Looking for tool to help write software design document

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1 comment, last by Xanthus 15 years, 5 months ago
Hey! I'm just about to finish writing my game design document. I've written that in LaTeX. For those of you who don't know what LaTeX is, the result is regular document in a pdf. This is good and simple if I want to send it to someone else for review or whatever. But now comes the time to write a software design document, and I know from experience that those can get much longer. In a software engineering course in school, our requirements document (game design document in the case of a game) was about 35 pages, and the software design document was like 120 pages or something. Also, I think the software design document is, more often than the game design document, used as a reference where you look things up as you are developing the software. With these things in mind, having the software design in a regular text document does not seem very convenient. I think the best solution would be to have the software design document split up into html pages or something, with modules containing links to classes, and classes containing links to functions etc. I thought there must be some tool out there that does this kind of thing. I mean writing the whole html would be tiresome. Do you know of anything close to what I'm looking for? Maybe I'll end up writing my own tool, because I care very much about readability or whatever of the document. By the way, if anyone thinks this thread is more suited to another subforum like Software Engineering or General Programming feel free to move it.
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I can't really answer about the best tool for software design document, but all of my work for game design documents have been with Word. I have found this invaluable because not only can you add links inside of the documents, but coupled with Visio you can embed your Visio charts directly into the Word document. Being able to embed a Visio flowchart does wonders for communicating the flow of game states and menu flow with programmers (who seem to not particularly enjoy reading text).
laziness is the foundation of efficiency | www.AdrianWalker.info | Adventures in Game Production | @zer0wolf - Twitter
Microsoft Office has great tools to help. If you don't have it and can't afford it or can't be bothered to buy it, try OpenOffice.
xdXD

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