A Suggestion to Speed Things Up

[Oiseau]

I think I may have already said this in the past. Here goes anyway.

Seeing as Book 18 was apparently two years in the releasing, I have a suggestion to make things go faster.

As far as I understand it, the people of Project Aon already have the text of all 28 books in their hands. Their efforts basically go into proofreading and formatting the result. Would it be possible to proofread ONCE, to remove all the glaring errors, then format, say, Book 19, then publish it in a few months -- AND ONLY THEN start worrying about whether Lone Wolf sees a "cliff face" or a "cliff-face", whether a Drakkar emits a "death cry" or a "death-cry", whether you see "a big brown bear" or "a big, brown bear" (note the extra comma), and so on ad nauseam ? This hideous nitpicking is surely the reason everything moves so slowly. If it's not, it sure seems that way from reading your Errata lists. I mean, come on. Surely it doesn't reflect that badly on Project Aon's staff if Lone Wolf throws a Sun Crystal in the Shadow Gate rather than a Sun-crystal.

So : Could we see published, slightly-imperfect-grammar-using books first, and special "Nitpicked Editions" two years later (at your leisure) ? Or am I completely missing something here ?

P.S. Plus, you can't get everything perfectly right. Take §290 in Book 18, which starts : "Having slain all of the guardsmen, and their sergeant, with stunning ease, the surrounding crowd of Eldenoran pikemen now look at you...." Read that sentence again. Who slays all the guardsmen ? According to the sentence structure, it's clearly "the surrounding crowd", not you. That's a grammatical mistake which is a lot more important than the difference between "bowshot" and "bow shot".

[beowuuf]

I think the versions are relased to be proof read once they are formatted, and you forget that now the proof written versions are being used by Mongoose as the basis of their prints (if I recall correctly)

And the grammatical mistake you point out is Joe Dever's. I think PA is proofreading the words and ensuring spelling it are ok. It's probbaly a lione that needs to be drawn somewhere. You are right though, thats Eldenoran pikemen are bloodthirsty, and are looking to go after LW next!

[outspaced]

[grumpy mode]

OK, there seems to be a common misconception in certain areas, so let's get a few facts straight.

It has not taken two years to work on Dawn of the Dragons. If you look back, it can be seen that the two Combat Heroes 1 books were released in January 2007--clearly that didn't just happen overnight, so a couple of months prior to the release was focused on those.

What's more, the scheduled release after The Deathlord of Ixia was supposed to have been Highway Holocaust, which has had a huge amount of work done to it. That was our main focus for quite some time, including getting a java app (called FWAC) ready for use with the Freeway Warrior books when they are released.

For most of the past year we have been working hard on revising the existing Lone Wolf books at the request of Joe Dever and Mongoose. So far we have revised Books 1-7 with literally hundreds of fixes and improvements. As was stated clearly in the Project Aon 2007 Annual Report we have been implementing an improved error tracking system via the wiki (the "Errata pages") and to facilitate the editing process, the multi-user editing process has been revised from using CVS (which is horribly difficult to use) to using SVN (which is much "friendlier"). Also pulled into that revision was hundreds of fixes implemented in Lone Wolf Books 19 and 20, and Freeway Warrior 2-4 as well, since we have those books in xml format as the proofreading for them is already fully complete. Check the individual pages for those books as linked from the Errata Page.

New systems such as these take time to implement. And with our small pool of regular volunteers, I think we've done a damn good job getting things up and running so quickly. Also, these systems now being in place, it is far easier to edit the books than it ever was before. Such changes have increased "productivity", and will continue to do so. Releases and re-releases are now less dependent on one person's time than they used to be; barring drains on our time from Real Life, we can conceivably get the books released more quickly than before.

Non-contributors sometimes overlook the fact that those of us who do volunteer have periods of time in our lives when we're very busy and unable to devote much--or any--time to a voluntary project such as this one.

Furthermore, since we're devoting our free time to this project we need to get something out of it too, and much of that is involved in understanding and implementing professional publishing techniques and processes, teaching each of us an awful lot. If this leads to "nitpicked editions", then it's something for us to be proud of, IMHO.

(And the Section quoted from Paragraph 290 reads perfectly to me: the context (i.e. the combat in the previous numbered section) makes it quite clear that the guardsmen were slain by Lone Wolf. Therefore, the grammar is not incorrect--whereas inconsistent or incorrect spelling clearly is incorrect.)

We do appreciate that people want the books released, and believe me, we do too. But since our names are against the books as contributing editors, and since it's our time that we're spending, we want to do as good a job as possible, as well as enjoying what is essentially our shared hobby.

People are free to join the mailing list and volunteer to help speed things along if they would like--we're always looking for more volunteers. We particularly need people to help us proofread the New Order books, since very few of our existing volunteers have access to them. Once the proofreading stage is complete for all the books, we can xmlise them and get to work on editing all NO books.

[/grumpy mode]

Still, at least the new series of Doctor Who starts tonight.

[beowuuf]

Well said, I'm glad to be reminded exactly how much effort you put in to all this so I can feel embarassingly humbled and be reminded to say a big THANK YOU

And woohoo at the new doctor who tonight!

[Oiseau]

Well, I guess I did set myself up for that rant. I kind of expected it too. But I still think Project Aon should release future books "as they are" first, so people can read and play them, and then work on "professional standards of publishing" or "revised editions". This wouldn't mean you couldn't do it. The revised versions for Mongoose and Joe Dever could still be accomplished, and you could commit as much time as you see fit to them.

And I'd like to keep arguing about that sentence in §290. I found the previous section with the combat, just to make sure the guards weren't killed by the crowd. Indeed, Lone Wolf does kill them. So if the sentence starts with "Having killed the guards...", the sentence subject should be Lone Wolf (since he performed the action in question). But the subject is "the surrounding crowd". To me that's a grammatical mistake. My English teacher used to point these out in our written essays and such. ^_^

[Thomas Wolmer]

From my experience of coordinating the releases of some of the Grey Star books, I'd say that the grammar and "Manual of Style" nitpicking only contributes marginally to our lead times. There are so many other things that move slowly...

[ramthelinefeed]

Aye - it really didn't take two years to get the last book out -
Project Aon was mostly tidying up the first books all over again for Mongoose (for *commerical* release... I still don't quite see how they wangle that one! but anyways...)
indeed we'd been tidying them up for so long, I remember forgetting why we were doing it and I asked "why are we revisiting all these old books we already did, instead of doing new ones? -
and it turned out we were well ahead of Mongoose's schedule, so we could afford to slip a new one in - hence Book 18.

[Rusty Radiator]

I hope Mongoose are giving you all shares ...

[Doomy]

Actually, Mongoose is ensuring Project Aon's long-term future - by introducing new errors. Should keep things ticking along here for another 20 years or so.

[Taryn]

Only 20 years? They're republishing 28 books, adding 4 more, plus who knows what spinoff series and whatnot...

[ramthelinefeed]

radiator said:

I hope Mongoose are giving you all shares ...

No they're not.
In fact is seems to me Mongoose is commercially exploiting the not-for-profit volunteer efforts of Project Aon, which is a slightly curious situation.
But we don't really seem to mind.

[matthill]

I was wondering about that too. As a newbie, I don't really know the history of all this, but it does seem rather odd that you're providing work for free that is resulting in commercial sales of which you have no share of the profits.

Maybe Joe is very clever and that was his intention all along.... get the fans to help produce the books -- and then sell their work back to them! :-) I'm being cynical, forgive me.

I also don't understand how the books can still be released for free online now that they are being republished again?

[beowuuf]

Mongoose hopes the additional content and new artwork (and the fact you have them in much better to read and transport book form) will offset the fact that the source material is available here

[kylinee]

I certainly am someone who, despite knowing about these gamebooks online, and using them to play the game through every couple of months, still bought the Magnamund deal from Mongoose. It's just not the same. The internet is great, but looking at something on the screen, even the exact same words, is just not the same as holding the book in my greedy little hands and turning the pages.

[Taryn]

I'm the reverse...I tend to prefer the online editions, as clicking a link is a lot easier for me than flipping pages. Sometimes if I was in, say, Section 32, and the book told me to go to Section 243, I would forget the number and end up in 234 or 242 or something, throwing off the whole story. Or I would put the book down because I was interrupted or had to use the toilet, and come back and be like "OK, was I in 161, 162, or 163? They all are on these two pages..." Also, I can enjoy LW without having the physical books with me (which is the situation currently) and it's easier to use the computer to track my stats because, well, I'm already on the computer. My EP total would formerly get erased and re-written so many times eventually it smudged and even tore the paper after a few books...