Adding tutorials, tips, tricks etc.
Posted: Sat Sep 29, 2012 8:41 am
Our Custom Content forums and our "the Learning Curve" sub-section is where you can find/use/add almost any sort of tutorial(s) that you wish to add. We encourage folks to create/copy/paste/use these various tutorials to help us all learn some of the aspects of creating custom content for NWN.
We also encourage folks to create NEW topics here, so if you have a tutorial that you think might belong here, please feel free to create a topic for it!
There are various tools that you can use to create and modify screenshots to help capture the image, and this website will automatically adjust a huge number of image formats to one that can be viewed here.
I personally use "Snagit" by TechSmith for all my screen capture and editing. I always save the original image, before editing, and the edited version on my local hd as a .PNG format. Even though a .PNG is larger on the HD side of things, it will automatically get converted to .jpg or whatever a website will support, when it is attached to a message in the forums.
I also typically host my images on my own images on PhotoBucket which allows me to organize images in sub-folders and provides links that can be easily embedded into the forum messages here so that you can provide visual shots.
I typically find that an image based tutorial is MUCH easier to follow than a youtube type of vid. Typically on youtube vids, the individual steps and clicks/menu choices etc, get missed as youtube and most vid capture utils only take intermediate screen shots and can miss a huge amount of detail.
Using the Snagit editor, which is provided free (or if you purchase for the very reasonable $50 price) you can do an amazing amount of editing of an image, you can capture menus, sub-menus, sections of a screen to save space, over-lay your own larger text and pointers to explain things etc. This gives you a huge amount of power as a tutorial editor.
I have posted dozens of tutorials on this site and you are free to view them all to get an idea of how powerful an edited image and a text explanation can truly be. I also freely admit that any tutorial I may have created, could also be better, but it is always a learning process as you go. (for example, the prior two sentences were at one point in time, much lower in this message)
Organizing your thought process a bit, prior to uploading can make things a lot easier to follow as well. I have found that splitting a larger tutorial into several messages also gives me time to re-organize and think what extra text/explanations may be needed or helpful.
The other aspect to remember is that when you enter a link, you can edit what the link looks like when posted.
" [ url = link]" Name of link " [ / url ]" can really be a powerful explanation of what you are linking too. Note that you MUST remove the extra spaces that I added inside of the " marks for the sytem to work correctly.
For example:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q= ... C0fLAkXLag is a HORRIBLE looking link, yet by using BBCODE to format the link PhotoBucket you can make it soo much easier to read.
Be warned though, to SAVE and re-edit your post as you go along, this site like any other, can sometimes forget to save if you have edited too much in a single session, or added too much bbcode at a single time. So save, and then re-open the post to edit it as you go along.
We also encourage folks to create NEW topics here, so if you have a tutorial that you think might belong here, please feel free to create a topic for it!
There are various tools that you can use to create and modify screenshots to help capture the image, and this website will automatically adjust a huge number of image formats to one that can be viewed here.
I personally use "Snagit" by TechSmith for all my screen capture and editing. I always save the original image, before editing, and the edited version on my local hd as a .PNG format. Even though a .PNG is larger on the HD side of things, it will automatically get converted to .jpg or whatever a website will support, when it is attached to a message in the forums.
I also typically host my images on my own images on PhotoBucket which allows me to organize images in sub-folders and provides links that can be easily embedded into the forum messages here so that you can provide visual shots.
I typically find that an image based tutorial is MUCH easier to follow than a youtube type of vid. Typically on youtube vids, the individual steps and clicks/menu choices etc, get missed as youtube and most vid capture utils only take intermediate screen shots and can miss a huge amount of detail.
Using the Snagit editor, which is provided free (or if you purchase for the very reasonable $50 price) you can do an amazing amount of editing of an image, you can capture menus, sub-menus, sections of a screen to save space, over-lay your own larger text and pointers to explain things etc. This gives you a huge amount of power as a tutorial editor.
I have posted dozens of tutorials on this site and you are free to view them all to get an idea of how powerful an edited image and a text explanation can truly be. I also freely admit that any tutorial I may have created, could also be better, but it is always a learning process as you go. (for example, the prior two sentences were at one point in time, much lower in this message)
Organizing your thought process a bit, prior to uploading can make things a lot easier to follow as well. I have found that splitting a larger tutorial into several messages also gives me time to re-organize and think what extra text/explanations may be needed or helpful.
The other aspect to remember is that when you enter a link, you can edit what the link looks like when posted.
" [ url = link]" Name of link " [ / url ]" can really be a powerful explanation of what you are linking too. Note that you MUST remove the extra spaces that I added inside of the " marks for the sytem to work correctly.
For example:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q= ... C0fLAkXLag is a HORRIBLE looking link, yet by using BBCODE to format the link PhotoBucket you can make it soo much easier to read.
Be warned though, to SAVE and re-edit your post as you go along, this site like any other, can sometimes forget to save if you have edited too much in a single session, or added too much bbcode at a single time. So save, and then re-open the post to edit it as you go along.