[Community Feedback] Potential Improvements to the Modding Section of the VS Wiki

[mayonnaise]

I haven't read much of this thread; But I recently made the move to Linux (Bazzite, a gaming-centric flavor of Fedora Atomic) and I think that the wiki could use more Linux specific documentation since for some of us it's really hard to get .NET Framework to cooperate on our specific flavor of Linux.

 

I don't know how many VS modmakers currently use Linux during development, but I'm sure there are enough of us to warrant a "tips and tricks" section specific to various Linux setups.

[brndd]

@mayonnaise on Bazzite you need to use containers for development due to it being an immutable distro. The Bluefin documentation is a good place to start: https://docs.projectbluefin.io/bluefin-dx/

[DecoyDan]

I'm a CS student so I have decent fundamentals about programming. One thing I struggled with yesterday when doing the trampoline mod was where the folders were supposed to be. I've poured over a few mods, and it seems like there is very little consistency about the convention of setting up the directory other than "put it in assets". As an example for me, following the guide to a T (or so I thought), I ended up needing to copy and paste the modinfo file into the root. Visual studio built off of ZZCakeBuild instead of the mod file I made, there were cs files inside of the mod that needed removing before building the final zip file package. I finally got it to work, but for such a simple mod, it took me far longer to troubleshoot than I'd like to admit, and I honestly felt somewhat more confused in the end than I did in the beginning.

As others have said, a guided walkthrough in the form of a self paced replication of a real mod, would be wonderful. Something the community can opensource review for best practices, explaining the why and how of things, and giving a higher level understanding of how everything scaffolds would be massive. Structure and file relationships is where I find the wiki tutorials lacking, and maybe a bit of JSON information for "code" values.

I would vote for a wiki page that's more like a book, with a basic informational landing page that points to an index of chapters and sub chapters, something like the following:

1. Getting Started
   1. Introduction
   2. Basic Overview (why the following chapters are important)
   3. Devolopment Environment
   4. Dependencies
   5. API resources
   6. File Structure
      1. Root
         1. Assets
            1. FooMod
         2. modinfo
         3. FooMod.dll
   7. Best Practices (links to C#, JSON, and Anego Studios specific docu for best practices, etc.)
      1. C# Links
      2. JSON links
      3. Anego links
      4. General Best Practices
2. Types of Mods
   1. Theme
      1. What
      2. Why/When
      3. Examples
   2. Content
      1. What
      2. Why/When
      3. Examples
   3. Code
      1. What
      2. Why/When
      3. Examples
3. Theme Mod Tutorials
4. Content Mod Tutorials
5. Code Mod Tutorials

Edited July 10 by DecoyDan