#Modding Documentation Site

1272 messages · Page 2 of 2 (latest)

orchid orbit
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so for reference: when you add a page, if you don't add a corresponding entry in astro.config.mjs, it throws errors... I think.

lusty marsh
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I don't think it should throw errors, it should just not show the page anywhere... Weird

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I might revisit the way that works again to simplify it. I think there's an autogenerate option that'll automatically make stuff so you only need to define the root of the topic yourself (like P4G or Common)
I think there was a reason I didn't use it but I don't remember why. Might not have been a good reason

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You should get the errors when you run it locally... If not I suppose maybe they're only caught on a proper build, not a live preview.
I think npm run build will do a real build. Should be the same as what the action does I think

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The Making Mods link on that P4G page goes to a 404 🙃

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I think I saw a starlight plugin or something that checked for broken links so this would be caught at build. I'll have a look around later and see if that is a thing

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This also got messed up, I think prettier probably is breaking it since it auto runs on commit. Another thing for me to look at

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Other than those small things, skimming through it it seems good so far. Thanks for working on it 🙂

open spire
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apparently putting buttons on top of eachother is impossible (or atleast requires custom stuff). So I found a pretty hacky way to do it. Still working out the kinks though.

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much better

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orchid orbit
open spire
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I think i'll leave the color stuff to someone who can actually understand css. Both because I don't want to stall and I don't want any merge conflicts.

orchid orbit
orchid orbit
open spire
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Yeah this seems a lot more involved than I was expecting.

orchid orbit
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the biggest frustration for me is really just the lack of helpful error reporting lol. the 404s are on me bc I could've checked those easily but the other errors are like niche cases imo 😔

open spire
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The biggest thing for me is that the starlight documentation sucks.

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anyone know of a way to make text smaller? I can't seem to find it on the docs currently.

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orchid orbit
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oh, I haven't even touched the cover page which is what I assume you're working on, so you should be good for a bit longer

open spire
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idk I think I'd just rather leave the button colors to someone who didn't just start learning web dev yesterday.

orchid orbit
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I definitely want to get info in first and make things look nice later anyways haha

open spire
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Yeah definitely, once I figure out the picture component and it works I'll pr it.

oak gate
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i just dont think they're meant for people that don't know webdev stuff, or at the very least, trying to do things that aren't already included

open spire
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me when i'm wrong, but yeah it's probably just me being bad.

oak gate
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is the text part of some component?

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if they're just headers you can just add more # for a different size

open spire
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oh damn thats cool

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Also the picture component is kicking my ass

open spire
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kind of just trying stuff, how is this?

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not a big fan, but I don't have too many options.

orchid orbit
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what, the general layout or?

open spire
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general layout

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I kinda hate it though

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Can't really get what I want. But I guess it'll probably be redesigned by someone who knows better so I probably shouldn't care that much.

orchid orbit
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functionally I think the buttons to get to the actual guides should be higher up

open spire
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alright

orchid orbit
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the text is also a bit small to read now

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but maybe that's bc I'm viewing on my phone lol

open spire
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yeah you're right

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I think i'm just overthinking this design

orchid orbit
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maybe. graphic design is not my passion so I'm trying to look at it more from a functionality perspective

open spire
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just kinda cut everything out

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orchid orbit
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amicitia is an example of a site that perhaps isn't the prettiest but functionally it's very good

oak gate
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dont think they look good as a button naothink

open spire
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you mean like this?

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i'm just gonna pr this. Gotta figure out how in vscode

oak gate
# open spire

dont forget to add a background naostare black on mostly black is unreadable

open spire
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I have a better idea

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nvm

open spire
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Finally, I made a pull request. That was very convoluted.

oak gate
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i just use github lol

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i should probably learn how to do it through cli but meh

open spire
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I had to use github desktop because it was so roundabout.

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Oh well, now I am free (until there is a funny bug).

open spire
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Though I think half of it was because I didn't know you needed to fork it.

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I might add that into the doc later on

orchid orbit
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would have preferred to do it through a GUI.... but my experiences with GitHub desktop have never been positive

oak gate
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???

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i meant the the website

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there's a button to make a PR from your fork right at the top fuukanaotocooki

orchid orbit
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oh

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ok I mean the application for doing pull/push to repos

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GitHub desktop just doesn't want to work for me ever

open spire
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Weird, works just fine for me.

orchid orbit
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I've always had to use CLI at some point in the process 😔 it's annoying bc I would rather use the GUI personally, it's more straightforward

open spire
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My condolences

lusty marsh
# orchid orbit I will fix when I get home 😔 I like how the new site looks more but this defin...

😔 I didn't have much trouble with it, I thought it would be relatively easy for people to pick up since it should basically just be mdx. I guess I am technically a professional web developer though so ig I shouldn't be surprised that I had an easier time, even if I had no experience with this kind of framework.
Hopefully it's something I can sort out for peoeple somehow. I'd like it to be fairly easy so I don't have to try and set up a real CMS

orchid orbit
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it's just the stuff I was complaining about before. a lot of it is chill but those errors I was getting took like 4 separate PRs to fix

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I feel like I shouldn't have needed to even make PRs to find them I should've just seen them before committing </3

lusty marsh
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Yeah, I don't get why you didn't see them locally

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I'll try and play around with it tonight and work out what was going on

orchid orbit
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it was like, for the last 2 PRs, I would check almost every single page and it'd be fine. so I'd be like, ok perfect we're cooking

and then I commit and it throws the errors then

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😭

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again that is why I made 3 broken PRs instead of 1 working PR...

oak gate
orchid orbit
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not yet I haven't been at my pc since haha

orchid orbit
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THAT WORKED

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if only i'd known about this before...

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no more broken PRs...... risepray

oak gate
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tbf, it really should've popped even in dev naostare

lusty marsh
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I had a look and it seems there are some checks that are only done on a real build which makes sense. It would be awful if you got errors like that during development before you'd even made the files that are missing or whatever.

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Also had a look into the sidebars a little bit and there is a plugin that might help but it doesn't work with the topics plugin (the thing that lets us have separate sidebars per game) currently so that's a no go.
https://starlight-auto-sidebar.netlify.app/getting-started/

Starlight Auto Sidebar
Getting Started

Learn how to tweak autogenerated sidebar groups with the Starlight Auto Sidebar plugin.

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We can switch to using the autogenerate option if we want which might help. You still have to manually define each group though (anything with child pages in the sidebar) otherwise it's named based on the folder name which gives ugly results like this

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So instead of the first, you'd have the second (switch the items array for the autogenerate property). If you go this way you do then have to add an order property to each page otherwise they end up in alphabetical order which usually isn't what you want

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Not sure which way people would find more intuitive, I don't really mind either way

oak gate
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ofc, changing the order will break links so... naosit

lusty marsh
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Like 1-some-page.mdx?

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You could but I don't really want that. Them that changes the link as well

orchid orbit
orchid orbit
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(I haven't looked enough, that's what I mean)

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this might be a dumb question but if someone makes a PR and I need to review it, is there a way for me to check that out locally and build to check for issues?

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speaking of 404s - regarding the broken one you were talking about, I've fixed it locally but I never got around to pushing it. I'll try to do so tonight but I also wanted to update the other pages to be more consistent with P4G too

lusty marsh
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I did also look into automatically deploying previews of prs yesterday fwiw and it doesn't seem like you can really do it currently. You can if you use the old method of deploying to page from a branch but we use the new method where it's done through an action since that's what the Astro docs said to do.

lusty marsh
orchid orbit
orchid orbit
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so i think this documentation itself is fine. but what even is this name

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this is not intuitive in the slightest

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maybe this is a common web dev name but like. a lot of the documentation has non intuitive names lol

orchid orbit
orchid orbit
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documentation doesn't seem to show anything for it. I wonder if they would rather people not use the auto generate for cases like this

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what I could do is keep the parent categories as items, and use autogeneration for the subsections. idk

orchid orbit
oak gate
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did you install everything included, didn't change any default settings?

orchid orbit
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yea 😔

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i suppose i can run the installer again though, it has been a bit

oak gate
orchid orbit
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that worked, ty. that is very annoying though i think i just had the second option selected bc well. it's default, recommended, and the warning was scary lol

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but: yay, I can use github desktop again

orchid orbit
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is there documentation anywhere on how to use special characters like < and >? backslash does not work....

oak gate
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take a shot for each use of component naodead

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orchid orbit
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this is a page i never actually completed last time i worked on these docs

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I am not looking forward to detailing how to do manual looping (and honestly I might just... not) but at least I can just say, hey, use pymusiclooper for basic loops

oak gate
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then you have to cover installing the correct version of py and looper's dependencies naostare

orchid orbit
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a lot of what I plan to cover here should be pretty universal so once this is all done, hopefully it can just be ported to the other mod pages with few changes

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how hard could that possibly be </3

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I mainly don't know how to write instructions for what I did with a lot of the songs in anime music expansion, where I had to mess around with the songs in audacity to create sufficient loop points

lusty marsh
lusty marsh
lusty marsh
# orchid orbit this part, I'm still trying to figure out though I'm not sure how I would set a ...

The name is just the title in the frontmatter, although I think I saw an additional option that lets you have a different sidebar name if we really need. For the order I think it's something like sidebar.order but I'll find the actual thing later.
I'll put all of this essential stuff in the contributing page when I update it. Whilst I will link the starlight docs people shouldn't really need to look around it unless they're doing fancy stuff

orchid orbit
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the issue there is that the Making Mods and Using Mods categories do not have a frontmatter

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if you try to define a frontmatter for them, they will just make that an extra page

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so it'll just show up as like

Getting Started
  Making Mods (page)
  making-mods (category)
    (the pages inside this category)
lusty marsh
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Oh, yeah you have to explicitly define categories to give them a name

lusty marsh
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That's unavoidable currently. At least, as far as I could tell

orchid orbit
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hm I think I missed that or was blind or something. oops lol

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thanks for pointing it out

orchid orbit
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cooking up a guide for audio looping bc I never documented that one before

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oak gate
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finally, a good music looping guide femc

orchid orbit
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I think it will go into enough detail for most songs, but I will admit I did leave this section a little bit vague because I don't actually explain how to find good points, I just explain to select a start and an end point

image.png
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https://personamodding.com/p4g/audio/audio-introduction/
https://personamodding.com/p4g/audio/audio-creation/

I've completed the first page and most of the second. the problem with a lot of these guides however is that not only do they take a long time to write, but I have no idea how helpful they are to newbies

Persona Modding
Introduction to Audio Editing

Introduction to audio editing for Persona 4 Golden (PC).

Persona Modding
Creating Audio Files

How to create audio files for Persona 4 Golden (PC).

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I also want to have a custom favicon for the site but I wasn't able to figure out how to do that or what it should actually be

lusty marsh
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The favicon is just under the public folder

image.png
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Would be cool to have one if someone wants to make one 🙂 (probably won't be me)

lusty marsh
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Writing guides really does take a long time. I should get the contributing page finished this weekend so it's more useful, and maybe more people start writing stuff.

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If I have the time some kind of intro to reverse engineering is what I would like to start working on (again, I've tried once or twice before). I know that it'll be an absolutely enormous task though.

open spire
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But it would be worth it.

lusty marsh
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Yeah, it definitely would be. Maybe I'll try doing what Brawler's done and do a page or two at a time. Normally I'd try to release something once it's all complete but that will be hard to do here.

orchid orbit
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don't remember exactly what I added but it wasn't anything substantial haha

orchid orbit
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I've found that when I'm in calls with other people watching them play games or or stream shows, etc, this is a nice thing to do on the side. even then, my progress is slow, but it's better than nothing

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I would say the main thing we need right now are

  • a more complete contributing guide (any of us could probably do that too, I just want to finish the audio guide to have that as an example of what guides should look like)
  • a more complete front page
  • complete the making mods categories for each game. right now, we only have P4G/P3P done
spark cypress
orchid orbit
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oh thanks! that does save time, it's nice that you can still preview the step too

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I'll go back and edit it at some point...

lusty marsh
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It's open source so you don't necessarily have to be the one to update it :)

orchid orbit
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true....

lusty marsh
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I'm working on the contributing docs rn. Just about to finish writing a page on how to add new groups, sub groups, and games. The only thing I need to write then will be one on how to actually write content in the mdx files. Not sure if I'll finish that today though

orchid orbit
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actually since you're here, I'm curious on your thoughts on this
how do I even show that I changed audio? like it's straightforward with a bustup since it's visual, but audio isn't lol
do I just. tell them, hey it should work now :D or should I go embed a video somehow or what

lusty marsh
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Up to you I guess. If you want to embed a video then you should be able to but imo you probably don't need to

orchid orbit
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I probably won't then

orchid orbit
lusty marsh
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Well it's markdown plus components

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I'm not going to explain everything, but I figure I should explain some stuff and then reference the Starlight docs and stuff

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Not sure how much I'll put in it. For right now I'll probably just leave it as a link to the Starlight and MDX docs

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There are some useful things that you have to dig around for a bit to actually find, so I'd like to highlight that kind of stuff myself. For example, to find out how to add these cool highlights to code blocks you have to go through a few hoops: Starlight Docs -> Code Block Component -> Expressive Code Docs -> Text & Line Markers section. It's stuff that you can find (I did) but it takes a little looking.

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orchid orbit
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hm I definitely haven't been using components at all. I looked them up and they seem pretty cool. a lot of basic functionality stuff there but also it seems pretty open ended too

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reverse engineering huh

lusty marsh
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Yeah, components can be basically whatever. We could write our own if we wanted (not that I want to really)

lusty marsh
orchid orbit
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fair haha

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I think I'm probably going to change the way I write my docs after I finish the basic audio stuff

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up to this point I've been writing each section in detail sequentially

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I think I should probably start with outlining/basic details instead though... documentation that's lacking detail is imo still a bit more useful than incomplete/partial documentation...

lusty marsh
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Yeah that's probably a good way to do it. Write out all your headers and stuff first with just enough detail then fill it in more later. I think that's what you mean?

orchid orbit
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yeah

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you can see the downside of my current docs for audio rn in that imo the first few sections are complete and well written

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but then there's nothing beyond that. how do you convert the songs to hcas and put them into P4G? who knows /shrug

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the least I could have is a section that's like, hey yeah go use Yona and put in your loop points then throw the completed files into this folder

lusty marsh
orchid orbit
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looks pretty good from what I saw (I skimmed thru it)
minor typo here if you're still working on it rn

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lusty marsh
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Ah oops, I'll fix that. Thanks

lusty marsh
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Did a little bit of work on the home page since I wasn't particularly happy with the current one. I definitely still want to clean up the layout a bit but it's better than nothing. In particular I don't want the logos all on the same line, they should spread out (should be fairly easy to do, just needs a littl css)

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open spire
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Yeah, I wasn't happy with it too;-;

spark cypress
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Having them as a list to scroll through might be cumbersome, maybe a 3x2 grid to have them all take up the same amount of screen space?

lusty marsh
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Yeah, probably something like that

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I'll play around with it later and get something better

open spire
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how did you get the logos to have light and dark images?

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I couldn't figure it out when I was doing the layout

spark cypress
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I think they're just transparent

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Oh wait no they actually swap that's cool

lusty marsh
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I made a new ImageLink component that has options for light and dark mode images. It's just some CSS under the hood that I copied from the starlight hero component which has an option for light and dark mode images

open spire
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ah, css. No wonder.

orchid orbit
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oof :(

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fresh python
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Oh yeah O need to add some of my stuff here adachi_true

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I never ended up doing that

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How does one do that here ICANT

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or is the others repo still being used

open spire
orchid orbit
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I've completed the basic audio conversion guide. anyone should be able to follow the steps I've written to replace a song in P4G

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I haven't pushed it yet though bc I still want to figure out how exactly to organize my pages with the other information I want to add

orchid orbit
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I've pushed my changes. I'd like feedback on this one though.

the first four pages (up to and including "replacing music") are done. I'm not really sure how to format this, because on one hand, the converting audio page provides general instructions for using Yona. on the other hand, the replacing music page offers specific steps on music replacement, a very common use case for audio modding.

either way there is a bit of redundant info as the music replacement page essentially cuts stuff from the converting audio page and adds a tiny bit of new info

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I think something like this would generally influence other guides on this site too - should they be focused on more specific use cases (multiple specific tutorials) or should they be more generally applicable (one guide that may give the user a bit too much extra information for the use case they want)

open spire
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You could have both? As in, you start of with generally applicable stuff. And as it goes it gets more specific. Because for example, reverse engineering is very complex and specific. But it wouldn't hurt to have a semi general 'how to' version of reverse engineering since even though you don't do the same thing each time. Most of them would share some parts.

orchid orbit
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so, leave it as is?

open spire
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Well maybe just note down what's general and what isn't and separate the two? idk tbh

orchid orbit
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yeah that's what I'm asking for advice on 💀

open spire
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I mean if you're creating documentation for something you probably have an idea on what would be general and what wouldn't.

orchid orbit
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that's... not what I'm asking

open spire
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;-;

orchid orbit
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I'm asking more for specific feedback on how I've laid out those pages and the info in them

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(they are pushed and viewable right now)

open spire
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Then yes, they look fine.

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Sorry I misinterpreted.

orchid orbit
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you're good. so you're thinking that having that general guide, then a specific guide with somewhat redundant info is fine?

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(how it's currently laid out rn)

open spire
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Yeah cause I mean you can just for example say "do this thing, if you don't know how, read it here: [place where it is from generally]"

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So you can write out everything that you need to in detail. While letting the more easily applicable stuff be detailed somewhere else. So then you don't need to rewrite it every time. If that makes sense.

orchid orbit
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I copy pasted my steps tbh lmao

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I get what you're saying. I also didn't end up doing that, the two guides just have a lot of overlap if you've looked at them

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like, a lot of overlap

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but at the time it felt weird to be like, oh yeah, follow most of these steps but ignore these steps etc

open spire
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I mean in the sense that redundant info is fine. Just that it would be more convenient if you didn't have to rewrite the whole thing each time in case they haven't see it before.

orchid orbit
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I know I'm probably overthinking it a bit but documentation is hard because this is like... trying to figure out how to actually present the information

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I guess I'll outline why this is an issue in my eyes rn

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  • the process for converting audio is like pretty much the same whatever you do
  • the difference is in what your audio file is called and where it is going
  • Yona has BGM templates though which get rid of a lot of those steps. but those only apply for BGM replacement
  • BGM addition uses completely different paths and requires different mod dependencies
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I could write a guide where it's like hey this is how you convert audio, but I can't just have a section for separately talking about BGM replacement and using that prev section as a dependency bc there's some slightly different steps due to the templates existing

open spire
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Well is the non yona way of doing BGMs better or worse than yona?

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Cause maybe you can just cut down on the non yona version for BGM? Though I guess if you don't like using yona that is an issue.

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I apologize if im misinterpreting again, i'm not really familiar with audio replacement.

orchid orbit
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they're all yona

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yona specifically has a shortcut for BGM replacement, that's the best way I can describe it

open spire
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Is there a big difference between not using BGM templates then? Like how im reading your bullet points is that using/not using templates is a separate thing (thats why I thought of yona/not yona).

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You say that it gets rid of a lot of the steps. So i'm just trying to get more clarification.

orchid orbit
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using the templates saves time with BGM replacement bc it does some steps for you, but if you're trying to do something else, you have to go thru the full process. export location also varies

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I think I might just be overthinking this lol.
looking at it again the next day, I think the wording might just be able to be updated to have the "converting audio" page be more focused on yona usage, while the other page is more focused on what specifically you need to do to replace BGM, or replace SFX, or add new audio with BGME, etc

open spire
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Yeah I think that works. I get the feeling though, it's hard to really account for things like this.

open spire
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@lusty marsh Didn't want to start filling up that modder help with info not related to it. But I've been thinking. Are you fine with just explaining the process of reverse engineering, rather than actually documenting it? Because I was thinking that you could give a bit of a rundown on how exactly to use it (though more specifically how to change what you want through coding). And then I can go in and just document that. Since it seems like the separation between 'documenting' and 'telling someone how to do it' is big. If not, it seems RVRZERO knows his way around so maybe I can ask him for more clarification. Or anyone who's up for it really.

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I mostly just want to get reverse engineering out of the way because it's the one thing that's barely documented at all. So just having something in there would be great.

lusty marsh
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I don't think I could really explain stuff without either writing so much that it'd be close to just writing the documentation or leaving out details that you'd need to work out yourself. It's also an extremely broad topic, you'd need to pick one specific goal and work towards that to write anything useful imo.

oak gate
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there's also a plenty resources and guides for reverse engineering, even specifically for game modding/hacking

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i don't think there's much that's specific to persona games outside some ghidra scripts

lusty marsh
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Could you link to anything? When I tried looking (like 5 years ago) I could find basically nothing. I spent at least a few years having absolutely no idea what I was doing 🙂

wispy sphinxBOT
oak gate
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i'll (maybe) see into finding the videos and repos about it later, but it's been a good while since i used them so naotoshrug

lucid pendant
lusty marsh
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Oh, cool. I guess that means I don't need to write anything naosmiley

open spire
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Fine then, I'll get some info from RVRZERO and write it down.

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I'll get around to it when I can, I got busy again, so hopefully once that is done I'll start writing it down.

orchid orbit
lusty marsh
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Sorry, I wasn't really being serious with that message. I still think it'd be nice to write something up. It's nice to know there are other resources though

lusty marsh
open spire
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Okay.

orchid orbit
lusty marsh
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Nah it's fine, I definitely wasn't clear. I can see how it reads like that. Conveying tone through text doesn't work sometimes 🙃

open spire
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I also just got up from sleeping then aswell lol. But i'm still gonna do it.

orchid orbit
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@manic canyon

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this is where we've been throwing together modding documentation (it is rather incomplete but yknow. just needs work)

manic canyon
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Thanks for pointing me to this, I wasn't really aware of it till now

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Nice, finally making good use of the domain

orchid orbit
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yep haha. i put together basic documentation for p4g audio editing and there's basic guides to get started but there is a lot to figure out

fresh python
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I am a little behind on this, how would I add a page to contain my own "useful resources" for flowscript

orchid orbit
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there isn't a dedicated guide we wrote on how to make a new page but the starlight docs (see pinned) should be helpful. you should follow the P4G audio pages for reference on how to make pages (tl;dr use auto generation when you can)

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@lusty marsh is there a point you'd like these modding docs to reach before you publicly announce them? I know I kinda put this down for a bit but I'm thinking about it again bc shrinefox was writing P5R documentation

lusty marsh
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I would kinda like it if we are least had an actual getting started guide for every page (currently the P3P/P4G one is copied around) but that might not be realistic.
The absolute minimum would be finishing off the contributing pages though. I wouldn't want to announce it until there's something proper to direct people to if they want to add stuff

orchid orbit
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ok! yeah that makes sense