Writing a book on Defold

Michael_Pearson · October 23, 2016, 5:44pm

Any time frame on a updated version?

Pkeod · October 24, 2016, 4:13am

This month I’ve made progress on example projects and recipes in spare time.

Right now I’m crunching on two major work projects that will be done before the end of the month, very soon. Then I’ll have more time for a while to fully focus on this. I’ll make a commitment to a big update date then.

Michael_Pearson · December 21, 2016, 5:19pm

Any news on an update?

Pkeod · December 21, 2016, 9:10pm

Still working on it when I can. The book is updated to Editor 2 now. I’ll publish a new public version by the end of the month.

Pkeod · December 22, 2016, 3:33am

Some more info:

I’ll have lots more time the next three weeks and I want to invest as much of it as I can into finishing this up and getting it fully published and accessible. I kept getting pulled back into normal work projects last few month and it sucks.
I’m currently in the process of moving the text project from Scrivener to GitBook. It will be able to be read online for free and downloaded as pdf/epub for free. Once it’s up, if anyone would be like to be added as a contributor can be added to edit the book to fix mistakes or add extra details. I’ve not yet written about some of the new features added in the last few updates but I’ll get to doing that soon.
The license is being changed to https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode this allows free access to read and share, but still allows me to potentially get the book published as a real book so that the publisher still has a legal ability to do so an incentive. If there is no interest from publishers after a while though I’ll make it completely public domain, or transfer the ownership of the project entirely to the Defold team if they would like to control it.
I’ll be removing the book from sale soon. I’ll publish some full game example projects as buyer exclusives for a few months at least as thanks for those who purchased. I’ll also ask the buyers soon if they would like their names + company links added into the front of the book as thanks for supporting it.
What funds were raised I’m still planning to use to pay someone to translate at least some of the text to a worthwhile language. As of today, there have been 54 pre-purchase sales, which means there’s about 1.3k to pay for translation. Mandarin Chinese with Simplified text probably but I’m open to any better suggestions. There is not enough $ for even a complete text translation for a single language, but I’ll cover the rest for at least the first language when it’s decided and we have a good person to do it. If anyone would like to donate translations too contact me. I would be willing to make a deal with people where: if you translate the project, and agree to put it online as cc-by-nc-nd 4.0 then you can publish a physical form with a publisher, sell it, and keep 100% of what they pay you. You just have to understand that Defold is still new, doesn’t have a large userbase yet, and efforts like these should not be considered commercial first but about helping to grow userbase so that we can all benefit from larger community.
I’ll make a new thread soon “Big List of Defold Example Projects”? and begin to publish zips with various other interesting stand alone examples without much explanation but may still be interesting for people to dig into to learn. Lots of experiments and tests which don’t fit well elsewhere.
Once this is all up, I want to do two other sort of large projects… “Defold All In One” as an exercise of using the majority of existing Defold features in a single project chapter by chapter and “Defold 30” ( inspired by https://javascript30.com/ )a set of 30 video tutorials with start and end example projects going through quickly implementing specific useful game features. Meant to be done once over a 30 day period one day at a time. All will be entirely free, and I’ll most likely publish them directly into the public domain. I’ll be working all of the rest of this month, and if I can get away with it all of January on this too.

Future is bright!

britzl · December 22, 2016, 5:44am

Thank you for sharing an update @Pkeod! Your plans all sound very reasonable. Good luck!

gianmichele · December 22, 2016, 12:06pm

Thanks for the update and the hard work. On my side I can offer an italian translation as a way to contribute to the project. i think it deserves it.

Dumdodoor · December 22, 2016, 1:59pm

Thank you for the update!

Mattias_Hedberg · December 22, 2016, 9:22pm

@Pkeod Thanks for the hard work and the update! Awesome job!

jhonatanvinicius · December 23, 2016, 7:05pm

@Pkeod, I’m am a Volunteer translator ( English -> Brazilian Portuguese ).

My last jobs were:

Translate, write and sync subtitles for more than 30 videos of Greenfoot Course and that were recorded by Professor Michael Kolling.
Translate, write and sync subtitles for some videos from ted.com

To translate these videos we had use the amara.org plataform.

So… if you accept… I can help you with the brazilan portuguese.

Michael_Pearson · December 23, 2016, 1:24pm

Thanks for the update, looking forward to seeing it completed

Pkeod · December 27, 2016, 12:37pm

Progress on getting the text up:

It’s a little mind numbing doing all of the formatting and setup so I’ve been going kind of slow but it’s getting done!

jhonatanvinicius · December 27, 2016, 2:15pm

WOW!!! thats amazing! thank you man!!!

ironmaidenfan · December 27, 2016, 6:38pm

Great!! Thanks!

Online reading showing error. “Failed to ungzip body:EOF”

Pkeod · December 28, 2016, 12:54am

When does this happen? I can’t seem to reproduce.

Pkeod · December 28, 2016, 3:04am

If it happens again please post a screenshot? I’ll report the issues to GitBook devs.

jhonatanvinicius · February 16, 2017, 12:56am

Hey @Pkeod i’m reading your book. there are amazing tips. But about the thread to translate it to others languages…

What is yout plan (strategy) to do it?

The volunteer is free to create another gitBook account and translate? or
or the gitBook offers support to multiple languages?
or is there another way?

Pkeod · February 16, 2017, 4:28am

They appear to support multiple languages but I’ve not tested yet.

https://toolchain.gitbook.com/languages.html

What I’m going to do soon is add the gitbook project to a github repo which is automatically synced, and then I can add contributors to the github repo who can add translations. Then it should hopefully just work to have

https://read.bookofdefold.com/en/
https://read.bookofdefold.com/ru/
https://read.bookofdefold.com/de/

and so on. And other volunteers / defold team members who are added to the git as admins can accept pull requests for text corrections / additions over time.

Please wait until I setup the github repo before doing translation so you can work from the raw files. I still have more setup work to do that I’ve not had time to do yet.

jhonatanvinicius · February 16, 2017, 8:40am

OK i’m keep waiting your signal to start it

somekindkindofdude · August 14, 2017, 6:53pm

Pkeod - It seems that the book on github wasn’t updated in the last 7 months - do you have plans on finishing it? I really try to like Defold but there are some things that I really don’t like and a book on the engine might help me getting started (for example the rotation system using quaternions - why can’t I get a simple rotate() method? Also the message system which relies on strings…).