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Washing Gamedev T-shirt
Some of you have received your swag packages. Grats!
I just want to stress that, when you wash your gamedev.se t-shirt, PLEASE make sure you turn it inside out, use cold water and non-bleach detergent. We used digital printing on the black T, so it requires extra care.
We have received a few reports from our gaming.se community that the design faded after one wash.(which isn't normal, since my gaming shirt looks fine after many washes). Anyway, just want to bring this to your attention.

There was also a small note inside the thank-you letter, about washing the shirt inside-out. I guess people don't read manuals or instruction sheets. :) Btw, the shirts are great, very comfortable fabric.

@Jin, it was a really good idea to put the small items into a plastic bag. My envelop was heavily damaged and had a large whole at the side. So the inner bag prevent the things from falling out. Luckily the content was unharmed.

@Jin, could you define cold as a temperature range?

@eBusiness as long as it's not on hot or warm then it's OK. I know different washer brands' actual temperature settings may vary

@Jin I am familiar with neither the term 'hot' nor 'warm'. I can convert from those strange American temperatures, but not from ambiguous words. So far all I know is that 40 deg Celsius is too warm.

@eBusiness I think tap water temperature is what "cold" setting in on my washer, I estimate it's about 18-22 C.

@eBusiness A 30° wash is a cold wash. Damn I can't believe I'm posting this on GameDev...

Or you could just not wash it and leave it in its pristine original state.


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Unaswered questions list shows some questions with answers to them
Is this something that's a site-wide problem or just something to do with my user settings? If I go to https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/unanswered I get a couple questions scattered on the list with a few answers already.
Is the Unanswered list supposed to show all questions with no accepted answers or is it like SO where all listed questions should have no answers of any kind?
Strangely enough, this Meta site only shows questions with no answers at all, like I would expect in the main GameDev site.

We define unanswered, as specified on the upper right of that page:

175
questions with no upvoted answers

That clears it up. It was confusing, having seen the questions picked differently than on SO.

To the left of the 'Unanswered Questions' header, there is a navigation element that lets you select which types of unanswered questions you would like to see.
I'm guessing you have it set to 'votes', or probably newest. If you want to see questions with no answers at all, just select that option.

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

sort: votes


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Outdated answered questions
If there's a question and an accepted answer for it, the same question basically should not be asked again. However, it's not unusual for the field to advance, and thus some q/a pairs might be outdated. Should the moderator who decides to close the duplicate consider this fact and possibly turn the question into a community wiki?
(related, but not duplicate: Why don't we allow repeat questions?)

Do you have some examples? Generally questions that could rapidly get out of date would be closed as 'too localized.'

For instance: How to implement rendering technique X, where API advancements might bring better solutions in the future; Another example would be comparing X and Y, where both might change.

Related discussion on MSO: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11705/how-to-deal-with-obsolete-answers

Questions to compare X and Y are usually bad questions irrespective of age.

I don't know if this question really has a "correct answer", being discussion.

In the cases where the question itself is not outdated, but the answers are, I think the best solution is to simply add an answer to the original question (and thus, for any duplicate questions to be closed as duplicates). The closed duplicates will still act as breadcrumbs to the main question, and by adding new answers over time the question will be further enhanced with a historical progression of valid techniques, which is interesting.
The downside is that the original author will likely never bother to update the "accepted" answer, so upvotes by the community will be the primary way of indicating that a newer answer is good. I'm not sure there's too much of a problem with that, though.
I feel that trying to introduce some kind of discretionary duplicate handling policy would be difficult, error-prone, and tedious -- for very limited benefit.
In the cases where the question itself can become outdated to the point of non-usefulness, I still mainly that's a case for closing due to the topic being too localized.

While I agree with this in theory, if the questions aren't visible and people who need help are getting to them via search engines, then we don't have experienced eyes on the answers to make sure they're still valid.

I do feel like people asking duplicates is useful -- but not so the duplicates get answers, but so that we can re-link to existing questions to (1) get them increased visibility to bring answers up to date, and (2) make those questions even more discoverable.

We do have the experimental "greatest hits" route which should highlight the questions that are seen from the outside the most:
https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/greatest-hits
And of course bounties were improved to solicit updates for questions that need it:
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/09/bounty-reasons-and-post-notices/

Oh sure, debut a bunch of great bounty features right as I'm about to cross the 10k rep line.

Leaving the new question open defeats the entire purpose of SE. If I find the newer one it might have a link to the older one, but if I find the older one, hardly ever has someone gone back to update it with information from the new one. This is exactly the kind of problem that happens on forums, which SE was designed to solve, and why questions can be closed as duplicates at all.
You could, I suppose, delete the entire old question after the new one has been approved. That solves that problem, but raises a host of others. A better approach might be closing the old question as a duplicate of the new one, but that's definitely going to be confusing sometimes.
Making the question CW seems irrelevant. Why would you do that? You can edit (or propose edits for) any question/answer. CW is more about questions where rep generation or "the single right answer" makes little sense.
I still don't see a concrete problem here. "The field advances", yes, but not very fast, and rarely in a way that invalidates truly good answers. (Admittedly, I view that somewhat tautologically - one characteristic of a truly good answer is that it rises above the immediacy of "this exact thing is what you do right now with this API-of-the-week/month/year".)

I know this is not an answer, but it is very closely related to the question. I am not sure whether I should open a new question or simply continue in discussion here.

Recently there was a questions about engines in LUA: https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/57964/lua-3d-game-programming

these questions are usually considered OT nowadays
there is a duplicate of the question, but seriously outdated: Love2D engine for Lua; What about 3D?

The problem is that google search for Lua 3D ranks the outdated question as first! Now this is a great example of SEO (exploit), but it doesn't really help. The next results is of bigger help I believe.
The asker of the original question actually tried some the answers from the "duplicate" question, but it did not help him.
SE has a motivation system based on reputation, but community wiki seems to be based on good-will only. How do you motivate anyone to update community wiki? Who's responsibility it is to keep an eye on the outdated information?

The idea I think is that the new question, marked as a duplicate, directs potential answer givers to post on the old question.  I'd rather see any new/updated answers posted to the question page that's the top Google hit than see a bunch of new answers to a new question while the old question keeps on being useless to Googlers.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


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Advertising for a post-doc positing in gaming
Clearly gamedev is not a good place to advertise a post-doctoral position which focuses on certain aspects of game development.  Problem is, I don't really know of good places (which do not charge exhorbitant fees) to do so.  I do think the people on gamedev do know the answer to this, but it would be improper for me to ask directly - thus the question here on Meta!
So: where would be good places to post an ad for a game-related post-doc position?

EDIT: I am aware of Gamasutra's jobs board, gamedev's careers hub, gamesindustry.biz's job board, as well as Careers 2.0.  But these all charge non-trivial fees, without offering any certainty that anyone with a relevant PhD might be reading the ad.  Where else?

Considering your implementation language is Haskell, that kinda further reduces the market - I think the Haskell mailing list your post is on, is the best you're going to get.

Anyone who manages to get a 'relevant' PhD can learn Haskell in very little time.  The current work has all been done by (good) undergraduate students, none of whom knew Haskell when they started their work.

Minus the link to the actual ad, this seems like a reasonable question for the main site. Why is it here and not there? (With the link to the actual ad, this is no more appropriate for meta than the main site - meta is not an anything-goes forum any more than the main site is.)

Do others agree with Joe?  In which case, without the actual link to the ad, I will post it.  But I would rather not post it, just to see it closed and bounced back to meta...

"Where can one find and post ads for post-doctoral positions in game development?" seems very much in-line with the other questions we have about hiring, e.g. http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/2374, http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/282. I might suggest expanding the range from "post-doctoral" to "academic" and make it CW - that way it can attract related things like graduate fellowships as well.

StackOverflow Careers, maybe? I don't know how what they charge compares to other venues... but it's an option. GDNet also has a Careers section that appears to already contain a fair number of academic positions.

StackOverflow Careers charges $350/ad, GameDev charges $185/ad.  We just don't have that kind of budget for academic positions!  Normally there are all sorts of free channels to advertise for post-doc positions, but gaming is 'different'.  If I was fairly certain that there were sufficiently many PhDs reading these posts, I would find the money, somehow.  But I am not even sure that these sites actually reach the 'right' market. [Gamasutra's jobs board and gamesindustry.biz also charge fees]

As far as I know, there are no PhDs among the most-active members of the Game Development SE, at least. Game development doesn't tend to attract that many academics.

True, but that seems to be changing 'rapidly', with quite a few academic programs being set up in the last few years.  I do know a couple of people who did get a PhD for game-related work.  So I am still optimistic.

I suggest spreading the word at relevant schools and universities. Surely they are amenable to free listings for postdoc positions, and that's the correct audience for these positions, yes?

Indeed.  But there is no 'easy' way to reach that audience.  So I figured I would ask here, the second-closest audience.


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Is "How was entire game X made?" off-topic?
In the past, we1 decided that "How can I make an entire game like X?" was a bad question. There seems to be a new-ish variant of this, "What technology did entire game X use?"

What technology does the iPhone game “Zombie Highway” use?
What game engine does Mega Jump use?
What language was used to make Jetpack Joyride?
Game engine used for iPhone Zombie Cafe?

This seems no more useful to me than the first kind. Fundamentally, it's the same question - how do I make an entire game? / how was an entire game made?
Usually a better question can be formed by extracting the parts someone is actually interested in. This uses the game as a shared reference explaining the goal, rather than the whole game being the question per se.

How does Half Life's covering work?
How do they do the 3d effect in Animal Crossing?
How to create the “drunk camera” effect in GTA 4?

How do other people feel about either categorically closing (or drastically editing into the second form) such questions?
1 A very tiny subset of "we" that didn't actually include me.

the first ones are almost trivia questions, aren't they?

I think the last 3 are OK questions.

My take on this is: Usually nobody except the creators of the game know the exact technology that was used. So unless the creators of the game happen to be part of this community, all answers are going to be speculative.
Also: How does it help to know the technology that was used? Does it really matter if a game was written in C++ or Java? Does it matter which 3d modelling tool was used to create the assets?
If you know that game X was written in C++, does that help you in any way as a game-developer? I think not.
I think questions in the form of: "How can I achieve a similar effect as in Game X" are way better (example).

Hmm, I think in many cases it's easy to see which engine was used for a game, especially 3D ones. And to beginners, it matters a lot what technology was used, because presumably they want a good idea of which skills are (a) employable and (b) proven to work.

If somebody is interested to get an idea what technologies are employable and proven to work, why not ask a question along these lines? Asking about technology used in a specific game still seems pointless to me. An appropriate form for this would be a huge table of games that lists the technology used for each game... but having something like this as separate questions on a site like gamedev.SE doesn't sound too pleasing to me :)

Because asking which technologies are employable and proven to work, that's either vague, likely to incite a flame war, or both. :) Picking one specific target does at least narrow down the potential answers, and it does help - asking about how Canabalt was made and how Gears of War 3 were made will yield quite different answers and will guide people in different directions accordingly. I'm not saying the question is very useful to the community in general, but I can definitely see why an individual would ask it. I agree that a single table might be better.

@Kylotan I see what you're getting at and I guess you have a point here. I still think the question could be reasonably formulated without inciting a flame-war though. Eg. "What game engines should I learn/look at if I wanted to create a game like Canabalt?". Still quite vague and very similar to "What engine was used to create Canabalt?" but it allows for more valid answers, as the goal is to build a game like Canabalt, not asking what was used to build Canabalt itself.

I agree - we should ideally try and understand why they're asking about that specific thing and perhaps edit the question so that the answers are useful to people in a similar position.

Part of the reason "how to make game X" is a bad question is because it's overly broad.
https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/faq#dontask

Your questions should be reasonably scoped. If you can imagine an entire book that answers your question, you’re asking too much.

Now these questions aren't terribly interesting, but they're at least reasonably scoped.  Granted, they aren't exactly solving a particular problem and the asker should drill down (like you're getting at), but I don't agree that they're the same classification of question.

The big difference I see between the first group of questions and the second group is that the first group of questions does not seek to solve a problem while the second group does (notice all the first group are "what" questions while all the second group are "how" questions). As Jeff pointed out, they are essentially trivia questions.
I think an appropriate general response to such questions goes something like, "What does that game do that you want to do? Inquire about that instead." If this line of thought isn't helpful, there's probably no substance behind the question.


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Including "Too Localized" in the what not to ask
As of right now, this question is worded is such a way it is too localized (I submitted an edit to try to be more general without changing the meaning, so it might be changed now).
I was looking in the FAQ, under "What kind of questions should I not ask here?", it doesn't say anything about questions are are too localized, but that is a reason we can flag a question. Can that criteria be added to the list?

Note that the FAQ does mention that "too localized" is a possible close reason under the "why some questions are closed" section.

As Josh pointed out, it is in the close section of the FAQ:
https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/faq#close
additionally, this is also noted in the "How to Ask" advice, which is linked a number of places including the FAQ and the question ask page itself:
https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/how-to-ask

Make it relevant to others
We like to help as many people at a time as we can. Make it clear how your question is relevant to more people than just you, and more of us will be interested in your question and willing to look into it.


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When the bounty goes away?
In this questions, Are the Minecraft animations hardcoded into the game? why the bounty is still there? Shouldn't it go away, when the answer has been selected?

Bounty awards are no longer tied to accepted answer in any way.
See the blog post: Improvements to the Bounty System
If you are the bounty owner, you can award the bounty to a particular answer by simply clicking the bounty amount icon that appears next to each answer, as pictured below:

Bounties are selected independently of the accepted answer.


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Will there be a great migration once the 3D Graphics site opens?
Once the 3D Graphics, Modeling & Applications site opens, will there be a lot of questions migrated, or does it really matter?
Questions like

Any good screencast for learning blender?
How to convert a Maya object to a VBO?
3DS Max equivalent to vertex weight painting
resource for “Substance Maps” 3ds Max 2012

Also, will tags like maya, 3dsmax, or cinema-4d be deleted?

If it opens; it's not even in closed beta yet, and we shouldn't be migrating stuff until at least open beta.

I like the optimism :)

99% and counting...

@Cyclops awesome!

Maybe.  It'll probably be a coordinated effort with whoever the mods on that site are to determine if they want the content.
As far as the tags are concerned, sometimes you're dealing with the export process of certain tools and pipelines, so I'm sure there are plenty of legitimate questions that would have those tags.

I think if the question is reasonably specific to game development it will make sense to be here. Just as there's a "C++ question" and a "C++ in game development" question (the former likely suitable for StackOverflow), there will probably be "Maya" questions and "Maya in game development" questions.
I also think that the proliferation of SE sites with narrower and narrower scope will eventually result in a saturation that prevents more from being kicked off, and in fact I think the newer ones will have to struggle much harder to find a critical mass than the older ones.

CGI is now in private Beta! 7 days (or more), till it's open to the public.
Update - and, now, it's closed. RIP, CGI... :(

I feel the vast majority of 3D.SE questions would focus around the specifics of modelling / animation / rendering in a 3D modeling program.
In fact, there's probably much less overlap than between, for example, Gamedev.SE and
https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=openGL

Well, now that the site is closed, I guess that answers that question.

exactly, Nicol Bolas


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BEST BEST BESSSSSSST! argh?
Wish there was a system to prevent people from using the word Best in their question title. :(
What are the most popular software development methodologies used by game studios?
The best algorithm enhancing alpha-beta?
What are some good learning resources for OpenGL?
What are some good tools for prototyping map layout and design?
What C++ containers should I use for my UI elements?
Best place for learning how to write games in Unity3d
How can I set up a flexible framework for handling achievements?
https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/18394/best-physics-engine-for-xna
What platform should I use for a master server?
What is the best way to learn Cocos2D?
Best 3rd Party DRM Solutions
What kind of data structure should I use for a resource container?
What technology should I use for a web-based game?
...and this list goes on forever!...forever!...forever!

Related, but on a different site: http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/1627/should-best-be-a-stop-word-for-questions

I suspect part of it, is a desire to avoid asking list questions that would get closed - so people apply a totally vague criterion that should also get closed... :)

And what would you propose as an alternative? Most of those questions are severely flawed with or without the use of "best."

Hey don't blame me, I've been trying to vote them away for years...

Incidentally, there is a system - if you write a question like "Best way to foo?" or "What's the best foo?" the site will warn you "The question you're asking appears subjective and is likely to be closed.". However, no one votes to close them around here, so it's just lying.

Ideally the term 'best' can be replaced with an adjective or phrase that describes a more objective and precise requirement, eg. "easiest", "smallest", "available on most platforms", "most fully documented", "with most shipped titles", etc. Eliminating subjectivity is going to be impossible but it can certainly be reduced.

It's too bad you didn't set the topic to, "Best solution for people using 'Best' in question?" :)

For what it's worth, I just went through and modified the questions in the title for a lot of those examples given.

@JoeWreschnig no-one around here generally has enough rep to close vote questions. There are very few people with enough rep - it's quite depressing that a 650 (myself) is #18. Maybe we need another question about using a bell curve to determine rights on the SE sites...

Don't worry, @Jonathan, in the all time rankings you're only #172.  Of course, we still only have 25 users with 3000+ rep.

Best way to stop people from using "Best"?

Do you have any specific arguments as to why these questions are bad? Perhaps more importantly, do they negatively affect your experience of the website, your general quest for knowledge, or your reading of non-best questions?

Yes. Allow me to read from the faq:

You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.

"Best", for the vast majority of uses of that term, is not practical or answerable. Take this question: What is the best way to learn OpenGL?
Is that answerable? Absolutely not. Any answer given will be based entirely on opinion, because there is no best way to learn anything. I, for one, believe that the Superbible version 5 is not a particularly great learning guide because I disagree with its teaching methods. Does that make me "right"? Is anyone "right"?
By what criteria is the current accepted answer accepted? Indeed, I would say that the current accepted answer is fantastically bad, because learning from samples encourages copy-and-paste coding. Learning best involves real instruction, not "here's some code that does this!"
But that's just my opinion. That isn't "the answer", because the question cannot be answered definitively.
If there is no right answer, then it's not a question: it's an invitation for discussion. And while I believe that Stack Exchange does need a way to actually discuss things (and no, chat doesn't count. Way too restrictive. It's like trying to explain quantum mechanics over text-messages), that way should not be to ask a "question" that isn't really a question.
The Q&A part of the site needs to be sacrosanct. That's what makes Stack Exchange good: that it focuses on getting answers to real, answerable questions. And the vast majority of "best" questions are not answerable. They're debate. They're discussion. They're opinion. They're dialog.
Fine for a forum. But Stack Exchange is not a forum.
Every non-question that remains open is an invitation for others to post non-questions. Every non-question that remains open tells everyone that this is really a forum, not a Q&A site. And that will only lead to the death of gamedev as an SE site.
Stack Overflow works because they are ruthless about snuffing out this sort of thing. That's what allowed them to get where they are today. Anything that even smells of discussion is instantly killed and buried in a shallow grave. And while that can be off-putting to those who want discussion, it benefits the site overall.
Tolerating non-questions will only lead to getting more non-questions. And that means less actual questions and answers.

Honestly my suggestion is to vote those questions down and explain why.  "Best way to learn X" is subjective, vote it down.  "Best performing Y" isn't specific enough, vote it down.  "Best middleware that does X" doesn't explain use cases, vote it down.

It's irresistable though! Us programmers are always searching for the best and most optimal solution to everything. Look all the way back to the hackers in the 60's, optimizing the crap out of their programs so that they would run faster than their peers'. Nowadays we're not so much into optimization of code any more, but there's a growing industry obsession with optimization of workflow - see for example Lifehacker. But there's always the tendency to always want the "best" anything, and unlike in the real world where "best" is usually not clear or things generally have downsides, in the computer world things are abstract and just made of data. Maybe you can't afford the best computer because you don't have enough money, but you can always figure out the best solution to a problem or (attempt to) write the best code.
And while best is generally opinionated, there's often a common opinion of what's "best", or at least agreement on some things that are not best. For example if you ask what is the best pathfinding algorithm, you'll get the answer of A*. It's generally agreed upon to be the "best".
As an user I like questions that seek out the "best" something, but as a mod I need to be careful not to like them too much. But mods represent the users, so if the users like "best" questions, then who are we to ban them? They're garnering valuable traffic and new visitors, and thanks to the Stack Exchange platform, a new answer or edit can always be added as information falls out of date.
Do you have any specific arguments as to why these questions are bad? Perhaps more importantly, do they negatively affect your experience of the website, your general quest for knowledge, or your reading of non-best questions?
Just food for thought...

Like Cyclops said, "best" is too vague.  Even "best performing" is too vague.  They're bad questions because there isn't a specific problem to solve.   "Best" style questions are just like gorilla vs shark questions, but without limiting it to a subset of answers.

@Ricket: See my answer to understand why they are bad.

@NicolBolas: It doesn't explain why they are bad, it explains why they are against the FAQ, which I already know. Like you said, Stack Exchange needs a way to discuss things. I know the questions don't belong here, but we don't really have a standard forum to send them to. As you said, we need to be ruthless (according to the FAQ anyway), but as I said, if the users like "best" questions, who are we to ban them? Note the 33 upvotes and 31 favorites, and only 1 downvote, on your linked question.

@Ricket: You are a moderator; your job is to enforce the rules of the site, even if the people on that site would have let it go. The purpose of a moderator is to ensure that the sites rules are being followed. I find it discouraging that you're taking this position even though it is in clear violation of what constitutes a good question. You may like it, and other people may like it. But that's not what SE is about, and moderators should be doing their best to enforce the rules, both in letter and in spirit.

@Ricket: Questions like these hurt the site. They let Help Vampires in and encourage their participation. They make the site about debates of what is "best" instead of answering real, legitimate questions. Every minute someone spends composing an "answer" explaining their opinion about some "best" issue is time taken away from that person composing an answer to a real, legitimate question. The more of these you let in, the less effectively the site functions as a Q&A site.

@NicolBolas http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/  You have to realize that the site is supposed to be community moderated.  Diamond mods are "human exception handlers", and really should only intervene when the system itself either can't act quickly enough or when there are problem users who need to be communicated with on a personal level.  It isn't necessarily a moderator's job to enforce their particular opinion of the goal of the site.

That being said, I do think it is appropriate to bring up the topics that being discussed here for certain questions.  Just because a question is popular doesn't mean it's good for the site.  We want the kind of questions that bring experts to the site, and subjective, vague questions don't help that.  In the case of the "Best way to learn X", sure if you want to be pedantic there is no "best way to learn", but if the question was made CW (I just did this) and rephrased to be more of a "What are some of the better tutorials out there", then the Q and As still have some value to the site.

@Tetrad I agree entirely, thanks for clarifying.


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Is asking for learning resources on topic?
I'm interested in learning a few specific aspects of game programming and I wanted some recommendations. Are "recommendation" questions off topic here?

The Q&A site format is generally suited more towards finding answers to specific problems.
It's better to ask "How do I implement A*" instead of "Where can I find a tutorial on how to implement A*".
External resources are unreliable anyway, as links die, books go out of print, etc.
If you want to start from the ground up, there are already a ton of questions about that on the site and honestly I'd probably just close it as a dupe unless there's something specific in it that wasn't covered by other questions.

I'm really just wanting to learn about game AI and the different types and how to impliment them. I don't think that it would be practical for me to ask "How do I implement game AI?" lol. I guess I can ask in chat.

@OghmaOsiris In that case, I'd suggest either searching through the questions here for stuff you want to learn about, or asking in chat.  General questions like this would work better in the chat, anyway.


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Are programming problems (bugs in code) on topic?
From time to time questions with snippets of code crop up and the poster usually asks: "Why doesn't my code work".
Have a look at this recent question for an example of what I mean.
I have been voting to close such questions as too localized, but in most of the cases they don't get closed. I'm also kinda unsure about the value of these questions.
What's your take on this? Are these questions valuable to our site? Keep them or close them?

This is one of those things where I think mob rule has pretty much determined the answer to that.
It seems like the consensus from looking at voting patterns is that it's definitely on a case by case basis.  It's pretty easy to tell from the question whether or not the person understands what they're doing.  Fundamental misunderstandings and questions by people who don't understand how to code are generally voted down.  Questions about API and specific functionality in some library (i.e. "here's what I'm trying to do but not getting the expected result") are usually acceptable.
That being said, I've always told people that they should vote what they think.  If you think that question you posted is bad, vote it down and explain why.  I wouldn't worry too much about what other people think.

OMG, they added mobs to Gamedev? Oh wait, you meant us peasants... :)

Sounds reasonable. I guess the voting system will take care of this.

If the question is reasonably well put together and contains enough information to answer, I'd answer it. The more a question is about the usage of a particular API, versus "help me debug this snippet," the better -- but I'd still answer the latter.
However (and especially for "debug this for me" questions), if the question lacks sufficient information, or if it contains too much information, I won't.
If the only thing I can do is speculate as to what might be wrong based on assumptions I can make about the missing pieces of code or the problem description, I might put those in comments. But I believe a good answer contains relatively little speculation, so if that's all I can do, the question isn't answerable until edited. In those cases, I'd downvote and comment or vote to close (or perhaps both).

I have a hard time categorically saying to close these because often - say 30% of the time - it ends up being a common problem someone else will have later. For example, if you follow Python Stack Overflow questions, confusion about list.sort sorting in-place rather than returning a new list is common.
Answering this is valuable first because you can create a canonical answer explaining the problem and hopefully redirect future askers to it (close as dup is usually easier to find agreement on than close as too localized), and second because it does create a resource that stops people from asking, if they are the people that actually read the suggested questions when asking, or search rather than immediately ask.
Unfortunately you often don't know whether it's a good or bad question until you put the work into answering it anyway.

I believe that there's a "natural control" of this kind of questions. Usually they will get less attention than other questions precisely because they are "too localized", and less people will take the time to look into it (it's boring to look for errors in other's people code).
On the other hand, some people might enjoy helping out, and in the future other people goggling for the same error might find the solution in this site.
And by "natural control" I meant that when posting this kind of question you will have less attention than other more interesting questions. And, probably, that's what you deserve.


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Why am I seeing (erroneous?) flags notifications in the site's top bar?
Occasionally when I log in, I see a notification count (with a yellow background) to the left of the "tools" link:

This is not the suggested edit count notification, which is orange and usually shows up to the right of the "tools" link (if I recall correctly). When I hover over this notification badge, I get a tooltip telling me there are flags to be acted on.
However, clicking the icon brings me to the last "tools" page I was at, and there are never any flagged posts displayed. Previously I have only see flagged post count notifications when I was already navigated to the tools page, and never in the top bar. Anybody know what's going on? Is this a bug?

Perhaps this is unrelated, but I also just noticed that I can't actually scroll to the bottom of the flags page in the tools view (using Safari 5.1.1 (7534.51.22) on a Mac). As soon as the footer with the copyright and SE link collection would scroll into view, the page jumps back up to the top of the page. Weird.)

Thanks for reporting this. Basically, for obvious reasons when you go to that page we filter out any flags about you. No: those 7 weren't for you! However, there was a bug (to do with database nulls) which meant that this filter was also excluding posts by deleted users.
However, the count in the page-header is much simpler and doesn't apply this check - hence it was reporting the flags for deleted users, when the main screen was not.
(I should clarify; this does not mean that flags against deleted users were not being processed - it just means that only ♦ moderators could see them).
This bug is fixed in the next build, and I've also rigged it to report the number of posts rather than the number of flags.


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So what's the community feeling on someone posting a "review X game (I made) for me" kind of question?
As was mentioned in a few questions, it's crucial to get good advice/input/feedback on your game.
Given the structure of SE sites, I think it would make the most sense if the question was slanted at reviewing a particular aspect with a particular goal, i.e.
BAD: "review my game"
GOOD: "please comment on the colour scheme used in the buttons on this screen: ..."
... albeit this is not as useful as a whole random "what do you like and not like" question (which is too broad and too hard to pick a "best answer" for).
What's your take on it?

So what's the community feeling on someone posting a "review X game (I made) for me" kind of question?

Such a question is a lot like "Best" questions: fundamentally not answerable.
A review is by definition an opinion. It can be based on facts, but it is ultimately what someone thinks. SE sites are not discussion forums, and if that's all gamedev.se is going to be, we may as well close it now and move to gamedev.net.
Stack Exchange is not for everything. And one of those "everythings" that it is not for is reviews.

I agree with this.  If you really want to get feedback on your game from this community, ask in the chat, there might be a few people willing to give your game a shot.

Even then, wouldn't gaming's chat be slightly more suitable for that?

They're both good places to ask for a game review, the gaming chat would probably be a good test of "do gamers like it", the gamedev chat might focus a bit more on some of the elements of the game, or they might provide a bit more insight on why something in the game is good or bad.  I'd probably try to get feedback in both places (and maybe hit up one of the UI/graphic design chat rooms for feedback on that part)

I think this would be more suited on Code Review, though it'll still be somewhat off-topic. I agree chat would be a very good option.


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Bounty Question Ending Without Answers
My libGDX applet question didn't get any answers. Adding a bounty also didn't get any answers. What can I do? I heard that it's possible to modify (add) more bounty, but I don't see any functionality.
Alternatively, if you want free rep, just add an answer and I'll give it to you -- it's better than letting it go to waste.

Well you've done all you can do.  At this point the best thing is to try to add more detail to the question (other than posting a link to a tutorial) and trying to solve it yourself.
Not every question on the site is going to get answered.  Fortunately, gamedev is one of the higher ones in terms of answered question percentages:  http://stackexchange.com/sites?sort=percentanswered  We're sitting at 96% of questions answered (I think they count "answered" as "having any upvoted answers" as opposed to "having an answer mark as accepted", though).

Bounties are overrated. If a question doesn't get a useful answer it's most often because not a lot of people are able to answer it, or it's phrased too poorly for people to understand it. A bounty can give you a little extra attention, but it doesn't fix the fundamental problems, and very often does it does not really make a difference. This is especially true on a small site like this where a relatively large proportion of the community will see each question anyway.

Contact the libGDX developers or fill an issue in their issue tracker. They know a lot more about libGDX than we do. I don't really know Java, but it seems like the exception gets thrown from the runtime.  So you could also ask on a Java support forum or even on StackOverflow.

Already tried on the libGDX forums before posting here; didn't get a response. Anyway, that's not the point :)


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Gamedev Birthday Celebration
Did you know that Game Development's birthday was on October 21st? Congratulations!
How about a contest or some other fun activity to stir things up a little? After a year of great Q&A, we'd like the opportunity to "give back" for everyone's hard work.
Anniversary events area a great way to spark some interest in the extracurricular activity in your site (more meta participation). An “anniversary event" can be just about anything. Take a look at Super User’s 2nd Birthday Super Contest for inspiration. It doesn’t have to be a contest. Dream up whatever you feel the community will find interesting, and go for it.
Start a meta post or chat event to work out the details. Rally support for your event and bring it to our attention (community@stackexchange.com). We're really interested in community-lead initiatives, so let’s just say, if you can work out the details, we’re very motivated to say “go for it!”


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Advertisements about proposals that are already in Beta
I have realised that the advertisements about new proposals shown in the right sidebar of gamedev.stackexchange.com are not always updated to their current progress. I initially thought that this was an "acceptable" issue. However, today there is still an advertisement about the new 3D graphics stackexchange site saying that its current state is "52% commited", which is totally wrong since the site is online already.
This can be a bit misleading to some users, and it is maybe even a "waste" of advertisement space. (to advertise a proposal that already exists...).
Is there any way to fix this? Is this happening also to other stackexchange sites?

The proposal ads should never be cached for more than an hour.  All the other ones I've seen look fine.  I've passed it along.

I think the problem here is that this banner is not from the Area51 site, but rather a community-promotion-ad!
See here: Community Promotion Ads - 2H 2011
That's also why the percentage never changed there...
Update: The Ad has been removed from the linked thread.


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Help us write an episode for Extra Credits
If you don't know of Extra Credits, you should go check them out:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/show/extra-credits
We had James Portnow on the podcast a few weeks ago, and he asked us to send him some ideas for an episode called "So you wanna be a developer".
They've done two previous episodes in the "So you wanna" series:

So you wanna be a game designer
So you wanna be a producer

but they don't have personal experience with development and decided to ask us for help.
Now, we have lots of ideas about what makes a great developer and how to get started.  For example:

Code, code, code -- There's no substitute for just diving in and learning to code, and starting is easier than you think.
Explore -- Don't tie yourself down to one language or approach.  Explore other languages, other paradigms, other ways of approaching problems.
Learn from smart people -- Don't code in isolation.  Get involved in an open source project, find a local hacker group, participate in an online site about programming, etc.  Find a way to learn from people smarter than you.
Develop your communication skills -- You need to be able to communicate your ideas to other programmers.  You also need to be able to communicate with non-programmers (and this is usually way harder, but equally important)
Learn other stuff -- Don't just program, also study things like economics, writing, and math.  All of these will come in handy, to some extent.
Ship something -- It won't ever be perfect, but get it out the door.  You'll learn more in 10 minutes of letting a real person use your product or a real developer use your code than you will in months of introspection.

Which is fine, but the show is about the game industry and none of us are game developers.
So our question for you is, what's different about game development?  What advice would you give to someone who wanted to be a game developer?  What skills are more important / less important in game development than other types of developing?
Thanks!

Watch So you want to be a Developer (Part 1) at Penny Arcade TV
Watch So you want to be a Developer (Part 2) at Penny Arcade TV

Wish I could make bounties on meta...

Turns out nothing was missing, Extra Credits only used the content in the question and the first answer. The other answers probably came too late to be used.

I'm a programmer, and I've worked in the industry before. So here's my list of important skills, from that perspective.
For a Programmer

Know how to talk to artists. Game designers are generally easier to deal with, but getting through to artists (depending on what field of programing you're involved in) is oftentimes hard. Artists are not like you. Even if they have similar nerdish interests to you, they do not think like you. If your programming duties often push you into contact with artists (ie: you're doing anything with graphics, animation, AI, or sound. So, yeah, probably a lot), you are going to have to learn how to translate things that have meaning for you into terms they understand. And vice-versa.
Most important of all, be patient with artists. They're smart people; they're just looking at things from a different perspective. If they don't get it when you tell them something, assume that it's your fault and try again. One of the best ways to understand artists is to spend some time in an artists shoes: make an art asset. Grab 3DS Max or Blender or whatever, and make a model. Texture it. Animate it. Good luck with that, BTW ;)
Debugging. Especially for console developers, debugging skills are absolutely paramount. Consoles these days certainly have a lot, lot more debugging functions than they used to (and those who've coded on older boxes know what I'm talking about). But you're still going to have to know how to use them to track down problems. If you've never had to track down hard debugging tasks like random memory corruption, learn. Oh, and good luck with that, BTW ;)
Problem solving. The fundamental foundation of all programming is problem solving. You should probably be good at this.
Know how to program broadly. As part of a programming team on an existing codebase, you are going to be asked to write code in a style that you may not entirely agree with. Maybe you think that smart pointers, RAII, and exceptions are God's gift to C++ programmers. That's great; I totally agree. But if your project as a whole isn't using it, then your code's going to stick out.
At the very least, if you want to deviating significantly from the established standards of the codebase, talk to your lead first.

For an Artist

Ask for things. I have found that artists sometimes have a tendency to accept that their current tools are as good as they're ever going to get, and they just deal with the pain points. Don't be that person. If your development studio has people who work on tools, ask for them to address some annoyance. Those people exist to make your jobs easier, but more often than not, they don't use those tools themselves. If you don't have a dedicated tools team, find out who is responsible for maintaining the tools and talk to them about it.
Learn to talk to programmers. Same deal as above; they're not like you. Their problem solving space is digital, quantified, and precise. Yours isn't. If a programmer lapses into technobabble, let them know that they're talking about something you don't get. Again, be patient.
Again, to better understand them, take up a scripting language. I suggest Lua, which is both easy to learn and powerful. Try to write something fairly large and complex in that. You'll be better able to appreciate it when a programmer says that something will be "hard".

For a Producer

Time management. Time Management! Markdown and HTML5 doesn't have enough emphasis for this; I need the old Blink tag back.
Many of the projects that I've been on that had extended crunch periods did so because of poor time management from production. Features would be cut late in development, well past the time when the writing was on the wall for them. Tech would come online late in development, forcing a scramble to properly integrate it, which won't have been factored into the schedule.
The job of the producer is to insure that production proceeds smoothly. That everyone is getting done what needs to get done, so that the next part can get done, so that the whole thing can get out the door well put together and on-time. Your entire job is time management. Please learn it ;)
Make sure that there is an understanding of how new pieces fit into the overall whole by everyone involved. When some new piece of tech comes online, make sure that the people making it know exactly where it needs to go and how it needs to fit into the existing framework.
Anytime new things happen, make sure everyone knows when they happen, how they happen, what they're for, and how they will be used.
TIME MANAGEMENT. Did I make that clear? Tasks take time. Don't forget this. Please.

+1. I think communication as a whole falls flat - programmers are strange people, artists are strange people, managers are strange people: the gaming industry being such a mashup of such different fields (essentially: sciences, business and humanities) means that you will very often step on each others' toes.

excellent, thanks!

Time to time everyone should come back to this answer to see what s/he is/was missing!

How about tips on how to land in a game developer position to begin with? :) Are companies looking at indie game devs, at devs of mod of their own games, at people that have developed other things first..?

One simple thing:
Never stop learning, never stop improving your skills (craft skill and human skill).  This industry is crazy fast and if you don't want to learn a new technology you soon will be out of job.
The iPad is 1½ years old right now, but is more successful for  Epic than Shadow Complex.

Nicol Bolas's answer is awesome, and amazing, and covers a lot, and gives some great advice. Here's some tips for people who are just getting started (assuming developer = programmer in this case).

Start small. If you've never programmed anything before, spend some
time learning a basic language or two (python, javascript, or
actionscript are good options). Don't just start using C++ or even
XNA because "that's what the professionals use". Learn the basics so
you know about variables, arrays, functions, loops, objects, classes.
Then you can start learning how to make games.
Once you start making games, again, start small. Make a basic text adventure. Make Tetris, or Breakout. Make a game where you avoid bigger squares and "eat" the smaller ones. Make Pac-man. Join an event like Ludum Dare or Global Game Jam, where you spend a weekend making a game based around a theme. Do this enough and you'll get an     understanding of how games are made.
Now you can start making the actual game of your dreams. For a small, simple game (World of Goo, Lyle in Cube Sector, Terraria, Braid), you're looking at something like 6 months to a year of development time, depending on exactly how complex your game is, and how much time you can devote to it per day/week/month. If you're thinking of making World of Warcraft, then go back a step and make Tetris again, because making WoW will take you 10 years.

Just so you know, the first part is now out, check it now. So You Want To Be a Developer (Part 1)
Make sure to go back next week for the second part.

The simple job specification: Programmers are the people responsible for making the game crash.
Or at least that is easily their most notorious contribution.
Thus programmers really need to be the ninjas of game development, being invisible is part of the job. I think a lot of game programmers want more visibility, want to make that contribution that makes people say "Wauw!", they definitely don't want to be the ones who say that's not possible/feasible.
The thing is, for every feature added there is going to be a statistical number of bugs that needs fixing. The number of bugs added per feature will rise with code complexity and stress level.
Try to add too many features and the game will be buggy, try to add too many features and then some, and you get Sword of the Stars II.
Thus if the programming team fails to say no (or someone in charge fails to interpret "no" as no) when too many features are requested the predictable result is that the programming teams contribution ends up being very notorious.
That was a bit of a rant, but I hope it tells something useful about being a programmer.


text:
Does voting to close a bountied question consume your close vote?
This question is, in my opinion, overly subjective, discussion-oriented, and potentially time-sensitive -- in short, a bad question for this site. I tried to vote to close it a while ago, but I was told that I couldn't do that because it had an open bounty.
Now that the bounty has been awarded, I went back and tried to vote it for closure again, but I'm now told that I already voted even though I don't see my vote in the close tally (as I write this, the close link says "close," indicating nobody voted to close it yet, instead of "close (n)" as I would expect if there were any votes recorded for it).
Note that at some point after I was told I can't vote to close questions with bounties, I also flagged the question, which may have something to do with the behavior I'm seeing.
Is this a bug?

You must be forgetting something; you actually did successfully vote to close this question; precisely on November 10 at 16:17 UTC, about three hours after the bounty was awarded.
Yours was however the only close vote, and hence it was automatically expired yesterday.

Oh. Oops. I feel silly now. Thanks for the information!


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"Where can I find art resources" questions: off topic/not a real question?
Where can I find free game assets?
Where can I find free sprites and images?
Where can I find free sounds for my game?
Where can I find free music for my game?
etc.
These questions are just "list of" questions.  I don't doubt their value, but recent StackExchange philosophy seems to be to shun these kinds of question these days.
Pros of keeping them:

they're common questions people have, and might drive traffic to the site
shutting them down may seem overly moderator-heavy

Cons of keeping them:

As with all external resources, there's the risk of them going away, not being maintained, etc.
They are usually not very specific, so the variety (and quality) of answers is going to vary wildly
Most "professional game developers" probably make their own art (or outsource it)

As always, the guideline of what kind of questions shouldn't be asked is found here: https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/faq#dontask

For posterity, a discussion we had in chat regarding this topic begins here.

So it seems the moderation policies have pretty much shifted to "list of X" questions not being useful.  There are other resources on the internet better suited to these kinds of questions, and I'm updating the faq to call out these questions as being off topic.

It couldn't hurt to have our own featured wikis for each of graphics, music.

These posters have mostly failed to search adequately. "Adequately" is objective in this case, meaning that they didn't find the existing post that answered their question.
While we can't physically force people to search better (adequately), perhaps we can modify the text in the existing post so that it comes up more frequently as the user is typing their question.

I think these (existing) lists can be useful (eg. to find assets for low-budget or prototyping). IMHO new questions of this type should be closed and currently this seems to work quite well. So I guess we can try to keep it at the currently existing questions.
I think this is also a question to the moderators, because they would be the ones that would have to merge answers to new questions into the existing topics? Then it's also a job for the community to keep this lists up to date by removing dead links etc.

I'm not sure I'd say it "works quite well," I find it rather obnoxious.

Maybe we should compile a list of these resources links and upvote it so it always appears? Then people would be less likely to create new threads. Plus it's useful to have a handy list :P

Voting doesn't "bump" threads.  Editing/adding questions does.  And I don't think we should be artificially bumping thread, people should be able to find them easily while searching.

mmm agreed, i first thought if we keep it high enough it will remain in the top voted questions. But i guess you're right. We would just have to keep it updated :D


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How to Cite Images
What is the recommended way of citing images? Have a look at this rather good answer - Kevin cites the image directly in the textual (as rendered) portion of the body, where I am more likely to do the following (keeping the citation out of the body; but still available for those who need it):
![Perspective View Frustum - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3aPerspective_view_frustum.png][1]

Alternatively you could do it this way:
![http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Perspective_view_frustum.png][1]

[1]: https://i.stack.imgur.com/kOCLV.png "Perspective View Frustum"

This ensures that the tooltip is meaningful (title attribute), however the alt gets abused and this could cause serious issues for disabled users - doing it the other way messes up the tooltip - so nobody wins. Finally you could use a hyperlink:
[![Perspective View Frustum][1]][2]

[1]: https://i.stack.imgur.com/kOCLV.png "Perspective View Frustum"
[2]: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Perspective_view_frustum.png "Original Source"

The main disadvantage here is that is really ugly markdown - which goes against the grain of why markdown was conceived in the first place; furthermore you lose the ability to create an actual hyperlinked image.
Which is the preferred method? Should we maybe add image citation to the markdown? Something along the lines of (which renders to something along the lines of my last option, or some HTML5 goodness):
![Perspective View Frustum][1]

[1]: https://i.stack.imgur.com/kOCLV.png "Perspective View Frustum" [http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Perspective_view_frustum.png]

This means that the image dialog would need to insert the cited source, when using images from the web. Currently the 'From Web' in the image window clones the image to stack.imgur.com; so the markdown-style citation points to imgur - thereby losing the original location. This would need to be changed to emit the markdown for whichever citation method is chosen.
The only reason I am bringing this up is because game developers are notoriously vigilant about correct citing.

I believe this is the best method using existing Markdown support:
[![Perspective View Frustum][1]][2]

[1]: https://i.stack.imgur.com/kOCLV.png "Perspective View Frustum"
[2]: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Perspective_view_frustum.png "Original Source"

Alternately:
![Perspective View Frustum][1]
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Perspective_view_frustum.png

[1]: https://i.stack.imgur.com/kOCLV.png "Perspective View Frustum"

... provide the bare link next to the image; why not just Keep It Simple?
Either way is fine. I don't see a need to add additional syntax when the existing syntax works OK for this.


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Community Promotion Ads - 2012

Possible Duplicate:
Community Promotion Ads - 2013

We're hitting the next milestone, and so we begin anew with our Community Promotion Ads!
What in the Wide, Wide World of Sports is Going On Here?
TL;DR -- put images and links in the answers. If they get voted up enough, they will appear on the main site as community promotion ads.
But whyyyyyyy?
This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:

cool game development related open source apps
the site's twitter account
scripts packs or power tools
cool events or conferences
anything else your community would genuinely be interested in

The goal is for future visitors to find out about the stuff your community deems important. And to click on it for great justice!
How does it work?
The answers you post to this question must conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored.

All answers should be in the exact form of:
[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]

   [1]: http://image-url
   [2]: http://clickthrough-url

Please do not add anything else to the body of the post. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.
The question must always be tagged with the magic community-ads tag.

Image requirements

The image that you create must be 220 x 250 pixels
Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)
Must be GIF or PNG
No animated GIFs
Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB

Score Threshold
There is a minimum score threshold an answer must meet (currently 6) before it will be shown on the main site.
You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats here.

Am I allowed to post links to my own content? For example, I made a tutorial for my engine, which is hosted on my blog, is it OK if I post a link (image) to my blog? Or, should I post it as a link to the tutorial itself?

@Bane If people vote on it, it will be okay. You may be better off adverting the tutorial if that is the main item you'd like to advert, though.

Great, I'll post it once I get home.


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What to do with answers that mainly consist in a link?
More often than not links in articles work and provide valuable information. But I really hate it when I come across an accepted SE answer, and it mostly consists in a link to the poster’s defunct blog. Even if the link works, I feel uneasy that the poster didn’t bother copying and formatting information.
For instance, on this question I think the accepted answer is not very good, but it gives direct advice. And this answer doesn’t really answer the question, but it provides much more interesting information; the problem is that you have to click the links to see it.
Should we encourage that second poster to copy information from his blog back on SE, or is only the link OK? What happens when his blog dies?

Copying the contents of the link is not the right answer.  Legally speaking, the contents of a blog or whatever (unless it's public domain) is under copyright of the author.  Copying it into a post here, especially considering all the content on SE sites is creative commons, is a bad idea.

Now if it's your own blog (as is the case of your specific example) then that's a decision to be made on a case by case basis, but by the author himself.

I've stumbled upon this discussion which happens to link to one of my posts. It's a fair point, and to safeguard against the blog going down someday I'll elaborate a bit more on my answer.

@Tetrad the recommended course of action is to quote the relevant parts of the link, as specified in http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/how-to-answer under "Provide context for links"

I usually downvote answers that are basically just a link and I add a comment so that the poster can improve his answer.
I think it's important that the poster mentions (at least) the relevant keywords in an answer, so that one can search the web for said keywords if the link goes down. It might be overkill to copy information from the linked article, but an outline of the described procedure would be nice...


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How should I select a correct answer to my question?
I've asked a question here:
How should I implement side-scrolling level design?
I have received two answers I think are correct.
One answer seems to be the most accurate for game development in general, the other is more accurate to my specific situation.
However, the latter answer is more accurate to my situation because the poster picked up that I'm programming in Greenfoot based on an screenshot I had uploaded.
Is it better to mark the former answer as correct because in general circumstances it is more correct, and because I didn't mention Greenfoot in the question.
Or is it better to select the latter answer because it answers the question in a very specific way relating to my problem in Greenfoot, even though I didn't mention Greenfoot in the original question.

The Greenfoot part should have been in your question in the first place, I have corrected that.
I'd say that you should accept the answer that helped you the most, even if there are other answers that seems to have a broader appeal. For two reasons:
The question may seem broader, but practically it could very well be relevant mostly to people in your exact situation, while the more academic answer may seem nicer to most of us it is probably a subject that is plenty covered already. To those actually experiencing the situation the realization that they are working with a shitty framework may be a lot more valuable than general optimization advice.
The answers that go an extra step to fit the exact situation of the asker are often somewhat overlooked, give 'em some credit for the work.
You still can and should award multiple upvotes if there are multiple good answers. Placing an accept doesn't mean that is the final truth, readers should know that.


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Link "set tag preferences" broken
The link "set tag preferences" on my frontpage is broken. It seems the "set tag preferences" link only shows up when you haven't selected favorite tags, but still have a frequented tag. I can't get the link to show up on other stackexhange sites.

The link: https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/users/8957?tab=prefs
Where it leads: https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/users/8957/mindworx?tab=prefs
Where it should lead: https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/users/preferences/8957

Looks like this was fixed rather a while ago, and there are currently no references to the old user preference tab in the source.

I'll take your word for this, as I can't check it, since I don't have the frequented tags anymore and have added my own custom preferred tags.


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MMONOOB tag request
Can we start using a tag called "MMONOOB" or something less direct to indicate that a post is asking "HOW DO I WRITE MY UBER SWEET MMO, NO I HAVEN'T DONE ANY WORK YET, HELP ME?". Then I could just add those to the ignore list and be happy.

Why don't we just close them instead...

In my experience the mmo tag cover pretty much what the mmonoob tag would, there is no need to start arguing whether or not people are noobs when they have already announced that they are developing an mmo, and by the way don't know basic pathfinding or something like that.

Well done for inciting a flame war each time the tag is used .. because thats a good use of tagging right??

This tag should not exist because it is primarily identifying a poor kind of question that is undesirable. If it is undesirable, the proper course of action would be to vote-to-close the question under an appropriate reason. Without the ability to vote to close, one can flag them for attention, or just not visit the question altogether.
Fact is, though, such a tag is not intuitive to new users (who will be the ones who keep asking such questions). This means that such users are not likely to ever add that tag on their own, so you would still see those questions. Existing users who visit such a question, again, should be voting to close or otherwise dealing with the question, not adding the tag and being on their merry way.

I think I was tired when I wrote this, but I was referring to the questions that technically fit the site. They're useful to others in that person's situation. Anyway I was tired, bad question sorry. The thought was to have users like us edit and retag with that so other's don't have to bother seeing it.

@brandon Can you give some concrete examples, then? Though all things said, tags should be designed for people to find things as often as they are for people to pass them by.

The fundamental problem with such a request is that you're asking for a meta tag.  Meta tags are explicitly discouraged: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/
mmonoob wouldn't describe the content of the question other than being a meta tag for "beginner" mmo questions.  Which would be the same thing as tagging a question as beginner and mmo.  And since the beginner tag is destroyed on sight, you can see where I'm going with this.


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Flag chat room for notification of new messages
Moving extended conversations in comments into chat seems like a good idea. However, generally those types of chats are not real time. Additionally, users have to manually check the chat rooms to see if any new messages have been posted.
In order for chat rooms to have the same benefits of extended comment conversations (notifications), it would be ideal if a user could flag a chat room they are interested in. When a new message is posted to the flagged chat, the user would be notified in the standard manner with a red notification in the upper left. Perhaps this flagging could be automatic in the case of moving a comment conversation to chat.

Would this really be beneficial with how busy some chat rooms are? Or are you always creating separate chats for these conversations?
I also feel like @UserName is sufficient. I can confirm that if you don't check the chatroom directly for these pings it does show up as a notification in your inbox. It happens to me plenty.


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Undo community wiki on this question
This should not be a community wiki question.
Generally there's not an over-doing it in terms of setting questions as community wiki, but I always go by for answers require a lot of information/expertise, not simply "Oh I loved Excitebike for the NES", then that is NOT community wiki.

Yep, I agree, CW has been removed.

Can also un-community wiki the answers?

Since it won't stop alerting me until I respond. I did this.


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Questions on user pages don't show ones with marked answers
When I look at a user page (take this for example), if the user has asked questions, they show in the Questions list. That's fine and expected. However, if the user has marked a question as answered, it does not indicate that unless you click the "View More" link.
Above, in the Answers list, it shows whether or not the user's answer was accepted, so why wouldn't it show it in the Questions list? On stackoverflow this works as I'd expect , so I think this may just be a styling issue or a bug that was overlooked.

That was indeed just a styling issue. Fixed after the next build of the sites (here as well as on english.se and android.se, and the respective metas; all of these had the same issue).
Thanks!

Is this fixed now or will there be an update later? I don't see it any differently.

As I said, "after the next build of the sites". This usually happens at least once a day, ofter more times. But not immediately.

Oh, haha. I'm dumb. In one eye and out the other? :)


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A small idea to prevent new users from posting subjective questions
I don't usually hang around on meta, so not sure if this has been discussed before. But just a suggestion.
Seems to me one of the silliest, most frequent duffs that happens on gamedev (and SO as well) is the posting of subjective questions.
Just as the SE sites suggest existing questions to prevent you from re-asking the same, and will also suggest what might be subjective, could we not show a note in bold, every time the "ask question" page is hit, that tells users to that if they have discussion-oriented or otherwise subjective questions, they should take them to gamedev.net (or other game dev sites of a similar sort), or the forums of the technology relating to their question? It's a bit silly when newbies post questions about obscure engines to our forums first and foremost, flattering as it is to us all, when they should really be directed elsewhere.
Anyway, I'm not sure whether the policy of SE allows suggesting redirections to non-affiliated sites. Though I'd think that'd be sad, since I know there are a number of us who have been long-time denizens of gamedev.net (Kylotan, myself, and I recall seeing others).

The "I don't know anything about game development how do I get started?" question seems to come up so frequently it seems like it might be worth explicitly calling that out on the "Ask a question" form, maybe even with a few helpful links to tutorials and/or more discussion oriented sites.

As potentially annoying as a question it is, this is in a lot of ways a very legitimate question to someone in need of a bit of mentorship.

I certainly don't want to discourage anyone, but those kind of questions are hard to answer other than with boilerplate "check out these resources" kind of reply. Plus, if they get a little bump and come back with a more specific question, they'll probably get a better reception on the site. From the other angle too, I think it would benefit the site to have a better ratio of absolute beginner type questions to more advanced topics.

The rules are already there, and are clear enough. "Tell me about topic X" can be solved by searching for X using the search function or using a search engine. It's way too generic. Something like "if the answer is a book than you are asking too much" is in the faq.

SO has their Definitive C++ Book Guide and List.  I would think a similar community wiki question polling for the best/most reputable/kindest forums for a few specific categories (e.g. Polycount for 3D art) would be a good place to redirect people who want a discussion more than an answer.  Rather than being redirected to one specific site, this would also give them the opportunity to refine their search a little bit by domain, and would give us the ability to keep such a list of community bookmarks alive and up-to-date.

Anyway, I'm not sure whether the policy of SE allows suggesting redirections to non-affiliated sites.

Indeed it does, particularly if those questions are egregiously off-topic for this site as you note.

could we not show a note in bold, every time the "ask question" page is hit, that tells users to that if they have discussion-oriented or otherwise subjective questions, they should take them to gamedev.net

We do have some specific help on the sidebar of the ask page:

How to Ask

Is your question about game development?

We prefer questions that can be answered, not just discussed.

Provide details. Share your research.

If your question is about this website, ask it on meta instead.

That also links to the FAQ and asking help page too: https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/how-to-ask
I don't know if it'd be appropriate to speculatively link to a specific discussion site, but certainly we do try to make it clear that subjective questions aren't what we do here.

Hi Jeff. I guess what I'm saying is that it appears this information isn't sufficiently in-the-face, or presumably we wouldn't get as many of these discussion-type questions. If this were the early 90's I'd suggest flashing bold text and animated GIFs :) If we offered an immediate, linked alternative directly above or below the post (sidebars may be overlooked), it might help more. And if such were DHTML enabled as is the pop-up for when a potentially subjective question is asked, all the better.

Re the linking to a specific site, unusual suggestion I know, but I think a relationship does exist due to the name, which is unlikely to be a coincidence since gamedev.net coined the term gamedev on the www, and I expect that provided the roots for this site at Area 51. Since it is discussion-oriented, and it has the same name, it seems a logical place to send users.

well, feel free to leave comments directing these subjective questions elsewhere. How many per day are we talking?

That's tough to answer, because I'm not as regularly active as I was a few months back. Given that during the 14-16 hours a day that I'm about, I see roughly 2-3, then I'm guessing 3-5 over 24 hours is not unlikely. You would have to ask @Tetrad to be sure though, since he probably ends up being the guy offering closing votes. Others can feel free to shoot me down on this if I'm wrong. It's not back-breaking, if that's what you're asking, but it is sufficient to be noticeable on a daily basis, especially (I'm sure) given our limited number of core users. Comments? I do. It's tedious. But I do.


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Are "What should I use to do x?" questions really on-topic and good?
The general question I'm talking about goes like this:

I'm looking for a new framework to use for my next 2d/3d/native project, what should I use?

And the answers go like this:

Unity
XNA
OpenGl
Other stuff

But only if you're lucky, the current example which kicked off this question does not even have alternatives to Unity. The problem I see with these questions is:

They're too localized
They may be biased, depending on who gets its hands first on it.
Additionally, the questions are ambiguous and vague.

The reason I'm asking this is because I'm not that familiar with the scope of GameDev, but those questions feel a little wrong. Are these on-topic questions? Or am I correct in my assumption that such questions should be closed?

My main problem with "which tech should I use?" questions is that they're only answerable by the one asking (requirements determine candidates, tests/prototypes do the rest). But if not, such a question is borderline irrelevant (lack of requirements) and perhaps indicative of fear of getting started (on the wrong foot). See analysis paralysis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_paralysis

I'm of the opinion that these questions decrease the usefulness of the site. They make the site more chatty and weaken the overall presentation of the place. And since we get about 3 of these questions a week (or at least it seems like we do), it comes up frequently.
Sadly, I'm not in the majority on this. I try to close these questions where possible. However, because many users see these as "borderline" cases, they're hesitant to close them. And of course not closing them makes them hesitant to close the next one. And so on.
On Stack Overflow, this stuff would be burninated quickly and efficiently. That site has enough people on it that those who see it for the damage that I believe it is, and would quickly close it. And there wouldn't be enough non-"borderline" people on the other side to re-open, so it would stay dead. However, that doesn't happen here due to a lack of viewership.
It is the tolerance of questions like these that make me feel like this is just another form of gamedev.net with a different kind of forum. Hence I spend more of my time on SO, where there are real questions with real answers to deal with.

Where on the Internet are the appropriate places to ask this class of questions and receive very good answers?

@AnsisMalins: You could try chat, but in general, there is nowhere to answer these questions with anything approaching authority. Everyone has their opinions, everyone has their ideas for the tool someone should use to do X, and none of them can in any way be determined to be "right" unless you establish extremely rigid criteria (at which point it's only right for that person).

but at least at that point, options have been presented. Then it's up to the end user to make a selection from the options that have been presented.

@BradParks: Stack Exchange is not a polling site.

@NicolBolas: Thanks for your feedback. As always, let the people decide ;-)

@BradParks: We did decide: polling questions are not allowed on any Stack Exchange site. That's SE policy.

@NicolBolas: And like any good policy, it can be questioned. That's what these "meta" sites are about. Establishing policy, and if the people want it bad enough, changing policy. None of these policies are writen in stone. Most will change, for what it's worth, my vote goes for being more lenient with this than strict. Thanks again.

@BradParks: GDSE is for setting GDSE policy. But GDSE's policies can't go against what SE is all about. We can't start allowing discussion or other non-SE stuff on our site. If you want to change SE polices, you need to take it up on Meta.SE. But be warned: any such suggestion on your part will be downvoted into oblivion, and such questions will likely be closed as non-constructive. This policy isn't going to change anytime soon.

@NicolBolas: Once again, thanks for your feedback. Have a good one.

Thanks for the insight, and +1 for the Trogdor reference :-)

If the question really is as simple as in your opening quote ("I'm looking for a new framework to use for my next 2d/3d/native project, what should I use?"), then it's way too broad to be a real question and should be closed.
If the question, however, is specific enough -- provides a solid list of requirements or a clear idea of the specific problem the asker is trying to solve with the recommended technology, it might be worth keeping around. Maybe.
I generally take in a on case-by-case basis and if I think the question is too broad or is going to have several equally valid answers I'll at least vote it down, and usually vote to close it as a duplicate or otherwise off-topic.

I am 100% with you, i got one of my questions closed though i wasn't just asking "what should i use" , i had requirements, and set of tools which i could use, and was asking what's best to use of these , to satisfy the requirements ! question got closed !

If 2 or more tools/techs satisfy all requirements, then it doesn't really matter which one you use, right? You can then consider other factors, price, support, documentation, update frequency which are overall more important than features in order to close in on one. Sometimes, you just have to make a decision without knowing which one will be better.

A couple of points against marking these as offtopic and closing them...

If you just want to attract game developers with plenty of experience who know exactly when to use X compared to Y and the benefits of A vs B that's fine. For those starting out, the choices can tend to be a bit bewildering - they will often come up with these kind questions as a first attempt at using the site. Closing them off and getting downvoted would probably be a disincentive to these potential users.
Off-topic questions can often generate great on-topic answers. Case in point one SO question here "why doesn't XCode run on Windows" that seems silly to someone with a bit of experience, but it wasn't closed, hence it did attract a great answer.

As a professional game developer, I find "which technology" questions exceeding boring and intellectually non-stimulating -- even when appropriately presented with a high-quality problem description and list of requirements. Having a lot of these questions discourages me from visiting.

And while I agree that off-topic questions can have good answers, that doesn't change the fact that they are off-topic and are better suited for another community. GDSE doesn't have to be everything.

"For those starting out, the choices can tend to be a bit bewildering" Let's turn it around. What are these people going to contribute to the site? We need new users, certainly. But we don't need Help Vampires. And these kinds of questions are usually asked by creatures of the night. We need users who have actual problems, not starting-out "what should I use" kinds of stuff. The same goes for SO; questions like "what language should I learn" and such are not acceptable there.

Edit: Mark Trapp wrote a pretty good answer on Programmers about a very similar issue.
https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1625/982
To wit:

questions that ask how to do something (where the "recommendation" per se is not the point of the question) are on-topic, questions that ask what will do something (where the "recommendation" is the point of the question) is off-topic

However, that mostly applies to the Programmer SE site itself.
On Stack Overflow itself there's another question with a similar answer:
"Deciding which technology to use" questions

The problem with these questions is that unless you are very specific about your requirements all you get is either a list of people's favourite technology or an argument in comments about which technology is "better".
...
The truth is that these days, unless you have a really specific problem, there can be little to choose from between technologies. This means that your question is either "not constructive" or "too localised".

So I'm inclined to agree with the other answers here now that those are generally off topic.  I've updated the FAQ.

Looking at meta.stackoverflow I came across these questions:
Which Stack Exchange site will tell me what programming language to learn?
"Deciding which technology to use" questions
The core of the argument can really be summed up by the blog post I've been adding as comments to a lot of these types of questions (and part of the answer to that question), at least ones that name specific tech:
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/08/gorilla-vs-shark/
The only reason I've been lax on shutting them down with a vengeance is that there usually is some kind of detail.  At this point in time, I kind of feel that "which tech can do X, Y, and Z" does have an answerable question and is useful to people.  And a similar question that's "which can can do X, Y, and W" isn't an exact dupe of the first because the requirements are different.  So like ChrisF said in his answer to the second question, it's all about being specific.
If there are no constraints than it's not a real question.  But where that line crosses from answerable to not isn't completely well defined.  Like if they're looking for something that's "easy" or "fast" it's sometimes hard to answer that aspect of it.

A downvote without a comment doesn't help me.

This is Meta. A downvote means "I disagree". As stated in my answer, I disagree that these are borderline cases that represent answerable questions. I disagree with the idea that because something might be useful to someone that it belongs on this site. As I stated, I believe that tolerating these questions only harms the site, watering down the useful content with chatty discussion stuff. Stack Overflow doesn't tolerate it, and neither should we.

My concern with the "which tech can do X, Y, and Z" approach is that if you have enough "X, Y, and Z" requirements to make the question answerable in a useful way, then the question has probably become too localized to ever be useful to anyone else.

I really disagree with the answer and blog post in the context of GameDev. When starting a new project (especially as an amateur) choosing the right tool makes a world of difference. If you want to make a simple FPS with pretty graphics, Unity is a far better choice than GameMaker, and this is valuable information to someone unfamiliar with both. And given how many tools and libraries there are for games, you will eventually be unfamiliar with some class you need to use. Equating these question to programming language wars is unconstructive.


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Is editing a question to remove all content okay?
This question was closed, and in response, the author edited the question to remove all the original content and encourage us to vote for deletion (edit history here). I rolled the edit back because I feel that this kind of behavior is unwarranted and bad for the site.
Even though a question is closed, it remains available so that it can either be salvaged into a good question and reopened, or if nothing else it provides examples of what the community thinks a bad question is so that we can discourage subsequent bad questions and hopefully end up with more, better, questions overall.
Furthermore in this specific example, the edit was allegedly done to "protect the idea" outlined in the initial post, which I feel is an irrelevant reason for obliterating a post (especially since the revision history exists anyhow).
That said, I wanted to solicit thoughts from the rest of the community as to whether or not my rollback was the appropriate course of action? As far as I know this is the first time we've had this kind of situation.

I'm no expert, but I think you did the right thing

Self-vandalism is looked down upon: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/94421/how-to-best-handle-the-possible-vandalism-of-own-posts-flag

I was thinking about rolling back to the previous version as well. I guess I didn't do so because I thought it would upset the OP... that's why I left the "hint" about the revision history. Anyway, I think you did the right thing.

No, it absolutely is not acceptable to blank a closed question. It's simply the act of someone who is clearly unfamiliar with how Stack Exchange sites work.
Also of someone who thinks that his "idea" of a networked game about buying and selling stuff is actually worth something. Yeah, never heard that one before...


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Is asking "Where can i find people that are x / to do y" a bad question?
The title say everything. I've faced some questions like this some days ago, and another today, here, you can take it as example: Where can I find some beginners to learn and work with?
Also, you can see that its a community wiki question, is it right?
In my humble opinion, this kind of question is the same of those that people ask technology. Its such a pain to encounter some like those.
Here are another examples:
Where to find designers for independent projects?
Where can I go to find a game graphic artist?
Those below does not asks for people, but i think it falls in the concept.
Trying to find a game development competition
Where can I find animated textures for free?
So when i see one of those, should i flag it or leave it okay?

Most of these are at best borderline. While a few list-type questions are OK and generally acceptable, we don't want to encourage it.
There should only be one list question of each type. So there should be one for each kind of asset (textures, meshes, etc). All new questions are duplicates and should be forwarded to the master question.
Any "find people" question should be pretty much gone. That's not really something we can do, it has no factual answers, there is no single best answer, it's way too localized, etc. A list of game development competitions is borderline, but I would say that it's acceptable.
Also, making something Community Wiki does not mean it gets to break the rules.


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Edit tags command not found next to tag list in questions
On Stack Overflow, there is an "edit tags" button or somesuch that will appear when you mouse-over the area to the right of the tag list on a question. It allows you to edit the tags of a question without bring up the whole edit box for the rest of it.
Even when you can freely edit questions and answers, I find this button useful for just editing tags. Do other people not see it, or is it just me? Is this intentional or a bug in the site?

I see the UI you're describing, both on main and meta. It doesn't seem to me like it should be behind a privilege gate that I have but you don't (retagging is granted at 500 reputation). Maybe it's a browser issue? I'm running Safari.

I'm using Firefox, the current version. I do have some unusual zoom settings, that sometimes broke certain SE sites. So it's entirely possible that it's local. I just don't know what is local.

You don't get access to inline edits until you get the moderator tools privilege at 10k rep.


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Do we need Unity questions?
Don't get me wrong, I love Unity. I think it's a great engine. But surely we should refer people along to Unity's official QA website? That's a better place for their questions (even if it is terribly built compared to SE).

I think Unity questions are fine.
Unity Answers isn't part of the StackExchange network. We don't close questions on UDK, Ogre, or OpenGL, or Direct3D (et cetera) with a link to the appropriate support site or forums for the technology -- there's no reason to do to so unilaterally for Unity questions just because Unity's official support site is a StackExchange look-alike.

I agree with this, though there might be certain questions where directing the asker to the Unity Q&A site is a good idea (or at least mention the fact that there is a Unity Q&A site)

yeah I agree with this as well. Every engine/technology has it's own forum/QA site related to it, but if it's not part of SE it should be perfectly fine to use. Otherwise like Josh stated we would have to close OpenGL, Direct3D, C++ to other appropriate links

Maybe I'm biased (I am), but the moderation here is a lot better than the moderation over there.
I, for one, welcome good Unity questions.  If the questions help drive traffic to our site, they're on topic, and they "help make the internet a better place", all the better.

+1 for the moderators here :) - Unity's site was a lot worse in terms of bad questions, duplicate questions (and I mean the same person posting the same question three times in a row...), etc. Plus, they moved from using the SE 1.0 codebase to QATO, which isn't nearly as usable as the new SE 2.0 that all the SE sites now run on.

On Unity Answers you often have people that don't know how to handle the QA-system correctly.
Often people ask only one question and then disappear.
You get a lof of questions there, that could be answered with a look at the manual/reference.
For my part I'ts nice to know I could post a question here and might get an answer from someone that has a broader horizon (a not ONLY Unity user).

I was a unity answers member before I joined this site, but I always get higher quality answers here. Most of my questions have deeper CS requirements even if it's a Unity question, so that may account for my experience.

Unity questions belong on UnityAnswers or the Unity Forums. I think wherever possible, technology-specific questions should be asked on fora dedicated to that technology, so as to contribute to those individual resources. XNA to its own, Unity to its own, iPhone dev to its own, etc. etc.
The only time users should really opt for this site over those sites is when the question tends more toward technology-agnostic games or simulation-related problem-solving. The best questions on this site, and the best answers, rarely have to do with individual technologies, IMO.
Wouldn't you rather have one single go-to point for a technology you are learning about, than to have to hunt high and low on the web (much fun as that might seem)?

The way I see it, if somebody has a specific problem that isn't easily googleable, then a SE site that covers the topic should either 1) have a question on it or 2) be the place where somebody can ask it.