Complete Guide To Unreal Editor
this is my initial concept for the advanced tutorial section. It is an index page to a number of category pages, each linked to the next.
Each page extends the lessons found in the Beginner's Guide (Mapping Lessons)
Beginner's Guide
Builder Brushes
Subtracting and Adding Space
Lighting
Texturing
PlayerStart
Placing Weapons
Terrain
Outdoor Maps
Static Meshes
Scripting
Animation
Bots
Weapons
3D Applications
Development
Wiki Community
I think this pretty much covers all the topics on the Wiki. This page is an index page like Mapping Lessons. Each chapter serves as both an advanced tutorial page and a master index page for all related topics. Keeping the existing index pages is a good thing as you can never have enough indexes.
Here's a sample Texturing page:
Complete Guide to Unreal Editor >> Texturing
This is the advanced topics texturing tutorial. This tutorial extends the lessons found in Mapping Lessons >> Apply a Texture. We will walk you through some UV Mapping basics: show you how to stretch and realign your textures, show you how to work with transparencies by building a simple cyclone fence, and make a simple animated texture, etc.
By the time you've completed this tutorial, you should be pretty well versed with most things you can do with textures. If you need to refresh your memory later, you can follow one of basic procedure links such as Animated Textures or UV Mapping and find a shorter, more consise Wiki style Element page which will give you only the stripped down basic steps without all the blather associated with tutorial pages.
At the bottom of this page you will find an index to all the Texture related topics on this Wiki. By clicking the Next Topic link you will be taken to the next page in the series and so forth. By the time you've followed all the Next Topic links in the Complete Guide to Unreal Editor, you will have seen about 75% of all the pages in this Wiki arranged in a linear sequence like a book, preferably in the order we have deemed most important to learn first and not necessarily in alphabetical order.
Musicalglass: Ok, on this page I am proposing reusing information found on other already existing topic pages. For instance the information on the Animated Textures page is only about a paragraph long and could easily just be copied and pasted into a paragraph of this tutorial, which would be strictly taboo in the spirit of reusable information on a Wiki. Which brings me to this other subject of possible methods to distribute elements of information in the future.
I could for instance make a page with horizontal frames and arrange is so you would see the UV Mapping page, then the Transparent Textures page, etc. one after another on a single page, except that each of those pages also has the naviagtion bar and additional page info. If it were somehow possible to make a different set of Wiki markup tags which would instead of creating a link to that page, would imbed the body of that page in the current html document, then people could reuse exististing elements found throughout the Wiki over and over without creating any additional data storage. I think that ties right in with Tarquin's master plan for Basic Procedures.
Also an alternative markup method might allow you to, rather than imbed the information, make something that looks like a text link with a little arrow which you can click and it will open something like a dropdown menu containing the html information, expanding the current document. Now viewers can access more indepth information without having to leave the context of the current topic. I thought of a number of methods this could be accomplished. It would seem the simplest would be using Flash with an Alt tag. Browsers that don't support Flash would see a standard text link, and those that do would have the dropdown html feature.
Tarquin: Isn't this a duplicate of Topics On Mapping?
The "master plan" for Basic Procedures is that more experienced readers can skip the simple stuff, so embedding it would go against that. I think embedding pages is rather more complicated than I would like things to be on this site.
