KolMafia Guide for Noobs.

Bale

Minion
Good news and bad news! The Bad news is that your guide is now out of date and needs to be changed. The Good news is that your guide seems to have influenced Veracity into changing mafia to better accommodate newbies with r8077. Since she's intends to release 13.9 soon, this means your guide really will be out of date by any measure.

Code:
Change a bunch of default settings so that KoLmafia will do fewer things
"out of the box" to surprise new users. In particular, purchasing and
item usage:

autoSatisfyWithCloset = false (leave items in the closet)
autoSatisfyWithMall = false (do not buy things)
autoSatisfyWithNPCs = false (do not buy things)
relayMaintainsHealth = false (let user decide when to heal)
removeMalignantEffects = false (let user decide)
switchEquipmentForBuffs = false (let user decide)
autoManaRestore = false (in-combat MP restoration uses items)
autoRepairBoxServants = false (let user decide)
mpAutoRecovery = -0.5 (off, rather than recover at 0)

Turn off a couple default settings that don't consume player resources,
but which can be confusing:

relayHidesJunkMallItems = false (show everything in mall)
relayTrimsZapList = false (show everything)

This means a whole section in this guide, where you tell the user how to turn off these settings needs to be removed. Also, you may want to add information about how to turn them on. (Particularly autoSatisfyWithNPCs and autoSatisfyWithMall are necessary to help mafia do good things, but it's nice that the new user knows he's enabling them.)
 
Fantastic....

Ok, reading the release notes. Ill make a note to self to revamp that section.

Is this an eclipse project or netbeans? I'm tempted to do the PvP aspect myself if I knew the right API command for it. :)
 
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Aye, thanks. I was rooting around in the tar.gz file and on the website and wiki.

I finally though to myself, "Hey, there IS this KolMafia forum that I post to...and theres even an Announcements subForum. Hmm, I wonder...." ;-)
 
10 page wall of text thwi no focus or structure. I'm not going to get through this

- stuff that works by default. "pickpocket and autoattack" is a bad example of a combat script, since mafia does that already
- "Collating of information" does this mean anything? It sounds like math, but I don't see any math
- your bio
- helpful links that are old and less than helpful
- defining parts of the interface that I've already forgotten. If you had a picture, like this, you wouldn't need these

clipboard04v.png




tl;dr
No offense but it sucks. more pictures, instructions, and exercises, less description and pages about nothing
 
Er... by "no focus and structure", you mean "structured into lessons designed to help those intimidated by Mafia's interface ease into it"?

I must agree pictures would probably be a good idea. Might it be more easy-to-update (and others could help) and include pictures in (and more obvious "structure" / lesson titles) if you were to move over to the (kolmafia) wiki as the primary location for this guide, SinginSally?
 

StDoodle

Minion
Might it be more easy-to-update (and others could help) and include pictures in (and more obvious "structure" / lesson titles) if you were to move over to the (kolmafia) wiki as the primary location for this guide, SinginSally?

I agree; I want to link to your guide on the wiki anyway, so why not move it there? ;)

In all seriousness, I think that would be a great idea because 1) It would make organization easier 2) I'm pretty sure including images would get easier and 3) It could be collaborated on easier, which is necessary in the long-run as people tend to eventually move on & things become outdated (and then must be re-written, whereas if it was on a wiki, it could be kept more-or-less up-to-date).

I've dug into wiki formatting quite a bit the previous week, so please let me know if you'd like any help with formatting & such (same name in-game & on the wiki).
 
No offense but it sucks.

Hmm. FYI, I am pretty sure that when you say everything sucks about someone's 20 pages of work, then it is going to be offensive. Perhaps you could Suck It and go somewhere else to insult people.


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StDoodle, putting this on the wiki is an excellent idea. A lot more could be done with the formatting as I am well aware. Plus, it would be a lot easier to make updates. I did not pursue this because I was not sure who was permitted to add what to the wiki. I am not sure if the people in charge are cool with this either.

Putting it in wiki format does have one side effect though: I lose control over the work effectively. This is kind of good, as many people can make corrections and additions as they see fit. This is kind of bad as someone might decide that "it all sucks" and replace entire lessons with a giant image of their interface.

Image-wise, I do have some pictures added, but they aren't super obvious. They are links. I wonder about this. I am using imageshack and if the pics are autoloaded with the Image tag, wouldn't that exceed bandwidth? Maybe not since this forum might not be super high bandwidth.
That was my first experiment with images, and I would like to go back through the guide and take more screenshots to illustrate certain functionality.

Update: So I finally RTFM and learned how to embed images. However, my images are too big, so Ill need to par them down some before I do this.
 
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StDoodle

Minion
StDoodle, putting this on the wiki is an excellent idea. A lot more could be done with the formatting as I am well aware. Plus, it would be a lot easier to make updates. I did not pursue this because I was not sure who was permitted to add what to the wiki. I am not sure if the people in charge are cool with this either.

The KoLmafia wiki is pretty lax, most of the time. As long as you aren't a spam-bot, and you're genuinely trying to make improvements, your efforts are appreciated!

I am currently being (slightly) "possessive" about editing of certain things, mostly function pages & their categories. This isn't long-term though, and is just to avoid re-doing my work. Alhifar & Grotfang especially have been helping with this, and as long as there is some coordination of efforts to avoid working on the same pages by multiple people at once, it's very much a good thing from my point of view.

Anyway, as far as your stuff goes, I could just make a few pages for you and let you know where to put your stuff. Feel free to just put up whatever you have, and I can look into formatting at a later time. If you'd rather wait until you feel your guide is "completely ready," that's fine too, as I've currently got plenty to do. But I'm always happy to help with any questions you may have.

Putting it in wiki format does have one side effect though: I lose control over the work effectively...

Yes and no; it's always possible to do reverts, so don't worry too much about that. Any edits that don't seem to be trying for genuine improvement are likely to be reverted, and the person (or bot) doing said edits is likely to get IP-banned if they are consistently abusive. You'd have to talk to fewyn for specifics, but I wouldn't worry too much about it.

Image-wise, I do have some pictures added, but they aren't super obvious...

Images are definitely helpful, and more so when they are embedded in the page. I don't know much about the wiki's limits on such things, but I could look into it if you'd like. Or, feel free to try it out yourself.

If you're still in the experimentation phase on the wiki, I highly recommend using your user page to try things out until you have a good idea of what to name pages & such.
 

Bale

Minion
I did not pursue this because I was not sure who was permitted to add what to the wiki. I am not sure if the people in charge are cool with this either.

These days StDoodle pretty much is in charge of the wiki. fewyn is the only one that has access to its sensitive workings, but StDoodle is rewriting almost all content and standards to make it more useful. If he says you can put it there, then it's good.
 

StDoodle

Minion
Guide has a home at the wiki: http://wiki.kolmafia.us/index.php?title=KoLmafia_Guide

I've only copy-pasta'd the first page or so, but to create the others, all you have to do is follow the red (missing page) links & go to the "Create" tab. Or someone else can get to it.

The only thing of note is to add "[[Category:KoLmafia Guide]]" to the end of the page. Feel free to tweak the format & make things pretty. I already tweaked the page names, as otherwise they would have been a bit long for a wiki page title. But in the links, the second part, after the "pipe," is for display only, so feel free to change that.
 

Bale

Minion
Small problem. File uploads are disabled so I cannot upload the few images that are included.

If a couple of people working on the wiki, say StDoodle, heeheehee and myself for instance, could be privileged to upload images we could help illustrate the guide.

Edit: Full guide is now on wiki. Formatting is still pretty rough though and needs a bit of work to be properly pretty.
 
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fewyn

Administrator
Staff member
You sure fire uploads are disabled? I could have sworn I turned them on a few weeks ago
 
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