HL Authoring Kit

[jfrazierjr]

Originally Posted by joelcifer

thanks man, what is a good program to work with XML's?

Assuming Windows, for free I would suggest Notepad++ AND you download the plugin for XML tools. It won't help you visualize things the way for pay programs do, but at the least you can ensure the xml is well formed. xml has some syntax requirements to a file to work properly or it won't load into programs that "read" xml. Honestly, the rules are relatively simple, but it REALLY easy to miss a closing tag or quote or something like that(one of the benefits the for pay tools come with is that they automatically close quotes and tags for you so you don't forget!). I tend to use XML spy (one of those REALLY expensive tools I was talking about) at work for some things, but for simple xml editing, I still use Notepad++(even with work stuff sometimes).

I have not used Textpad in years, but at the time, I am fairly sure it did not have full support for XML. granted, that may have changed.

[joelcifer]

Originally Posted by AndrewD2

I would like to point out that I suggested going through the walk-through and reading the documentation I linked. Which answers many questions you've already asked.

the walk through is over 800 pages, do I have to read all of it?

[Farling]

Originally Posted by joelcifer

the walk through is over 800 pages, do I have to read all of it?

I'm sure the walk through wasn't that long.

It provides a good understanding of the basics, and without the basics you won't be able to do all the good stuff

[AndrewD2]

Sorry I guess I was assuming you'd go through the website and not the PDF.

The walkthrough is here: http://hlkitwiki.wolflair.com/index....s_Walk-Through

Scanning over the sections in the website are helpful. You're going to need to understand the basic concepts.

If you have programming experience feel free to just jump into the walkthrough, but I always assume people have none when I explain stuff.