The three virtues of a programmer: Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. – Larry Wall
Unreal Wiki:Basic procedures
Basic Procedure pages are small tutorials which cover simple tasks that can be easily linked to from tutorials. This saves the bother of explaining over and over again how to add an actor, choose a resource, and so on.
If you have any questions about basic procedure pages, feel free to ask on the discussion page.
Using basic procedure pages
When writing a tutorial or giving specific instructions for accomplishing a certain goal, consider if it could be broken down into basic tasks. Try to find description pages for these basic tasks in Category:Basic procedures and link to them instead of writing more detailed instructions. For example, instead of writing:
| Now open the actor brower window by clicking on the little pawn icon, then navigate down the tree by clicking the + signs, and find Actor >> Info >> ZoneInfo. Then back in your map, right-click in the room and pick "Add a ZoneInfo here". The actor should appear in your level. |
you can just write:
| Now [[add an Actor]] >> Info >> ZoneInfo in the room... |
Doing this keeps the wiki usable by people of all skill levels.
- Beginners who don't know how to do this can follow the link, and the Add an Actor page will explain everything in simple steps, with screenshots and everything.
- Intermediate users can go to refresh their memory if they like.
- Experienced users can just skip it.
Creating basic procedure pages
Sometimes you may find that the Unreal Wiki doesn't have a basic procedure page for a specific task. This could be due to a number of reasons, but usually one of the following will be the case:
- The task was never used before.
- Tutorial writers mentioned the task but never bothered to create a basic procedure page for it.
- The task isn't that "basic" after all.
Feel free to ask on the discussion page if you can't find a basic procedure page for a specific task. Sometimes it turns out that there already is a page describing the feature, and just has a different name than what you may expect.
Basic procedure pages are generally written like tutorials, except that they are usually much shorter. The names of basic procedure pages should be chosen so they can flow into the text of a tutorial as in the example above. Depending on the type of basic procedure, add either {{basic-editor}} or {{basic-script}} to the top of the page for basic procedures related to UnrealEd or UnrealScript respectively.
