can download it as a pdf here).

• 0143379 Fix typo ref upper sidedef texture. (Thanks @therektafire)
• 21416a1 Fix rst warnings re spacing between bullet points.
• 1f94765 Include cookbook titles in the index.
• f15731f Add alignment shortcuts.
• 12eb66c Add monster closet trap section.
• 5aa9d40 Add monster closet images.
• a07b2b9 Add monster platform trap.
• b9222a2 Create the cheatsheet.
• 6f2ffb4 Change license to CC, fix up introduction.
• 7fd32ad Improve monster closet trap layout.
• c3cc49a Improve the monster platform trap layout.
• 9fbbf15 Add crusher trap.
• 22eb95c Add drop trap.
• 28d0cb8 Add the lock-in trap.
• a549109 Add the teleport ambush recipe.
• 37693e9 Add room teleporters to traps map.

@beast, thank you for this cheat sheet! Can I translate it to Russian?

It looks nice. I am using Eureka at the moment although I'm relatively new to it, I'm not new to mapping though. And that's the problem from providing feedback, I think your audience is for a more beginner mapper perhaps. The cookbook is excellent, a few tricks in there for Eureka I wasn't aware of. Thanks for working on this!

Just now, Jon said:

It looks nice. I am using Eureka at the moment although I'm relatively new to it, I'm not new to mapping though. And that's the problem from providing feedback, I think your audience is for a more beginner mapper perhaps. The cookbook is excellent, a few tricks in there for Eureka I wasn't aware of. Thanks for working on this!

What more advanced stuff do you want to know about?

32 minutes ago, therektafire said:

What more advanced stuff do you want to know about?

At the moment I regularly have to add a reverse sidedef to one-sided lines and manually set a sector number, but that feature is invisible in the latest Eureka so I've stuck to an older version. I guess most people don't do this very often

Just now, Jon said:

At the moment I regularly have to add a reverse sidedef to one-sided lines and manually set a sector number

Hm, I'm not actually proficient enough in mapping to know why you would want to do that exactly... are you trying to make 2 sided linedefs out of 1 sided ones?

Yes that’s exactly it. When I rearrange lines around the border between two existing sectors or merge lines in a complex way and need to fix up the results.

9 minutes ago, Jon said:

 

At the moment I regularly have to add a reverse sidedef to one-sided lines and manually set a sector number, but that feature is invisible in the latest Eureka so I've stuck to an older version. I guess most people don't do this very often

I agree, I don't know Andrew removed that feature when he went from v. 1.11 to v. 1.21. I actually keep a copy of v. 1.11 for the rare occasions when v. 1.21 will, for some reason, not make a linedef double-sided. At least, it's rare for me, perhaps it occurs more frequently for you.

On 5/11/2018 at 5:45 PM, Arbars said:

@beast, thank you for this cheat sheet! Can I translate it to Russian?

Yes please @Arbars. The Libre Office open document spreadsheet is for download on the cheatsheet page. I am happy to add your translated work to the project if you feel generous.

On 5/11/2018 at 10:45 PM, Jon said:

Yes that’s exactly it. When I rearrange lines around the border between two existing sectors or merge lines in a complex way and need to fix up the results.

I have not come across this myself but I try keep my sector merges simple as possible. I would love to get a better idea of how to replicate this issue, perhaps we can find a solution that works.

@beast, cool. Link on my of cheatsheet translation: https://mega.nz/#!9ssGHAhA!vlUHMBldFEccz7OUphEwDMmk0PTSEwodwATQvZGCwHA

Also, I forked a project on Github, and started translating!

P.S. I'm sorry about my english...