Meta/SDKBeta
From TDN
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A Letter Of Introduction
Howdy, and welcome to the SDK Owner's Private Beta of the Torque Developer Network.
Because you own one or more Torque products, you've been invited into this phase of the TDN release. You have full access to not only read documentation, but to write it. (At least, for the products you own. ;) Found an error or typo? You can correct it right away. Got something you just discovered you want to note down? Go for it.
World domination through collaboration. We could hire a small army of documentation writers but without them also being experienced Torque developers the docs won't be much good. And if they're really knowledgeable, getting them to do docs and not work on more exciting projects is going to be tricky. So we need a way of writing documentation that is going to keep up with the fast pace of game development, to let the developers themselves write docs. It has to be quick, it has to be easy - it has to be a wiki.
And if it's that fast and that easy to use, why not invite all the other Torque developers out there to participate in the process? Why not ten thousand eyes on the problem instead of twenty?
So now you're here. Welcome! :) We invite you to make this place your own - post the docs that help you out - turn this into the single most valuable and useful website for all things Torque developers need. Meanwhile, we here at GG will also be making this the official home for all of the docs we write, and we're also committed to making sure that the docs here are fully up to date and accurate.
Our Beta Goals
What are the goals for this beta? What remains before everyone can share in the goodness that is TDN?
- Develop Core Users
- Every community has that core group of users that makes it really sizzle with activity. They're the guys that are on the forums every day, that read every news post, that even make news from time to time. Without them, you're just an empty website. We've already got a few here, but we want to find a lot more. Part of this beta is giving the talent a chance to rise to the top, to get to know who's going to be spending time here.
- Develop Community Standards
- What a dreary sounding name. But the fact is we've never run a TDN before - no one has. There have been wikis and documentation sites before, of course, but never quite the same intersection of Torque, indie talent, driven developers, and awesome writers. So we want to take some time with our core user base - the SDK owners - to see how they'll interact with us, what things will work, what won't, how much openness will work, and so forth. You need some time to get an idea of how TDN should be used, and we need some time to find the ways that work best for people to use it.
So we need to develop some community standards. And now is the time to do it.
- Shake Out The Codebase
- TDN, though it builds on the shoulders of giants, represents a significant amount of new functionality. We have a whole new permissions system; hooks into the GG main codebase; lots of little tweaks and enhancements, a whole new skin, and lots of other stuff. We need to take some time and make sure it works properly. So this is a controlled way to do that.
- Develop Core Content
- We've put a fair amount of stuff up on the site already, but there's a LOT more yet to come. And we want to finalize the core content now, before everyone on the planet is involved, because that core content, like a seed, will set the direction of all later content. So this is the time for that initial direction-setting to happen.
Once we've satisfied those four goals, we'll flip the switch and open TDN for everyone to use. Only SDK owners will be able to contribute (well, them and a few specially blessed people from the community), but everyone will have access to public content like script language documentation.
From Here To There
Beyond these higher level goals, there are several tasks that will be happening in the near future that you should be aware of.
- Lots of Cleaning & Organization.
Now that the final technical pieces are in place, we have a fair amount of cleanup & organization to do before we can really call TDN solid. This will be happening starting after IGC, as we make sure everything has the right category links, is in the right path, has the correct permissions... Basically, this beta will start out with a rough cut, and end with a final draft, at least, of whatever is there at the time we leave beta. TDN will always be growing and changing, so it can never truly be said to be finished. - Launch Elixir
Elixir still has to go live; it's a key portion of our strategy for TDN to be a comprehensive home for all Torque documentation. It's very close as of IGC, so this task ought to resolve fairly soon. - UI Polish
There are still some places where we have rough UI - messages that don't have localized strings, making them <showup_likethis>, slightly misleading documentation, incomplete help, and so on. We'll be making all that a lot more solid in coming weeks - maybe you'll even get a chance to participate. - Official Docs
TDN is the home for most official docs, but we have a bit of a chicken and egg problem. We need TDN to be up before we can use it for official docs, but it isn't very useful until they're in. So the compromise is simply to put it up in a limited sense and start putting docs in it. Now that it's up, we'll start wholesale migration of existing docs, and make sure all new docs are up here as well.
Closing Comments
If you have any questions, comments, feedback, problems, or wishes, please talk to User:Ben Garney or User:Adam deGrandis (follow the profile link on those pages to get their e-mail addresses) about them. They will either help you resolve them, or put you in touch with people who can.
We're very excited to see how TDN matures in the coming months - and we hope you find TDN to be a useful resource!
-- Adam and Ben, The TDN Wranglers
