• Which the release of FS2020 we see an explosition of activity on the forun and of course we are very happy to see this. But having all questions about FS2020 in one forum becomes a bit messy. So therefore we would like to ask you all to use the following guidelines when posting your questions:

    • Tag FS2020 specific questions with the MSFS2020 tag.
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    • Questions about airport design can be posted in the FS2020 airport design forum. Once airport development tools have been updated for FS2020 you can post tool speciifc questions in the subforums of those tools as well of course.
    • Questions about terrain design can be posted in the FS2020 terrain design forum.
    • Questions about SimConnect can be posted in the SimConnect forum.

    Any other question that is not specific to an aspect of development or tool can be posted in the General chat forum.

    By following these guidelines we make sure that the forums remain easy to read for everybody and also that the right people can find your post to answer it.

New Wiki categories? And a Wikihow?

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Here for the Beer

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Dear Arno (and anybody else interested!) -

A friend of mine has been involved in discussions over on the EvolveAi forums regarding an idea for something called a "Wikihow". There's actually a site called Wikihow that is attempting to pull all kinds of tutorials together (some on very strange subjects).

The Evai discussion was triggered by a repainting tutorial that a public-spirited member of the group is posting on the forum there.

A few ideas were batted back & forth and the final conclusion was that it might be best if FS-related how-to articles were posted somewhere such as FSDeveloper (since everything from Airport sceneries, meshes, flightplans and aircraft liveries are all developed for furthing our enjoyment of the sim).

So, would there be any objections to people
1/ Posting up articles on development projects that don't involve design tools (eg repainting, AFCAD, approach writing and so on)?
2/ Introducing a tutorial element into the existing Wiki where some of the existing (and some new) Wiki articles could be threaded together by an overall How-To (like a Microsoft wizard sort of thing).

For example a Tutorial on designing an airport might have as one of the later steps "Add jetways", and link out to one or more small articles on the finer points of placing and orientating jetways.

The How-To/Tutorials would probably be a separate section that cross linked into the more substantial articles already present in the FSDeveloper Wiki. If you just wanted to refresh knowledge of a specific point the tutorials could be ignored and the precise article used instead.

It would also be quite cool if people who'd written tutorials elsewhere could be persuaded to centralise their work here on FSDeveloper (there are some superb tutorials out there that really ought to win some sort of award!).

FSDeveloper seems a logical choice because 1/ The name's exactly right! 2/ There's a Wiki structure here and it is used. There's no point dividing effort, reinventing perfectly good wheels, and all that.

Bearing in mind that it might drive extra traffic through the site too (which may or may not be a good thing depending on your ISP) it was agreed that it would be polite to suggest it before sliding articles in on repainting aircraft, designing AFCADs and possibly even publishing (or re-publishing) existing standards that developers have settled on (eg Gate Sizes in AFCAD).

Does this suggestion sound reasonable, or does anybody have objections or suggestions. I'm particularly intrigued by the threading of articles into tutorials a la Wikihow. That sounds as though it could become quite a powerful asset.
 
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Hi,

As long as the focus of the articles on the Wiki remains on developers and not on end users of the addons, then I do not care how many articles are added :). So any new subject that would be of interest to other developers is welcome.

At the moment we don't have too many general introduction articles there, that link to the more detailed articles. But people are free to add them of course. If some extra categories are needed in the navigation structure just let me know and I can add them.

We are also working on a better integration of the forum and the Wiki, so that it should be even easier to find the knowledge that is stored there. Hopefully that will be online soon as well (but it is delayed at the moment by things out of our control).
 
Many thanks, Arno. I'll relay the info back to the Evai board. I may ask people to post the idea elsewhere too, eg PAI, TFS and JBAI for AI aircraft developers, and perhaps to Avsim and Flightsim to see whether people that have already created knowledge-bases of their own would be interested in contributing to a more central source.

As far as new categories go, I'd personally forsee a painting and texturing section (with subsections for airport texturing and aircraft repainting). These would focus on the graphics programs in use, and tips and techniques for working with them, maybe tutorials on using layers in Paintshop Pro and Photoshop, for example. How such textures might be used in airports would still be under the category of object design - applying textures to objects (with a reverse link from that section in case a reader wanted to know how to make the textures to begin with). How-to articles could range from "create a layered paintkit for an aircraft" to "create an addon texture for an AI aircraft" for planes, and "create a convincing asphalt texture" or "create weathered building textures" for airports. I've not done any of these but I'll bet there are things to look out for, tricks of the trade.

There'd probably even be fairly small sections on flightplanning (for addon traffic) - sources of information, what to look for in data, how to identify gaps in the data and so on. AFCAD is already addressed in your existing Wiki. I'm coming from an AI aircraft perspective, although I know someone that designs small sceneries and have asked questions here on their behalf in the past (Marseille), but my view is slanted towards the area I know best.

The other main new category would be the How-To section itself, because although it would be part of the Wiki it would also slightly stand apart. Unlike the Wiki, which is very good at answering precise questions, the How-To would be actually very general - a list of steps and stages in a process - some of those steps would be entirely described in the How-To and the deeper knowledge would get a link out from the How-To tutorial and into the Wiki material itself.

Time would tell how the concept would evolve, but your existing Wiki setup I think is the perfect starting place. I hope it also serves a purpose of getting some more developers onto this site, because I've certainly had some very comprehensive assistance here.
 
Arno - somebody on Evai raised the point that the Wiki would need to state that the content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.

If it is not, then all content is owned by FSDeveloper and people would be prohibited from making copies of their own. Also, if the site was to disappear in future, the documentation would effectively be lost to the community.

There would need to be a statement to the effect:
"All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details.)"
This is from Wikipedia itself, where the MediaWiki software used comes from.

Are you okay with that? I assume that you are, but I obviously need to ask.
 
Hi,

That is no problem with me, I thought something like that was already on the Wiki, but I can't find it at the moment :). Could also be that that was on the previous Wiki software we used. I thought there was a Creative Commons license on that.

Basically the content of the Wiki should indeed belong to the community, not to me as the owner of the site. So everybody should be free to use it like he wants.

I'll check it out in some more detail this evening.
 
That's great! I was sure it was nothing more than a technical point. I'd not even considered it either. I think a few people probably need that reassurance before they'll commit to making contributions.

I assume it is something that either goes into each page footer (links to terms & conditions) or some separate section. Either way I'll relay the reassurances back to Evai.
 
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