Sort of on this subject, has the suggestion been made before of maybe having a section on the site (or even just a bunch of stickies on the forum) answering all those basic scripting questions that get asked time and time again? E.g:
How do I make a unit move?
How do I order a unit to get in a vehicle?
How do I instantly move a unit into a vehicle/start him off in one?
How do I make a unit fire his gun?
How do I make a unit target/fire on anything?
How do I eject units from a vehicle
How do I set a unit's position? How do I get his position?
How can I create a missile/ammo?
How do I create a unit?
How do I heal or damage a unit?
How can I set an object's velocity?
How can I get units to respawn in multiplayer?
How can I get a unit to say my speech?
How can I play a sound effect?
If you look at the list, you see that most of the questions have direct associations to the command reference. This section of OFPEC (page or whatever) could complement the command reference, plus there are always questions that the comref doen't have answers to (respawning, sounds etc).
The comref works like a portugese - english dictionary. You look up the command (the portugese), find what it does (the english translation). OK, the analogy is questionable, but hey
.
What your average english speaker wants, is to find out an
english word is in
portugese. At the moment, they'd either have to check the comref to find how to do what they want, which is a hit-and-miss process, unless the person is patient. This is because they'd have to stumble on the right command by luck (and some of the commands aren't that intuitive at all). Either that or, far more likely, they go ahead and post on the forums. Fair enough too; keep in mind that the comref also assumes some prior knowledge and is not that friendly to the complete padawan.
This is where the proposed page comes in. It acts as the english-portugese dictionary. You have a quick check down the page, find the nearest thing to what you're after, and click the relevant link to the comref. This is your portugese word. You then come back and find out what all this business is about 'return types', 'arrays', 'groups/objects' and so on if you need to. At this point, you could also link to the relevant tutortials if need be.
In answer to my own question, the suggestion
has probably been made; ofpec's been around for a long time. But it seems a sensible thing to do, at any rate.