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Generic programming questions are off-topic, period. Right?
I came upon this question, a while back. TL;DR: the user is trying to implement a custom List, and does not understand when Unity complains that it does not have the required interface to complete its Sort() method.
I identified the problem, quickly. I have had the same problem, in general programming. I also know the solution, but here's the problem: the entire subject of the matter (question and answer) are very generic to programming (or maybe C#, rather).

I flagged the question, and tried to suggest the user post at StackOverflow. The user still hasn't received an answer, and the question was not closed.
Recently, another user commented on the question, saying that generic programming questions are tolerated, if they are in the context of game programming. It was decided, here on meta, though they could not find the link.
My understanding has been that if you can take out the game development element of the question, without changing the question and relative answers, it is a generic programming question.
Ultimately, the user is asking why Sort() is not working. They need to implement a method or two that compares whatever primary value their class contains, but this all has very little to nothing to do with game development.

Am I wrong, here, and this sort of question is acceptable? If it is acceptable, I will actually answer it.

Personally, I have recently come to the conclusion that our policy here is far too draconian and have been refraining from unilaterally closing (most of) these questions as a means of trying to gauge how much the community actually feels about the issue.
I generally will only unilaterally close such a question right now if it's purely a compiler error or similar syntax issue. I feel like the post in question is fine here.
I haven't really had enough time to formulate what I think a good revised policy should be, which is why I haven't bothered to float the issue here yet. But offhand I think I'd be perfectly fine with a policy that permitted these questions except in the case of questions asking specifically about syntax issues.

My opinion is that Stack Overflow exists for those questions. Having redundant Q&A for the same questions doesn't seem helpful to me.
But I'd be willing to go along with the rest of the community if they decide we should allow them.

The gist of my thought that we should be more lenient is that StackOverflow is so busy that it's a great place for a question to go to die. And in general SE is okay with there being some overlap in questions among established sites (for example, vim related questions are on topic on at least three sites and get good traffic and answers without a lot of rules-lawyering about who should close what). To me it seems like it probably won't hurt us, since we certainly do have the expertise to answer most of these, and it might make the community more accessible and useful.

"make the community more accessible and useful" Yup. I often think it's so sad to close questions asked by new game programmers that are trying to learn, "sorry dude, don't ask here". I wouldn't be surprised that it turns them away forever most of the time.


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Do we allow "where can I download X" questions?
A user recently asked where they could download the Havok Physics engine. I was under the impression that "where can I download X?" questions were considered off-topic, and flagged it as such.
However, since then, two answers have appeared. One of them is by one of our moderators. Are "where can I download X?" questions off-topic? Alternatively, should they be?

Questions asking us for a download source shpuld be considered off-topic, but on a case-by-case analysis, they may still be fairly salveageable.

Regardless of policy, I see some issues with these sort of questions.
The user is asking for a web link
If we assume the download is accessible, it seems to me like good answers would follow the following format:

You can download X from the (X/Company Y) website. Just follow this link for the download page.

It seems as if it would be rather difficult to post a good answer, with out providing the link. This creates a Catch-22; it can not be considered a good answer if it does not hold with out the link. We have a very strict policy with this, to prevent good answers becoming bad answers due to link rot.
To a minor extent, the user is asking for recommendation
We consider software and technology recommendation questions off-topic. I would only loosely group these questions in with "where can I download X?", but ultimately, the user is asking us to recommend a specific website to provide the appropriate technology.
One might argue that different answers may also lead to different 'preferred versions'. While this is an issue I can see, I am not sure it is really a big one.

Salvage versus Close
It is entirely possible that we could edit these questions to be on-topic, and still draw the response the user is looking for.
Why is X no longer accessible?
Sometimes, the root of the question comes from confusion, when a previously accessible piece of software becomes impossible to find.
In the example, the user likely1 googled "Havok" and found that although there is a lot of reference to a shareware version, there are no links on the official page.
As answers have since pointed out, a semi-recent acquisition resulted in the shareware version being discontinued. Bummer.
I see no reason we can not allow "Why can't I access X anymore?" questions, in the rare situation where this is the actual case. I actually found the answers, in this case, very helpful.
Is X available to the public?
When it comes down to a complete lack of being able to find reference to a download, I see no reason why the user can not ask if there is a download.
This might highlight the actual problem, as there was with the example question. A good answer would still provide links to the download, if valid, while still directly answering the question in text format. Win, win.

1 Assuming, in good faith, that the user did try to find the download, themselves, before posting.

No, we shouldn't permit "where do I download X" questions. But if it's possible to edit those questions to turn them into something other than a simple link request, we should try to salvage them that way.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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In what context do we permit general "how do I get this game hardware to work" questions?
This question came up, a while ago. I flagged it twice1. The first time, the flag "aged away", but the second time, the flag was outright declined. This leads me to believe I have a misunderstanding of our general scope.

The question asks how to use the Kinect as a microphone in Linux. The user does not state any form of relation to game development; they just want to use the microphone from their Linux computer. Here is the direct transcript of the original question, as it is quite minimal in content:

Originally I intend to use kinect camera as the device for voice communication. But at least now I want to use it as the input device for recording a voice and play that voice in the same pc. How can I do so? I am using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and the kinect camera is of type Microsoft_Xbox_NUI_Sensor_043367545147-02-Sensor.Thanks

A comment suggests that "the Kinect is used in games, so it makes sense to ask it here" - but that does not make sense to me, at all. We use a lot of hardware, in games. I would not expect a question asking how to set my Xbox up to be considered on topic, nor a question asking why my PlayStation errors when I try to connect it to the internet. For these questions, I would head to the Arqade, where they specifically take video-game related questions.
I accept that the original user may have intended to state explicit use for game development, but without any mention of game development, that is just pure speculation. Without any mention of actual game development, interpreting the question in such a way also means we have to make a guess on what they are actually using to develop their game.
In what context do we allow "how do I get this hardware to work" questions?
1 I originally interpreted the ability to raise the second flag as confirmation that I had not raised the first flag. I am unsure whether this is normally the case, or whether it was due to the fact that the original flag was not looked at; I was only alerted to the fact when I reviewed my declined flags

It seems to me that this question is reasonable (with one caveat, below) since the Kinect is primarily a gaming peripheral, and thus game developers will have some familiarity with it (likely more familiarity than a non-game programmer, in the general case).
This seems to fit with our related policy of "if a game developer would give you a better answer, it's okay" regarding general programming questions (although our overall position on that issue may be changing).
The one caveat is that it's not clear to me if the user is asking because they're trying to do this in a program they are writing, or because they want to just use the thing in an existing program, like a Skype clone or whatever.
Since the question is from 2015 and the user hasn't been seen in some time I've taken the liberty of simply editing the question to assume the user was writing a program themselves. If that's the case, the question seems fine to me. If it's not, if the question is just about using the hardware as a consumer and not a developer, then it wouldn't be.

This makes sense. Thanks for the clarification; it seems obvious that users still think this is a good question. Now, all we need is a good answer

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


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How do I delete my community account?
How do I delete my Game Development Stack Exchange account, specifically?

Let's everybody remember our "be nice" policy okay? It's not appropriate to be sniping at the original poster for any reason; that won't change any perceived or real issues and will only encourage the perception that this is a "toxic" community.

You will need to involve the community team to delete your Game Development account. Instructions for doing so can be found here. Be sure to specify that it's only your Game Development account you are interested in removing. The community team will work with you from there.
I'd be curious to know more about your reasons, though. From my perspective this desire seems rather abrupt.

I am assuming you mean you wish to delete your account. The only thing close to "unsubscribe" would be 'unsubscribing from emails', but your mini-rant suggests this is not what you want.
We have an excellent resource for questions like this, already. It's called the Help Center, and it has a page dedicated to "how do I delete my account".
Given that you have made posts on the regular1 site, you can not simply delete the account, yourself.

If you have voted or posted, please contact the Stack Exchange Team:
Visit the contact form and select 'I need to delete my user profile.' After you contact us, the team will reach out with further instructions.
- That page your asked to read when you first sign up, and again when your question is closed

Please take this with a grain of salt: In the real world, people are going to disagree with you. If you throw in the towel over one or two people disagreeing with you, especially when there is evidence of many more users trying to help you, your going to have a bad time.
In game developing, your going to receive criticism, too. It is important to be mature about this sort of thing. Criticism can reveal key issues in your game, but your reaction to criticism may reveal key issues to others.
1Regular referring to the non-meta site

Yes, I want to unsubscribe to this particular community. Instead of a whole story couldn't you instead, have answered my question? I can be perfectly civil, and I, in fact, always am. The thing is, this community disgusts me, with the pretense that they know what they're talking about, while downvoting me at the same time. So, could you tell me this one thing: how do I leave gamvedev.stackexchange.com. That was my question, please if you don't know the answer, could you refrain from posting an answer?

So, let me state this one more time, as clearly as I possibly can: I want to unsubscribe to gamedev.stackexchange. Not the whole stackexchange community. They are pretty awesome. except here. I want to unsubscribe from HERE. Can you answer that?

Yeah, if just that comment was your answer, I bet you wouldn't have got the downvotes you did, don't you think? I asked one simple thing, you wrote a wall of text as an "answer". Note that I cannot downvote, my reputation isn't enough for that, so other people saw how toxic you were being and decided to show you that. There may be a hope for this community afterall. Anyway, I'm not sticking around to see it, so peace out.

@FinnTheHuman, as a mature adult, I accept the downvotes as a difference of opinion. I agree that the second part, in retrospect, is no longer very useful (it is localised to you, after all), but it is important to point out how easy it is to get this information, ones self.


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Should we do something with tags 'fsm' and 'state'?
We have these two tags:

state: 120 questions, one synonym (states), a description "Generally used in correlation with a state machine."
fsm: 49 questions, a description "Finite State Machines model game flow, AI behaviour, or other processes using a set of discrete states and transitions between them. "

And there are 22 questions that have both.
Since they're closely related should we do something about them?
There has been some discussion in the past, with the conclusion "let's leave them separated, because users don't know the relationship between those", but I feel this should be revised.

From the linked discussion, and from the numbers of tags attributions, users seem more inclined to use the tag state. However, as a guideline question, can one be expert in state, or are they expert in finite-state-machines?
I think users would be more experts in finite-state-machines. However, as previously stated, fsm is not intuitively found by users.
So I suggest we make state a synonym of fsm, as fsm has a more complete tag-wiki, and then rename fsm to state-machine.

This seems reasonable to me.

I think renaming the fsm tag to state-machine is particularly useful, so that it comes up as a suggestion when a user starts typing "state." I also find my colleagues more commonly call these "state machines" in practice, with the "finite" basically assumed (I certainly haven't yet made a game system with a truly unbounded collection of states...) ;)


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Should we do something with tags 'resizing-window' and 'multiple-windows'?
I was astonished to see that this question/revision did not have a tag related to the concept of window.
While trying to edit the tags to add one, I realized that all the tags that were related to 'window' were resizing-window and multiple-windows.
Since none of them fitted the question, I created window-management which was still appropriate and broader.
Should we keep resizing-window and multiple-windows?

Since both 'old' tags are not very 'popular' (16 questions for resizing-window and 5 questions for multiple-windows) and don't contain a description, and since window-management covers window-resizing and multiple-windows, I suggest we make them synonym of window-management.
With the question "are you an expert in [tag]?", I would argue that if one is an expert in window-resize, or in multiple-windows, they're pretty knowledgeable in window-management.

I have made these changes.


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Should we delete or clarify the 'scale' tag?
The tag info for the scale tag reads as follows:

Scale in relation to:
Size - the physical size that an object in inside the gameworld.
Project scale - the amount of work and/or ambition that goes into making the game or project meet all requirements.
Image - the amount that the source image needs to be stretched by to suit the current needs. For example: covering a surface bigger or smaller than the image.

I find this is a very poor usage guideline. In context, we are giving users varying uses, where they would likely use a more specific tag to clarify the usage. In turn, this would make scale a meta tag, in these uses. We do not use meta tags.
This seems to extend past the main usage guideline. While the guideline states use of the scale in three seperate contexts, there are many questions that go outside the bounds of these three contexts.
Should we clarify or delete the scale tag?

Given that we seem to agree that the scale should be used in relation to transform, I am going
I would like to invite other users to slowly iterate through the questions using the scale and ensure that the questions either apply to scaling a transform or have the tag removed.

I have also submitted a revised tag wiki that reads as follows:

Scale in relation to the geometry, in a game, whether that be 2D or 3D.

It certainly leaves much to be desired, so feel free to improve the tag wiki, providing we stick to the decided scope.

Note that I am not going to be able to pay the attention required to complete this task. I am making this the accepted answer, so other users are more likely to see it, and follow through.

There are two types of scale issue I see arise fairly frequently in game development:
1. Asset export / import scale. A number of bugs can arise from exporting a mesh from a 3D modelling tool with one set of units and importing it into a game pipeline that expects different units:

Models showing up too big or too small.
Skeletons interpreted at a different scale than the vertex data, leading to the mesh vacuum-forming or ballooning out from its bones.
Animation data interpreted at a different scale than the mesh, leading to wacky exaggerated movement on translations like the start of a jump.

2. Dealing with non-uniform scale. Which introduces a number of gotchas...

Maintaining aspect ratio when scaling an image/sprite/texture on a surface
Understanding that physics primitives commonly ignore non-uniform scale.
Understanding that non-uniform scale in a transform hierarchy can introduce skew into child transforms.
Understanding that engines like Unity commonly strip non-uniformity in the rendering pipeline by baking it into the vertices, so shaders won't be able to detect the non-uniformity in the matrix.

I remember these issues being very mysterious to me when I was starting out, and over time I've learned what symptoms to look for, what import/export settings to check, where non-uniformity works & doesn't, etc. So in that sense, I would say it's possible to develop gamedev expertise in the topic of "scale"
I'd have more confidence I could answer a question tagged "unity gameobject scale" than "unity gameobject" alone, for example, since the tag suggests it's in a narrower subset of all the possible GameObject questions that could exist.
So, my recommendation would be to keep the scale tag, but boil its description down to the geometric sense.

If we're to make anything with scale, we should probably do something with rotation. Both are basically transformations.
So why not make both of these tag synonyms of transformation? Users that know about scale are generally well versed in rotations too :)

This actually makes more sense than my answer. Its worth noting that many questions are not in context of transform, and would have to have the tag simply removed.

@Gnemlock if that's the consensus, we'd have to review all the questions that have [tag:scale], and remove them manually before creating the synonym.

Shouldn't be a big task. There are only 75 questions (as opposed to 600 in rotation, which appears to be used fine), and the context is made pretty clear in most of them, between both title and other tags.

@Gnemlock Yeah, that's what I thought too!

I'd argue that [tag:rotation] is substantial enough to be its own area of expertise - rotations in 3D have their own weirdness that don't apply to other transformations ;)

I am voicing my vote withdrawal from this answer, as @DMGregory makes some good points, and I would honestly prefer leaving the [tag:rotation] tag due to its sheer question count.


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Can we clarify the 'career' tag?
Having a brief look through the career tag, it is clear that there is some severe usage issues. With 61 tagged questions, I count only 19 that have not been closed. It appears to have been over 2 years since somebody asked an on-topic question, using this tag. I still think the 'on-topicness' of some of the open questions is questionable, but I digress.
It seems that some of these questions have still received good feedback, despite being closed. I do not think we should delete the tag. That said, it seems evident that users who use this tag are far more likely to be asking a question that is off-topic.
Can we get a good canon usage guideline for this tag, so users understand when to use it, and why many of the questions that might use it would be off-topic?

I think the tag is fine. In fact I think removing it or otherwise prohibiting its use runs directly counter to the current stated topic of the site. The Help Center explicitly lists "game industry (careers, trends, technology, etc)" as a valid topic.
Just because we haven't seen any questions in the tag recently that we also consider on-topic for other reasons does not mean the tag is, itself, an issue. And removing it would imply a larger discussion about whether or not the help center needs to be revised.
I can certainly envision a future, although I don't necessary endorse or decry it, where we relax certain other existing guidelines to permit discussion of career history or advice.
I do think it needs a excerpt and wiki though. I have tentatively seeded the tag excerpt as follows:

Career refers to the progression, over time, of one's chosen profession. Questions using this tag should be related to such topics, but note that opinion-oriented discussions, such as solicitations for career advice are off-topic. See the full tag wiki for more details.

And the wiki as:

While questions concerning the game industry, including topics related to one's career, are broadly considered on-topic here, many career-related questions tend concern career advice, which can be heavily opinion-based and subject to extensive discussion and are thus off-topic by their nature.
Depending on your specific question, you may be able to find the assistance you need on another StackExchange site, in our chat room, or a discussion forum such as GDNet.

I believe this adequately covers the current de facto state of the tag. If anybody has suggestions for how it could be improved (and cannot improve it themselves due a lack of reputation), please comment here.

Awesome. That's exactly the sort of guideline users need.

I think we should keep the tag for legacy reason, and put a warning right in the excerpt. The only Usage guidance (excerpt) I could see fit for this tag would be something along the lines:

If you tag your question with this, it will most likely be closed. Sorry. Questions related to jobs in the video game development industry. Questions about this are generally considered off-topic for this site as based on opinion.

With the full description:

The scope of the site has changed since its creation; as time went by, opinion based question became off-topic, but they were not deleted for historical reasons.

Note that I say most questions are closed. Not all of them. Its not that such questions are automatically off topic, it is that users seem to find it difficult asking ontopic questions.

Also, for clarification, the opinion based questions close reason is universal. Its not something we decided on, here, and we should not give the impression that we can discuss removing this close reason, here.

We can, however, decide where we consider the boundaries for "primarily opinion based" to be; there is certainly precedent for SE sites that have significantly more room for opinion and discussion. I don't really think it's needed here, but it's not impossible for us to decide to relax our stance on particular classes of opinion.


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Community Promotion Ads - 2017
It is a bit late into this new year, being that we're already in the second month, but we are now cycling the Community Promotion Ads for 2017!
What are Community Promotion Ads?
Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.
Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?
This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:

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

The goal is for future visitors to find out about the stuff your community deems important. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are relevant to your own community's interests, both for those already in the community and those yet to join.
Why do we reset the ads every year?
Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.
The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.
How does it work?
The answers you post to this question must conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored.

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

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

Please do not add anything else to the body of the post. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.
The question must always be tagged with the magic community-ads tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.

Image requirements

The image that you create must be 300 x 250 pixels, or double that if high DPI.
Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)
Must be GIF or PNG
No animated GIFs
Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB
If the background of the image is white or partially white, there must be a 1px border (2px if high DPI) surrounding it.

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

This is our new ad for this year. We submitted a community promotion ad three years ago, and it was reasonably well-received. I think there's enough crossover that this ad might see the same. Feel free to downvote if it's not.

This is a demonstration post to indicate how this should look when an ad is posted. It also doubles as your twitter ad, but it's up to you if you wish to promote it by voting

For more information about this ad, please see this Retrocomputing Meta post.

Bandai Namco and Taito copyright?

@JopV. There's also an Apple font there. :-) I think this qualifies as fair use, especially considering that I have modified the ghosts, made my own Tetris structure and given the protective barriers a heavy blasting with the 1x1 pencil tool, that I have put them together to make a unique image, that I am not claiming these as my own creations ("remember these?"), that it's not exactly detracting from the revenues of these companies (if anything, it's advertising their games!) and that nobody is making any money from this. If any of these companies consider it an issue, they can DMCA it.

3D modelling seems quite relevant to game design, imo.


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Can you set up a game on this website?
Hi I'm from Langdon School and we are making an educational game and I was wondering if you can set up a game on this website? If so, how?

Would recommend unity for setting up beginner games. If you google game hosting you can find many sites for helping host games if that's what you're after.

If you're looking to host a game, try itch.io

No. I believe you misunderstand the purpose of the site. This is a site for asking questions and answering questions. We don't develop games on the site, host games on the site or anything like that. Get a quick overview of the site here: https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/tour


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The tag 'forces' is quite specific, what should we do with it?
The tag forces seems to be very specific. It has at the moment 14 questions and no tag definition.
Is it too specific?
Could/should we do something about it?

I suggest we make forces a tag synonym of physics because...

... the concept of forces being a subset of physics
... half of the questions tagged with forces are also tagged with physics
... someone is rarely expert in forces, they're more often expert in physics.

This makes it more of a meta tag, in my humble opinion.

This has been done.


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Is it time to merge the tag [c++11] into [c++]?
It's 2017 now, and there has been 2 new versions of the standard released since then, c++14 and c++17.
Should we merge c++11 into c++?

I think we should merge and create synonyms to point c++11 to c++, and similarly for the other standards versions (c++14 and c++17).
I am generally against versioned tags, except in the rare scenarios where it makes a huge difference (differences between D3D 9 and future versions, differences between D3D 12 and earlier versions, for example).
Topic-wise, most of our questions concern issues that are higher level than language minutiae; those sorts of questions are often asked instead on StackOverflow, and work well there.
I see neither a need for us to be differentiating questions concerning C++ by version, nor a real attempt by any users to do so. Most of the questions using c++11 don't appear to be asking specifically about or for a problem with C++11-specific features, nor do the answers appear to be offering C++11-specific solutions, in general.
Further, one can be an "expert" in C++, but still not know all of it and thus still be unable to answer certain kinds of questions dealing with certain aspects of the language (and that's fine), whereas one can probably not be an "expert" in C++11 without also being considered an "expert" in C++ itself, so the use of the tag for searchability purposes seems low, especially since it forces users to consume two tag slots per current guidance, which just seems like wasteful overhead.

I have done this.

I think we should merge c++11 into c++.

No questions have been tagged c++14 or c++17 so far.
The amount of question tagged c++11 is minimal (68).
About half of the questions tagged with c++11 are also tagged c++ (33).
Questions tagged c++11 without the c++11 tag and that don't mention "c++11" are not about c++11 specifically, they're about c++.
Even though users are actually using the language as specified in the c++11 version, the questions tagged as such are rarely about the new features introduced by that version.
As a comparison, we only have one tag for java and c#, even though the languages have evolved over time.

This leads to believe that the c++11 tag is adding more confusion than anything else, and should be removed.

Without better argument, I am against this proposition. It has some merit, but I think it needs to be hashed out more.

I can personally vouch for the extreme difficulty in trying to find an answer to a question specific to an earlier C++ standard. I feel that the tag has some use, and more importantly, I can personally confirm that it can be quite valid as of 2016.
It is certainly possible for a user to be an expert in general C++, but not as much in C++11.
In regards to the fact that all c++11 questions also use c++, this appears to be the intention. We are currently instructing users to do so, via the c++11 tag usage guidelines.
Questions may not simply be about new features; they may be about old features. For example, 'how do I do this, when I only have access to C++11, which predates the functions I would normally use?'
I am generally under the opinion that if you tag a question as c++11, you do not need to mention that you are using C++11 in your question. Many other users follow this opinion, or at least, standard. I see this a lot when I answer unity questions. Many users omit the programming language completely, in the actual body of their question. This is never an issue, because they have used the tag to specify language. Likewise, the tag should tell other user's that 'this user is looking for an answer specific to C++11'.
The fact that there is no c++14 or c#3 tag does not tell me that such tags are never useful, they just tell me that they do not appear to be useful, yet. It does not set precedent.

I think the tag excerpt could do with a slight improvement. As it stands, the usage excerpt states that 'c++11 replaced c++03'. I think it should also say that 'c++11 was replaced by c++14', as users may not be aware that there is a newer version, and thus assume that their using c++11. It certainly would not hurt to specifically note that users should only use the tag if they are asking specific c++11 questions, or otherwise looking for an answer that is c++11 compatible.

"how do I do this, when I only have access to C++11, which predates the functions I would normally use?" Do you mean when I don't have access to c++11?

Please keep it civil, folks.


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Chat poll: 'Recent questions' feed: as a chat message in the room, or via a slide-down ticker overlay at the top of the room?
A couple of months ago someone in chat suggested that we change the 'Recent questions feed' from via a slide-down ticker overlay at the top of the room to as chat messages in the room.
The added advantage was that one could easily refer to a question by 'replying' to the chat bot. And we found out that this had the inconvenience of spamming the chat log, making actual posts harder to spot and breaking the flow of the conversations.
The messages of the chat bot can be ignored, but this causes the user to not see new questions.
And recently, someone else requested that we revert back to the old way, with a slide-down ticker overlay.
Unfortunately, we can't have both.
Now let's see what the community prefers.

As a small note, I'll wait about a week or so before doing the changes, if changes are needed, in order to give everyone a chance to voice their opinion.

Based on the 3 answers that wanted a less intrusive way to display new questions, and the opinion of all the users who voiced their opinion via an answer or a vote (at least 6), I have reverted the behaviour of the feeds to what it was before the change:
Message feeds:
New items from these feeds will be posted into the room like regular chat messages.

Recent Questions - Game Development Meta Stack Exchange
Featured Questions - Game Development Stack Exchange

Ticker feeds
New items from these feeds will be shown via a slide-down ticker overlay that periodically appears at the top of the room, and will not be persisted.

Recent Questions - Game Development Stack Exchange

Thanks to all of you who took the time to write an answer or to vote!

A non-intrusive side list similar to the star board would be good - out of the way but still visible.
The old RSS-styled top-left pop-in was handy but was web-browersly bad because you had to be in the room at the time of the question being asked, and if you clicked Dismiss accidentally you couldn't get the list back.
The current implementation of having every new question appear in the chatlog is annoying - the font is too big, but really it drowns out the main purpose of a chatroom: user-typed messages. I go to the chatroom to chat. If I wanted to see what new questions are on the site, I'd visit GDSE directly and browse my favourite tags.
I don't mind new questions appearing on the chat page somewhere, but please, keep them separate from the chatlog.

This is my vote. I'm "the one" who requested the old thing back. :)

You say "A non-intrusive side list similar to the star board would be good - out of the way but still visible." but that's not an option, the options are the in-chat feedbot or the dismissable thing on the top-left pop-in which you also said you don't like. (This is to say, we have 2 options, ticker vs feedbot, you're advocating a 3rd option =p)

Good point Kevin.

I take "I don't mind new questions appearing on the chat page somewhere, but please, keep them separate from the chatlog." as meaning "via a slide-down ticker overlay at the top of the room" for the context of this question!

If there's no way to implement something new, I'd prefer the old ticker.

No, there's no way, unfortunately. Well, there could be, but that would not be an immediate change: I guess that getting enough users wanting a new feature on http://meta.stackexchange.com/ would probably have the SE team add it. But the choices for the room owners are limited to the two options I have mentioned in the opening post. (There is a third one: nothing at all. :P)

I find the direct posts into the chat feed annoying and noisy for main-site questions. I would prefer to switch the main-site feed back to the slide-over that stayed in the upper-left of the screen.
I like the direct posts for meta questions, though. Those questions occur more rarely, right now, and tend to be of a nature that concerns everybody (and thus everybody in the chat). Whereas main-site questions are often restricted to a particularly subdomain and thus don't.

Slide-down ticker overlay. It would be nice if we could have Chris's third option, but I don't think we get to request feature changes.


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What's the rationale to have questions tagged [c++11] also be tagged with [c++]?
Based on one of my other questions, the tag info about c++11 suggests to tag c++11 tagged question with c++ too.

Please tag questions about C++11 with the c++ tag, along with the c++11 tag.

(Source)
I feel like it's very redundant and really wonder why users should bother.
Why do we ask users to tag questions about C++11 with the c++ tag, along with the c++11 tag?

I'd be curious to know why this question has been downvoted!

I can see an argument that C++ experts may not think to search for the C++11 tag as well and thus may miss a question taggged only with c++11... But I think that creates more of an argument to merge the tags than to encourage effectively-duplicate tagging.
I think this guidance should be removed from the tag documentation.

Second tag is often an indication of what subset of C++ asker can use and what he can not.
For example, delphi indicates question that needs expertise in Delphi programming language, but delphi-7 means that solutions should be compatible with Delphi 7 version specifically (which lacks operator overloading, for example).
P.S. I doubt C++/C++11 separation is viable for GameDev. After all we are typically dealing with higher-level concepts than specific language version quirks/features.

Yeah, I feel that c++11 is used as a meta tag here.

This is a discussion "thread". I would appreciate the downvoter to comment on his downvote, so his/her point could be included too.


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What's the point of the [class] tag?
I noticed that someone had proposed an edit that added the class tag to a question. The tag has no description and it looks like it's used for when the question relates to the generic programming concept "class".
Should the tag be removed? Is this actually a useful tag? If it is, could a usage description be added to the tag wiki?
It feels slightly weird to have a tag as such, almost like tagging questions involving functions with function and variables with variable.

class has about 17 uses as of this writing, but I agree it's not particularly useful. In all 17 cases it seems to either add no value, or seems like a more conceptually-specific tag could replace it.
I'd be in favor of nuking it.


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Can we please burn the "environment" tag?
My arguments for burning environment with fire are:

No description of the tag.
It has been used only 6 times since 2013.
In those 6 questions, they have been used with a wide approach, meaning either the development environment, or the game's environment.

Removing it seems reasonable to me. I can't think of a way to codify the tag's use that would not be better served by making the tag name itself slightly longer and more descriptive.

I've removed all occurrences of the tag and added it to the bad tags list.


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Duplicating, answering & redirecting questions
Summary:
User A posts question X.
At a later date, user B essentially duplicates question X as Y, answers question Y & then answers X as a link to Y.
In response to asking which should be marked dupe, I was told the question with the better answer(s) is more important than the order of asking. Rather than hash it further in the comments, I'm asking here for further discussion: is it legit to duplicate, self answer & redirect?
Edit: The specific questions under consideration are:

Disable global fog from camera
How do I disable fog on specific camera/s

For the specific issue at hand, I deleted the "link only" answer from the older question and closed the question as a duplicate of the newer version that has a more complete answer.

I'm still not totally clear on what to do & not do in these situations though. I've get a strong "don't dupe" message here & "don't assume malice" is a good baseline, but what (if any) flagging should I have used & where? Also, does this warrant a separate meta question or an edit to the original?

Look at the two questions, flag the one with worse answers as a duplicate of the one with better. That's pretty much all you need to do. If you see somebody creating a duplicate just to self-answer repeatedly, flag one of those for moderator attention.

is it legit to duplicate, self answer & redirect?

No. If you see a question you can answer, you should answer that question. You should not post a duplicate of that question, self-answer that, and then attempt to link the original question as a duplicate. This serves no purpose but to clutter the site and is essentially just a reputation grab.
That said, it's very understandable that somebody might do this accidentally, because they don't know the original question or questions exist. It's difficult or impossible to prove this scenario occurred with malice, so it's better to assume good faith and handle the scenario accordingly.
In general, given a set of candidate duplicate questions, the question with the best answers should be the target of the duplicate links. This ensures that users searching for help who end up on a duplicate find the solid answers they need as quickly as possible.

then answers X as a link to Y.

This is a "link only" answer and should be flagged for deletion as such. Just because the link is still to SE, and still to the same SE site, doesn't mean it won't suffer the same fate as any other link-only answer (the link may die for any number of reasons, making the answer useless).

I'll confess I've done a duplicate & redirect once, but with a particular purpose. I saw we were getting quite a few questions pertaining to undesired rotation behaviour, They all had a common root cause, but each question tended to be very particular in its phrasing/platform/feature so they weren't exact duplicates. Instead I asked & answered a question about the root cause, to have something more generally-applicable to direct users to. Was that the wrong call?

That's a good point, actually, I hadn't thought of that. We had established a desire a while ago to try making more good "canonical" questions that had both very clear questions as well as answers pertaining to subjects we get a lot of slightly-different questions about. It never got off the ground, really, but it was essentially a proposal to do in a specific scenario what I'm suggesting here is bad in the general case.

In favor of not allowing the duplication:
The in favor argument doesn't work very well for orphaned questions that have multiple valid answers - duplicating it all seems like a lot of unnecessary effort. It also seems like it might present a loop hole that could be used to game the reputation system.

I don't see any good reason to duplicate a question.

I agree; there's no reason to allow a duplicated question to exist if we know it's a duplicate. The one with the better answers should be the canonical version and the others should be closed accordingly.

In favor of allowing the duplication:
This might be a good way to deal with orphaned questions. For instance, someone asks a good question, gets a good answer, but never came back to accept it. If it were duped, the answer could be marked & the older question could redirect to the newer one.

The duplicate 'target' does not have to have an accepted answer as seen here.

True, but that particular target has a reasonable number of votes though. I was thinking of orphans as being lower ranked.

There's also nothing wrong with "unanswered" questions in general (that is, those for which the OP did not accept an answer).


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Do we really need a "free" tag?
As in the title, do we really need a free tag? What is the utility thereof?

I was thinking of asking the same question.

I have removed the tag from all the questions, and added it to the blacklist.

No, we don't need the free tag.

In my opinion, this is a meta tag which does not inform at all about the topic of the question.
You can't be an expert in free.
The vast majority of the 24 questions with this tag are closed. This is associated to the fact that questions about 'free' stuff are most of the time off-topic/too broad for this site. (E.g. asking for free resources.)

I think we should remove it and add it to the blacklist.

Why remove the free tag? It could mean free-to-play.

@narawagames There is the [tag:free-to-play] for that purpose :) And as for 'why', the answer answers just that.


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Where is the best place in StackExchange to ask about Unity C# issues?
If I have questions about building a game using Unity and C#, where is the best place in StackExchange to ask for help?
I found out that the "C#" that runs on Unity is not the same as the "C#" that Microsoft documents. I needed to sort an array, and I have some questions about the Unity API.

This question might be more appropriate for meta...

Read the [help] at the various sites to find out which support what.

I found out that the "C#" that runs on Unity is not the same as the "C#" that Microsoft documents (I needed to sort an array), and I had some questions about the Unity API. I suppose this is the right place then for this kind of questions.

Note that Unity uses an earlier version of C#. Microsoft documents it; but anything newer would naturally not apply to Unity. In regards to sorting an array, you can use System.Array.Sort(array). AFAIK, that is how you always sorted an array. However, I suspect it comes up as Array.Sort() in documentation, because Microsoft assumes your using the System namespace. I make note of that, here, because if it does solve your problem, I would honestly think the question itself showed a lack of research. Always show research - it might save you a downvote or two.

It depends. It might be here on GDSE, StackOverflow, Computer Graphics, or possibly others. The general rule I apply is which sort of expert would give the best answer to my problem. If the nature of the question is such that a game developer would give you a better answer, then GDSE is an appropriate place to ask. If it's more of a general programming question, Stack Overflow is probably more appropriate (that being said, GDSE seems to be relaxing the "general programming questions are off-topic" stance somewhat). I initially asked a question here about simplex noise that was on-topic, but later we decided it was better served by CGSE instead.

Take your best guess at which community might have the sort of answers you need.
Read their help center info to double check that your question is on topic for that community.
Ask & adjust as needed.

You should be fine asking questions about both the use of arrays and the general Unity API on this site.
There once was a time when we closed questions that involved generic programming. However, we have loosened this restriction quite considerably, after a good argument made by Josh. I have also seen it said, somewhere, that Stack Overflow is where we send these questions to die, and in retrospect, I whole heartily agree.
There is one caveat: Make sure you still follow the general rules of the site. If you are unfamiliar with them, I suggest having a quick read of "What topics can I ask about?" and "What type of questions should I avoid asking?".

I found out that the "C#" that runs on Unity is not the same as the "C#" that Microsoft documents.

But it is. The language is exactly the same. You will even use a lot of the .NET core classes like String or List. The main difference is that you might be interacting with different APIs.
When you wonder if you should post on Gamedev.SE or Stackoverflow, then you should ask yourself this question: "is it a question which any C# programmer can answer, or is it something you can only answer if you have experience with Unity?".

I needed to sort an array

Sorting arrays is something every developer needs to do once in a while, no matter if they develop games, office tools, web applications or telemetry software for space probes. And no matter in which of these industries you work, if you use C#, you would do it roughly the same way. So this is a question you would ask on stackoverflow (although it would really surprise me if you manage to come up with a question about sorting in C# which isn't already answered on stackoverflow)

and I have some questions about the Unity API.

Now that's a question you would rather ask on Gamedev.SE, because Unity is (almost) exclusively used by game developers. If you are a game developer too, you will likely get a better answer on Gamedev.SE.

I believe we would accept the array question, here. I also feel the user would receive very negative feedback asking about something like that on StackExchange. We do accept generic programming questions, now. Within reason.

@Gnemlock Why do you think there would be negative feedback about  a question about sorting arrays on Stackexchange which wouldn't also receive negative feedback on Gamedev.SE?

StackOverflow is a lot less forgiving than we are, here..

I'm not saying it won't receive negative feedback, here. But on StackOverflow, it would be a lot worst.

Unity programming questions are on topic for GD.SE, but in practice I've found that Unity Answers is a much better resource. Disclaimers:

They are not affiliated with StackExchange, although they use the software
Quality and curation is much worse

But in terms of sheer breadth of content, they are the best resource I've found online.

Fair enough, but when the question is "where in Stack Exchange, this does not actually answer the question. It could also be misinterpreted as "not here, go away". Perhaps this would be better served as a comment?

What if OP is unaware that SE doesn't always have the best site for a particular domain? SO is great and all but that doesn't apply to every other stack. When SE either doesn't cater to a domain or if its stack is clearly inferior, I'm happy to suggest an offsite alternative. I mentioned right off the bat that GD.SE is fine, but not the best. That's clearly not a "not here, go away".

In which case, this would be better served as a comment.

OP here... yes, I am familiar with Unity's own site, but I am exploring my options. Stack Overflow has been quite useful over the years with Android (non-game) issues, so I was looking to see what you had for Unity games.


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Does including a link to our website in a post automatically constitute spam, even if relevant?
A new user asked a very off-topic question; as a music composer, they asked what game developers look for when hiring a music composer. As part of the question, they note that they have created a website, to which they include the web address. They proceed to ask why a game developer would go for them over another music website, of which they also provide the web address. An edit has since been made purely to remove the authors address. It is worth noting that the competitor address was not removed.
My question is, assuming it has some bearing on the question, does posting a link to our website automatically constitute spam? If not, is there any reason why it would be considered spam, in this case?
I am asking purely for future reference, as I see this edit behavior, infrequently. For the purpose of discussion, we should not be looking at the quality of the question, nor its validity as an on-topic question. Since posting this question, a user has edited the question to bring it more inline with what we consider on-topic. If you wish to look at the original question, make sure to review it's edits.

The flag description for spam reads as follows:

Exists only to promote a product or service, does not disclose the author's affiliation.

In such cases, the author is disclosing that it is their site, and it does have purpose including the site in the post.

The "How to not be a spammer" help page has some key points as follows:

Don't talk about your product / website / book / job too much.
Don't include links except to support what you've written.

In such cases, the link is provided to support the post. In the above case, the user is asking why their work would be favored over somebody else's. In itself, off-topic, but given the context of the question, the website is very relevant to the question. If you disagree, consider explaining why as part of the "If not," caveat to this question. Other cases of link removal are very clear on the relevance of the address. For example, we may have an answer that states "You can solve this problem by using a script I wrote. Here it is on my website".

I can only find one other meta post detailing actual consideration between legitimate use of linking to our own website and actual spamming. The post clearly implies that linking to the authors product is not always spam, in part due to the fact that the author discloses their affiliation, and in part due to the fact that the author has clearly provided content that did not link to his site.
I feel that the inclusion of past activity makes this a bit of a grey area. On one hand, not all users who are marked as spammers in this way have a history of activity on our site. On the other hand, I feel we should not assume the worst unless the post actually reads as a self advertisement.

So where do we make that distinction?

You may wish to note that another user has now totally edited the question, so to understand this more, look at the edit log.

It should be noted that this exact text has been posted on other places https://www.gamedev.net/topic/687079-seeking-your-advice-composer-for-games/ and http://forums.indiegamer.com/threads/newbie-composer-seeking-your-advice.59249/ - Hat-tip chat

My question is, assuming it has some bearing on the question, does
  posting a link to our website automatically constitute spam?

Nope.
I mostly agree with Alexandre's answer, I'd just like to add that I think there's two broad kinds of spam:

the malicious kind, where the user is really just trying to be a jerk and get quick hits to some product or service
the ignorant kind, where the user doesn't really understand the rules about what is an isn't appropriate for this community and creates a post that is a little too spammy

Apply spam flags to the first kind liberally. With the second kind, I'd much rather see restraint: editing, commentary, and flag-for-moderator-attention if really needed. Spam flags can prevent the user from posting again, which is what we want if somebody is being a malcontent but not what we want if somebody just needs a gentler introduction into the idiosyncrasies of StackExchange.

Does including a link to our website in a post automatically constitute spam, even if relevant?

No. The key here is "even if relevant". Is it relevant in the first place? If so, we can wonder if it's spam. If it's not, let's remove it and consider the rest of the post.

[...] assuming it has some bearing on the question, does posting a link to our website automatically constitute spam?

Nope, it does not.

If not, is there any reason why it would be considered spam, in this case?

The website of the author had no bearing on the question. I felt that it was there only to promote it.
Removing the URL to the author's website did not change the core of his questions which were "What are things that you look for when hiring a composer to make music for your games?" and "What would make you hire a composer like me over using stock websites like [3rd party site] that provide cheap or free effects / music etc?"
That second question was asked after he described the way he was working, thus removing the need to visit the website.

So where do we make that distinction?

I don't think there is a line to draw here. As you've mentioned, it's a grey zone. It's to be judged on a case-by-case basis. And since where human (at least most of us, I guess), we'll have different opinions (and even the same human can have different opinions over the same topic over time) about whether a link fits in or not, or if a link constitutes spam or not (although there are obvious situations).

Things worth noting:

The flag description can be misleading; unfortunately, I can't remember where I've seen this, but the comma in this text should be interpreted as "and/or". This means that it's not because that the author's affiliation is disclosed that the post is not spam.
The flag acts on whole posts, not on specific parts. So it should be used only when the whole post is spam and can't be salvaged by editing out the spammy part.
The context in which the link occurs can be relevant:

Self promoting links in questions about a service are rarely something other than spam, or disguised spam.
Self promoting links in answers often end up being 'link only answers'.
Self promoting links in comments are in a grey zone. Are they relevant to the post at hand? If so, they're not spam. See the answer given by Josh.

Links to outside resources tend to rot. This is why they can be used to support a post, but they should not be mandatory for a post to make any sense. In the SE philosophy, we like canonical questions that can stand the test of time, but products and services change a lot over time.

It would be nice if the downvoter left a comment :)

Retaining downvote out of disagreement


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Do we need a [blender] tag?
It's obsolete and it makes people think modelling related questions should go here. There's already a separate Blender SE for that.
In my opinion this tag should be separated into blender-engine and blender-file-format.

modelling related questions can go here, if they also relate to game development.

I don't see any reason to do anything about the blender tag; Blender questions are on-topic here, just like Max or Maya questions.
Just because the Blender StackExchange site exists does not mean we automatically consider questions involving Blender off-topic.
It's possible that a user might be better served by having asked their Blender-related question on the Blender site, but as long as it's reasonably game-development related it's perfectly fine here.


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Can we improve the [gamification] tag?
I noticed a question that uses the gamification tag, and out of interest, I clicked on the tag to look at the other questions.
Here they are, in full:

What is the line between a serious game and an application with points? [closed: primarily opinion based] (asked in 2011, 7 upvotes, 1 favourite, 5 answers)
What is a good book on gamification?  [closed: off-topic] (asked in 2015, 0 votes, 0 answers)
EdTech game development  [closed: too broad] (asked in 2015, 0 votes, 0 answers)
Bartle taxonomy formula  (asked yesterday, 0 votes, 2 answers)

History shows that this tag has very limited use. While the question range is limited, they have also mostly been closed. This leads me to two assumptions:

We do not need the gamification tag, or
We need to improve the usage guidelines for the gamification tag.

If we delete the tag, we would only need to cater to two of the questions, as only two only feature this tag:

What is a good book on gamification? speaks for itself. We have a recommendation request that has not received any real traffic. This question could simply be deleted.
Bartle taxonomy formula appears to be the one exception to the pattern of gamification questions being closed. We would need to determine an alternate tag to use, though I do not feel I know enough about the subject to offer a good suggestions. That said, brief research tells me that it relates to a classification of players. I do not understand how this actually relates to gamification, in the first place.

If we improve the usage guidelines, perhaps we should include a disclaimer to warn user's that this tag is commonly associated with off-topic questions, and to ensure their question meets our question guidelines?
For a point of reference, here is the excerpt:

Gamification is the application of gaming elements to non-gaming contexts.

Here is the body:

Gamification refers to the process of applying mechanics and elements typically employed in games to non-game contexts, often with the goal of increasing engagement or interest in something.
This tag should be used for questions about the process or mechanics behind gamification of some subject matter.

Perhaps we should focus more on the correct use of the tag, rather than an explanation of the term. I feel that linking to the Wikipedia page, alone, is enough to invite users to conduct their own research into the definition of gamification.

Thoughts?

Just because we haven't gotten many reasonable questions yet isn't reason enough to blacklist the tag. Low-usage or incorrect usage don't make a tag eligible for blacklist, deleting, et cetera. They are sometimes factors in how quickly we process a decision to blacklist a tag, but they aren't usually problems with the tag itself.
Gamification as a topic is acceptable here, and will remain on-topic until somebody makes a meta post that provides some fairly compelling evidence that the topic is detrimental or otherwise out-of-scope for the site. So the tag has to stay, because there's otherwise no other mechanism to label questions about the subject.
From the looks of it, the tag's description and wiki both look fine. I don't really see a point to including any kind of "questions with this tag are often off-topic" notice in the tag because

The questions using it that were off-topic were not off-topic because they were about gamification; two were off-topic because they're asking for lists of things (book and reference resources) or were hugely open-ended.
We don't actually have a problem with people asking off-topic questions about gamification. Three off-topic question is not an alarming trend.
It creates undue prejudice against the topic for no other apparent reason than it's low-traffic. This is a slippery slope.
I very much doubt anybody who is interested in using the tag on a new question will read or notice it anyway.

You make some good points in regards to clarifying the tag. I previously backflipped on delete vs clarify, in part due to the other answer, in part due to your clarification of "blacklisting". However, I am content with this answer.

Remove the tag
Gamification is all about applying game-like mechanics on things that are not games. This should make it off topic, as it's not about making games.
By the way, the Bartle question is mistagged; I've made an attempt to replace it have replaced it with more appropriate tags - it's not about gamification.


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Am I allowed to ask a question about Udemy courses?
I want to know what course I can take on Udemy that is specific to general game development terms, such as the math behind it (matrices for transformations), what the specific gamedev lingo or jargon refers to (shaders, culling, ...), ...
I thought this was a great question to ask here, but I read that it is frowned upon to ask a question without one clear answer:

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

Am I allowed to ask such questions and if not, where do I ask it (or what courses are good ones in my case? ;))

Questions about "what should I learn next" are off-topic, and that basically covers questions about which courses you should take or if a course is a good idea. Alexandre's advice is the same advice I'd give you; ask in [chat] or at GDNet, we'd be happy to help there.

(Also, thank you for reading the help and for posting here beforehand. It's a rare thing.)

@JoshPetrie I know stackexchange sites, they are not very forgiving when it comes to not knowing the community rules (written and unwritten) ;)

Questions about "what to learn next" are opinion based. And it's one of the reasons to vote to close a question.
The question being off-topic here, you should not ask it on the main site.
I think GDnet is more appropriate for this kind of discussion. Their model is a forum (as opposed to a Question and Answer site like we are here) which allows a better back and forth dialogue between the users. With this, other users will have a better sense of what you need and will be able to guide you better in your choices.
You can also ask in chat. Maybe someone there knows about what they offer and will be able to guide you.

Please don't ask questions you know will be closed.

@Byte56 Edited :)

I would argue that not every answer would be equally valid. The OP seems to have some very specific requests, which from my knowledge of Udemy GameDev courses (And I have taken a few, see https://www.completeunitydeveloper.com/blog/resources-for-learning-unity-and-game-design for some information) are actually not that common.

The argument about whether or not answers are "equally valid" or opinion-oriented or whatever are irrelevant, really. "What courses should I take" questions are explicitly off-topic here.

The existing answers cover the site's policy and rationale well.
One other factor to consider here is that StackExchange is geared toward getting expert help. Most of the detailed answers you get here are written by people with substantial experience in game development — and usually that's a good thing.
But it also means we've been doing it for a while: the world we learned in when we were first getting started is not the world you find yourself in today. I'd wager that Udemy may not have even existed when the folks who've replied in this thread were making our first games.
So when you want to know what tutorials/classes/resources are good for beginners today, you'll probably benefit from more relevant experience by asking your peers & fellow early learners, rather than going to more established experts.
See if there are any gamedev hobbyist or student groups/meetups in your area, or people tweeting about Udemy courses they've taken — they'll be closer to the subject matter you care about than the type of user who hangs out answering questions here. ;)

Alexandre Vaillancourt makes some very good points, and you should definitely address his answer for advice on where to go to ask such questions. However, it is worth addressing the additional reason such questions would be considered off-topic;

Questions about "how to get started," "what to learn next," or "which technology to use" are discussion-oriented questions which involve answers that are either based on opinion, or which are all equally valid. Those kinds of questions are outside the scope of this site. Visit our help center for more information.
- Flagging > Closing > Off-Topic (emphasis mine)

There is more ground to argue whether a question truly is opinion-based; and such questions can usually be salvaged, in one way or another. However, this is a moot point, as your question would most likely be closed for asking "what to learn next" before it was closed for "primarily opinion-based". As pointed out, your welcome to ask about it in chat.
It is worth addressing that this does not make questions in context of Udemy off-topic. For example, you might be able to ask about clarification referencing work you have completed and your own understanding from Udemy. Such questions are not necessarily off-topic, and indeed may make great questions, if they remain within the scope of Game Dev.


text:
Developing games in games
Many games allow you to create games in them, such as Minecraft or Roblox. I'm not talking about modding.
Are questions about these considered on-topic? I know questions like "Minecraft keeps crashing" are definitely off-topic, but what about questions like "Counting players with command blocks"? (I never played Roblox, so I can't say anything about that).
Tl:dr
Where's the line between game developement and gaming? Is something considered game developement, if it creates a standalone game? Is there an overlap between the two?

Is there a specific question you have in mind?

@Josh I just saw a question about Roblox crashing constantly and I got curious if it'd be on-topic, if it was a question about actually making games with it.

I think this is the question @Bálint was referring to.

I don't see why the topic of "developing games within existing games" would be off-topic.
A game is being built by leveraging an existing game as a toolset. I don't see this is as fundamentally that different from modding, and even if somebody were to disagree with that it's hard to disagree with the fact that a game is still being developed.

As to your specific hypothetical "counting players with command blocks" in Minecraft question: given that the audience for modding here is small, and the audience for Minecraft-specific modding is even smaller, I'd say a user is more likely to get a better answer to that question on Arcade, where such queries are on-topic (as of this writing) and the subject has a wider base.
But as per above, I don't think it would be off-topic here, so if we ever saw such a question I'd probably just leave a comment suggesting Arqade might have a more appropriate audience and offer to migrate the question if the poster wanted, but wouldn't otherwise do anything.

Agreed. Since questions about developing games using an engine is (very) on topic surely questions where an existing game serves as the engine should be on topic.


text:
Please flag responsibly
In the past couple of months, there seems to have been an increase in the number of posts landing in the Low Quality Posts review queue.
Some of them legitimately belong there, which is nice because the community takes part in the moderation of the site, but most of them do not, and this is what this post will try to address.
What flags are for
Questions and answers flags (and comments flags, for some of them)
spam

Exists only to promote a product or service, does not disclose the author's affiliation.

A post should be marked as spam ONLY when it contains an unsolicited advertisement.
It should NOT be marked as spam when:

The answer contains no useful information, such as an answer that says “I don't care about your problem”. Flag an answer as not an answer instead; if you find a weird non-question, then flag it for moderator attention with a custom explanation.

It contains only gibberish, such as “fsdguejgkfdlk”. Use the rude or abusive flag for these cases, or flag for moderator attention with a custom explanation if it requires more detail.

(Source)
rude or abusive

A reasonable person would find this content inappropriate for respectful discourse.

Even if a post is a bad post for some reason or another, it is probably not rude or abusive.  The rude or abusive flag (formerly known as offensive) is meant to be used only in extreme cases, like hate speech, abuse against people, or abuse of the community or system.
For example, if a user posts obscene images to the site, that should be flagged as rude or abusive.  But if someone says something bad about your favorite technology, that probably doesn’t apply.
As a rule of thumb, if you can’t justify something being hate speech or abuse, you shouldn’t mark the post as rude or abusive.  Instead, you should downvote the post.
Abuse of the system or community is everything that is created with the intention to harm them. This includes posts that contain no useful content at all – i.e. gibberish posts along the lines of:

asyuv;laergap897wertp[98 gb;vp98a34

Cats are not allowed to walk across keyboards as part of Stack Exchange posts; this is abuse and should be flagged as such. (Source)
If an otherwise valid post contains vulgar words as an expression of frustration, edit the bad part out instead of flagging the entire post as rude or abusive.
(Source)
very low quality

This answer has severe formatting or content problems. This answer is unlikely to be salvageable through editing, and might need to be removed.

The post needs to be removed, as it is beyond saving. This flag should be used when the others don't apply. E.g. The user is complaining that their grand-pa is always farting and ask if they can buy gas masks at the grocery store.
(Source)
in need of moderator intervention

A problem not listed above that requires action by a moderator. Be specific and detailed!

This flag is to be used if you feel there is something wrong with the question but it does not fit in the other categories. For instance, if you feel that the user is "sock-puppeting", or trying to abuse the reputation system, or if the user re-posts the same content again and again, etc.
Questions flags
should be closed...
This has already been covered here. Please note that this other post is about closing, but the same rules apply to flagging.
a duplicate
This has also been covered here. Please note that this other post is about closing, but the same rules apply to flagging.
Answers flags
not an answer

This was posted as an answer, but it does not attempt to answer the question. It should possibly be an edit, a comment, another question, or deleted altogether.

Comments posted as an answer: This is common from users who do not have the 50 reputation required to comment, but feel they have something useful to say.

“Thank You” answers, “I’m having this problem, too” answers and different questions posted as answers: These are considered noise; answers must be actual answers.

Link-only answers: These tend to break under maintenance of the linked reference. Users should be encouraged to include the essential parts of the solution in the answer's body. Note that, only if the answer is fully worthless without the link, it actually is a link-only answer.

Answers that fail to address the question: If the answer is not answering the question, it clutters the answer list and add noise to the site.

(Source)
Comments flags
no longer needed

This comment is obsolete, chatty, or otherwise unnecessary.

As described in the help pages, some questions or answers need clarification or improvements, and this can be is done via comments. When a user post an comment, and the post is updated accordingly, the comment is no longer needed. Flagging a comment with this reason is a way to tell a moderator that the comment should be removed because no longer needed.
Comments are not for extended discussion. If the comments turn into a chat between a couple of users, without the aim to improve the question or answer, this is another valid reason to flag these comments. A moderator will likely move the comments to the chat and delete them from the post.
What flags are not for

Telling the user that their post sucks. Use the downvote button instead.
Telling the user that their answer is wrong. Leave a comment and use the downvote button instead.
Downvoting without losing rep. Use your own rep instead, -1 rep will not kill you.
Telling the user that their English is bad. Suggest an edit instead.
Telling the user that they suck. Although you might feel annoyed that a certain user always asks very newb question, the flags and the downvotes are to qualify the content, not the user. Either help the user by answering or commenting, or ignore the user and move on.

Did you notice?
These flags are there to ask moderators to delete the post and possibly punish the author (aside from should be closed..., a duplicate and in need of moderator intervention flags).
This is a very drastic measure.
So, before flagging, please make sure that the issue with the post can't be fixed first by editing the post, then make sure flagging is really appropriate. If it's not, consider using the site's feature to notify the user that the content is not very good: use the downvote button.
And use the upvote button more often :)
Happy non-flagging!

About the gibberish, the reason to use the rude/abusive flag is that after enough of these flags raised, the post is automatically deleted, and the author is punished (-100 rep); this does not seem to be the case with the VLQ flag. So if a user posts gibberish content repeatedly, they're abusing the system and should be flagged as such. If a new user posts gibberish, and he's posted only once, one can assume that they started to write a question/answer, did not know how to backtrack and hit the 'post' button. Flagging as abuse is preferable, but VLQ eventually work to delete the post.

I don't think the abuse vs VLQ flag for the gibberish posts is a big issue here, at least for now. The VLQ is a safety net for the new users.

Abuse/VLQ for random gibberish are both valid. What I see as being a more widespread problem today is the misuse of VLQ as a "this answer is bad" or "I disagree" button. That's what the downvote button is for.

Also, the utility in this post, I think, is not to be helpful for new users (they have the Help Center and are less likely to see this meta post anyhow) but rather to act as a reminder for existing users.

This is an excellent summary.
It's hard to provide good individual feedback to users who use flags well (or not so well). In case you're not aware, you can get a summary of your flagging history from your profile. In the "Activity" tab, under the "Impact" section on the right, there's some text about "X help flags cast." This text is a link to a summary page with some statistics about your flag casting and a list of every flag you've raised, including a blurb that explains why it may have been declined, if appropriate.
Ultimately the point of a flag is to bring attention to a post, either the attention of higher-reputation users (in the case of "this should be closed" flags available to those who cannot yet cast direct close votes) or the attention of the moderators (in the case of inappropriate behavior, abuse, and so on). If you are in doubt about which flag to cast, but know that a post needs attention that you can't provide, flagging it in any way is generally better than ignoring it.
For the most part nobody is going to get on your case about flagging incorrectly, so don't worry so much if flagging guidelines seem overly complex. Unless and until there's a trend of incorrectly-raised flags, it's not going to be a concern.
That said, please don't consider that a license to avoid even trying to interpret the post and find the correct flag. Almost every flag you raise causes human intervention, so you want to be respectful of your fellow members' time and energy when doing so. If you dig through your flag history and see a bunch of "declined, a moderator reviewed your flag but found no evidence" type of notes, you may want to return here and review Alexandre's post and/or A Close Vote is not a Super Downvote and see if you can see how you can improve. You can always ping me in the chat if you have specific questions about why a flag was declined; even if I wasn't the one to decline it I can usually explain to you why I think it probably was declined.


text:
Can we expand our migration options?
There's an option in the flagging menu for "this question belongs to a different StackExchange site" where you can choose in which SE the question should be migrated to.
Currently you can only choose StackOverflow, but there are many more SE sites questions can belong to:

Computer Graphics for graphics related questions
Computer Science for algorithms not specifically related to gamedev
Software Recommendations
Super User for software problems
Blender for modelling problems
Artificial intelligence

And there's much more I forgot about. Could we include these too?

"Currently you can only choose stack overflow" Are you certain? From what I see now, the only migration path that exists is to here, meta. The option about SO is a 'close' option.

@Alexandre Strange, I thought you could choose that

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/285467/a-proposed-philosophy-of-question-migration

The short answer is no. As for the long answer:
First off, I don't see a historical trend towards frequent migration to any of those sites. We don't migrate much of anything. Occasionally we send a question to Arqade, and prior to our tentative relaxation on the rules around general programming questions we'd send stuff to StackOverflow. But since that relaxation that's mostly dried up. Our migration rate is 0.46% as I write this.
Even if I agreed that we should have the migration paths you are proposing (and I don't), there doesn't seem to be sufficient evidence to convince StackExchange of that. They tend only to enable direct migration paths when the frequency of migration is creating a burden for the source site. That is not happening.
Second, migration is a disruption, so we should only be doing it rarely. It's historically poorly understood, which is why migration paths are not available to all users by default. Generally we only migrate a question when it's well-formed but blatantly off-topic here, and also blatantly on-topic somewhere else. If it's a junk question it gets closed, if it's on-topic here, it doesn't matter if it's on-topic somewhere else too. It stays here (especially if it's been answered).

What should we do instead then when requesting a migration to a non-listed SE site?

@Pikalek Flag for moderator attention, explain why you think it should be migrated.

From this answer from Noctrine,

The pre-defined migration paths are set up based on how common manual migrations are to the other site.
Remember, you can always flag as "other" with the comment telling where you think the question should be migrated to.

I'd advance that even though I see some questions that could be migrated, it's very rare that I see any that could be migrated verbatim. Often they don't fit exactly on the other site, either because of the format, or the content. And since we don't want to be polluted by questions migrated from other sites, I guess it's rare that we actually migrate questions on the other sites.


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Is there a way to show only 'on hold' questions?
Is there a way to show only (or hide for that matter) 'on hold' questions?
Just to clarify, I don't want to filter out closed questions. Instead I'm wondering if there's a way to show only questions that are currently on hold. The original idea was to look to see if there are any on hold / off-topic questions that could be salvaged with edits. I only mentioned hiding them because I figured maybe there would be a way to reverse that to show an on hold only view.
I did try guessing at some status searches, but didn't have any luck. Here's what I've tried:

on-hold:yes
on_hold:yes
onhold:yes
[on hold]:yes

I would suggest making the suggestion in the Stack Exchange Meta; though as a feature request, I do not think it would have the practicality to be implemented.

Use a closed=yes search query. In the search results, click the "newest" tab.
"On hold" is not functionally different from "closed." It's purely a nomenclature thing in order to make the status seem less confrontational. A closed question displays its closure status as "on hold" for the first five days of closure, after which the text "on hold" changes to "closed." There is nothing else different about the two statuses.
If your purpose is to look for questions that can be salvaged with edits, filtering by closed=yes and sorted by date is a reasonable way to accomplish this.
Questions that have been on hold for more than five days (that is, those that are "closed") are perfectly valid candidates for edit salvage as well.

The 10k moderation tools can show you recent close votes and recently closed questions as well, but it's not as friendly a view and it is hidden behind a reputation gate.

Thank you for pointing out that "on hold" is just a form of closed. I assumed incorrectly that since SO prevents adding [on hold] to a question title, it was its own status. I'd prefer to focus on on-holds since it seems like a greater chance to re-engage users who might otherwise never come back, but appreciate knowing that older closed questions might also benefit from edits.

There is a way to get *some* results, yes, but it's hackish and not reliable a lot.
You can use the StackExchange Data Explorer to perform an SQL query and search for the questions.
Just for the fun of it, I've made one here.
As its title implies, it's very hackish, uses magic numbers that I know nothing of (I've noticed a pattern in the data) and you don't have up-to-date results because the database dump is old.
In fact, the data is updated once a week

The data is updated early every Sunday morning around 3:00 UTC.

(Source)
So you can spend your Sunday trying to salvage questions that are on hold from up to the previous ~Tuesday/Wednesday, but I guess that it'll get boring after that because of no new stuff coming your way :P
@Josh's method is better ;)

Thanks. It's too bad the data isn't refreshed more often, or that'd be a really slick solution. Your post did lead me to the Stack Exchange API; I might look into that down the road.

@Pikalek Yeah, the data is really there for the geeks out there that like to check stats, I think, that's why they don't update it often; they don't need to. But nice, the API!

No. As per previously-raised meta, you can filter on hold questions only by filtering out all closed questions. Simply add the parameter "closed=no" to your question. This filters out all questions that have been closed, including questions that are on hold.
Likewise, you can only look for on hold questions by looking for all questions that have been closed with the parameter "closed=yes".

There are a bunch of useful search parameters you can find by looking at the "Advanced Search Tips" to the right of the fully-fledged search bar.

Along with some other useful tips, it provides additional modifiers to filter search results based off the status of the question.

closed:yes
  duplicate:no
  migrated:no
  wiki:no

You can also find out more about advanced searching in the help centre.

I'm not looking to filter closed questions, I'm looking to filter questions that have been placed on hold.

Yes, I read it. It tells how to do other things. It does not specifically address on hold status. I also searched the searching help for the term 'hold' & got zero hits.

@Pikalek, the point I am trying to make is that this question was already asked, and the above functionality is the best there currently is. "on hold" has no implementation as a parameter, either. Alternativley, you could filter back in duplicates, not other closed questions.

Sorry if my lead off was unclear. I'm actually interested in the opposite of what your reference is asking for (i.e. sometimes I'm just in the mood to help on-hold off topic questions).

@Pikalek, my answer still stands; there is no way to do it. Note that in any consideration, you can use the opposite words of "yes" and "no" to filter results to only show or ommit the particular search function. The fact that you can not filter out these questions is confirmation to the fact that you can not only filter for these questions.


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Where to ask "which technology to use" questions?
Recently I asked a question, which unfortunately got an on-hold label!
https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/139224/which-game-engine-to-build-for-arm-linux-target
Putting an on-hold label and saying that "you shouldn't ask this question here" is not enough. You should say "Ask this question at X forum instead" to help the user.
Now please help me: Where exactly can I ask this question?

Please keep in mind that the on-hold/close infobox is applied automatically when enough users vote to close the question. It can't be modified to address every single question and why they've been closed. Instead, it gives a way to the user to see why the question has been closed and by linking to the help center.
By following the links, there is an answer to your question, right there, in the help center:
By clicking on the first help center link, then visiting the What topics can I ask about here? section, you'll find the Where can I ask subjective, discussion, and other questions not fit for this site? page section:

Our chat room
Reddit
Gamedev.net
Did you already search with your favorite search engine to see if your question has been asked/answered elsewhere?
Are you simply looking for someone to make a decision for you? Are you suffering from analysis paralysis? Just make a choice and go with it, see where it takes you. Or perhaps you could roll some dice or flip a coin.

With

If your question is not specifically on-topic for Game Development Stack Exchange, it may be on topic for another Stack Exchange site.

In this specific case, your question could be a good fit for Software recommendations. Please read the help center to make sure it fits well and to see how you should ask there.

Elaborating on a point addressed by Alexandre Vaillancourt, your question might be on-topic for the Software Recommendation Stack Exchange.
Of particular note, here are some more considerations:

The site features a game-development tag. The tag currently has a response rate of roughly 60%, and the top user appears to be active.
In contrast with most other sites, there does not appear to be any specific hard coded off-topic close reason unique to that site. Most sites have a couple of options under "Flag" > "Should be closed because.." > "Off-topic because.." that can give you a good idea of some common unique close reasons. Software Recommendation currently only has the option of "Blatantly off-topic".
You can read more about what not to ask and how to remain on-topic at their help center, which might give you a greater idea if this is the right avenue.
The tour page specifically states that a good question should have a purpose (i.e. what it is you are trying to accomplish) and some objective requirements (i.e. the minimum set of features you require from the software).
In contrast, the tour page specifically states that questions that do not define a set purpose or objective requirements are considered off-topic.

All in all, looking at your question, I am confidant it could easily be adapted to be appropriate for the Software Recommendation Stack Exchange.

There are suggestions in the help center: https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic (see the section headed "Where can I ask subjective, discussion, and other questions not fit for this site?")


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Should we consider "does product X have feature Y" type questions as on-topic?
A question about Linux support for Lumberyard was recently closed as off topic. A further comment mentions that:

.. questions about the support and software requirements (et cetera) of various products are not on topic here, in general, anyway.

I respectfully disagree. There's a precedent set by similar questions (this for example), & I didn't see anything in the on-topic/off-topic help indicating the contrary. The wording of the closed question could certainly be improved, but it's not obvious to me why it was closed, but the second example was not.
To clarify, I'm asking whether or not we should consider "does product X have feature Y" type questions as on-topic or not.

Are you asking why I closed that question, or are you asking whether or not we should consider "does product X have feature Y" questions on-topic or not? (I think they are separate discussions)

The latter will likely inform the prior, so let's start there. It appears to me that some questions of the given form are okay, while others are not & there's no obvious way to know apriori which holds. What are the guidelines for such questions & how are communicated?

I personally don't think they're really okay at all, and I'm not sure why I bothered to answer that older one instead of just closing it. Probably I just wasn't paying enough attention.

For the record, I didn't select that example to criticize you. I selected it because it was a recent question of similar form that happened to involve the same X. I'm interested in understanding the issue & making it less opaque to new users, not scrutinizing any particular person's moderation history.

Perhaps I've misunderstood things - my reading of furthermore is that even if the question isn't requesting speculation, it ask "does product X have feature Y", which is also off-topic. Perhaps I should have edited the question to reflect the clarifications made via comments, but I don't see how I've misconstrued things, or what point I've made if I've done so.

For one, your saying the question was closed, citing a specific quote that was never used in closing the question. Editing your question to more clearly state that, as I thought that was quite obvious, to begin with.

I don't think they're the best fit for our format here. I don't know if I'd call them off-topic, but there's a number of awkward aspects:

In my experience, most of these questions I've seen are answerable by looking at the technology's website/documentation, or searching for similar features in tutorials/games built with that tech. So I often downvote for lack of research effort when this comes up.
If they're not easily answered with reference to these resources, then to answer them you need not just experts in game development, but experts in that specific technology. Asking on a dedicated user forum or product support site for that tech is more likely to get it in front of the right people.
What would a "high quality" answer to such a question look like? Especially if the answer is "no, it doesn't support this" — lacking an official statement from the developers, this can be tricky to demonstrate concisely, and trying to expand on why the feature might not be supported tends to run into speculation about developers' intentions.
Like other tech questions, this can age badly. Maybe the feature wasn't supported a year ago when the question was first asked & answered, but is supported now. Until a subject matter expert notices this and adds an updated answer, new users stumbling across this question will get completely incorrect advice.
These questions are ripe for side-tracking into "what technology should I use" discussions anyway, eg. through well-intentioned answers saying "You could/couldn't use technology A for this, but you really should use technology B..." At the end of the day, it's still a "help me pick my tech" question with similar issues.

Any case I can think of for these questions could be more constructively reframed as "HOW can I achieve this goal with this tech" rather than merely "Can I", so my recommendation would be to encourage the user to edit the question toward this direction.

Your closing point, in particular, jives with the general idea that "yes or no" questions don't work well on SE: they almost always have an implied "if so, how?" follow up and it's usually better to just edit them into that form.

I agree that reframing such questions is probably better idea in general & that they are awkward. I still favor using community voting to reflect community values as opposed to closure. In either case, this answer currently best illustrate why such questions should be downvoted or closed.

I don't think we should permit questions that are about whether or not particular products support particular features.
These kinds of questions aren't really meaningfully related to game development in a way we should care about. Just because the product in question might be game development related doesn't mean querying about its feature is. That query is fundamentally the same whether you're talking about Unreal or Excel. It demands basic internet search expertise, not the specialized knowledge required of a game developer.
Further, the answers to these questions tend to change over time much more rapidly than the answers to other kinds of questions. A new version might come out tomorrow, adding or dropping features, rendering old answers obsolete. Permitting these sorts of questions open a door, in my view, to permitting the site to devolve in the direction of being bullet-point-wiki of feature support, which would do harm to the audience and create a lot of tedious busy-work to maintain that I think falls outside the scope of what a StackExchange site should want to be.

It seems like a slippery slope ("how can I compile X for platform Y"  is in part, "does X support Y").

I am not particularly in favor of "how do I compile X" either, for similar reasons (that's what X's documentation is for, and that's potentially a hugely broad and involved topic).

I agree with your negative points, but differ in that I see them to be poor questions in need of down voting (i.e. if the answer is in the documentation, it shows a lack of research) rather than off-topic. Furthermore, some questions of the given form appear to be of higher value to the community than others. Why not let the market sort it out?

I think there is something that can be salvaged in "how to compile" questions, potentially. I don't see anything salvageable in "does this have feature X" questions, and only negative precedents.