Help:Readers

This page lists things readers might want to know, related to the website and how wikis work, etc. Also see this page with important information about games.

Categories
Pages that start with Category: are semi-automatically created. Categories are simply lists of pages that are grouped in some specific way. If a page does not exist yet, it cannot be inside a category, so some categories will have alternative lists that include things without pages.

Misconceptions
There's a few common misconceptions or obscure things that many people don't know about or have been mislead to believe, due to poor VDC documentation or otherwise. It's assumed that you know these things on this wiki.
 * FGDs don't show you everything an entity can do. Many people believe that if something isn't in the FGD, it's impossible. The wild inaccuracies of FGDs are why this wiki documents by code. (At least, as much as we possibly can. Due to many games not having public code, there's some things which simply cannot be seen or determined.)
 * Outputs are able to send values automatically into the parameter box used by inputs. The outputs available to use these things extensively. These values can be overridden manually by the mapper too, if desired. This feature is put to use very, very rarely.
 * Portal 1 has (nearly) every piece of code that the Half-Life 2 episodes have. It's basically an Episode 2 mod.
 * Half-Life 2 Episode 1 and 2 run on the exact same code. There is absolutely no distinction between them except the assets in each game folder. (The ep2 flashlight can be enabled in ep1, simply by changing a certain .cfg setting.) This codebase is called the Episodic branch.