V12 Engine Release Date

#1 Personally, I'd like a printed API and function guide.
Other than that...
I have a hell of a slow printer!

#2 well i'd like both
for myself i prefer printed stuff but i cant send the books to my team members but data on a cd isnt a problem

#3 Well one printed versio of the doc would be a must.

#4 Uhh guys, please remember we are ONLY paying $100 for the V12. If I get a CD with the code and whatever docs they have now, on the CD, then I will be happy. Dont push your luck is all I'm saying.

#5 Books are expensive indeed, and printed documentation could easily double the price. If you happen to have a white-collar job, just use the office printer. :-)

#6 You could also take the disc to your local Kinko's and have it printed, collated and bound there, if you so wish...

#7 I know how expensive are printed docs, but you overstate the price. If garage games wants to be in the big leagues (and they are big league players since they are backed in a way by Sierra) they should have printed doc. Of course it depends on how much modification that doc is subjected to and how much doc there is. If the doc does not change much then they should print it.

I will be back with figures ($$) example of how expensive docs are a little later.

#8 You should be prepared for the fact that when the original release comes out, there will be almost zero docs. Then as the community gets a hold of the ngine, slowly more and more documentation will come out.

I've been working with the genesis3d open source graphics engine for several years now, and that's exactly how it started as well. The first six months of use was pretty much useful for c/c++ programmers only, with a bare minimum of leveldesign tutorials...and then slowly as people became more familiar with the engine, documentation comes out.

Your demands that the engine come out with paper documentation is unrealistic, with this taken into account.

By the time you mastered a copy of the documentation, the community would have (hopefully) created either more thorough or updated versions of 1) the engine itself, and 2) the documentation itself.

GarageGames would end up in a constant state of creating and spending alot of money on paper documentation that provides obsolete or, even worse, incorrect information on the engine.

I think that the money raised by GG would be much better spent on active development and promotion of the games that everyone here is hoping to make ;}

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BTW, GarageGames are already in the big time. This site has given alot of attention to indie gamers. You can pretty much be guaranteed that at least some of that attention is by publishers and developers to see what comes out of this little experiment in social engineering ;}

#9 Like Hiro said, keeping printed manuals up to date on an active project like the V12 would be extremely difficult and costly. After this first release we will be making a decision about which auto-documentation tool to use. From then on all documentation will be in the code and a tool will parse the code and produce functional documentation. So as people write and modify code they update their little section of documentation and the next time we run the auto-documentation tools everything is updated. Many of these tools output a variety of docs, html, text, pdf, etc. Very cool stuff.

--Rick