CoLoBoT 15th Anniversary Preparations

[Simbax]

new features of cbot are not described in in-game help

They are. I know, because it was me who documented (most?) of them. If something is not documented then it is not supposed to be at this moment or I (or someone else) just haven't done it yet. I was also planning to rewrite old documentation at some point... Anyway, the CBOT is a mystery even to us and new discoveries are still made. Seriously, nobody knows how CBOT really works and people generally are afraid to touch it. It's work in progress.

Why facebook fp died? (i'm not sure if it's the right place for this question)

Because nobody here is really into social media and there is usually nothing to post about. Most commits are not interesting for the end-user. Also, isn't Facebook slowly dying anyway? I feel like it is, but I feel old already, I don't understand what is popular nowadays and I honestly don't like all these Instagram, Snapchat or whatever thingys. They seem... pointless? Ah, I'm off-toping here, sorry.

So maybe I'll do it? But I'm not sure if my informations are up to date. And i still don't know how to use translation tools (there were some scripts but I don't know what they do) just for the state that is planned for 1.9 release.

If you do it, it'll be awesome! Even if only partially done it'll be far better than nothing.

Well, the thing with translations is... There are .po files spread everywhere and you can edit them in any Notepad-like editor or use something like POedit. That's when you want to translate something. When you are creating something new or modifying the content, then you just work with standard .txt files in English. So you just write it normally like you were creating a help file for an user level, but of course with different folder structure. But here's a catch -- you must generate and update the .po files every time you change the original files. I have full Colobot development environment configured, so I just do something like `make install` to automatically update the translation files and to copy the right file to my dev Colobot installation, so I don't know if it's possible to create help files without having the whole Visual Studio (or MinGW or whatever) and cmake environment ready to compile and build the whole game without problems. And you'd need to learn how to use git if you don't know this versioning system already, so you can make a pull request to our main repository.

I could try to build an environment to work just with translations which may require to modify some cmake files (maybe there already is an appropriate flag like "only translations" or you can just manually run the .py scripts, I don't know) and write some kind of tutorial on the forum, but I kinda have limited time resources right now.

You could eventually just work with standard GOLD dev installation available for download after every commit and share the files with us so we can take care of the rest and commit them to the repository. You must also remember to update your data (dev) directory once in a while since it's build separately and it's in a separate repository, but there isn't usually many commits to that one.

I don't know where you stand with your programming knowledge, so sorry if I mentioned some "obvious" things.