ID:1343157
 Aug 3 2013, 4:38 am
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As it stands, people who want to discuss their code, who made a cool tech demo, discovered some feature of DM, or wrote some snippet they want to show off will make a post in Tutorials & Snippets. These posts are usually unpolished, and they have zilch pedagogic value, but they clog up the forum and detract from the visibility of proper tutorials and snippets. The suggestion is to re-imagine Design Philosophy to include this sort of technical discussion, and in this way narrow the current concept of Tutorials & Snippets into something more serviceable.
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Well they're both forum changes requesting somewhere to discuss projects, although this one is more focused on smaller discussion as opposed to game development discussion, both could find a home in the same place very easily, it's something that people obviously want since it's already been requested a billion times.
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I don't think you'd handle both in the same area, as their audiences are different. One is (as per the name) developer-centric, the other better represents an early marketing avenue.
I would expect to find say ... a debate about the merits of two different kinds of pathfinding algorithms in Developer Talk, but would not have placed such a discussion in any kind of "New Games" discussion, which I would see as having a more non-technical, gaming audience. | |
No, but they both cater to the same need:
A place to discuss programming outside of hub listed projects. It would be ideal to have two new forums, but since not a single forum has been added like, ever, it's a pretty solid alternative to just have one area where developers can chat. Its namesake after all, is Developer Talk, a place for developers (regardless of what they are actually developing, be it a game, a snippet or just a bored gallivant into text handling) to discuss their project. | |
But they don't. One does as you say, the other discusses and (importantly) shows off bleeding edge, new games. One's a technical discussion avenue, one is a marketing / design avenue.
The addition of new sections isn't that big a deal, getting the purpose and divide of the sections intentions is. | |
Yes I assumed at much, I guess re-reading that topic that I posted Keeth worded it in a way to seem like it was a marketing place for unfinished games, so you have a fair argument.
Personally I just want somewhere to get feedback on my systems, be it programming, or gameplay. To me, marketing is all a part of development, although I guess literally it isn't. | |
I'd support a repurposing of a subforum or two. I'd question, though, the need for more subforums when the overall posting traffic around here isn't all that high to begin with.
If we were getting hundreds of posts per day, then dividing them up by narrower and narrower topics would make sense. But with a relatively slow influx of posts, it makes more sense to divide them up more broadly. Why make forum readers browse 2 or 3 separate subforums to see 1 or 2 new posts in each, when you could combine those three subforums and save the reader a few clicks. Browsing one forum with half a dozen new posts is far more convenient. | |
So so, I've never really bought that particular argument myself, that it's a problem. What I have seen as an issue (because the current site iteration killed it off more or less in terms of games vs developer discussions) is if you throw in two tangentially related subjects, one usually dies off.
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I disagree with this. Dumping all of those little snippets into Design Philosophy is not going to help that topic. I value Design Philosophy, and I would hate to see it get overrun by all of these snippets. You would no longer be able to easily find large, inspiring discussions on the methods of world design. Snippets simply do not belong there.
The way I see it, these snippets just need to be given their own special place, where they can't interfere with larger, more meaningful discussions. This would also make the snippets much more searchable, so that you could easily find some code you are looking for. You could think of snippets as being somewhat more like mini-libraries of commonly reused code. This just wouldn't fit in with either the Tutorials or Design Philosophy, which serve a completely different purpose. Basically this is what I'm suggesting: 1. Rename Tutorials and Snippets to Tutorials and Guides. 2. Round up all of the little snippets and herd them into their own searchable Snippets "database". 3. Moderate the Tutorials and Guides section. If something is not sufficient to be called a tutorial or guide, then move it to Design Philosophy. Also, if the original post just contains useful code and not much else, then move it to the new Snippets section. I can imagine it might be pretty hard to separate the Snippets from the Tutorials at this point, since they have been stuck together for so long, but once the transfer is finished, it will result in a much more usable forum. What this means is that the Tutorials and Guides section will be filled with nothing but actual useful tutorials and guides, that are generally well designed. The new Snippets section would serve as a place where anyone can dump random, but useful code snippets. There obviously wouldn't need to be as much moderation for that one. If there was never an "and" in "Tutorials and Snippets" to begin with, we wouldn't have this problem. Snippets are just incompatible with the other topics and need to be separated into their own section. | |
Right now there's no need to separate snippets meant and documented for public use and tutorials. That's what I see the Tutorials & Snippets forum being used for. The problem is when someone's snippet falls into one of the categories mentioned above, e.g. patched-together, hacky tech demos or forewords to a technical discussion about the quality of said snippet.
I don't consider Design Philosophy a very good forum, in terms of the breadth and usefulness of the subject, but also in terms of traffic. That being said, whether we create a new Developer Talk forum or DP ends up being adapted for that purpose, the point is that we need a catch-all dumping ground for developer discussions that don't necessarily fit into one of the present categories (and so end up leaking into other forums, esp. T&S). | |
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