Chapter 1. Introduction

Once a component of Mote that will be visible to the end user or the workaday extension writer has been designed, prototyped and incorporated into the main project source, it is intended that documentation for it will appear here. Therefore code contributors, game logic designers and curious/advanced users will have a reasonable way of obtaining knowledge about the codebase and its philosophy without needing to poke through the source or the mote-dev archives immediately.

It is expected that this document will include:

API Guides

For both MotePerl and the game engine itself. These APIs will be for the benefit of all extension writers, though for very basic tasks the documentation on the Mote Tool Manual pages will suffice.

Papers

Essentially finalised design ideas. These will explain the philosophy behind a given design choice (why we used library X instead of library Y, for example). They shall only be included after the given design choice has proven itself and are likely to be updated very rarely once included. These papers can be assumed to be "concrete".

Example Code

All the code samples from the manual and other places will be included here for quick reference. I expect the extension writers manual will take the form of a tutorial with the dissection of a large application as an example. Therefore this section would contain the complete source for the example Mote application.

Source Code Tour

A short document describing all the major classes in the Mote game engine, what they do, why they are there and so forth.

The Mote Jargon File

Essentially an extension of the FAQ. This will contain both the peices of jargon that we all use regularly and links to further information.

The internal organisation of this document is yet to be finalized, though a Part for each of the above strands of documentation seems sensible (in a addition to indexes and the like).