After spending quite a bit of time through the DF Hack user manual, I've been having a troubling time figuring out what I'm supposed to do with the tools given to me. I can see it has mod tools, but it just give me a set of standard functions and not much else. It seems strange to me that the program encourages users to make use of its advanced features, but do nothing more than tell them to figure it out on their own?
That's what I never understood about DF's modding community. It appears that almost everyone is self-taught in some way, and the only in-depth and meaningful tutorial that I've been able to find is on the wiki. I have done extensive searching and have found absolutely no meaningful or helpful tutorials on utilizing DF Hack, and that's incredibly strange to me. Surely, with all the time DF Hack has been out, no one has thought to write up even a brief tutorial for new modders?
How am I to make use of these functions and scripts and plugins? How do I make custom raws? How do I make custom syndromes and announcements? It seems that the only way to figure these things out, is to indeed do intense research through both the documentation and the files provided in DF Hack. I found that looking through Deon's Fallout Mod was an interesting way to see how things worked, but there needs to be a a more comprehensive and in-depth guide for making such modifications.
If there are any in-depth guides for creating mods that take advantage of DF Hack's features, please let me know.
The best option would be to learn how to read the source code, which is something I'm not terribly sure of my own ability to do, or at least follow along.
Unfortunately, the project is very big and complex because it needs to interfere in a very complex process whose internals aren't as well understood as I'd like, which is Dwarf Fortress.
Sure, Toady could tell them about it, but he's busy building the game, and he's reticent about this for various reasons (though I think I remember him talking about a plan to give the dfhack developers memory maps for the various structures in the next release).
Nobody seems like they are in a position to write a tutorial about all of it, partly because the potential of the exposed features isn't exactly quantified either as there still seems to be a surprising amount of innovation going on in some of the scripts, but really, the best people to write the docs for the features are the ones who wrote them, and since they seem to be a bit behind on that, not that it's easy to balance writing the code and the documentation, it's hard to get started.