Help Wanted -- Walkthrough Proofreaders

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OK, you both have access now. I suggest Beren takes it from here and PMs you a few details on where and how to get started. Thanks for volunteering to help!

 

Ok, our first job will be a walkthrough for Pillars of Eternity 2. I need to go back to that thread to figure out where we left off. Once I get a sense of that, I'll send a PM with detailed instructions to both accounts.

 

Cat on your keyboard, @Tarrasque ?

 

Sleepwriting?

 

I proofread English for a living: if the source text is in Word, I'm willing to do it. I have zero knowledge of the games though. Personally I feel that is a plus: walkthroughs are supposed to guide a newbie through a game. A person with intimate knowledge of a game tends to skim over some "shorthand" but I will be able to point out if something is totally unclear. I will be only checking the text and links though--I will not be cross-referencing accuracy with the games themselves.

 

That's fine, but the source pages are actual online walkthrough pages, not Word. There there is also the matter of checking that the links and images are done properly and so on, so it's a bit more than just plain text. Of course, any text could be copy/pasted into Word to check or the pages saved locally and opened in Word, or would that be more than you're willing to do? Beren's implementing fixes on a page by page basis, so it's not a matter of doing the whole thing at once, but in more manageable chunks.

 

I guess I can do that, though I'm not sure what you mean by "images done properly." I can check whether they are cropped properly, annotated correctly (if they are?), that they actually correspond to the text they are associated with, and don't have artifacts. However I will not be able to ascertain whether they are "correct" in terms of gameplay, having no knowledge of these games.
Editing in Word allows us to track changes, which is immensely useful with multiple editors. I'm assuming the online walkthrough doesn't have a versioning system (except what Beren backs up on his own HDD of course)? If you're okay with me directly editing the to-be-published text, I guess I'm okay with it too.

 

Hi Gibberish,

Glad to hear you may be willing to help out. It might seem like not doing it in Word is a big deal, but we do everything through a forum we call Workshop.

When dmc was here, here's an example of how he posted corrections:

This is the page that the corrections were posted with respect to:

https://sorcerers.net/Games/Pillars-of-Eternity2/Walkthrough/world-map.php

So the idea is to start by identifying the page, "World Map" "Dark Castle", etc., then number by number post any grammatical or spelling errors you see, or query whether you don't understand what I'm saying, and then it's up to me to fix them on the pages and upload the corrected versions. When I've done that, I post "fixed".

Links, just check to see they go where they're supposed to. If you hit a "Not found 404" page, just say "no. # Link broken". Or if there's multiple links broken, "no. #, second and fourth links broken" or "no. #, all links broken".

As far as maps and images, that's just a matter of if the picture isn't what I say it is, like I talk about fighting a dragon during this part of the game, but the screenshot definitely doesn't include a dragon, or if the numbered items in the content don't match up with the numbers on the map (e.g. 25 content items, but the map has numbers 1 to 26), either of those are things I'd appreciate a heads up about. It's up to me to figure it out.

I know it feels like an awkward system, but it's necessary because we're working with .php pages which by now I have a passing knowledge of how to work and edit. It just doesn't translate well with a word doc.

But it's actually pretty easy once you get the hang of it. For those times where dmc wasn't busy with his law firm job, we could burn through several pages a day at rapid fire pace.

 

Wow. Looks like you have to do a lot of cross-referencing and possibly a good amount of mental gymnastics... and how much you have to do depends on the quality of my feedback. Maybe we just give it a shot and then determine our mutual comfort levels?

Unrelated, but I think your choice of font colour is poor. It's very difficult to identify red on a cream background. May I recommend putting them all within boxes with contrasting backgrounds like I've done here?
This is another example of boxed numbers (not mine).
That will also help to separate out the important stuff (I'm assuming numbers) from the less important stuff (I'm assuming 'x').

Before we begin, you will have to tell me whether you want me to proof for US or UK/EU English.

 

Sometimes it is a lot of work on my end, but I've become efficient about it over the years. Usually I implemented dmc's corrections within the day.

I do see your point about boxed numbers, maybe in future walkthroughs? Red seemed like the best choice at the time because every other choice melted even more into the background. The map with the cream color may not be the best example either, but it does show up better on dungeon maps with black background. The World Map was an usually difficult beast to tackle.

Also, US English.

 

Ok, if you want to make a start, dmc finished all of the quest pages except for those for the Seeker, Slayer, Survivor DLC.

Here's the first page:

https://sorcerers.net/Games/Pillars-of-Eternity2/Walkthrough/quests/sss/the-proving.php

For now, let's make our way from The Proving until Potions of Plenty.

 

The last screenshot doesn't link to the gallery page, I noticed.

 

The Tyrant of Decay one?

Edit: Just to clarify, were you wanting screenshots to link to the gallery page or the image itself?

 

Okay, I'll start making notes about these 18 pages. Where would you like me to post my lists when I complete them? Here?

 

@Taluntain

Ok, before we get ahead of ourselves, Tal, can you give gibberishh access to the Workshop forum?

 

That one, yes. Didn't you always link to their gallery pages? If you link to the image directly, you can't see the image description in the gallery, can't comment, etc. Same logic as with the map pages.

Also, I see that there are no mouseover descriptions for the images; we've got them in most walkthroughs, but I'm not sure if you've had them in yours?

Done.

 

Ok, I'll look at all walkthroughs to see if any screenshots need to be corrected. It'll take a while though.

@gibberishh

Here's the Workshop thread for the walkthrough. You'll see plenty of other examples of how dmc and I did things.