DISCUSSIONS AROUND ONGOING PROJECTS

If you enter the SE as a complete newcomer, you are asked to enter a scenery name, which is trivial. After that, you may be getting lost already. Well, if you come to browse the graphic elements (shapes) offered, you may or may not find something useable intuitively. But you may be struck down by the variety of only partially (if at all) usable stuff as well. When starting in the wrong place, for example, in city elements, you may get completely lost. I have not figured out til now how to combine the shapes of the cities' sets into a complete house much less a street or a square.

To put it more systematically: You learn to open a scenario defining a top-level data structure (scenario, private or public), fine. Below is the hierarchy group, but it remains somewhat unclear why groups do exist at all and how to define and edit the first and subsequent ones and how to combine them (ok, one may imagine, but examples for useful group combinations would help).

And then you have the lowest hierarchy level, shapes, three-dimensional graphic elements being thematically organized. This distinction (shape groups) is more or less self-explanatory/speaking, but often rather less (the naming should be worked on, no criticism intended, and an index of shape groups togetger with some documentation and explanation would help a lot). The shapes proper are not uncomplicated, either. Some shapes are "complete", such as plants, water, certain buildings, many generic shapes. Some shapes do not appear at all if you try to activate them.

Other shapes, such as mobs, appear as transparent white structures. I do not know if such a mob may be "dyed" (eg White Kitin of the Depths, green or red-and-white Kiro etc.) and how, and whether he/she/ it moves, or even attacks, afterwards. Or whether you can modify the weapons and may wield/store/exchange them. Probably I am doing the twentieth step before the first one with such considerations.

But right there is my problem: I do not see how a graphics beginner may start. learn and advance, how to fail, learn, correct. The SE certainly is a powerful tool, but what I am missing is a tutorial for the unexperienced starter (when introducing somebody to C, I am starting by hello world, and not by double indirection of an array of function pointers - everyone would be running away screaming if I did) . From my part this is not a complaint or whining about something not yet existing, rather an attempt of analyzing the problem and attempting a project proposal how to get people interested in this tool avoiding unnecessary frustration and finding a way to familiarize with it. I'm sure the SE is a powerful tool, but the way it is looking so far, I do not know if it is motivating a lot of players. But it would be a pity if it could not.