I do not normally do this but this has really gotten under my skin. I really do appreciate the fine programmers that make the python scripts that have extended blender’s funtionality but here is my two major gripes.
!. WRITE DOCUMENTATION.
RESPOND TO BUG REPORTS/ERRORS.
Nothing is more frustrating then looking here in the forum seeing what others are doing with a plugin or script you cannot get it to work or if you do get it to run at all you do not understand what you are suppose to do after you get the interface up. There is one particular script here that has several pages of thread with people saying “IT ROCKS DUDE” but with nothing or very little explaining how to use it. I have posted 4 questions in the thread, wrote both the co-writer’s pms and gone on blender chat and still cannot get it to work as the screen shots here say it should.
I’m not sure about this myself: the fun part of script writing is the programming itself! So I’d much rather that programmers wrote the scripts without documentation than not write them at all…
Maybe we could have a sticky thread for people who want to write scripts but aren’t interested in documentation: something like “documentation required” - then people like me who aren’t talented enough to write real scripts themselves could donate some of our time to doing the documentation for them…
You know I have been tempted several times to do just that. Especially with some of the non native english speaking programmers. There docs are normally ok but just need some small tweaking to make the clearer to a colloquial speaker
I have always found documentation to be a problem myself. I DO write documentation, but I seem to have a problem presenting the information in some digestable format. I tend to be longwinded (just like my posts on elysiun), making it quite unreadable it seems. I have a problem keeping it compact.
I have found it quite frustrating in the past having spent almost as much time on the documentation as on the script development, that people just keep asking questions that are already answered in the documentation. And some just don’t read it at all I guess. Some time ago, I saw a post, asking questions about how to get the old refraction plugin to work, while the example file has the documentation included in a text window right next to the 3d view…
I think people tend to like a visual presentation the most rather than text.