Dynamic KSPedia Pages?

[Kerbart]

Looking at a thread like this one, I get the impression that the content of KSPedia pages is rather static. Perhaps it is already planned, but wouldn't it be great if the KSPedia included dynamic content as well in the future? The most obvious thing that comes to mind are key-mappings (so you can look up in-game what the actual mappings are, not the default mappings), but also celestial body and part catalogs.

"Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself," so I'm sure it can be done!

[Alshain]

I don't know why they didn't just make it HTML.  I mean, it's a great attempt at re-inventing the wheel, it could have been easy.

Edited May 23, 2016 by Alshain

[DMagic]

25 minutes ago, Alshain said:

I don't know why they didn't just make it HTML.  I mean, it's a great attempt at re-inventing the wheel, it could have been easy.

It uses the Unity UI. Which is nice for a Unity game, that uses the Unity UI for everything else. 

It's easy to create an entry with just a few minutes of tinkering in Unity (coming up with the content is what really takes time), and it's easy for KSP to draw these entries on-screen. I'm not sure why incorporating some completely different system would be any easier.

[Kerbart]

9 hours ago, DMagic said:

It's easy to create an entry with just a few minutes of tinkering in Unity (coming up with the content is what really takes time), and it's easy for KSP to draw these entries on-screen. I'm not sure why incorporating some completely different system would be any easier.

Not everyone uses Unity. Granted, not everyone knows HTML but it's a lot more likely.

Is putting up extra barriers for your fanbase to create content is the right thing to do, especially when the reason is it's easier this way for us? That's not the mentality that got us to the moon.

Now, to return to my main issue... If this would allow dynamic (game/mod/settings dependent) content, I can see why. But we don't have that either. Yet?

[Superfluous J]

11 hours ago, DMagic said:

It uses the Unity UI. Which is nice for a Unity game, that uses the Unity UI for everything else. 

It's easy to create an entry with just a few minutes of tinkering in Unity (coming up with the content is what really takes time), and it's easy for KSP to draw these entries on-screen. I'm not sure why incorporating some completely different system would be any easier.

To write a KSP page you need Unity. You need to know how to use it, as well. There is a learning curve just to get started, and after that you need to learn how to make the pages. Once you've learned all this, you have learned how to make KSPedia pages and nothing else.

To write HTML you need any computer made in the past 50 years. Sure you need to know how HTML works but it's likely you already do or - at the very least - what you learn in the exercise will be useful in many other applications.

[DMagic]

@Kerbart @5thHorseman If KSP were some kind of content-creation public-service utility then teaching users how to make HTML content might be worthwhile, but it isn't. KSPedia is an internal tool for adding info to the game. Since it uses standard Unity UI objects and asset bundles it makes it relatively trivial to take entries that anyone makes and incorporate those into that game.

Any step-by-step tutorial using unfamiliar software will look daunting. But coming up with clear and concise writing, appropriate images, and making sure that it's understandable to people who don't already know all of the information you are trying to convey is far more difficult and time consuming that learning how to make pages (which you'll only have to learn once).

As to the original point, yes it would be easy to edit KSPedia text content because, wait for it... they use Unity UI objects. You can point DebugStuff at KSPedia page and see the breakdown of all the Text objects. Squad's entries use less than helpful naming schemes (Text001, Text002, etc...), so it would be tedious for a mod to go in and edit the content of those objects. But it would be fairly straightforward for Squad to tag certain Text objects as being tied to in-game settings, celestial body parameters, or anything else.

Adding buttons to KSPedia pages is another possibility, I'm not sure why anyone would want that, but someone probably has a good reason. It would be a lot more trouble than editing Text objects, but I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be possible.