Yahaha seems great on the surface, but lacks any guidance, help or examples on Nodegraph nor Lua scripting.
Am I missing something? Does either Lua or Nodegraph work with Yahaha? If it does why is it not covered in any documentation?
The guides go as far as how to print strings. I’m sorry but that’s just horrendous. The API documentation has sprinkles of half-attempted examples with no context - the prerequisite code and an application of the function or property should be demonstrated.
I bet you anything there have been hundreds of people willing and excited to dive right in to Yahaha - and they’ve all come and gone, because it seems to me Yahaha is just a black box and no one knows how to work with it.
There should be very clear instructions on how to get started, built from the bottom up - and supplementary to that there should be fast track material demonstrating how engines like Roblox, Core and such map to Yahaha to achieve the same results they are already familiar with.
Yahaha is primarily made to be used without coding. That’s why there are a lot of components and even assemblers to do certain things for you. Albeit scripting will make the games function a lot better but clever uses of components can help you make a very decent game.
I understand the premise of Yahaha. And I fully anticipated this defense “there’s no help in scripting because we don’t want you to script” - that’s basically the message every time someone asks this.
Even if we got over that, I don’t think I can weight anything I say enough to convey just how abysmal the insufficiency of material is - and one reference to an intermediate tutorial which doesn’t actually step the reader through building up a Nodegraph is not nearly enough.
And having thought about it, Nodegraph is just a graphical layer which pulls together Lua code, so the infastructure for anyone who wants to cut straight to the chase and write in Lua is already there and just as valid as using Nodegraph. So this excuse that there’s no help because Nodegraph is the way is wearing thin. And the other excuse that there are pre-packaged components to use is a fad. You have people here and now pleading for direction because they want to go further than those components and create more.
Personally I think, whatever doc is there for lua is actually enough. I am someone who hates the nodegraph and actually doesn’t use any components. I script custom stuff for every single space of mine. But then again I go through existing scripts to learn and not tutorials. So of course I don’t really understand you when you say lua doc is lacking.
I agree with you about lack of good documentation especially around creating community components. I assume given their name the idea is for contributors to make and share them but there is no good documentation on how.
Even some of the documented components need better documentation especially how to combine and use together especially for the assembler.
Having said that I much much prefer Yahaha to Core - the user interface, movement controls and way of building is so much easier than Core. Obviously Core has been around longer and since it uses Unreal Engine the graphics are outstanding but it also lacks documentation and is harder to work with due to not being able to import models.
So I’m hoping that over time more documentation will become available - I imagine even more of it would come from contributors - because it should be encouraged for community component contributors to fully document their components etc
Core has been around longer, but Yahaha is missing a trick that the majority of documentations allow: user contributions. On Core I contributed to the documentation via pull requests, and so did many other users. This allowed people to build up and correct the documentation organically. So yes, 100% the documentation should be open to contribution. And honestly it falls in line with what this platform and community are about - user generated content.
Maybe Yahaha staff will read this thread and add more documentation related items to the roadmap - being a professional developer myself for a long time now - it’s common for developers to work on functionality and leave documentation trailing a long way behind - and I’ve been on both sides of this but for a community focused system such as this - I agree that documentation is pretty vital to allow wider adoption of the system.