text:
How is this question determined to be off-topic?
I asked the question at Can I legally make a free clone of a game and use the same name? because I read a question that basically asked the exact same question in the same forum ( Is it legally possible to make a clone of the game?) but didn't answer the question of whether the same rules applied for a free game. It really surprised me that people made such an issue of the appropriateness of the question to the point of closing the question. Why is one question OK and the other off topic?
Even consulting the FAQ, I find the question to be on-topic in the area of project management. The name of a game is an important aspect of publishing, which is an explicit component of project management.

It was closed for being off-topic because five members of the community determined it should be (it's possible not all of them voted for "off-topic" specifically, but that was the majority's choice). They are the only ones who can say why they voted the way they did.
For the record, I agree the question should be closed and consequently declined to add my vote to the reopen list. I don't think that "off topic" is necessarily the best close reason, but I don't really care as long as it's closed.
The issue of legal questions is not very clear-cut. I am of the opinion that the the only way to really answer most of them is to say "talk to a lawyer," which means anything asking for legal advice, especially regarding intellectual property laws (which are the majority of legal questions we seem to have here), should be closed as a duplicate pointing to some question with the answer "get a lawyer."
Intellectual property laws in particular are varied across the world and in many cases, particularly the US, very subtle. Your question is basically asking for an interpretation of the intellectual property laws (probably trademark ones) in your jurisdiction and that's really something you should be talking to a lawyer about. In that respect I can see how others may have voted for off-topic since it's really better suited for the hypothetical "intellectual property law StackExchange."

So why are the other legal questions quoted in my question not also closed?

They haven't had enough close votes. Maybe they will be now that your new question draws attention to them, because they are much, much older and in some cases existed before we had enough users with a high enough reputation to cast close votes.

On the topic of talking to a lawyer, though, realistically that's not an option. This is just a 3-day project I put together for fun, and paying through the nose to answer such a simple question seems silly. So I figured maybe it makes sense to ask other game developers who have surely dealt with similar legal questions before. I don't need a legally sound answer, just the experience of others who may already have dealt with the question. Surely not everyone who has had a trivial legal question about a piece of software has hired a lawyer. In the absence of hypothetical forum, isn't here OK?

Lawyers can be surprisingly inexpensive and are generally willing to work with you to get you what you need without making you pay a lot. If you don't need a legally-sound answer it's almost not worth asking the question, since you don't care enough about the result to protect yourself from the ramifications (ignorance of the law is generally not a suitable defense) and because the question is still legal in nature and on an open forum and so others may stumble across it (and potentially be misled by an incorrect answer).

For simple throw-away projects or if you really think you can't find and talk to an IP lawyer, err on the side of caution: "if you have to ask, the answer is no."

See, that's the kind of answer I'm looking for to my question. Why can't that be discussed as a response to my original question? If it's because of the risk of incorrect answers making people legally liable, shouldn't we add a legal exclusion to the FAQ?

I think the issue is less about making people legally liable, as there probably is some kind of clause for that already in the site terms of use. It's more about the danger of being wrong. If you aren't a lawyer, then you're speculating and not producing authoritative answers. Most of us game developers, even those of us who are professionals, know only enough about IP law to be dangerous to ourselves and others. Those of us who recognize that are keen to point out that a lawyer is a better option.

Due to the fact that so many legal questions do arise in game development, wouldn't it be nice if this were one of the places that it would be OK to ask them, perhaps with all the necessary disclaimers. Take for example, once again, the question I referred to in my question. The first answer was from a lawyer. That's really helpful. Why not invite such helpful discussion?

This isn't a discussion forum though -- and for that matter nor is the comments thread, so if you want to keep talking about this you should probably join the chat. But in short, my take on that is "no, this shouldn't be the place for that kind of question." Beyond that it's up the community to decide.


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How to close a question with the author’s consent?
I wanted to help close this question where the author says in the comments area that the question can be closed because they didn’t really ask what they were looking for (asked about numerical stability while actually looking for numerical precision).
I'm tempted to close using “not constructive” but I fear I would look a bit rude if the moderators don’t read all the comments. What’d be the best option?

You can always flag for moderator attention with a custom explanation. (i.e. the "other" option) Briefly detail what the situation is and why you flag. It should then be perfectly clear to the moderator what your intentions are and they can act (or reject, if they feel the need to) accordingly.

Thanks, I was focusing on “close” whereas “flag” was probably a better idea.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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Preventing "Oh, I had flagged that already."
I flag lots, but forget what I've flagged. When I reflag a post I had already flagged, I get told so by a helpful yellow box.
Surely it's bad usability to only say so afterward! It would really save me time if I could immediately see I've already flagged that post.

If the system had to check all flaggable content (answers, questions, and comments) every time you navigated to a new page, the number of interactions with the server would increase dramatically. I think this is probably going to be shot down for technical reasons.

What, one more database query would bring down a site that hands out hats to everyone for the holiday season? :)

Well, no... but you're just one of many, many users. It'd be one (or more) database query per user. Think about how many simultaneous users stackexchange has.

Think of it this way: you can see edit greyed out if a suggested edit is going, you can see how many views, you can even see the moment someone up/downvotes or comments/answers! I think just one tiny little box won't be too much.

@RavenDreamer maybe if it stored the fact in a temporary cookie it could handled client side, if there is any worry of spanking the database it's better than nothing I'd say

This was fixed by the recent StackExchange-wide update to flagging and closing.
There is now a bracketed number next to the flag link if you've already raised flags on that post:

The flagging dialog box also does not show options to raise flags of the kinds you can't raise anymore:

Jeff said (on MSO):

This would require many, many queries per page load per logged on users.

So: No.

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


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Why can I not link directly to FAQ anchors?
Our FAQ has some useful stuff, but it doesn't look like I can actually link people to that useful stuff. Instead I have to link them to the FAQ main page and ask them to search themselves, which is rather uncool.
For example, in the comments to this question I tried to link the asker to the section of the FAQ that lists other places that are better suited to opinion-based discussion questions. The section has an anchor tag, so a link to this address
https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/faq#where-can-i-ask-subjective-discussion-and-other-questions-not-fit-for-this-site

should take you there. However, if I create such a link, and then attempt to follow it, I'm taken the main FAQ page.
I assume this is because of the fancy HTML/CSS/Javascript or whatever that's employed on the page (and as such perhaps it's a browser-specific bug -- I'm using Chrome when I see this behavior). But I feel like it's something that should work.
EDIT:
Further investigation in the chat suggests this might be because the specific section I'm trying to link to has hyphens or is otherwise long. The shorter anchors, such as this one to information about how to ask a question, do navigate properly. So perhaps we just need to edit the FAQ and give the "where can I ask subjective stuff" section a simpler anchor.

@KevinMontrose Your answer didn't address the bug reported here.  I don't think the misbehaviour on this specific anchor tag is actually "by design".  Could you double-check that 'status-bydesign' is actually appropriate here?  The answer you provided two minutes after applying the tag seems to imply that you misunderstood this bug report as being confusion over the FAQ system, rather than reporting an anchor which doesn't work with the system.

1st) There's a shortcut to the FAQ: [faq] and an extended one to the different topics: [faq#TOPIC], where TOPIC is the id/name of the headline/anchor.

Example: Link to the [faq]
Example: Link to the "What kind of questions can I ask here" [faq#questions]
Note: This doesn't work in questions/answers, but in comments and in chat.

2nd) I also have a Gist that some of us over at WPSE maintain - just the text is slightly different from user to user.

[faq#where-can-i-ask-subjective-discussion-and-other-questions-not-fit-for-this-site] doesn't appear to do it, nor does [faq#3] (and in any case, do they fix the problem where the link is correct but navigating to it only takes you to the main FAQ page?

Link to the [faq] - Link to the "What kind of questions can I ask here" [faq#questions] - doesn't work in questions, but in comments and in chat.

I see. I still don't think this solves the problem though -- the /questions anchor is at the top of the page, so it's hard to tell if its navigating to the anchor. [faq#what-about-subjective-questions] doesn't navigate to the anchor ("what about subjective questions").

Anchor links to the faq move the linked content to the top of the page (technically it's a copy, the original is still present if you scroll down).
https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/faq#deletion for instance, leads to a page that looks like:

I noticed that, I think it's broken by anchors that have hyphens in their names, though, because that behavior isn't present for the "where-can-i-ask-subjective-discussion-and-other-questions-not-fit-for-this-site" anchor (nor the "what-about-subjective-questions" anchor).

(And if the hyphens breaking it is by design, as the tag you added to the question suggests, could you explain why?)

Those are also new(ish) sections in the FAQ so something may have been forgotten when they were added, but hopefully the design wouldn't require explicit action to make them link-able.


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Gift reputation to users that need it to join chat
While I realize that for many users the chat is not a big part of the community but its really what keeps me engaged with the site and I think it would help keep other people (as in new users) here as well. Would it make sense to implement a feature where you can gift a user the gap amount of reputation needed to chat? Gifting would involve the gifting user permanently giving enough of their own reputation to the user they would like to join chat. To lessen the blow, perhaps the receiving user needs to accept the gift of reputation and join the chat so that reputation doesn't just disappear (this isn't a requirement but I think it would make people more willing to use the feature as there would be less risk involved). It could also be a privilege that is unlocked at a certain reputation level.
When would this get used? Sometimes there are bad questions for the site that would be enjoyable to discuss with the person looking for information and beneficial just to share opinions and experiences on the topic in real time. Often times, though, the user doesn't have enough rep to chat. If we had the ability to gift reputation to get people in the chat room it would lessen the blow of their (usually first) question being closed to oblivion, get them involved in the community in other ways, and hopefully become active members on the site.
Why would this be a good idea? When I get the feeling of "boy I wish I could chat with this person" it is because the question they asked is actually on a topic that interests me as a game developer meaning its generally not your basic "how do I X" or "Why doesn't this work" questions which means this person actually has the potential of contributing useful content to the site even though their first question may have been bad. We want to keep these people around so instead of completely putting them off of the site altogether by closing and downvoting their questions, lets get them in chat and have valuable discussion on the topic they wanted to find out about and help them get their next question right.
I personally have not given this idea full thought but there are definitely times I wish I could say "Hey! Join us in chat and lets discuss it further!" but I can't. Sure they could easily get the 20 rep needed to join chat but then the onus is on them and odds are I'll never seem them again anyway. It would be nice to have the power to be proactive in encouraging people to get involved instead of waiting around for them to get motivated on their own.
Needless to say I thought of this as a "simple" solution and wanted to see what the community thinks. If it doesn't make sense for the StackExchange network and let me know why. I'll probably see things your way.

I like this idea, or something like it. I find the 20 reputation requirement to speak on the chat a huge barrier because it's often the new users without that reputation who ask the questions that would be better suited to the chat.
I've heard that diamond mods can "bless" users such that they can chat anyway, so perhaps adding that privilege to high-reputation users would be another alternative to this approach.
(It occurs me to that you could half-ass this if the low-rep user has an answer on the site, because you could generate and manually award a bounty for that answer, but that seems abusive of the bounty system.)

Interesting point. On the flip side I've used bounty a couple times and I believe one of the times I got a quick answer I liked but couldn't award it due to a forced 24 hour delay between when you generate the bounty and when you can award it. As such this isn't even practical enough to abuse IMO. Maybe the delay is different / non existent under different circumstances? I don't know.

I've never used the bounty stuff so you're probably correct.

I will say this: I don't use chat (because I don't like chat-style communication). But if I knew that a bunch of newbies were flooding chat with questions of dubious quality, that would make me stay away regardless of my feelings for that kind of communication. So I don't think giving newbies access to an essentially unregulated discussion system is healthy. If they can't get 20 rep, then they're probably not going to add much to any real discussion.

The key thing to note though is the people we would be letting into chat would be ones who have asked "good quality" questions that are discussion oriented. Just because a question is bad for the SE QA format it doesn't make it bad for chat.


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Will there be further moderator elections?
I know SE sites' community moderators are elected by the community. The last and only election on GameDev was in 2011.
Do these elections happen periodically or just that once?

From my understanding if there's pressure to add another moderator, or an existing moderator steps down, then they'll have an election.
I don't think existing moderators have to re-nominate themselves, it's purely an additive basis.
Do you feel we need another election?

Another election seems unnecessary. Moderators should not be added until the need is obvious and they should most certainly not be replaced except under extreme circumstances. I wanted to check if I agree with the site's policy and I'm glad I do!

I think they only happen when they need to happen, generally at most once per year; so far there's been no need for another one.


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How can I see someone's accept rate?
Where is the % accept rate in Game Development, which normally appears under a question-writer's badges in other Stack Exchange sites such as Stack Overflow?
I've seen it mentioned in Game Development.meta posts, and can't find anything suggesting it's no longer used. Thanks.

This does still appear under a askers badge on the question page. I don't know the exact conditions that need to be met, but it will not show up for users that haven't asked a question before and haven't had a question open for long enough.
For example, a user that has asked questions in the past and is asking a new question:

Will show an accept rate below their badge.
EDIT

Found the rules in the stackoverflow blog:

The following rules are used in the calculation:

Questions must not be community wiki.
Questions must not be closed.
Questions must be more than 3 days old.
Questions must have at least 1 answer.
There must be at least four eligible questions as determined
  by the above rules, otherwise the statistic will not appear.

Please could you provide a link to a question with an accept rate? I can't see them on gamedev or gamedev meta, even on questions asked by people who asked questions before, by you, or by users with gold badges, including questions asked over two years ago such as this: http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/1589/fixed-time-step-vs-variable-time-step

This question currently shows an accept rate of 75%.

Thanks. I can see that too. I wonder what the rule is for whether it's shown or not (it can't just be those in this answer, for the reasons in my above comment).

Maybe it's only shown for people who have failed to accept an answer in a certain number of days, and then it goes away again if they then accept answers? One way to find out... :-)

@MikeHoward I've updated with the rules for showing the accept rate.

Thanks. I couldn't find that, even searching the blog for "accept rate". I guess a lower proportion of users from gamedev have answered four eligible questions, because it's much less busy than stack overflow. Maybe four is too high for this site?


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"add comment" button missing
I can only "add comment" on questions and answers posted by myself, not others. The button is missing. Why is that?
I use the linux version of firefox and chrome.

You don't have enough reputation yet yet. You need 50 reputation to "comment everywhere."
https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/privileges/comment


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Is this the site for "How to safely profit from violating copyright" questions?
Specifically, this question.
Note that the two highest upvoted answers, including the accepted one, both agree that yes, the proposed scheme to avoid being caught for profiting from violating copyright is good and would work to avoid prosecution, while still allowing the user to get paid.
Are methods of getting away with a crime the sort of expert knowledge we really want to be gathering and archiving on this site?  Should we be accepting questions about where to hide bodies?  What about how to profitably engage in money laundering?

No. (Apparently I can't just post "No" as a comment or an answer, and need more text.)

I tried the same thing.

I'm just baffled that the question hasn't been closed.  My close vote on it has already expired, and the question is still active enough to remain on the front page.  Is there anything that can be done at this stage?

Regardless of the intent of the asker, the fundamental question in that question is "Can the developer of a game be held liable for content that modders distribute?", which seems to be a valid question.

@Tetrad Agreed, that part of the question seems valid.  Would anyone object if I edited the question to only ask that?  (Removing the "M==P" and "How can M avoid being caught" portions of the question, which are more ethically difficult to justify).  Bearing in mind that the question's upvoted and accepted answer is primarily answering those latter questions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Be_bold

Do it. (Ah comment limit again!)

When faced with a question asking about the likelihood of getting caught for knowingly enacting a criminal scheme, the question should be edited to remove the criminal scheme context, and to remove the "would I get caught" portion of the question.
In this case, the original question was (paraphrased) "If I anonymously released a mod for my own commercial game, and that mod contained copyrighted assets to which I had no rights, could I be caught?"  The edited question was turned around into "Is a game's author liable for copyright infringement in a mod which he didn't release".
As a general rule (which I know that I personally forget much too often!):  Don't be shy about editing other people's questions in order to make the site better.  Questions here aren't primarily about helping individuals (although they're about that too!), but are mostly about helping make the Internet at large a better, more useful place for everyone, by archiving great answers to common questions.  If you see a bad question and think you can edit it into a good question, absolutely do it!  :D

I've tried to paraphrase the comments above, and distill them down into a full answer that can be voted on and (maybe) accepted, just to finish off this question.  Please, anybody else feel free to post a different summary/answer or edit this one.   I'll wait a few days and then accept whatever has the most votes.  :)


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How do I ask better questions?
This is oversimplifying things, but every day I find myself having thousands of questions, which usually fall into one of these categories:

Trivial questions: Stuff that I've probably done before, but I'm just too lazy to remember. I ask google, and the first result shows my answer. This accounts for the vast majority of my questions, and certainly have no merit in being asked here.
Intermediate questions: Questions that arise whenever something doesn't work as I expect it to. The majority of the time, looking for the cause of the problem, reading the documentation, debugging and the like solve my problem. If after trying a lot, I haven't found a solution, I end up asking, and after a while of trying a bit more, I find the solution, so I answer my own question. I probably should not even create those questions in the first time, and the lack of interest (upvotes) seem to agree with this.
Tough questions: This is the stuff that really makes me think, and where I think I actually need help. However, this is usually too specific, and asking it will help nobody else, because nobody has my exact same problem. So I try to remove the details as much as I can, and end up with a question as generic as I can, like this, this and this. But by removing all the context to make the question generic and useful to other people, I end up dumbing it down, and end up attracting controversy instead of answers. I also fail at making it into a better question, which the extreme lack of upvotes reflect.

So what I now have is a bunch of questions that not only created some useless controversy, but also don't have any useful solutions, and end up wasting both my time and that of the people who answer them and that of the people who may come with a similar question only to find no useful answers.
This is of course not the fault of the people who helpfully try to answer my questions, but my fault by asking bad questions. I try to bring only what I consider to be the most interesting questions, that other people may also have, but I'm pathetically failing at it. Of course, my accept ratio stands at a solid 0%, but I can't accept something that doesn't answer the question, nor can I delete the question.
I would like to know of the expert askers in here, how do you find a balance to ask questions that are both helpful to you and other people, while also attracting useful answers.

The important point to understand, I think, is that StackExchange sites are archived Q&A repositories, not simply Come-Here-To-Get-Help sites.
That is, questions and answers are preserved here in perpetuity to serve those who visit the site in the future, and we only want questions and answers which will be useful to those future visitors.  This is why "debug my code for me" questions are typically closed as "too localised"; nobody else is ever going to need an answer about how to fix that particular bit of buggy code.
A simple criteria you can use to determine what questions to post to this site, and what questions to post elsewhere is just this:  If you think it's likely that someone else will want to ask the same question here someday, and an absolute answer which applies to everyone can be provided, then absolutely post the question here (after searching to check whether someone has asked the same question here before).  If you think it likely that you're the only one who will benefit from the question, or if the 'correct' answer would be different for different people, then a discussion forum or our chat would be a better place to ask -- they're transient discussion mediums which are designed to facilitate personal interactions and assistance.  :)
In some cases you can modify a question which is about personal advice just for you, and rewrite it into a question which applies to everyone (often a structure like "What factors influence the choice of whether someone should (A) or (B)?" can be used for this purpose).  If you can formulate your question in this way, rather than as "I'm (personal details), should I do (A) or (B)?" then absolutely do so.  Make the question apply to everyone, and you'll normally be fine.  :)

Yes, but this is precisely the problem I exposed in point 3 up there. After I generalize my question as much as I can, and I turn it into an interesting question that other people may also have, I post it and end up attracting controversy. Should I have not posted the questions in the first place? Should I have asked my original ultra-specific question instead?

Of the three questions you linked in point 3, all are upvoted, all have been given answers, and none has attracted any close votes.  I guess I'm just not seeing the controversies that you are.

Your 3 questions have problems for different reasons.
1) It's an interesting question and not a bad one but if there was an answer it would likely be of a complexity that would require a paper to be written about it, and yet is of zero practical use considering most people will either rotate the sprites in Photoshop or accept the graphics hardware's native filtering.
2) This blend question didn't really attract controversy; it just attracted one person who disagreed with the premise of the question. I disagreed with that person's answer, but I don't have a better one to supply. Not every good question has someone here that can answer it. Most people never have a use for anything other than the traditional blending mode and occasionally additive blending. You also have to accept that some people here on GD.SE can be quite brusque with their replies, and don't take it personally.
3) This question is too vague. You removed the extraneous text about your personal situation etc. but it was still too vague, because there are many of different types of online game and many aspects you could want to prototype. You've assumed there must be some sort of tool for your problem, but there isn't. There's just hard work and a lot of reading to do.
Remember this site is heavily focused on clearly answerable questions. Not every question is clearly answerable, and that doesn't make it a bad question, just one unsuitable for this site. In such cases, you might consider forums like Gamedev.net or TigSource.com, or even post on the Gamedev subReddit.

Regarding question 1: If, as you claim, everybody uses hardware filtering, I would have expected answers mentioning this, including relevant experience, and a few examples. I honestly thought this was a straightfoward question that had already been solved, and any self-respecting graphics programmer would know the answer to. But the question itself gathered so little interest that I would prefer to delete it.

Regarding question 2: I don't mind answers that disagree with the original question. Sometimes you are looking at the problem from the wrong angle, and you need somebody to tell this to you, but the answer provided is just mean and not helpful at all, as it basically says "get lost noob, learn something before even asking", and doesn't even provide alternative points of view. Of course, everybody agrees with him (the answer and his comments are upvoted, while mine aren't), so he is probably right. Once again, my fault for asking the wrong question.

Regarding question 3: I originally included the text because it provided context (I can, and have written online games, but writing an online game and prototyping one have very different non-functional requirements). Everybody, including yourself right now seem to have misinterpreted my question as "Hi, I've never programmed but I want to write WoW clone plz give me teh codes". I think the question is very specific asking for technical tips that simplify prototyping, but everybody seems to disagree. So once again, wrong question on my part.

In conclusion, all of these have the same pattern. I wrote bad questions, and caused inconveniences, and made people (including yourself right now) waste a lot of time. I want to fix this, and that's why I created this meta-question. Asking good questions is difficult. Much more difficult than I had thought. I am having a lot of trouble asking good questions, and would like to get some hints on how to ask good questions that people can identify with, and then provide interesting and constructive good answers.

Re: Q1: You misjudged the way people use graphics. But the question itself was interesting, which is why it got 8 votes and an honest attempt at answering it. Deleting questions because they don't get enough interest is sort of against the ethos of the site. It's the quality of the question that counts, and this one is a good question, just not as relevant as you believed.

Re: Q2: As already stated above, I disagree with the answer there but don't have a better one. If it were a bad question it wouldn't have 5 upvotes.

Re: Q3: the context wasn't really relevant, sorry. And no, I haven't interpreted your question in the way you suggest at all, nor is there anything in what I wrote to suggest that. What I have suggested however is that you made several incorrect assumptions (eg. that networking is something fairly standardisable, that a tool would exist for testing it) which mean you won't get the answer you were hoping for.

Please don't be offended, but it sounds like you have a bit of negative self-image going on here. You want to delete a question just because it's not had much interest, as if it's an embarrassment not to be more popular. You're assuming 'everybody' agrees with a harsh answer to your question and that therefore you asked the wrong question and are at 'fault'. And you think that everybody is judging you because you didn't know much about networking, or that you're somehow inconveniencing people. The first step is to stop worrying so much about bits of text on the internet.

Ultimately your questions aren't bad - you just think they are. Not every good question is answerable: I have a few myself over on Stack Overflow. Just accept that and move on.

I'd have them deleted because I think they don't add anything to the site. They're just noise and have caused inconveniences and made people waste their time. As I understand these sites, you guys are aiming for nothing but the best questions ans answers, and anything that isn't either up to the standards, nor leading to it doesn't belong here. You either shape up or get out. And I don't think I'm doing really good.

You're being excessively self-deprecating. The community and the moderators are the judges of question quality. Your questions have an average of 4 upvotes each, which appears to be above average. Don't worry about it.

Multiple Positive Upvotes means that someone (groups of someone) feel as though your content is adding something of value to the site. Please continue contributing!

First of all, chill out.
The questions you ask about game dev will get better as you learn more about game dev.
There is nothing wrong with asking a question and having it closed!  Not a big deal.  A learning process.  As you ask more questions and see responses, you're going to find out what this particular community likes to answer (yes, there is an "it's not you, it's them" somewhere in here).
If your question isn't getting upvotes, that does not mean it is not a good question.  It just means no one who saw it can relate to it or answer it.
The highest voted questions are basically the ones that everyone can relate to and everyone feels needs a good answer: "What are good games to “earn your wings” with? [closed]", "fixed time step vs variable".
Asking these questions is sort of luck of the draw - you can into the problem and thought to ask it first.

Thank you very much for your feedback. Unfortunately your answer does not address any of the points in my question, and is not related to what I am asking (who said anything about closed questions?) Are you sure this answer is for this question?


text:
Please stop feeding users editing rep for minor alterations
Over the last few days, a user has edited dozens of posts. That, in and of itself, is not bad. However, his edits are:

In many cases too minor to bother with.
In many cases, are bumping trash to the front page, without fixing the substantive content of the question to make it a decent post.

Could we stop approving these edits when it's not appropriate? Edits like this, this, this, this, this, etc, should not be accepted.
He's effectively gaming the system. He neither asks nor answers any questions. He just walks through the list of questions and edits them to fix minor problems. That's not something we should be rewarding 200+ rep for.
It should be noted that this comes up frequently on MSO, and the general consensus is to reject such edits.

Agreed, the moderators seem to have just been approving everything, even the very minor stuff. Additionally, an approval from a mod is all it needs to pass, where as regular users like us need to have two people agree on accept or reject. For example an edit on a post from Feb 8 '11 just to remove the thank you, rejected by me, approved by @Noctrine: http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/9669

@Byte56 It's interesting, I didn't even see the status of that edit on the queue. But yeah - I did accept a number of edits by this user. Also, I wasn't looking at the dates just the content - and editing out "Thank you's" and the like is quite common.

@Noctrine I would accept too if the question were just asked, but given that it was nearly two years old, I rejected. I think looking at date is important for any edit. Perhaps the date should be made more obvious.

Bummer, it seems the user in question has deleted their account...

Most wikis have a checkbox for 'this is a minor edit'. Aside from not giving reputation, such a checkbox could be used to prevent minor edits (like fixing a single word/letter) from bumping a question/answer to active questions.

I was coming here to post about this. If there's a limit to how many edits I can review in a day, there needs to be a limit to how many edits someone can make in a day. One day has 30+ edits, and I can only review 20 per day?
I completely agree with both your points. Most of them are capitalization fixes or fixing grammar by change "I've" to "I have". In addition there were a number of edits on closed questions.
I was going through rejecting all the minor edits, when I was told I'd reviewed my maximum for the day and to come back tomorrow. There was still some 30+ edits pending review.
Bleh, and it's totally messing up the active questions page.

I really wish that SE had the concept of a "minor edit", which would apply the edit to a question/answer without popping the question to the top of the "active question" queue.  If we'd had that, this whole event could have been much less of a problem.

@Trevor Surely edits so minor as to be marked as minor were unnecessary in the first place?

@Anko Unnecessary, sure.  But fixing grammar, fixing spelling.. they help questions be found and understood via a search engine.  It can have some value to the site.  The problem in this incident was that so many minor edits were being made so quickly that it was disrupting the normal operation of the site by filling the front page with 2-3 year old questions, completely displacing all the newly asked questions.

@Trevor If an edit adds value, I'd consider it no longer minor. I understand that the edits in question here weren't valuable. I just instinctively revolt when anyone speaks of adding complexity to a system where it's not absolutely necessary. :) This debate has been had before and results were [status-declined] by Jeff.

If someone edits an old, inactive question (say, six months or older) for any reason other than to fix something which is seriously wrong with it (ie: bringing a dead link up to date), then it's probably an invalid edit, and we should reject it, full stop.
This is doubly-true when it's part of a single-user mass-edit spree, as we're seeing at the moment.
And quadruply true when the minor edits being made are to questions which should be (or already have been) closed according to current site rules.  There's no point to cleaning up questions we don't want, particularly when it results in those questions we don't want returning to the front page.  (Note that I have no problem with edits which are designed to make a closed question more suitable, for the purposes of attempting to get the question re-opened.  I'm only talking about minor edits.)

I disagree.  Edits to improve a question or answer, even minor grammar edits or edits to 6-month-old questions, only serve to improve the site, so I see no reason to actively prevent them.  But should the user earn rep for them?  I personally don't have a problem with rewarding a user a small amount of rep for going out of his way to improve the site.  The only issue I see is that minor edits (or really, any edit at all) probably shouldn't bump a post to the front page, but I think that issue is pretty minor.

@BlueRaja-DannyPflughoeft I don't think we disagree -- if edits didn't bump posts to the front page, then I'd have no problem at all with minor edits to old, non-closed questions. But bumping posts back to the front page every time someone fixes a misplaced comma hurts the usability of the site, especially as we saw in this incident, where every frontpage question was two-three years old (and most were closed). If bumping isn't going to change (and there's been no indication that it will), then the only rational option is to try to deny minor edits to ancient posts, to protect the front page.

tl;dr:  Minor edits make the site a little bit better.  Clogging the front page with ancient, already-answered, and closed-as-off-topic posts makes the site a lot worse.  If we can fix the second, then absolutely we should encourage the first.  But until then, I think it's a net negative for the site.

You are right in a way, but even if very little his edits are really improving the questions. So based on current site policies we can't reject his edits.

Actually, site policy is to reject "very little" edits.

Note that my down vote doesn't mean this is a bad answer, just that I don't agree with it. As Nicol says, "Too minor" is one of the reject reasons proposed when reviewing edits.

@Byte56 I don't agree with my answer either. I mean I do think nicol made a valid point but I didn't know anything about those minor changes policy he mentioned. So I'm leaving this answer to be here.


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Can PlayStation Mobile questions be asked here?
PSM is a platform for indie development on the PS Vita and PlayStation Certified Android devices. You code in C# using what it seems to be a heavily modified version of mono, with a rather minimal API to control some of the features in the PS Vita.
They also support publishing to their online store, with a yearly payment required.
So, to me, this looks very similar in idea and scope to Microsoft's XNA.
I haven't yet seen any PSM questions in here, and I would like to know if it would be okay to ask some.

Yes, it would be alright to ask playstation mobile questions here.

Well, I made my first question. Let's hope we can steal some people from the official PSM forums.

As long as you're not breaking any developer NDAs there's no problem with it.

I heard iOS development requires signing an NDA. Does that mean iOS questions are technically forbidden?

Considering most of their docs are publicly available: http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/navigation/, no

@PandaPajama: Note: the notice about NDAs is for your benefit, not ours. You're the one who would be in trouble for breaking NDAs.

@NicolBolas Nobody said PSM has NDA requirements.

As most of the others have already noted - it should be fine. I just tried finding a PSM tag, but it doesn't exist however. It would be a good idea if one of the higher rep users could create it.


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Why was this answer so popular?
I happened to answer a question, and at the time of this writing, it has gotten 74 upvotes. Much more than my second best answer.
Now, don't take me wrong. I like getting an answer upvoted, because it means I did a good job. I just want to know what was good about it, so I can do it again.
In my opinion, my answer is:

Too long
Not very helpful. The original question was tagged with "libgdx", a library my answer doesn't mention even once (this is supported by the fact that the asker has not accepted the answer)
Based on lots of opinions and with no references. Somebody should add a few dozen [citation needed]s in my answer.
Inaccurate. As visible on the comments, there are lots of corner cases I'm not covering, and I know that most of the stuff I said is never that perfect in practice.
Unnecessary. What I said is much better covered at thousands of websites and books, with much better precision. A single google search shows much better answers than what I wrote.
Not constructive. It's not technically an answer, and the knowledge I used to answer it is very shallow. I don't think I'm adding anything to the entire knowledge of the human race with this answer.
Poorly written. English is not my native language, and it clearly shows on my answer. There are so many grammar and composition errors even in its current shape that I would like to edit it again, but by doing so, the question would get bumped, which is something I'd rather avoid.

Yet for some reason people seemed to like it, and now it's one of the highest voted answers in the entire site.
I originally wrote the answer in frustration that none of the current answers were very accurate, so my answer was more of a rant against the other answers, than an honest answer to the originally very poor question which I actually downvoted. The reasons for writing that answer were not good, and I think the answer itself was not good either.
Yet for some reason, people seemed to like it. Why? I have no idea. I prefer answers in which my personal experiences add value to both the question and the answer, like this one or this one. They're by far not perfect answers, but much more in line with what I understand this site is about.
I'm missing something in my appraisal of my answers, because I don't really believe my answer to the texture question deserves more than a few upvotes. So I turn to you guys.
Did you like the answer? if so, why? I'm really at a lost here.

94 upvotes out of more than 2,700 views is barely 3% of viewers. Remember, a question that collects more traffic will generate more total votes. The other two answers you point out have less than 900 views combined, which at the same 3% rate would suggest 27 upvotes; at time of writing they have 14 votes combined, about a 1.5% rate.

gamedev has a huge beginner slant, where a lot of viewers perhaps may never have thought of what resources a texture takes up, and "which is more efficient" seems like a reasonable question. In this case, while I think the question is pretty bad, it's actually doing something useful because you taught a core concept.
People who know better can't help upvoting any answer that starts ""efficiency" [is a]  commonly misused term" because MOST EFFICIENT WAY ARRRGH
I imagine the question made it to the "hot list" in the bar and drew people in to vote from the other network sites. "Which image format is more memory-efficient" is perfect linkbait title for attracting clicks from people just browsing for interesting questions.

It probably hit Reddit or something too.

It's sad that our "linkbait" questions are generally low quality ones...

@NicolBolas I think that's true for a lot of fields. The top-voted questions on Math.SE are extremely basic or not-even-math compared to say, the 'newest' page.

I like your answer a lot.  It's a really good broad overview of all the relevant issues, and is written in a way that makes it accessible to non-experts.  It's precisely the sort of information that StackExchange was designed to gather and archive forever to help future visitors, and to make the Internet a more useful place for everyone.
I agree that the answer doesn't precisely match the question, but frankly, the question wasn't great.  And if I had to choose, I'd much rather preserve your answer than the question it's posted on.  I've been tempted to heavily edit the question in order to make it a better place to hold the answer you gave.
Because frankly, your answer is far more valuable to the site and to the community than the question ever was.

"I've been tempted to heavily edit the question in order to make it a better place to hold the answer you gave." So why don't you?

@NicolBolas I have a general sense that editing questions in order to make them better match one of their answers is maybe a slippery-slope action.  I'm really tempted to do it in this instance, but..  I do wonder whether long-term it sets a bad precedent.  Or maybe I just worry too much.  :)

I've noticed lengthy answers tend to get a lot of upvotes no matter the actual content.

It got tweeted on the GD.SE Twitter account.
https://twitter.com/#!/StackGameDev/status/296196620100464640
I expect that brings a lot of passing traffic.

I believe that happens to any question that gets at least one positive vote.

The anwser is very complete on the subject. You can see a lot of people bookmarked the question for future reference, but what they actualy bookmarked was your answer (at least was my case).


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What does one look at before answering a question?
I'm curious - I see a lot of questions that go unanswered on the front page, some of my own, some of others, and I'm really wondering - when the community is going through the index page to take time off their hands to pick questions to answer... what do you like for?

Any reason I've received some close votes?

I look at the tags and the title before going into the question. If it already has an accepted answer, I just go in to see what the answer was.
Unfortunately, I can only help on programming questions in C, C++, C#, Java, Lua and Python. For engines, I can only help on DirectX, OpenGL and GLES, and not on XNA, Cocos, Unity or libgdx, which are very popular right now. That pretty much leaves me out of around 90% of the questions in this site.

I look for whether it's a topic that interests me. That means the question has to be specific enough to let me know what it's about, but not so localised that the answer is only of use to the asker.
Examples using your own questions:

'Creating a level editor event system' is too vague for me to be interested and it contains multiple sub-questions which make it a less appealing question to try and answer. If it were clearer what exactly you're trying to achieve and less about worries that may or may not be actual problems, it would probably be interesting.
'Creating a frozen bubble clone' seems to be about finding a bug in your code rather than something that will be of use to the wider community. It might work better if it was clearer what the exact problem was, and if the title of the question actually described the problem rather than the project.

In fact, both of these are examples where your question was not a question but a description of the application you're working on. That gives a real impression that the question is likely to be ill-defined, vague, or localised. Consider ensuring that every question can be summarised with a one sentence question, with the main body elaborating on the details of what you're doing, what you're seeing, and how that differs from what you want to see.

This is what the favourite/ignored tags are for.

This is the quickest way to highlight questions on topics I know.

I answer questions in 2 main situations:
1)  The title from the front page catches my eye, or I think I know the answer to the question just from the title
2)  I think I have something to add to the discussion of a question I am interested in seeing the answer to


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gamedev.stackexchange: logo info
the logo of gamedev.stackexchange is of interest to me. specifically does anyone know who designed it? how long ago it was made? and i am also curious how the design came about.
i ask because for some years i have had a logo design built around that concept. i am planning on using my design as a personal business logo and do not want to run into conflicts.
currently the only publicly visible iteration of my design is an iGoogle theme i made that incorporates the logo. i made and uploaded it in 2010, but i would have difficulty proving this without cooperation from Google. if you would like to see it is called "hexBird". search that on iGoogle > themes.
other than that i only have a thumbnail pencil drawing of it from 2009 and potentially a handful of friends / acquaintances who could attest to it's existence. all of my other copies (digital and hard-copy) have been lost to time.
again to re-iterate i would like to be able to use my design and would like to do so without trouble or inconvenience, to myself or others; so i would like information on the gamedev.stackexchange logo.
thank you.

New Design Launched
https://gamedev.meta.stackexchange.com/users/166/jin

thanks for the info. and thanks to noctine for the migrate. i am new to stackexchange if you could not tell and i have always been terrible at finding things.
do you foresee any issues arising caused by the similarity of the two logo designs?

@brnnnrsmssn That's a question for lawyers. SE and You're lawyers. Please contact the SE team for further help.

Actually the first iteration of the logo can be found here: http://meta.gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/239/design-for-game-development-site

Our page footer:

site design / logo © 2013 stack exchange inc

You should ask them.


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Should I ask Pong questions here or on SO?
Since Pong is a tag at main site SO and not a tag on gamedev, is the preferred place to ask about Pong on SO even if Pong is game development? I saw that Pong runs on some FPGA and asked about it it but I think it got too localized.

Pong as in the game pong?  There probably isn't a tag for it because nobody has asked any questions about it.
As far as progrmaming questions go, see the faq.  If a game developer will likely give you a better answer than the audience of SO, feel free to ask it here.  Most game developers probably don't deal with a lot of embedded hardware, or whatever FGPAs are classified as.

Yes as in the game Pong. There're no games AFAIK for the Nios II CPU, I asked and removed the question since it's probably very uninteresting if you don't have this FPGA (Altera DE2). I asked and got no reply.


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How can I do X? My idea is to use plan Y. Would that work?
I've recently been noticing a lot of questions which follow a particular formula;  they ask a question, then propose an answer, and then ask for confirmation of that answer.  It's probably always been like this, but it hadn't clicked in my head until now, so I thought it was worth bringing up for discussion on meta. Just grabbing a few examples from the current frontpage:

How do I resolve asynchronous client actions against an authoritative server state?
Determining Poker Hands
How should I manage the AI using lua scripts?
Implementing a build queue in a browser based game
Converting a 2D curve into points for data storage

What do people think about questions which are asking for confirmation of (or improvement upon) the author's own answer to the question, which is contained within the question body itself?  Is it something deserving of any special action/treatment?

And I've just found this related discussion on meta.stackOverflow:  http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/108969/best-way-to-deal-with-questions-answered-by-the-op-in-the-question-instead-of-in

You seem to be having a very engaging dialogue with yourself about this topic, why involve the rest of us? ;)

Well, I'm in two minds about it (hence the two answers I wrote).  Just wanted to get thoughts from others to make sure that I wasn't insane for even thinking it might be an issue.  :)

Sounds like editing out the OPs answer is also useful for solving the "asking for a discussion" problem brought up in your other answer.

I think such questions are (generally speaking) excellent, and should in no way be discouraged.  In particular, they're vastly preferable to the all too common questions where the askers, instead, omit all mention of their actual goal X and just write "I'm trying to do Y but it's not working the way I want! Can anyone help me?"
Note that, in most of the questions you've cited, the asker is not actually proposing a real answer to their problem in the question; rather, they're either describing a failed answer that is not solving their problem, or they only have a vague and incomplete sketch of an answer and are asking whether and how it could be turned into a real solution.
Basically, by including their own (unsatisfactory) attempt at an answer in their question, these askers are telling us what they've tried so far, something our FAQ explicitly encourages (emphasis mine):

Do your homework
Have you thoroughly searched for an answer before asking your question? Sharing your research helps everyone. Tell us what you found and why it didn’t meet your needs. This demonstrates that you’ve taken the time to try to help yourself, it saves us from reiterating obvious answers, and most of all it helps you get a more specific and relevant answer!

Of course, I'm sure there exist some questions that do, in fact, contain or presuppose their own answer and would benefit from the measures you suggest (moving the answer out of the question, or closing as "not constructive" or "not a real question").  I'm just saying that I don't think any of the examples you've listed above really are such questions.
I should also note that the meta.SO post you linked to in the comments (or at least the accepted answer to it) is mostly about something else, namely about situations where the asker, after having asked a more or less valid question, later finds an answer but posts it as an edit to their question rather than as an answer to it.  That's really more of an issue of new users being confused by the Stack Exchange user interface than a case of actual inappropriate questions.

I was going to post exactly this. Someone who can document what they've tried is obviously serious about their question, so we should be happy to have such questions. If the content needs editing to improve its relevance to the typical user and to de-emphasise the suggested approach if it is sub-optimal, so be it.

+1 for a perspective I hadn't even considered.  Re-reading the questions I linked originally, the first four appear to be proposing theoretical answers which the poster hadn't actually tried, while the last one is stating something which the poster actually attempted, but didn't work out.  I agree that the last one is definitely okay, but I'm still feeling conflicted over the "here's my answer, what do you think of it?" implications in the first four.

In this sort of situation, we should edit the user's proposed answer out of the question body, and post a comment encouraging them to repost their proposed answer as a proper answer to the question.
This would allow us to keep the questions while maintaining a true Q&A format, rather than a QA&Yes|No format.

I came very, very close to posting this answer at the bottom of the question, with a "Would that work?" postscript.  :)

I agree with this.

That said, there's a fine line between a question that also proposes a legitimate answer and one that explains what the user has tried or researched already; for example, the first question in your list (about asynchronous server stuff) doesn't feel like it clearly falls into the category where his proposed hashing solution should be removed because I think it provides some background on the specific problem he wants solved.

There's a post on meta.SO which advocates not even asking the user to repost the answer after editing it out of the question, but instead doing it yourself immediately and posting the answer as Community Wiki.  Which probably protects against new users who don't know how to get to the edit history, and drive-by askers who just never turn up again.

By contrast, the last question about 2D curves basically says, of the proposed answer "here is my solution can you make it better?"

I don't think we can explicitly post single answers as wikis any more, that's a mod thing, no? I know you can trick it by getting enough people to edit it, but that seems drastic.

@JoshPetrie: The "community wiki" checkbox seems to be still there below the answer box. I assume it works as it used to.

Oh, I didn't realize that.

The question would be: is it still there below the answer box if you don't have 4000+ rep?

People who ask a question, answer it themselves within the question body, and then ask for confirmation of their answer aren't actually asking a question to which they want an answer -- they're instead asking for a discussion about their answer.  And as a request for discussion, such questions should be closed as off-topic for Stack Exchange.

I think this a valid point (that they're not asking a question that's suitable for the site), but I also think the question they proposed and answered is probably interesting and valid to the site so I'd prefer to edit out the aspects of the post that make it a discussion or validation of the proposed answer and instead leave what is (hopefully) otherwise a good question for the site.


text:
What's a Late Answer?
Under the review tab, there's a category "Late Answers" for review.  I can't locate a definition of a late answer in the FAQ or anywhere else.
So, Q: What's a "late answer"?

A late answer is an answer which was posted a long time after the latest activity on the question.  (Not sure the exact threshold.  Seems to be somewhere in the 6 month range)
These are pulled out for special review because they often wind up turning out to have been people arriving from search engines who've posted a "Thanks" or "This was useful" message as an answer, or follow-up/related questions which should have been asked as separate questions, or similar problems related to people assuming that StackExchange works like forum software, rather than as a Q&A site.
In general, you can review them exactly as you review any other answer.  Check that they're actually a real answer to the question, and that they wouldn't have been more appropriate as a comment.  If all looks fine, then everything's fine.  :)

Thanks Trevor.  Seems like this explanation should be written somewhere on the site, no?


text:
Asking Question Guildine
new to this forum and I would like a quick bit of guidance (which doesnt seem to be covered by the site FAQ). I have a question I would like to ask but I can see that it has already been asked and answered from over several years ago now. I believe my question is dependant on time though and the answer may have changed since it was originally asked. How do I correctly go about asking such a question.

@Byte56 But then you answered him below! ;)

@Vaughan yep, the whole thing, including answer, should be moved to meta.

The correct way to handle this is to open a bounty on the question. Unfortunately, this is not an option for new users. You can either wait until you have enough reputation (75) to open a bounty or a higher rep user may be willing to open a bounty on the question for you to get an updated answer. You will need to include a link to the question for that to happen.

This is the question - gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/394/network-layer-libraries. Was asked several years ago.

@CanCan Ah, that likely won't be one that would be good to get going again. That question is sort of considered off topic these days. Since it's a "which technology to use" question.

Is there anywhere to ask that sort of question?

Yes. Check out the [FAQ]. That will give you a list of sites where you can ask discussion oriented questions.


text:
Should closed questions be retagged?
Usually, untagged questions need tags. However, some untagged questions are closed and some closed questions have bad tags. Retagging would presumably bump them to the front page. (I haven't tried, lest it anger the elders.)
Is it alright to retag closed questions?

If they're useful to the site still closed and adding tags would improve the ability for them to be found, retag them. If they're complete garbage questions, vote to delete.

You can edit only the tags, but it still marks the question as "active" (I tested it). If you mouse over just to the right of the tags, you'll see the following option:

It would be nice if editing the tags in this manner didn't cause the question to marked as active, since it would be a good strategy for cleaning up/improving search results. Perhaps that's something the SE devs can implement.


text:
How can I ask this question to make it not "off topic"?
A few days ago I asked this question...
https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/49668/what-framework-tools-are-available-for-making-web-based-games-like-game-dev-st
I'm a long time stack overflow user, and of course I understand subjective questions are not allowed. I tried to make it clear I was aware that it could be seen as subjective, and that I was looking for what the options are as opposed to which is the best, which does have an answer and is not subjective.
If asking any "what can I use for x?" questions are off topic here, where does someone go to get those sorts of questions answered? I've spent roughly 10 hours searching for what options are out there, but I seem to always end up at dead links or something that doesn't meet my requirements.

As an experiment, I tried reframing this type of question a few days ago.  My version doesn't yield a list of libraries as answers (which would quickly go out of date and become dead weight in our Q&A archive as technologies come and go), but it does give answers about how to pick a library to use (which remains accurate even when new libraries appear and old ones go away).  Seems like this formulation of the question is less problematic for people.

I'm sympathetic to this issue.  Often I'm in need of a good list of all the excellent resources on a topic.  Sometimes that sort of question sneaks through the review process and, due to some quality answers, they inevitably end up getting bookmarked and become top voted questions.  Some examples:
How do I get started making Android games? (64 votes)
2D Gaming Libraries/ Frameworks/ Engines for Android (40 votes)
What are typical pitfalls when writing games with a managed Language like C#? (53 votes)
And so on.
My feeling is, while we all encounter this sort of research issue from time to time, StackExchange can't become a provider of all services for all needs.  In other words, we just have to bite the bullet and accept that the utility of a quality Q&A service that results from strictly enforced protocols outweighs not having a quality "discussion" area here.
Try reddit? :)

I think you're right. Maybe a note should be added that these sort of questions will not be allowed in the future.

Number of up votes does not indicate conformity to the standards of the site. It just means the question was easy to understand, or easy to answer. As list questions typically are since they don't take much thought to answer, understand or ask.

@Byte56 I don't think we're saying different things here.  My comment about such questions getting upvoted was really more of a sidenote observation.  (I've been guilty of upvoting or bookmarking Q&A's like that when the subject matter is handy to me.)

@CameronFredman Yeah, I was pretty much agreeing with you and describing my reasoning for those questions having high up votes.

I would try the chat room or a forum somewhere.
Alternatively, loosen your requirements.  If you've searched for "10 hours" and not found anything my guess is that there isn't anything out there (at least not with an active enough development community to make using it worth the risk), or you're being to stringent.

I think the problem is I didn't really know what to search for. I asked on twitter (again) and someone pointed me towards https://github.com/cocos2d/cocos2d-html5 which looks like what I needed. Never found that in my search results.

Gamedev.SE's FAQ has a whole section dealing with where this sort of question can be asked.
And I just realised that the 'direct-link-to-the-section' link that I've been using for the past few days doesn't actually take people directly to that section.  :/
It's the "Where can I ask subjective discussion and other questions not fit for this site" section;  the third section on the page.


text:
Bug: FAQ navigation bar links scroll to wrong place
On the FAQ page, there is a navigation bar on the right, showing all the different sections of the FAQ, for quick navigation.
In that list, the following two links scroll the user to the wrong content section of the FAQ:

What about subjective questions
Where can I ask subjective, discussion, and other questions not fit for this site?

All the other navigation bar links seem to work correctly, and take the user to the correct content section.
Can those two links be fixed, please?

Probably related to the same underlying issue:  http://meta.gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/999/why-can-i-not-link-directly-to-faq-anchors

So its by design then? :P


text:
Why should 'How was the technique in X done' be considered off-topic?
We get a lot of people asking about a certain technique in a game.
eg:

https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/49813/how-did-oldschool-dungeon-crawlers-ie-dungeon-master-eye-of-the-beholder-render
https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/49769/how-to-make-spacedown-ninja-jump-game-mechnism-in-box2d

etc. And sometimes they get closed because "How to make X is off-topic". It's fine that asking about a whole game is both too broad and too specific, but why apply this to individual techniques that were used in one or more games?
A previous discussion was here: Is "How was entire game X made?" off-topic?
And the top reasons given there are:

Nobody can know how it was done
Asking about a whole game is overly broad
They're 'trivia' questions

Yet we're closing things where none of these really apply. For example:

we may not know exactly how Dungeon Master or Eye of the Beholder was rendered, but it's easy to supply a useful and practical guess as to how games of that type were rendered;
the rendering technique is quite a specific area and not too broad to be covered in a single focused answer;
a correct answer is more than just trivia - it's a useful resource for people making retro games and remakes.

I would argue that we are wrong to close such topics - my full explanation is in my answer below.

Indeed, I totally agree with you!

As someone who comments asking people to change their question, I do so because I don't believe "how did X do Y" and "how can I do Y like X" are equivalent. As I say in my comment on Trevor's answer, those two can often be very different. It's more likely an answer will be useful if the answer is telling someone how they can do Y, instead of how someone else (likely with different goals/limitations) did Y.

Also, I only down voted this question because it contains your answer, which I don't agree with. Maybe you could separate your question and answer? (I'd like to down vote the answer, not the question :))

@Byte56: done - see below.

I suspect that the crux of the disagreement is this:  If someone was to ask how Dungeon Master rendered its graphics, does your picture of a "correct answer" involve assembly language, RAM page layouts, and clever use of native hardware registers?  In my head, I say yes -- that would be the "correct answer" to this question.  I assume, @Kylotan, that you say no?

@TrevorPowell: Nobody is defending a "how does Dungeon Master render its graphics" question. I'm defending a "how did games like that achieve the specific effect of 3D environments with 2D sprites" question, and there's no need to consider assembly language, RAM, etc. in that context. We're wrongly labelling perfectly specific questions like this and pretending they are "How was Game X made" questions in a rush to close them.

Okay, fine.  If someone was to ask "how did games like Dungeon Master render their graphics", does your picture of a "correct answer" involve assembly language, RAM page layouts, and clever use of native hardware registers?  In my head, I say yes -- that would be the "correct answer" to how games of that era rendered their graphics.  I assume, @Kylotan, that you say no?

@TrevorPowell: I would say such a question is too broad to have a correct answer. Not sure what your point is here, because that question is nothing like the questions I cited.

BS.  You know perfectly well that your very first cited question is "How did oldschool dungeon crawlers ie Dungeon Master/Eye of the Beholder render?".  That's precisely the same question I asked in my "How did games like Dungeon Master render their graphics?" hypothetical upon which I asked you for further comment.

The title of the question is a summary. Look at the content of the question for what was intended, where the question was clarified to make it very clear what aspect was asked about. Do you really think a question should be closed simply because its title isn't a complete representation of exactly what the asker wants to know? If so, why bother having content beyond the title?

Kindly refrain from putting words in my mouth, @Kylotan.  I said nothing of the sort, and you know it.  I'm clearly wasting both my time and yours here, so I'm going to politely bow out of this conversation.  The matter appears to have been decided, regardless.

What if I'm targeting an old platform?

"How did game X implement technique Y" is historical trivia.  It has nothing to do with developing a game, and is therefore off-topic.  Even if the author of game X happens to be on-hand and is legally and ethically able to give an objectively correct answer to the question, while such an answer would undoubtedly be interesting and probably entertaining, it is still off-topic, because the question is fundamentally not about developing a game.
"How can I do thing X, so that it looks like game Y?" on the other hand, is a relevant, completely on-topic question, and can be correctly answered by anyone with relevant experience, in a way which is practically useful in the future.

so I assume you mean it's merely a problem with word ordering? instead of "how X is implemented in Y", one should ask "How can I implement X so that it looks like Y".

That isn't a problem of word ordering. It's a difference of the question's subject, verb tense, and overall intent:  "How can I accomplish something now", versus "How did somebody else accomplish something back then". One is a practical question which is relevant to the site, the people on it, and future developers, and the other is a request for a trivial factoid.  My intuition is that most people who ask the "How X is implemented in Y" question aren't actually planning to do Y; they're just asking out of idle curiosity because it costs them nothing to ask any whim that comes into their head.

"it is still off-topic, because the question is fundamentally not about developing a game". This is not the case, though several people seem to think it is. The FAQ says this site is about game development. It doesn't stipulate that you must be making a game.

"overall intent", "My intuition is": you're judging a question on the asker's intent. Who are we to read minds, or police what people want to do? We should be judging the question purely on its utility for the site as a whole.

+1 Knowing how they did it and how I can do it are totally different things. Especially when it comes to retro games. We don't have anywhere near the limitations that old game developers did, so telling someone how they can flip bits to optimize their game play for 64k of RAM is totally irrelevant. It would be far more useful to know how you can create that effect using today's technology. How someone else did it doesn't actually matter, it's far less likely to apply to the current situation.

@Byte56: we can judge that on a case by case basis. Techniques unnecessary on modern hardware can be written off as trivia. Techniques still important in some way, such as how to implement a faux-3D effect with a 2D engine, are useful and relevant.

@Kylotan It's not only the age of the hardware, there are plenty of other restrictions that the original developer may have been dealing with, that are not necessarily present with the current developer. All in all, I think it's better to just have a general rule to convert them into a "How can I do X like Y?". Those questions should get the OP what they want, without the issues raised by "How did Y do X?"

@Byte56: but there's often no good way to describe the technique without referring to a game as an example. We're getting hung up on the idea that the asker wants to know precisely how that game was implemented when they almost never do - they just want to know how to achieve the same effect. Closing the question instead of editing it slightly to accommodate this is a pretty hostile thing that we do to people eager to learn.

@Kylotan "Who are we to read minds" applies to you, too.  All we have to go on is the question that they actually asked.   And the question they actually asked (in this theoretical situation of which we're speaking) was for historical trivia, not for help in developing a game.

@Kylotan I agree, referencing a game is fine. And we agree that they almost never do want to know exactly how "they" did it. That's why I comment asking them to change the question, because it's likely what they mean is how they can do it, and I'm trying to ensure that they're asking a question that's on topic, instead of a question that's off topic. I vote to close if I see that the user has been active since I commented, but hasn't changed the question. To me, that means they intended their original meaning (wanting to know how "they" did it)

@TrevorPowell: but I'm not trying to read their mind, because I'm not interested in their motivation at all. If they ask "how did games like Dungeon Master render the graphics" then that is something that can be meaningfully answered no matter why they asked it.

And I'll reiterate, there's no reason why someone who asks a question must be developing a game. The only bit of the FAQ that implies that is the "actual problem you face" issue - but not only do I disagree with having that in the FAQ, but I think that research into techniques is itself a legitimate problem. To decide whether something is research or trivia is really about the usefulness of the answers and not the intent of the question.

@Kylotan If you really want to discuss throwing out and/or reinterpreting the FAQ, that should probably be introduced as a separate meta question, not introduced twelve comments into a comment thread on an answer on an unrelated question.

I view the whole of this Meta site as an opportunity to debate what the rules should or should not be. I don't think of it as a place to play rules lawyers, treating the FAQ as the law. That seems back-to-front to me.

"How did game X implement technique Y" is historical trivia. It has nothing to do with developing a game." => I disagree with this. Knowing how some game implemented some feature can be a huge boost for inspiration, so asking about it seems perfectly fine to me. In other words it can be "an actual problem that you face". Provided that the question doesn't violate other faq items: e.g. asking about how was the whole game made, being too vague... I'm thus upvoting Tetrad's answer.

@LaurentCouvidou: Just because you feel inspired by the information doesn't change the fact that it's still trivia.

@NicolBolas It is trivia that has to do with developing a game. You missed my point.

@LaurentCouvidou: But it's not trivia that helps you develop a game. "Inspiration" doesn't make a game or even part of a game. How someone wrote some assembly routine to make some graphical effect on 20-year-old hardware is of no practical benefit to anyone today.

@NicolBolas OK we just have different opinions on this. I feel kinda sad that the community leans towards closing those questions, but fair enough. Maybe I just like historical trivia too much ;)

At Byte56's request:
I would argue that we are wrong to close such topics, and equally wrong to dogmatically insist in the comments that the original asker edits their question to fit some arbitrary rule. If specifically focused on a certain technique, the fact that the asker used the phrase "how did X do Y" instead of "how can I do Y like X" should not be our cue to close the question. It's not our job to be the secret police dedicated to flushing out miscreants who never intend to implement the algorithm they ask about - if the answer will be useful to the world, then the question is surely useful also.
EDIT:
I think the criteria we judge the question on should be:

Is the technique relevant to modern developers (bearing in mind that many are working with restricted resources, eg. limited to 2D, small amounts of RAM, etc).
Is the technique possibly documented somewhere, or is it one that experienced developers will be able to comment on with authority?
Is the technique notable, whether for being innovative (eg. the rewind mechanic in Braid) or widely used (eg. the faux-3D rendering in Dungeon Master etc)

If these are true, or mostly true, I think it would be disingenuous to argue that the question and good answers to it would not benefit the community, meaning that closing the question is a net loss for the site.

I think you misunderstand the reason why we want "how do I do something like X." Answering that question is very different from answering the question of "how did X do Y." I cannot tell you how X did Y if I haven't studied X in any detail. However, I can tell you how to do something like X, in many cases after a cursory evaluation of X. Or, to put it another way, the way Dungeon Master did it's rendering is not necessarily the same way we would implement it today. How it was done in the past is mostly irrelevant to the idea of achieving the same effect in the present.

Also, questions of notability are far too subjective. Who decides that something is "notable". Who decides what is "relevant to modern developers?"

I don't think I misunderstand it; I think moderators here take too narrow a view of what sort of answer the question is looking for. If someone says "oldschool dungeon crawlers" it's clear they're looking for general principles, and not specifics of one individual game.

And I don't particularly see any issue at all about the notability argument. Moderators make their own judgement calls all the time on whether to close a question or not, eg. whether it's "too localized". Notability is just another way of looking at how localized the question and the answers are.

"I think moderators here take too narrow a view of what sort of answer the question is looking for." So you're saying that we should guess what they're actually looking for, instead of assuming that what they're looking for is what they asked for. That's been brought up on MSO before, and it did not go over well. It is not our job to find the good question in someone else's crap. It's their job to provide it, and if they don't, they get their question closed until they do.

Or, to put it another way, "what sort of answer the question is looking for" is an answer that answers what the question asks. Anything else is mind-reading or making assumptions. And that's not what we should be doing. If someone sees a "how did X do Y" question, they're going to think that the answers are going to explain "how did X do Y". They're not going to assume that the answers will explain "how to do Y on modern systems."

"If someone says "oldschool dungeon crawlers" it's clear they're looking for general principles, and not specifics of one individual game." The problem there is a lack of specifics: there are a lot of "oldschool dungeon crawlers". Indeed, there are a lot of schools of "oldschool dungeon crawlers", all with their own visual style. So there are no "general principles" to be had with a question that broad.

I don't agree that we should keep closing questions until someone can guess the right combination of words to get past the moderators. Moderators should take some responsibility for editing questions that are nearly-acceptable into ones that are acceptable. Otherwise the first hit for many Google searches is a closed question when it could have been an open question with good answers.

As for your last comment, this is you moving the goalposts. If a question mentions a specific game, you say it's trivia or too localised. If a question mentions all games of a certain type, you say it's too broad. So they mention a certain type with some key examples to narrow it down and put it right in the middle, and you act like it has both problems now when in fact it has neither. It is perfectly possible to explain how the graphics in games like Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder game were rendered using 2D tech, but people are pretending it is not to justify closing the question.

"Moderators should take some responsibility for editing questions that are nearly-acceptable into ones that are acceptable." It is not the responsibility of others to fix your questions for you. Doing that only encourages people to keep giving you crap questions. Such questions are not "nearly-acceptable", because in order to make them acceptable, you have to make them into a different question with a different intent. And if that was their original intent, then it is their responsibility to state it correctly.

Jeff Atwood's 'A Theory Of Moderation' talks about closing blatantly off-topic questions. Questions like this are not blatantly off-topic. They are often a minor edit away from being salvaged, which is preferable to closing. It's unnecessarily punitive to close the whole thing and it leaves the site with an unanswered question coming up in search results and a reputation for harshness towards newbies. Who does that benefit, exactly?

It benefits the community by: 1) giving people an incentive to ask appropriate questions 2) dis-incentivising people who refuse to take responsibility for their own questions 3) making it clear that such questions are not welcome. I'm happy with a "reputation for harshness towards" people who disrespect the site by asking inappropriate questions and won't correct those question when asked to do so.

Also, you keep talking about what "moderators" do. "Moderators" did not close that "Dungeon Master" question; 5 users with close votes did. And most importantly, it took thrity-four hours for that question to be closed. In that time, the OP did not edit the question at all. The OP did not talk to anyone who suggested improvements. The OP clearly did not care to ask a proper question.

Lastly, closing is not permanent. If someone corrects their question, as advised in the comments, it can be reopened. Granted, given how few close/reopen voters there are on this site, that's not likely without moderator intervention. But moderators can be flagged for this.

The two examples in your question, if they were closed, would be closed for different reasons.
The first one is just trivia.  It isn't really a question that needs an answer.  If you (the question asker) were trying to create that look, then you should do your research and come up with a solution that works with your constraints instead of asking how somebody else did something.  See also Are "why did game X do Y questions" not constructive?
The second one was closed by me because I felt that it has two problems with it.  1) It basically asks "how to make entire game x", along with the recent discussion presented here: How can I do X? My idea is to use plan Y. Would that work?

Sorry, I don't agree. It's not 'just trivia'. It's useful information for someone who wants to implement that sort of game, "If you were trying to create that look, then you should do your research and come up with a solution". That's the entire reason such questions get asked! People come to GD.SE to do that research and get the solution. I strongly disagree with the idea that we should be blocking off people's research efforts because we secretly suspect they're not going to go away and implement anything.

@Kylotan Asking a question on StackExchange is not "research".  "Research" is consulting a variety of specifically chosen primary/secondary sources and analysing them to find an answer for yourself.  Asking a question on StackExchange is more like asking your professor for the solution to your problem;  it's what you do after you've done the research and turned up nothing conclusive.

Don't agree, sorry. Asking experts for advice is a useful way of doing research, and StackExchange is an effective way of asking experts for advice.

Amazed that people are upvoting that comment. The reason you don't ask your professor for answers is because part of their job is to keep standards of education high by testing your ability to find the answer independently, and also because they know that the question they set you can be answered by reference to already-published texts. Neither of these are true with GD.SE. This site is here to help and inform people, and probably 90% of questions here are actually of the form "how do I do X". If the answer to that is, "you should research elsewhere", then this site is pointless.

@Kylotan I think the key takeaway here is not that you can't ask "how do I do X", but that a lot of people don't know what X is exactly and are fishing this SE site for suggestions on what they should do.  Maybe not specifically regarding the "how did old school game do Y" questions that you are originally asking about, but as a reaction to a lot of the design paralysis you see with newbies.  The whole "what should I do next" type of questions that are really unanswerable.

@Tetrad: the body of the second question does indeed look far too broad - no disagreement there. But the title of it is quite specific, and could have been answered.

I think this is the most reasonable answer. We don't need a flame war on this, some questions of this type as reasonable, some aren't. This isn't a decisive criteria for closing questions, maybe just a warning sign. So I personally wouldn't declare a total ban on questions that ask about a particular game's feature. Inspiration is a part of game development after all. I personally answered a question on Rayman Origins that seemed valid to me, but those two questions were indeed quite un-answerable.

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.

You say

we may not know exactly how Dungeon Master or Eye of the Beholder was
  rendered, but it's easy to supply a useful and practical guess as
  to how games of that type were rendered;

Bolding mine. I think it's pretty clear from the FAQ that these questions are off-topic.

Firstly, wanting to know how something is done but not knowing it can be considered a legitimate problem. As I said on other answers, we shouldn't be trying to guess someone's intent or refusing good content just because the asker isn't going to go away and code it.

Secondly, the FAQ shouldn't be considered prescriptive. If the site is governed by the FAQ, then who chooses what goes in the FAQ? Surely the FAQ should adjust to our rules, not the other way around.

We should follow the StackOverflow methodology as closely as possible. It works. It was very carefully designed to make a Q&A site goverened by its users work properly. One reason it works is that it focuses on straightforward answerable questions. If we have to guess at the answer, that's not a good fit for what a StackExchange site should be.

I think you're understating how useful an educated estimate can be. Many of our highly-voted answers are basically opinion backed up with logic, and the same would apply here.

SE sites are not about getting educated estimates. They are about getting answers.

Educated estimates are a type of answer. There are many thousands of them both here and on Stack Overflow, voted up because they're useful. They're not off-topic as long as they're backed by logic or experience.

Considering the FAQ and considering the value such question may pose to someone who is either attempting to recreate a look or just learn how to accomplish a task it seems like our FAQ should change.
"Practical" is a term that is very subjective to the task at hand. Depending on what I wished to do examining how a game did a specific feature could put me on the right track, or it could be completely off base. "Practical" seems like it is too open to interpretation.
"Answerable" is dependent on the people in the community as a whole. If a question is about a specific implementation we can't make the assumption that a person who had a part in the implementation is not a member of this site. Furthermore many companies release production details about components of games. We can't make the assumption that the data is not out there.
Along with a question being answerable, it seems that many individuals with closed questions are looking more for a point in the right direction than a specific answer.
I agree that a "How do I implement entire game X?" question is too broad, but questions about specific features that are narrow enough should be allowed.
Answers to questions such as these don't seem to be trivia as they have real practical use to people who are looking to develop something similar.

How about taking a real example, where such a question leads to insights?

How did Castle Master show so many colors on 16-color systems?

Answer: With the Color Graphics Adapter they could address each pixel individually so they could use dithering to give the illusion of more colors. They had to restrict themselves to using only 4 of the 16 available colors at the same time, though, and only one color could be selected freely, the others were fixed. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter#Standard_graphics_modes
New insight: That’s why they had so distinctly colored scenes! They had to assemble the scene from only 4 colors - that’s almost like todays designers who build websites from only 3 to 4 matching colors to make them recognizable. If I restrict my scene design to only 3 base colors plus one scene-specific color, I might get a similar effect.
So I think asking how a specific game realized a given effect is relevant, because it can have a big influence on other aspects of the game - which might have been misjudged as intentional design decisions instead of simply the result of choosing a specific approach to solve an unrelated problem.

"New insight: That’s why they had so distinctly colored scenes!" Besides personal interest... how does that help you make your game? Are you making your game on CGA hardware? No, you're not. So it has no value outside of trivia. GDSE is not for trivia.

The criteria by which a question is deemed off topic should be changed such that these types of questions, provided they are specific enough and the implication is "How does X do Y, so that I may do something simliar in my game, which I may or may not be currently developing," are considered on-topic.
I have two primary reasons:
First: These questions are not trivia and are absolutely relevant for developers seeking out knowledge on how to develop their game.
StackExchange is a great thing because you can google for a specific question and get a specific answer. But sometimes your question wording doesn't quite work out, and you really meant something entirely different which may come up based on search terms in another question or answer framed in the context of asking how a specific game works.
Second: This site has a problem in that it overlaps significantly with StackOverflow.
It was pointed out in chat recently that a question on StackOverflow that would clearly fit extremely well in GameDev.StackExchange was found, but moderators on StackOverflow refused to migrate it. These "how did game X accomplish specific effect Y" would help differentiate GDSE. And if we encourage a culture of focusing on games that had a unique effect they can be a really valuable part of this site.
But isn't that hard to moderate?
Not any harder than filtering out all the redundant questions we currently get anyway that aren't in violation of this rule. and it would actually add explicit value to this community over StackOverflow, as these kinds of questions would definitely not fit on SO but that is not clearly the case for GDSE.
Of course, we could end up with a bunch of "How did Call of Duty 1 implement Physics? How did Call of Duty 2 implement Physics?" and such. But that problem comes with any question asker who thinks their particular problem is special. The community standard is that the effect Y in game X should be unique enough to be exclusively associated with game X as a GDSE question. Everyone who asks, answers, or reviews one of these questions should have an obligation to search for preexisting questions that already provide an answer out of the context of the game, closing the question if it is asked and is found to be redundant.
But proprietary knowledge, breaking contracts!
Who gives a shit?
Don't answer if you can't legally do so. Askers won't care about how it was actually implemented. They want how it was probably implemented. Out of all arguments against allowing these, this is the weakest one.
What about effects that are just painfully out of date?
It's not entirely bad to have trivia like that on here, in my opinion, but I understand why we'd want to keep it out.
One reason to have it is that old approaches can often inspire modern solutions both from a technical and design perspective. "Game Development" is supposed to include design, right? This information is valuable for design, or possibly people experimenting with weird platforms. And if you're experimenting on a weird platform, nobody's going to have a real answer for you, so it's much more useful to ask about older games that were on older platforms with similar but different peculiarities.

"These "how did game X accomplish specific effect Y" would help differentiate GDSE." If by "differentiate" you mean "make me never want to come back here", then yes. These are not the kinds of questions that bring me to SE sites. "the implication is" No. We don't deal with questions by implication; we deal with the question that was asked. To do any less would invite people to just answer in whatever way you think the OP was asking about. If your question doesn't state what you truly want, then it's a bad question. And bad questions should get closed.

@NicolBolas Are many current questions really actively engaging you on this site anyway?

_ "How does X do Y, so that I may do something simliar in my game..."_ I don't think anybody is saying that those kinds of questions are off topic.  It's more that there are a certain kind of question that are basically historical trivia and not really relevant to, well, anybody.  Unless somebody says up front that they're doing a C64 game jam or something like that, that is.  Personally I think part of the backlash is due to the fact that game development has a lot of onlookers who aren't really vested in the field as a whole and just think questions like that are "neat".