Over the Hump
All difficult technical challenges for the completion of Leadwerks3D are solved. This includes navmesh pathfinding, cross-platform support, Lua and C# integration, OpenGLES rendering, the abstract driver model, etc., etc., etc. Basically, all the scary stuff is done, and the only thing that remains is hard work. I'll be turning my attention back to the editor shortly, but first I wanted to address a different kind of challenge: Documentation and the website.
The present appearance of the website took a long time to develop, and is the result of four or five different people's work. It was difficult to find him, but I finally came across the one who is the master of the forum software and CMS we use. He was able to fix a few small issues I had, but he did not design the site. Now he has bee recruited to create a new website theme using the good elements of our current design, in a Web 2.0-ish style. We're also planning on an improved image and video gallery, and a better display for community articles. Professional web design services will be used to create product pages for Leadwerks3D that truly reflect how awesome the software is. I'm not a web designer, and I am happily surrendering that responsibility to someone who has instructions to develop Web 2,0-style product pages with my content.
Last summer we launched a lot of new website features including a chat bar, video gallery, and embedded documentation. The first two were a success that I feel really add to the site experience. The third I consider somewhat of a failure. The documentation search is not very good, the pages take too long to load, and the organization is too categorical. I installed a temporary Wiki where I have been jotting down docs and ideas, but I wasn't committed to the idea of using it for the Leadwerks3D documentation. Then I found the documentation system we're going to use.
Leadwerks3D documentation will be available in a two-panel searchable HTML page, which is pretty standard. However, the same docs can also be exported in PDF and even EPub format, which is what iBooks uses:
So, with the documentation system decided and web design out of my hands, I now turn back to the Leadwerks3D editor...
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