Please Fix Tutorials? :(

Feature requests
#1

Hey,

First off, I’m really liking Defold and its workflow - you have a great product here. Right now I’m trying to convince my team to give Defold a chance but it is increasingly difficult when the official tutorials have so many issues. I have had them try the tutorials to convince them and end up having to provide fixes for oversights that are not only very easy to correct (Magic Link’s centeroff?), but have been pointed out by users for you here on the forums months ago with no action taken. I understand time is a limited resource but with problems like this right at new users entry point to Defold you are discredited quickly. Unfortunately free is not a good enough selling point to overlook this when there are so many other good options out there right now that make getting into their products easy.

As I try not to complain without offering a solution: Would it be possible for you to bring on temp staff to fix this/provide more? Or set up comments on the tutorials themselves so these typos can be more easily pointed out and resolutions found? What about setting up a wiki for these tutorials instead of static web pages and let the community manage them? These are all relatively fast+inexpensive ways of managing this.

4 Likes
#2

If the tutorial source files were on a public git I would have submitted fixes already.

2 Likes
#3

I’m managing tutorials and try to respond to feedback. There has been a number of fixes to them, for instance a big overhaul of the Getting Started some months ago, but there are certainly more that needs to be fixed and probably some stuff that has been missed.

Moving everything to a wiki is a pretty big thing so I don’t think that’s feasible. Likewise implementing a comment system would be great, but is also probably quite big.

What you can do for now is to print to PDF and add annotations to the page. Would you mind sending me a list of specific issues and I’ll fix asap?

3 Likes
#4

Putting the sources we build the pages from on a public Git might be a good idea. I’ll look into it and see if it’s possible.

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#5

It would be awesome if you could post any specific issues you find (as PDF or whatever works for you) to this thread: Tutorial needs work

1 Like
#6

Hey sicher,

Thanks for the quick response - I understand your plight. Things get missed/lost/forgotten/pushed back :slight_smile: I’ll try to help out and add what I can to the existing thread.

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#7

Cool. I just noticed a couple of things in that thread regarding the Magic Link tutorial that I did miss. I’ll publish a bunch of updates soon.

1 Like
#8

Ok, a slew of fixes published now.

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#9

Putting the tutorials up on a public git not only would help with folks submitting fixes, but readers can submit issues that would make it easier on you to fix things as well. Thanks for updating the tutorials!

I think as the community grows, someone will create a github based tutorial site that will allow us to create / update new tutorials as well.

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#10

Yes, that would be awesome. Our goal is to provide what you guys need to get going. If you can show awesome ways to do awesome stuff in our tool, we’re more than happy!

Btw, the Magic Link issues that I forgot about are fixed and published now too.

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#11

I just had a glance over the magic link page and it looks like the issues i had were all resolved except for the colors array:

local colors = { hash("orange"), hash("pink"), hash("blue"), hash("yellow"), hash("green") }
hash("grey") }

I think you need to remove hash(“grey”) } still. I’ll take a look tonight

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#12

Yes, that’s another bug. I’m fixing that one right now.

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#13

I think we should have some kind of reporting feature on the actual webpages (every single one of them) of the tutorials - and possibly even the API-pages so that if a user finds a bug (s)he can quickly report it. Many companies run with similiar solutions for their help and support pages. It should be linked with the forum account so that an email address is required (in case you need to get back to them and retrieve further information).

Another idea - which I’ve discussed with Ingela only so far - is to have a public wiki for pretty much everything but the API references (which are auto-generated by code). That way people can fix things on their own when they discover issues with the docs.

4 Likes
#14

Thanks for the updates, it made the tutorial very easy to do! To make it even more easier I found this from “Getting started” tutorial, the instructions where you:

Right-click the “hero” folder in the Project Explorer and select New ▸ Script File. Name the new file “hero.script”

Even though it’s quite obvious, there was no instructions to add the newly created script to the hero game object like from the pictures. Had to backtrack a bit on why my frog wasn’t jumping :smiley:

2 Likes
#15

Ok. I’ll make a note to fix. Thanks!

2 Likes