text:
Why was my edit to this answer rolled back?
The question in question:
Why am I unable to edit the Input Field object's script?
The issues:
1) My original question was "edited", in ways that add nothing meaningful (slight changes in words, but not meaning or fixes in grammar).

2) I edited the answer I planned on accepting, because I found additional relevant information, which completed the answer:

Note that this edit was accepted. This is also very much in line with accepted etiquette for when answers should be edited: Why can any user edit any other user's question or answer?, and something I am used to doing on other Stack Exchanges.
However, this edit of mine was rolled-back (to a state where I would not fully accept the answer any more), and the following comment was left by the editor responsible:

Except that the edit I made was not much of an alternative, it simply notes that the source code for Unity's UI Engine is officially available. The editor made further edits to the answer which were trivial comma additions.
My immediate reaction was to simply delete my gamedev.stackexchange account and move on, rather than deal with this annoyance, but I have decided to take out the time to put together something more comprehensive to the meta community, in case I am in the wrong. Please advise.

I didn't even realise it was the asker making that edit. But actually, you do still accept the answer; you did before the edit had been made :/

The first edit is explained more clearly in this help article, more specifically, under "Should I use tags in titles". TLDR; only in an unforced way; never in the style of "Unity:". The second edit was first raised as a comment, though. In these cases, it is fine to initially explain your reasoning for the edit in the comment. I interpret the edit as alternate information, not necessarily supplemental. No-one seemed to care enough to reply to my initial comment, though :/

Actually, that last edit was inappropriately minimal; by itself. I missed it, the first time I confirmed the edit, but added it roughly 23 seconds after. In such cases, the system is suppose to roll the changes into the prior edit, so it really doesn't count as performing another edit at all - more like correcting the prior one. But grammatically, it is correct.

Your time & effort are appreciated & it's clear this situation has frustrated you. What isn't clear, a least to myself, is what you're asking. Without a clear question, is difficult to provide answers or reach a solution.

For the record, I was one of the reviewers to the edited answer. I do not see the edit as being alternative information, but rather additional information as what was in the second paragraph ("how to view the source code of a dll"). I also did not notice that it was the Asker that was making the edit. Per this meta question I have no meaningful input.

I also reviewed the edit adding the source code link. It struck me as a little unusual, but then I thought about how often we approve edits replacing a broken link with a working one, or a secondary source with the original source. This struck me as a similar situation: adding a more reliable source for the information the answer's author wanted to provide. On that basis, I approved the edit, since it only improves the answer and didn't contradict the author's message. I wouldn't recommend leaving over an editing disagreement though — we all have them from time to time and we sort them out. :)

Having reviewed the scenario I really don't see anything here that was untoward or indicative of a "power trip." For the record. I think dopplegreener's answer does a good job of explaining things.

@Gnemlock I am sorry about this, I think I let my own annoyance grow disproportionately, rather than address it in more productive ways. Let's think about whether we can roll back the last edit, and everything else is fine?

1) My original question was "edited", in ways that add nothing meaningful (slight changes in words, but not meaning or fixes in grammar).

This edit was standard protocol: we discourage writing tags in titles. That means a title of "How do I foo?" is preferable to "Unity: How do I foo?" when the question is also tagged unity. An edit to remove that single word from the title is fine, and the user removed another superfluous word while they were in there (which is also fine).

2) I edited the answer I planned on accepting, because I found additional relevant information, which completed the answer [and then the same editor criticised the decision]

Ok, that's reasonable to object to, but it doesn't indicate a power trip. It's also standard protocol to be wary around other editors adding content to others' posts, though this looked to be a pretty reasonable circumstance to add new content and a good edit.
All of us in the community can get tired, not check something properly, misinterpret what's going on, etc. We're human beings and limited in our energy and abilities. At times like that mixups like this can happen, or the wrong thing can get called out. Sorry to hear it frustrated you, and I can understand this looking particularly objectionable in light of the apparently-minor edit to the question itself — nothing too bad happened here though.
I suggest that in circumstances like this, it's helpful to assume the user was tired and made a mistake or misunderstood something, and investigate with them accordingly (e.g. explain the circumstance and request clarification in comments) before assuming malicious intent. The community members moderating this site are after all generally doing their best to act in good faith — and if they really are acting with malicious intent, it will become clear while you're trying to converse with them under that good-faith assumption. If you suspect foul play or someone overstepping, remember you can also flag for custom moderator attention.

"We're human beings...". Speak for yourself.

Thanks, this answer is great, and yeah, having a few days too cool off, I do  think that I got too riled up myself. Your recommendations for how to proceed when stuff like this happens in the future is great, and something I will keep in mind.

@user89 I'm happy you were able to work things out. :)


text:
Can we enable MathJax on GDSE? (revisited)
This has been discussed before in math markdown on this site, but I'd like to have some fresh discussion of this matter. Circumstances have changed in the meantime. The discussion of 2011 seems to consider it a foregone conclusion GDSE can't & won't get MathJax, but sites such as RPG Stack Exchange and Code Review and Worldbuilding have been granted MathJax, so that's no longer the case. I think it's worth having a fresh discussion of the matter; none has happened since 2011 because each subsequent time the issue has been raised it's been closed as a duplicate of that 2011 discussion. Jeff Atwood called it a heavy dependency, but that was in 2010, and MathJax's client-side performance has improved since then to be pretty smooth.
I believe it would be beneficial for GDSE to have MathJax enabled, and it's likely we could actually get it if we can show we'd benefit from it — which I am sure we can.
As Shog9 said in response to Code Review's request for MathJax:

Unless there's a large population of posts that could benefit extensively from it, there's no need to impose the cost on the rest of the posts. A few subscripts don't really necessitate this.

I believe there may well be such a large population of posts. Game development can get very mathematical: matrices, vectors, quarternions, projections, rotation, probability, physics, and graphics operations, are all mathematical subjects that are standard fare for us.
In one prior meta request, a user expressed they would prefer to use math formula, but used psuedocode because it was all that was available.
As was the case on on RPG Stack Exchange, the standard delimiter of $ ... $ would be an issue, so we could instead use delimiters of \$ ... \$ for inline MathJax, and $$ ... $$ for block-level MathJax.

Since all the concerns about this feature are from ancient times (i.e. performance, bandwidth, browser support), I'm absolutely supportive of it.

We're going ahead and enabling this, as you've shown plenty of examples of cases where it'd be useful.
As requested, the inline delimiters will be changed to \$ ... \$, and the block-level delimiters are $$...$$ and [...] (which are the defaults, and can't be changed).
Fixed posts broken by this:

Unreal Engine 4.15 Error C++ | ERROR: UBT ERROR: Failed to produce item UE4Editor-ProjectName.dll
https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/a/47615/63420

Woohoo!  Thanks for enabling this!

This is a community wiki post anyone can edit.
Its purpose is to compile a list of Game Dev SE posts that would significantly benefit from MathJax/LaTeX markup, as part of the use-case argument for enabling MathJax here.
We need a decent body of evidence that MathJax would be worthwhile. RPG.SE and CodeReview responded by gathering a list of posts that would benefit significantly from MathJax, and the request was eventually implemented.
I believe such a body of evidence exists to be found. We just need to do the legwork to demonstrate it exists, so I invite others to participate in uncovering it.
This post already includes the posts mentioned in previous community requests for MathJax, which I am listing to ensure coverage and to indicate positive community sentiment for this feature:
How can I render math formulas from StackExchange in my web browser?,
Latex Integration,
TeX should be supported on GameDev, like on Math.SE, Physics, et. al,
Why don't we have LaTeX?,
Can we have MathJax on gamedev.SE?.
A word on pseudocode
Many GDSE posts use pseudocode to represent maths. That's frequently useful to do when showing how to implement something natively in code.
Sometimes however it's not the most effective means of communicating mathematics, and reading the post it looks like pseudocode has largely been used just because it's the only real option available. Things like saying cross(vector1, vector2) can be simply expressed in either MathJax or pseudocode, and sometimes it's simpler and cleaner as MathJax.
Sometimes pseudocode is expressing how to implement a very complex formula in code form, which is also extremely useful! This stuff should remain as-is. However, often it's difficult to understand what basic mathematical formula is actually happening, when it could be something as simply annotatable as a matrix-on-vector transformation. These pseudocode blocks would greatly benefit from being accompanied by a MathJax representation of what they're implementing.
I can't read into all the cases where an author might've been happier writing out their pseudocode as MathJax, but I'm making an educated guess as to scenarios that would've been better that way, or where it would at least be excellent to have a choice to use MathJax.

List of posts that would improve with MathJax
Pseudocode that is preferable being left as-is and is entirely adequate without a corresponding MathJax formula has not been counted for the purposes of this list. Real code that is used or intended for use in a real codebase is not counted. Deleted posts and posts with trivial uses of mathematical notation (i.e. MathJax would likely not improve clarity) are not counted. Answers to closed questions have been included.
The ‡ symbol indicates the post is either already using LaTeX via images, or is using code blocks and/or unicode to represent complex mathematical symbols and/or layout for complex formulae.

Detect mouse click on a bezier curve's neighborhood ‡
Adding air drag to a golf ball trajectory equation ‡
How to achieve uniform speed of movement on a bezier curve? ‡
How to compute acceleration by using Kinect device joint positions ‡ (actually tried writing literal mathjax syntax, which doesn't parse. weird. maybe they were expecting readers to use one of those mathjax-parsing browser extensions / bookmarklets?)
How to compute acceleration by using Kinect device joint positions ‡ (same again.)
Using random numbers with a bias (user has explicitly stated they'd rather use MathJax for this answer)
How do I determine a good path for 2D artillery projectiles? ‡ (user includes a scanned photo of handwritten formulae)
Math behind drawing one game object relative to another? ‡ (matrix and vector notation)
How do I detect the direction of 2D rectangular object collisions? ‡
View Matrix FINDING U
How to solve a pow equation? ‡ (would also benefit from align)
Advanced dice probability
How can I move and rotate an object in an “infinity” or “figure 8” trajectory?
How can I move an object in an "infinity" or "figure 8" trajectory?
How can I move an object in an "infinity" or "figure 8" trajectory? ‡
Find vector tangent to circle through a point ‡
Converting Euler rotation angles from Z up to Y up (Max to OpenGL)
Why is sin = Y and cosine = X?
How can I prevent small numerical advantages from dominating the balance of an encounter?
Problem with Rotating Third Person Radar UE4
C++ and SFML moving a Sprite with a circle equation
Calculate the distance/number of moves one square is from another
How can I project a vector on another vector?
How does one calculate the surface normal, in 2D collisions?
How does one calculate the surface normal, in 2D collisions? (probably)
How can I project a 3D point onto a 3D line? (uses python out of the blue instead of math formula)
How can I project a 3D point onto a 3D line?
What is Vector Projection and what is it's use in games? (but may be better leaving mathjax inside the diagram)
Three points to normal notation (interpret the math)
Three points to normal notation (interpret the math)
Coordinates of the corners of a rectangle bridging two circles
Difference between column- and row vector matrix multiplication (vector transform)
How to work out the height of a point on a tilted surface?
Merge angle range
Approximating a fourth point with a weighted average between three points?
Timebased transition from start to end value
Timebased transition from start to end value
Hemisphere Projection
Calculate damage values from bullet velocity and size
Determine the z coordinate of a deformed plane based on uv (xy) coordinates
Axis of affine transformation matrix ‡
Axis of affine transformation matrix ‡
How can I find a point on a line when I have only two other points? ‡
Finding the Distance between 2 Objects ‡
Computing chance of winning when dealing with fuzzy numbers
Computing chance of winning when dealing with fuzzy numbers
Computing chance of winning when dealing with fuzzy numbers
Computing chance of winning when dealing with fuzzy numbers
Parametric form of a cubic function
Parametric form of a cubic function
Parametric form of a cubic function
Time series for creating new events in a PVP game
Why don't Javascript Math.cos doesn't match this vector tutorial?
clamp a 2D coordinate to fit within an ellipse ‡
clamp a 2D coordinate to fit within an ellipse
how to handle the virtual Z axis in 2D games?
How can I prevent small numerical advantages from dominating the balance of an encounter? (benefits from arrays)
Rotate directly towards a target at a constant speed ‡
How Matrix4 represents an object in space and matrix lore ‡
Translation Matrix not working properly
How to convert -1 to 1 coordinate back to screen coordinates?
What is a simple algorithm for calculating evenly distributed points on an ellipse?
How to calculate the exit speed of ball bouncing off a solid surface
Ray Intersecting Plane Formula in C++/DirectX
Rotate vector by matrix?
How can I find a point on a line when I have only two other points?
How are these physics formulas translated to this code? ‡ (uses screenshots of formulas I'd translate to mathjax to improve legibility)
Calculate matrix transformation components separately ‡
Calculate matrix transformation components separately
How to calculate acceleration and deceleration
How to calculate acceleration and deceleration
How to calculate distance of travel needed get achieve speed x?
How to calculate distance of travel needed get achieve speed x?
Attack vs Defence and who is the winner?
Weighted Random Distribution
Weighted Random Distribution ‡
Get bullet movement direction?
understanding spatial hash function behaviour and Knuth for int64 (would benefit from align)
How to enforce touching within a ring shape?
How do idle games handle such large numbers?
Frustum Culling: How to calculate if an angle is between another two angles ‡
How can I launch a GameObject at a target if I am given everything except for its launch angle? ‡
Accurately simulating the lots of dice rolls without loops? ‡
How can I launch a GameObject at a target if I am given everything except for its launch angle?
Test if Jump can reach target
Computing a full revolution for an arbitrary orbit?
Object orbiting a 3d sphere
Finding pitch/yaw values from lookat vector
Orbital mechanics: orbit as a function of time. Universal variable formulation?
calculating the weights for direction vectors to a target
Get local coords from global coords ‡
Adjust Aim Angle for Motion with Accelerating Bullet
How to draw a circle that is around an object and becomes smaller if the player enters it
How to draw a circle that is around an object and becomes smaller if the player enters it
Returning a List of coords for a sphere in order of inside to outside
Explanation of the parameters in the line intersection code
How can I calculate current level from total XP, when each level requires proportionally more XP? (so many equations)
How can I calculate current level from total XP, when each level requires proportionally more XP? ‡
How can I calculate current level from total XP, when each level requires proportionally more XP?
Algorithm for spending x points on y things divided by n people
Exponential EXP Curve | FIXED TIME -> MAX LEVEL
What's the most optimized way to transform series of points into curves in order to be serialized? ‡
Get all points of a parabola (everything except the code example at the end is formulae)
Calculating the vector to catch a falling object
Find two points in a point cloud with the maximum distance?
Find two points in a point cloud with the maximum distance?
Hex axial coordinates to table coordinates conversion (would benefit from array)
How to work out given two coordinates should I use a vertical/horizontal/diagonal line to connect them
Collision detection with curves
How do you calculate if a line is facing a curve?
How do you calculate the nearest point on 2 curves?
Bezier curve arc length
Moving ships between two planets along a bezier, missing some equations for acceleration
Bezier curve not drawn correctly
Collision detection with curves
Cubic bezier for easing?
Average for damage formula (Min-Max Attack - Min-Max Defense)
How can I transform a Point2f with a matrix on Android? ‡
Path following with Asteroids-like movement. Time to complete path (‡ potentially — or user could've preferred keeping the latex markup intact in the diagrams anyway)
Calculate the slope of a 3D triangle?
How To Program a fully controllable spring (Damped) motion ‡
Calculation correct position of object after collision (2d)
How to find the point on a hypotenuse divinging triangle into two right triangles? ‡
How to find the point on a hypotenuse divinging triangle into two right triangles?
Curvilinear distortion for mapping texture on quad sphere ‡
Calculating pitch angle to hit a target using a projectile that has fixed speed ‡
Finding coordinate in radius (pseudocode)
Calculating orbital elements from Cartesian Vectors
Rotate coordinates back after rotating game context (geometry) ‡
Computing Normals for a displaced material ‡
Given a constant rotation and target point, find position so that point will be in camera center ‡
Non equi-probable random function
Cannot find bug in frustum culling code (lots of plaintext vector definitions that would be presented far more legibly in mathjax)
Detect if two objects are going to collide (equations would benefit from being legibly
expressed in mathjax alongside psuedocode)
Calculate intersect point / aim point ‡
Calculate intersect point / aim point ‡
Calculate intersect point / aim point ‡
Rotating a 3rd person camera toward a target
Fast Ray Sphere collision code
Need some help with math steering behavior stopping on destination point
Is there a quick way to determine if a vector is in a quadrant?
How to invert a damage formula? (maybe)
atan2 : inversed result? (angle 180 is on the right side, angle 0 on the left side)
How can I make a spline out of three points that define circular arc?
Inline-Building a World (SRT) Matrix (maybe)
Determine if Plane is seen by Camera
Understanding normal mapping
Understanding normal mapping
Affine transformation: rotate a plane parallel to another plane
What is the simplest way to calculate distance in a 3D environment? (provides native formula + implementation pseudocode already; native formula would be better off as mathjax)
"aim at" in 3D space algorithm ‡
How to reposition a bouncing ball after it has passed through a surface
Separation of axis theorem implementation at normals ‡
How can I test whether points are within a polygon?
How to calculate a direction vector for camera? (probably)
Trajectory of a spinning ball
Trajectory of a spinning ball ‡
How do I interpret the dot product of non-normalized vectors? ‡
How do I interpret the dot product of non-normalized vectors?
How can I come up with a simple diminishing return equation?
How can I come up with a simple diminishing return equation?
How can I come up with a simple diminishing return equation?
Formula to measure uv-mapping distortion (would benefit from align)
Formula to measure uv-mapping distortion ‡
Gravity: Slow down on ground approach
Percentage of object inside a moving rect
Percentage of object inside a moving rect
How do I calculate the distance between a point and a rotated rectangle? (real code; would benefit from being annotated with mathjax as the operation is fairly simple)
Implicit Functions and extracting an isosurface
Explaining vector math for a pendulum camera
Converting time of day into a smooth day/night variable?
Screen coordinates to isometric coordinates? (maybe)
How do I generate solar systems for a 2d universe map, but still look random
RPG like hit points growth algorithms help
RPG like hit points growth algorithms help
How can I manually construct a right-handed orthographic projection matrix? ‡ (would benefit from align, currently replicating that 4-dimensional matrix via a code block)
Determining a sensible gear-like hierarchy for a series of connected objects
How to use "weighted average easing" correctly with variable framerate?
How do I convert from the global coordinate space to a local space?
How do I convert from the global coordinate space to a local space?
How do I convert from the global coordinate space to a local space? ‡
Find point in 3D plane
How can I find the tangent and normal at an interpolated point on a Catmull-Rom/Hermite spline?
Predicted target location (real code, ought to be accompanied by MathJax)
Using Bullet physics engine to find the moment of object contact before penetration
How do I convert screen coordinates to between -1 and 1? (probably)
Why do we use the Pythagorean theorem in game physics?
Why isn't this physics code scaling velocities separately? ‡
How can I compare two quaternions for logical equality?
How can I Intercept object with a circular motion ‡
How can I Intercept object with a circular motion
How can I Intercept object with a circular motion
How to achieve cavalier projection using OpenGL fixed pipeline? ‡ (matrix notation)
Integration error in high velocity ‡ (unicode, array table)
How do I disassemble a 3x3 transformation matrix into rotation and scaling matrices?
How do I disassemble a 3x3 transformation matrix into rotation and scaling matrices? ‡ (matrix notation)
How to rotate vector A around another vector B?
How to rotate vector A around another vector B? (dot product in pseudocode ends up erroneously looking more like a property accessor)
How to tell right from left: Finding the vector pointing towards the right side of a character?
How do I check why is no output on screen? (array tables)
How to find the total bounds rectangle around a list of rectagles
Projecting a light onto a quad (apparent math pseudocode at the beginning is hard to understand)
How can I get a direction vector from a an Euler angle? (pseudocode formula at start of answer)
Intelligently move aircraft using curves
3D Camera Rotation ‡ (matrix notation)
How can I get the normal vector for a plane from a set of vertices?
How to create a projectile motion of a cannonball in top down view? ‡ (photo of a handwritten formula)
Applying angular velocity to quaternion ‡
https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/a/149365/33287 ‡
Rotating vector3 by a quaternion (and specifically this answer ‡)
https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/a/98111/40264

Tags of interest

mathematics - pages 1-11 of 26 covered
matrix
vector
quaternion
projection
rotation
probability
physics

(Note: avoid overlap when searching, e.g. ideally search [matrix] -[mathematics])

Thanks for including 117 in there. I'll confess I rewrote part of that answer today into a different factorization just because using ^ to show an exponent in a formula doesn't read as well as a proper superscript in math markup (and risks misinterpretation as a bitwise XOR). I still prefer code for writing the actual procedure, but being able to use common math formatting could help with the prose explanations accompanying it (eg. "This method is O(n^2 log(n)) and...")

Fun fact, this answer is nearly at the 30,000-character limit on posts.

Wow, I didn't realize there was a limit! I wonder if we should prune the duplicate links and just append a note like "Q" "A" or "Q&A" to indicate when multiple posts on the same page demonstrate the issue.

I've opted to use a regex to remove title slugs from the URLs, which ought to free up a lot of characters. :)

@DMGregory You can do superscript and subscript without MathJax, with the <sub> and <sup> tags, respectively. MathJax may look nicer, but for something like big-O notation it seems a bit overkill. (Not that this is any reason for the site to not have MathJax; there are clearly many reasons.)

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


text:
What is the best way to correct a user's reversing of an edit?
Here are the revisions of the relevant question.
The game-design doesn't apply to this question. But just putting in another edit isn't going to help the user know that the tag isn't right and why. I feel like it would muddy the comments section of the question to explain that there.
What's the best approach to educate and fix the question's tags?

It seems to me that game-design needs a bit of a work for clarification since people seem to be misusing it too much (about 25% of questions closed or on-hold in the first page) not sure how I'd go about that though. Maybe put the relevant tags in the guideline instead of the expanded explanation? This would make those a click or just a hover distance instead of two clicks.

I had a similar issue this past week with a user who objected to / rolled back most edits to their question. Ultimately I just let it be, figuring voting would take care of it if other users found the question unclear as it was phrased at the time. :/

A short "hey, I am editing your question because of X Y" is certainly appropriate for the comments section. In this case, the question is clearly about programming, in general. I have made a brief comment pointing to the usage guidelines of the game-design, where it specifically says "not for programming questions about 'design' of features".
Once you feel the point has been made, and assuming it is your comment, there is no need to flag for moderators attention. It is your comment, and as such, you are free to remove it at any time. In this case, it certainly helps to have the editing privledge, which is awarded at 2,000 reputation. Without it, edits are pushed to a review; and in this case, the edit was flat out rejected by the asker.
In this case, I have applied the programming tag, as I feel the question does not specifically apply to graphics-programming, but is certainly against the usage guidelines of game-design. It is possible that the asker may still insist on the original edit, and roll it back. If you are confident that such an edit was appropriate, you should flag the question for moderator attention, as opposed to entering a "rollback war".

Commenting on the question is what I'd recommend. The comments can be removed when they are no longer relevant or if the discussion escalates to the point where a specific meta post should be made.
If the user insists on tagging a question incorrectly after discussion, flag the post for moderator attention and we'll deal with it.

You can use the comments section for that; once the message got through (or it did not get through), and you had a discussion with the user, you can flag the messages for a moderator's attention and explain that the comments are no longer needed.
I'm not sure where, but I've seen on meta.se that it was not worth doing an edit war with the user. If they're not willing to receive help to have their question get the best visibility, their loss.

Well I'm also concerned with the fact that the game-design tag gets misused so much that when I come to look at questions for that tag, most of them aren't related. So individual question visibility is important, but also keeping the tag useful for someone looking to provide answers.

@Chris I know how you feel about de-cluttering the tag; then I'd suggest to follow the suggestion Josh made and flag the question for moderator attention if it goes on.

Yes; generally, you shouldn't engage in a rollback war with a user over things like formatting the question, how they phrase it, et cetera. If they want that to remain unadulterated, even if it hurts their question's answerability, it's generally fine. But mis-using a tag is not.

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


text:
Is this question about Maya modeling off-topic?
I recently flagged to close this question about modeling in Maya. I believe this question to be off-topic and my reasoning is this:
It has nothing to do with game development. While it's true that you can use Maya in game development that does not mean that this question is on-topic here. This question is exactly as appropriate on any other forum about modeling or programming as it is here. The only hint of game development in this question is the brief mentioning of Unity.
This reasoning comes from the help center itself:

Would a professional game developer give me a better/different/more specific answer to this question than other programmers?

I believe this question does not fit that description. Any thoughts?

PS. This question might also be too broad since I asks for the "best practice" but I'm unsure how I feel about that.

Just for reference, the title of the quote you posted from the help center reads "General programming questions more likely belong on Stack Overflow instead of here. A good rule of thumb is to ask yourself...", so I don't think that applies to this question about a modelling software as it seems to be aimed at generic programming questions.

I understand this but I feel like it can be generalized to other topics as well. If it's the case that any modeling questions are appropriate here that would be a good candidate for an answer.

Perhaps changing the text and re-use the term "developer" instead of "programmer", as it's a bit more generic and would reflect a bit more the target audience of this site...

Also note that votes are generally used to reflect agreement, here on meta. Downvotes do not mean "bad question" or "shows no research" as much as it would, on the main; downvotes simply mean that users disagree with the main point of your post (or at least, what they interpret to be the main point of your post).

@Gnemlock correct, I spoke too fast. Edited. I'm also aware of the vote system on meta but thanks anyways!

The comment from @Gnemlock reflects my opinion too:

We do not close questions because they are better suited, elsewhere. We close questions because they are not suited, here. As is, we do accept questions regarding 3D; especially those regarding 3D in context of game development.

Keep in mind that a professional game developer is quite vague. An artist proficient with Maya can be considered as a game developer, and as such, fits the description you've quoted.
Also, there is a Blender.se, but it does not mean that blender questions are off-topic here, and we don't migrate questions there automatically.
You can tell the user that there could be a better stack to ask such questions, then if they want to have it migrated, or ask their next question about the subject on that other stack, it's up to them.
But they're not off topic here.

As for the 'too-broadness' of the question, questions asking for "the best practice" can often be edited to ask "how can I achieve it" instead, which lets users to come up with solutions they think are appropriate for the issue.

There does not appear to be a Maya Stack anyway

@doppelgreener No, there has been some proposals for 'generic' 3d graphics design and the like, but they all have been closed.

Does this mean that any modeling question is appropriate here as long as it's vaguely about game development? Because I feel like this question is very "how do I do this thing in Maya? Oh btw I'm creating a game"-y if that makes sense. This question would be just as legitimate if we edited out the game development part.

@Charanor Sure, why not? We already facilitate "How do I do this thing in Blender" without any mention of a game development context, and people modeling for games even need to make movie cutscenes sometimes.

@Charanor From my experience, yes, it is legitimate. If you ask a bunch of game devs how to make a model, you'll get a game dev perspective on how to achieve what you want, and I don't think game dev modeling has the same constraints as general movie/tv animation modeling.

@AlexandreVaillancourt, furthermore, game developing sometimes has additional constraints for 3D (for example, you can bake a movie/TV animation set into a formatted video and run on any projection device; in game developing, you often have to animate while keeping the end user hardware constraints in mind).

I think it's perfectly on-topic here. We are a site about game game development, not programming, so I think we should welcome questions that touch more on the art pipelines involved in game development.

The argument of "Would a game developer offer a better answer than anybody else" reflects a much stricter scope than what we allow, here. The general rule of thumb would be to ask if a game developer would be able to answer the question, with a confident and absolute answer.
We do not necessarily apply the rule of "would a game developer provide the best answer.
As I provided, in the comments, a very good example of this is the legal questions we take. A game developer would not be the best at answering these questions; a lawyer would be. However, we still happily accept these questions2. As Tyypii_77 points out, the quoted argument derives from our help center; this quote more specifically applies to programming, but even than, it appears debatable that we should loosen our definitions for pushing these questions to other exchanges. I was personally of the opinion that any such question should be pushed to Stack Overflow; but others have made arguments that have since changed my opinion.
There is a game development context to this question, if you look closer.
I admit that you have to read between the lines, a little, to identify the game development aspect of this question. It actually took a re-read to realise that the original post does not contain any actual mention of game development. However, if you look at the language, it very much sounds like the user is asking in context of game development. In fact, they go as far as to confirm this in the comments. At best, the game development context should be strengthened through an edit to the post; this is an example of where we can save a question, rather than delete it3.
There may be the opinion that the question is too broad, but we can fix that.
Again, this applys to any opinion that the question is too broad. The user is asking for a "best practice"; perhaps there is an absolute best practice. If not, the key is to determine the askers requirements for the "best practice". In such cases, if you feel the question is too broad, ask some probing questions. Work out more specific requirements for what the user is asking. With more specific requirements, it is often very plausible to provide an absolute quality answer to these sort of questions; which generally negates the principle of a question being "too broad".

1 I use the logic of your original comment, as I find it applies to 3D a lot more than "programming" does.
2 You may find a few downvotes for lack of research, but we do not close them, other than as duplicates.
3 The fact that I initially interpret the question to apply to game development leads me to the conclusion that such an edit is, in fact, unnecessary; however, if others disagree, I would not argue against the resulting edit.

There are several other answers that refer to the game dev context without explicitly identifying it. I think that clearly identifying that portion is helpful for framing this discussion.

What is the best approach for modelling such large environments. Should I scale it down, add smaller details and scale it up in Unity? How would I best go about this?

To me this generalizes into asking about which modelling tasks are most appropriate for modelling software versus the game engine. The question is modelling related, but it's really about the interplay between tools & engines. In that regard, it seems totally on-topic.


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How do we answer all these Game Maker questions asking about how to implement data structures and therefore all requiring dynamic memory allocation?
So I've been browsing the list of questions tagged with game-maker. There's a decent number of them all asking about various data structures or something pretty similar to the concept. A number of these are listed below.

How should I structure my turn based engine to allow flexibility for players/AI and observation?
Events and objects being skipped in GameMaker
GameMaker : how can i get the instance ID of multiple instance in a radius?
Turn based battle and formula
How should I make realistic electricity?
How to Check and Destroy "linked" gems quickly efficiently
How would I go about making an unstable tower of objects, that must be balanced by the player?
Drawing a possible movement area in a tiled map
Saving an array in GameMaker with DS Maps
How to make compound data in Game Maker?
A way to create a variable that includes a modifier that should be checked every step [Gamemaker]
How can I spawn only two objects, instead of spawning an infinite number of them?

The core issues lie in how game maker handles objects and data structures.
To those unfamiliar with game maker, there are two likely avenues for making data structures. The first is to use object instances as nodes for trees, graphs, and other linked structures. This won't work though as game maker's idea of pointer doesn't work. The things they point two randomly shuffle. The documentation describes it here:

Note that the assignment of the instances to the instance id's changes every step so you cannot use values from previous steps.

Similarly the built in data structures will be deleted from memory when one uses the default mechanism for saving and loading (there is no alternative short of writing your own save mechanism).
My only known workaround that isn't buggy is to write a C-style allocator from scratch and work from the bottom up. This prescribes the same answer for several different questions such as this one in particular.
This begs the question:

Should we close all of them as duplicates and refer to one question? ..or should we compile the allocator code somewhere? ...or should we give the other options as horrible answers?

I've been using game maker for quite a while and I can see that people have the same problem just with different structures. I'd hate to force people to be put as duplicates but I fear most of the code to write will just be "another set of allocation functions copied from somewhere else".

+1 Thank you for looking at these and trying to find a solution.

@Byte56 You're welcome. To be honest, this is a pretty long term irritation of mine. You see, I've tried to over the years implement turn based combat like stuff and the best way to efficiently do that is with a linked structure. Game Maker has no built in "cycle" data structure so this naturally led to a lot of bugs and irritations as you can imagine.

Why did this get downvoted?

@S.TarıkÇetin no clue. It had -5 or -6 at one point.

We do not close questions as duplicates because the answers or potential answers are the same. We close them as duplicates because the questions are the same. Looking at this list you have provided, I see absolutely no evidence that these are all duplicates at all, so that is a non-starter.
It looks to me like you have a reverse XY problem of sorts here: you have identified that all of these questions may require the use of a persistent data structure that can survive saving and loading, and you thus want to write about how to do that as part of (or the entire) answer. While that is your prerogative, I don't think it will produce answers that are widely considered to be good answers to the actual questions asked by the users who are trying to find solutions to specific high-level problems.
If you think the concern about writing a C-style allocator to back the data structures is so fundamental to every single answer you'd want to write to those questions, the proper thing to do is ask that question ("How can I build a data structure that will persist across saves/loads in GameMaker?") and self-answer it.
Then, for each of the questions you have listed, write a better answer than the ones that are there, making sure to specifically address the unique high level problem in each question while referring to your canonical question on writing data structures in case the reader feels the need to step down to that particular level of abstraction.


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When post is first made, it says "viewed 1 times"
This is a very small bug, which might not even be worth fixing, but I thought I would throw it out there because it is a mistake. When I posted a question, I noticed in the 'viewed' section on the right side it used the plural of time, when it should have been singular. Screenshot posted below:

I know this is very minor, and I'm not sure if it is at all useful, but it seems very easy to fix, so I thought I would throw it out there. Thank you

Yes, this is a bug. Yes, the involving parties are aware of it. However, it is a rather insignificant bug. As such, it is fairly low on the priority order.
That said, this is not a problem specific to Game Dev Stack Exchange; While it may seem easy to fix, all you can do is raise the concern. However, you would not raise the concern, here. You would raise it at the Stack Exchange meta, as it pertains to the general Stack Exchange collective.
You would also be sure to observe that such reports have already been made. Again, they are aware of it; but such fixes are low in priority. The accepted response was a quote from Jeff Atwood, and the report was marked as "complete".
Here is said quote:

I think this covers it. I know it's a link-only answer, BUT it is to stack exchange. So if THAT link is dead...
What is the story of Jeff Atwood and the pluralization 'Bug'?
:)

Did you just perform an edit to add a smiley face?

I did, actually. I wanted to make sure it was clear I wasn't saying the guy asking the question was being a dork. :)


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Do we need a "blog" tag?
I noticed we have a blog tag. As it is, it has limited use, and no usage guideline1.
I could only see two reasons why such a tag would be used:

In regards to questions asking for help in finding or identifying a particular blog, or blogs that match particular requirements.
In regards to questions asking for help in creating a blog.

In the first instance, such questions are effectively asking for resource referrals. We automatically consider these questions off-topic. This also seems to be the only current usage for the tag, with requests for:

NES-era game technique articles (closed)
Game development blogs (closed)
A specific blog, where the author came up with a daily game idea
Updates regarding Valves Source engine

In the second instance, I fail to see how the context is on topic for game development, regardless. Even if the subject of said blog was game developing, I would think you would not ask a game developer for professional opinion; you would ask a writer.

Do we really need the blog tag?
1 As is common, in a lot of "usage guidelines" I see on here, there is a usage excerpt that tells me what a blog is; but nothing to tell me how the actual tag should be legitimately used.

We don't really need that tag.
In Where can I find current information on Valve's Source SDK? and Where can I read about techniques used in NES-era games?, [blog] is being used as a meta tag. They're looking for certain information and think the answer might be a blog, but tags aren't for what we think the answers are about; they're for describing the content of the question, which is about old school techniques and Valve's Source SDK.
That leaves us with two questions where it seems pretty legit: Game development Blogs, which is closed, and Who kept a blog for a year with a new game idea every day, and where is it?, which is the only open, topical use of the tag.
Over on RPG Stack Exchange we have a more generic online-resources tag for questions asking about online resources. That tag doesn't care whether the resource in question is a blog, a wiki, a google doc, a set of forum posts, or anything else — I think that'd be more appropriate and workable here.

The problem is, asking for online resources is considered off-topic, here

@Gnemlock Is that based on the second bullet point in the On Topic help, or some other meta post? I actually think that idea-a-day blog post seems OK, but I'm not familiar with the current state of moderation on this site. It's not asking for recommendations of online resources, it's asking for an identification of a known specific resource, which seems like a topical thing. (Like "Where do I find the documentation for [obscure library]?" might be on topic, I imagine.)

That's one reason I did not flag that particular question, but if you look at past closures, recommendation questions are closed under the "starting out" close reason. This reason specifically mentions "software recommendation", but this has been loosely interpreted to include "all recommendations", given the issue of seeking discussion still remains. I would argue that, even if you are seeking a very specific resource, it is still a recommendation; your still asking for a "recommendation", given a far more narrow scope. I also interpret these questions to ask for a "source" recommendation.

I'm sure I did read meta, but tbh, I'll have to look for it, later.

Gotcha. I draw a personal distinction between identification requests ("I know this exact specific thing exists, where is it?") and recommendation requests, but I don't know how that's reflected in GDSE policy. On [rpg.se] we ban recommendations and allow identification of products and game content and requests for where documentation is located, but that's just our stack's policy.

Potentially related, requests for the identification of product features are  also generally off-topic / discouraged.


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What is the appropriate course of action for a duplicate answer, especially one made several years after the fact?
I have run into one or two "duplicate answers". They are technically correct, but they do not add anything new to the current answer. Furthermore, the current answer is often accepted, and several years old.
The one consensus I run into, on the Stack Exchange, is that such answers are demeritting to the purpose of Stack Exchange. We already have the information, but they add a general lack of quality, as well as failing to add additional information. In effect, they are just noise. However, the manner at which they should be dealt with often differs between down voting and flagging.

To give one particular example, we have "How would I find the SDK folder for Android Studio so I can build my Unity project?".
The accepted answer was posted in February of 2015, and reads as follows:

"the sdk may be hidden in the AppDatafolder (the folder itself was hidden).
If you want to look for AppData, but can't find it, open explorer and type %appdata%, press enter. It will show the hidden files. Path will look like this; C:\Users\Your.name\AppData\Local\Android\sdk1 Now that you have found the sdk, go back in to unity and click EDIT / Preferences / External Tools. You will see a field for Android SDK location - enter the path in that field."

Recently, we have had an additional answer posted, which reads as follows:

"Go C:/user/username/appdata/local/sdk but some time it may be hiden if this floder hiden studio give error message like SDK tool directry missing"

Formatting aside, I can not see any value in the second answer. We already gain this information from the first answer.

What should we do, in these situations? I find that on various exchange sites, the appropriate response can differ, but often boils down to two or three solutions:

Simply downvote and comment, assuming that the answer will be deleted through the low-quality queue
Flag for moderator attention, sighting "not a real answer", and assume the investigating moderator will realise the duplicate
Flag for moderator attention, specifically commenting to say that this answer is a duplicate of the original answer.

I usually downvote the answer and leave a comment. If there is already a comment regarding the issue, I downvote the answer and upvote the comment.
I do this because the downvote button text says:

This answer is not useful.

which is the truth, as there is already one covering the issue at hand; it's not useful to have a second one.
I do this also because I believe that having more than one user acting upon the post will have a more impacting effect on the author than having a single one (a mod) delete the answer ("Boohoohoo, a mod on a power trip deleted my answer"), thus help us better show how the site works to the user.
It's not clear to me whether a user that has an answer deleted by a moderator or by the community is aware of it, but if not, that would be another argument to not have a mod simply delete the answer.

The only 'downside' with downvoting the answer, as opposed to flagging for moderator attention, is that it's not free, it costs one rep. It's not an issue with users that have any significant amount of rep, but I would not be surprised that it discourages some users from using that downvote button.
This makes the process of eliminating low quality content slower than just flagging and having a mod delete the question. This could be a good thing (more people involved, community power, time for debate, you name it), or this could be a bad thing (bad content stays up for a longer period of time, the immediate feedback is the best to teach, but that's not what we get, etc.).


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Would we benefit from separate [unity-2d] and [unity-3d] tags?
As part of my editing recently, I've been removing a lot of tags from titles. One of the consistent patterns I see coming up regularly are for people to say they're using "Unity 2D" or "Unity 3D".
Are these substantially important enough that we should have unity-2d and unity-3d tags for people to specify? People seem to feel the need to specify as such in their titles, so I see there might be a case for this, but I don't know well enough about Unity to be able to be sure myself.
I'll note I see that unity3d is already a synonym of unity, so I'm braced that the answer might be "no".

I don't think we need such distinction in unity tags.
We have the tags 2d and 3d which can be used to narrow the domain of the questions. That's not exactly the way the tags are designed to be used, but that's how they're used now.
Also, adding a distinction between unity2d and unity3d, I feel we'd get questions bloated with redundant and inappropriate tags:

unity
unity unity2d
unity2d unity3d
and all of the other combinations...

unity3d was probably put in place because the 'official' name of the engine was 'unity3d'.
Note that in the past, we've been marking some unity related tags as blacklisted, or as synonym, such as inspector, as they did not add much value to the site.

I believe Unity was earlier more commonly known as unity3d, and was initially only for 3D game development. AFAIK, 2D was further integrated, when it became apparent that the engine was being used for 2D game development

@Gnemlock I agree that was the original name for it. "unity3d.com" is still their official web domain, their official twitter handle is @unity3d, and old articles like this one from 2012 call it "Unity 3D".

I have updated the answer.

@doppelgreener While true, it is now officially called "Unity." The URL and twitter handlers were maintained and old docs and articles weren't updated (who would bother?), although the company also owns unity.com (and uses it as a spotlight website to highlight things developers have done) and do (seem to) control the @unity twitter handle (it is unused and the only info on the profile is a link to unity3d.com).

I brought up some discussion on the various meta tags of Unity, and in turn, we merged a few into the unity tag.
You would not be versed in using Unity for 3D, and not be versed in using Unity for 2D. Tags are used to identify areas of expertise, and as such, I feel it is appropriate to use unity under either circumstance. At the end of the day, there is very little (if any) difference between using Unity for a 2D game or a 3D game. As such, -2D and -3D are only meta tags, being used to describe the specific context.
Ultimately, we would not benefit from differentiating between unity-2d and unity-3d.


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Should we update the "voxels" tag information?
Currently the voxels tag's description is this:

VOlumetric piXEL (volumetric picture element). An approach to world construction that uses small, uniform volumetric elements as opposed to the larger, non-uniform polyhedra most commonly found in contemporary games.

The term "voxels" is traditionally used to describe a volume storage type, which uses a regular grid of values, "uniform volumetric elements" is just one of the many ways to represent it (this misunderstanding probably comes from the popularity of games, such as Minecraft).
The current description excludes game with isosurface-based models or terrain, such as the whole Worms series.

Do you want to write a new description for it?

@Byte56 The tag info should be changed to something like "VOlumetric piXEL (volumetric picture element). A way to store volume data as a regular grid of values."

Put your description as an answer here and I'll update it, or just modify the tag description yourself.

This tells me what a voxel is; it does not tell me how to use the tag. We are not informing users of definitions, here. We are establishing tag usage.

Voxels don't need to be rectangular and the resulting isosurface / mesh does not need to be rectangular, either. The tag seems to be very limited to minecraft-style voxels. it doesn't even fit most other voxels games like Space Engineers and Emyprion. It should be overhauled complely. And it should clearly mention when to use it and when not.


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Can I post here for hobby project recruitment?
I don't want to break rules and I couldn't find any useful information if it is possible to post here for hobby project recruitment.

No, you can't. But thanks for asking first :)
That's out of the scope of gamedev.stackexchange, and Stack Exchange at large.
There is a forum section about that in GDNet: Hobby Project Classifieds. This forum is more appropriate for this type of question.

You can take a look at this help page and this help page. Basically, recruiting is not an issue in the sense SO sees it, it's too broad and doesn't have a definitive answer.

I suspect the answer to this will also be 'no', but could OP instead ask about how to recruit for a hobby project?

@Pikalek That's a good question! I think it's border-line too broad or opinion based. There is a [tag:hiring], and not all questions are closed (yet). Maybe there is a way to ask it that would not invite users to answers with link-only answers.

The Stack Exchange is a question and answer site; so, as already stated, it is not an appropriate platform to post job recruitment.
On one side, you could seek out forums. However, it is entirely possible that you specifically wish to ask our users, whether it be due to previous interaction, or previous answers they have posted.
If that is the case, you also have the option of directly chatting with users you would like to work with in chat, once you have earned the requirement of 20 reputation points.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


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How can we improve the game-design tag to reduce improper use?
The game-design tag receives a lot of mis-tagged questions, and seems to have a high number of closed/on-hold questions.
While I'm of the opinion that there's a larger issue of Game Design as a pursuit not being well understood or defined, I'm looking for feedback on how we might update the tag info to better guide users.
The current excerpt:

Game Design is the creation and balancing of game systems and
  mechanics. Not for programming questions about "design" of features,
  engines, etc. Not for visual design questions about the looks of
  assets.

Spends more characters talking about what it is not. But also that first sentence "creation and balancing", I think has a connotation of creation = development/programming. And possibly most users stop reading at that point.
I'm thinking that changing "creation" to something like "describing" or "documenting" would help. But I'm not sure and haven't been able to come up with something that's a significant improvement.
So I wanted to bring it to discussion here, instead of possibly making several small revisions. How can we improve the game-design tag excerpt and description to reduce it's misuse?

On Monday when I see my teacher ill get a really good description of game-design and post it here to help with the discussion.

I can certainly create mechanics without programming them. For example, "I would like to have a game where the player fights off monsters, so I'll want HP, different sorts of attacks and weapons the player can use--including long range and short range--and probably some special moves as well that require the player "power up" first by performing hit-combos." Already I've designed a combat system without writing a single line of code or producing anything else mechanical. But you're right that it is worded ambiguously.

"The game-design tag receives a lot of mis-tagged questions, and seems to have a high number of closed/on-hold questions." I don't think the issue here comes from the tag description, but simply from the users nor reading the rules. There is not much that can be done, aside from closing the questions before they get answered, and moderate the tag usage a bit more (like you've been doing for the last couple of months). This does not mean that the tag could not be improved, though :)

This is an ongoing problem I encounter in my work as a game designer - a lot of people, even in the industry, and even students well into game design programs themselves, don't understand what designers do. XD
So the term "game design" gets applied very loosely among gamers, developers, educators, and game media alike, serving as a catch-all for "doing stuff that contributes to a game" rather than clearly identifying its own specialized discipline.
The best definition I know is Liz England's The Door Problem, with its extensive array of examples of design problem solving, though that's hard to boil down to an effective tag summary. ;)
I think Pikalek is on the right track in focusing on decisions and rules. I'd be inclined to lead the summary with something like:

Game Design is the process of deciding the rules and mechanics of a game, and balancing them to achieve the intended play experience.

That last bit about having a target experience in mind is important - design is conscious creation. "Creating something without any outcome in mind is not design but experimentation" as Lehdonvirta and Castronova put it.
This also echoes Salen & Zimmermann's "The Game Designer only indirectly designs the player's experience by directly designing the rules"
I think the remaining tag summary should probably warn off common misconceptions, that the tag is not for questions about programming implementation/architecture or visual art / character design.

In the tag wiki I'd want to guide users toward asking well-structured design questions, because it's easy to stray into "too broad / primarily opinion based / unclear what you're asking" territory with these questions.
Taking a look through some of the better design questions I've come across in my time here...

How do you prevent inflation in a virtual economy?
Dungeons in a 3D space game
How do you handle loss aversion in probability-based games?
Hinting at steganography
How can I make my color-mixing game more difficult?
How can I discourage camping while still supporting a sniper style of play

These questions

Establish the context of the game in which the feature exists (genre, single/multiplayer, related features)
Explain the feature or mechanic whose design the user is struggling with
Define a desired outcome, or a problem/undesired result to overcome
Ask for strategies to adjust the rules or balancing to achieve that outcome

Which I think suggests a template worth providing for users who click into the deeper tag wiki (or to which we can link users who clearly didn't read the tag wiki and need help tailoring a clear, on-topic question)
Other types of design questions I've seen handled successfully:

Asking for definitions and clarity surrounding game design terminology (eg. What are affordances in game design?)
Asking about the rationale for common game mechanics (eg. What is the purpose of having lives?)
(This last one I see as particularly high-risk for veering too broad/opinion-based, but it's led to some good Q&A in the past in some cases... I'm not sure whether there's any particular guidance to offer to help tailor these)

I've taken a first stab at updating the tag summary & wiki to reflect the points above. Edits to both are welcome so we can improve them together. :)

For starters, I revisited my design books & here's what I found:
Jesse Schell's definition from The Art of Game Design: "Game design is the act of deciding what a game should be. That's it."
Tynan Sylvester's definition from Designing Games: "Game design isn't code, art or sound. It's not sculpting pieces or paint game boards. Game design means crafting the rules that make those pieces come alive."
To me, this is basically what we currently have: game design is selecting & tuning the systems & mechanics and game design is not the implementation & assets for said systems & mechanics.
Maybe the root problem is that the tag is too meta. Certainly I think that an implementation tag would be a meta. If design is everything that's not implementation, perhaps it's also a meta tag.

I don't think game-design is meta. One can be expert in game-design. Maybe it is broad, but I think it has it's place here.


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Could GDSE's low-visibility hyperlinks please be revisited and improved on main, meta and in chat?
GDSE has a bunch of issues with its links having major perception issues across the board. Could link colors on this site's main, meta, and chat please be revisited? My request would be that our links should be clearly distinguishable from regular text in all three site areas, and preferably visited and unvisited links would be distinguishable from each other.
Some of these issues have sat reported for several years unactioned. On meta and chat they incur severe legibility issues, and that's for people with good eyesight and well-adjusted monitors.

Chat: We can hardly see links at all. Reported in 2014: Can we get a hyperlink style for chat that is less subtle?, Link color in chat is too similar to normal text color. This is impactful enough that when I'm linking people to stuff in chat, I have now been making a habit of pointing out there is actually a link there or using link emoji, so that they don't miss it.
Meta: Visited and unvisited links have significant visibility issues. Visited links are a dark grey, which is hard to tell apart from the off-black regular text (these have a 2.6:1 color contrast ratio, which is poor at this font scale). Visited links aren't great either: that dark red only has a 1.2:1 color contrast ratio versus regular text, which makes it an extremely difficult-to-detect colour difference.
Main: Visited and unvisited links look practically the same. Reported in 2012: Link Colors for Visited and Non-Visited Links too Similar. This is the only place we can at least actually clearly tell links apart from regular text.

We should not duplicate-close a meta question designed to shed light on an issue that has thus far received no response one way or the other from SE developers, for quite the same reason as we won't be duplicate-closing this or any question that is about revisiting old policy decisions such as this.

As you may be able to see, the link colors on Meta.GameDevelopment have been updated. They have been reverted to the standard Meta link colors.

Update July 24, 2017
Chat and GD.SE link colors have been updated and will be updated once production builds out. Once production build, I'll update the post's status.

Update July 26, 2017
Production has been built out. I've updated the post's status.

I'm pretty happy with this change! Those are much more functional link colors, and they look just fine with our meta theme. (Grey goes with every color!)

Seeing the status-completed tag, I'll note that this bug report covers chat and main as well. Is the chat issue also being looked at separately?

@doppelgreener Sorry. It's been a busy few weeks and this fell off my radar. We'll take a look at it this week. I've updated the status to reflect the fact that we aren't finished with this post yet.

Thanks very much for checking back in and updating us. :)

We've just seen the update to link colors in chat. Thank you so much for updating that. :)


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Is it fine to post an answer that elaborates an edge case of another answer?
Here is the link: https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/a/142800/74040
The author of the answer based his answer on an edge case that happened while application of the accepted answer.
What is this site's take on this situation? Is it fine to post this as an answer; or should it instead have been purposed as an edit to the accepted answer?

If the answer goes into detail regarding an edge case brought up in another answer, I do not see any problem.
From what you have established, the new answer goes into more detail on a particular issue that was only mentioned in the original. Perhaps the original poster thought it was not worth going into detail, for the minority of the cases that would need to take the extra considerations, or progress with the more particular answer. Regardless, it is useful to have a detailed answer regarding these situations, for users that do find themselves in this minority.
If the additions are semantical, I would favour downvoting. If not, take your own judgement into consideration, in regards to voting.
As a whole, there is no real problem, here.


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Should we remove dead links that can't be replaced?
While going around trying to help purge the engine tag I found this question that includes two dead links to some source code. I was going to remove those links but I hesitated because I was unsure if we should remove dead links (that, in this case, can't be replaced). I also couldn't find anything about the subject here on meta.
Should we remove dead links that can't be replaced?

Yes, we should remove dead links if they can't be replaced.
They don't bring anything good to the post, so there is no reason to keep them around.
If the post does not make sense when removing the dead link, and you can't find a way to retrieve the meaning of the post, you should flag the post for a moderator's attention and describe the situation. The course of action is probably to have the whole post deleted.
If you review a new post, or a post from a new user and notice that they posted links to "shaky" resources, such as their DropBox or Google Drive, you should encourage them to upload the content to a more stable external source such as Stack's Imgur for images (using the tool in the edit bar), or YouTube for videos. For the code, well they should post it straight to the post (and if "it's too big", they should narrow the scope before posting, so vote to close :P).

Before removing, it might be worth it to check https://archive.org/web/ to see if there's an archived copy of the content.


text:
How should we handle tags appearing in one question only?
The "New" tab in the Tags section contains tags so specific each one of them appear in one question only since their creation. This looks like a sign they aren't significant - or even pointless - and may be safely removed. Examples are: normal-generation, procedural-destruction, or raymarching.
I'm not sure though how to tell what tags are to be removed, and what are to be replaced by more appropriate and popular tags.
Should we simply remove such tags, or are there better tags we can use as replacements?

I have a list of questions I was going to stick two of those tags on over the upcoming long weekend, but since you asked this I went ahead and stuck them on a few right away.

Tags that are applied to only one question get automatically removed after a certain period of time, specifically because they are considered irrelevant.

I've implemented a routine that removes tags created more than 6 months ago which have been used only a single time. It will run monthly. (Source)

If you feel the tag is relevant, find another question to which it could be applied and add the tag to it, this will make sure that the tag is kept alive.
If not, nothing should be done, and let the magic system handle things :)

How long does it take on average? Just out of curiosity :)

Edited the answer: 6 months, +/- one month.

As Alexandre says, they'll get nuked automatically. You shouldn't need to do anything.
The three tags you listed, however, seem pretty relevant to game development. I added two of them. procedural-destruction was used to replace polygon and algorithm in a question about breaking an object into pieces at runtime based on some physics information. This is a really common operation in game development for destructible fences, props, et cetera with a variety of interesting solutions. "polygon algorithm" is a pretty useless way of describing that problem domain.
Similarly for normal-generation, we do have quite a few questions on the ways to produce normals from geometry. This seems sufficiently distinct a problem domain from, say, using normals in some particular kind of lighting computation that I believe it's worth calling out as an area of expertise.

This rises another problem: these tags are relevant, but are about to be deleted due to limited usage in questions. How can this be addressed?

I added them fairly recently, they shouldn't be in danger of deletion yet. And I tagged a bunch more questions with them.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


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Why I get banned to question again?
In the past, I asked some bad questions thus I got banned for half of a year. After half of a year, I learn my mistake and I try to ask better question (some say the site can't accept the kinds of better questions that go from worst to bad, but how about bad to normal?). I just ask one question and I got banned again, even though the question is not votedowned or anything (this: How to check if NPCs are on ground or not?). So what's the deal? After 6 months and I can't even start fresh again as a new user?

I understand it now. To get un-banned, I need to un-delete my deleted questions (I delete those questions because they got closed, one of those questions actually has upvoted, I thought it's a good practice to delete closed question)
To un-delete the questions, go to "all actions" and find the deleted questions, click those questions and un-delete them.

Lesson learned: Never delete the upvoted questions even if they are closed questions.

Closed questions can be used to be targets of "duplicate" questions, so they still have value :) Glad to see you found a way out!

Thanks for posting this here.
Mods don't know the full set of rules of why some users get banned from asking questions because StackExchange staff has not shared them with us. We're constrained to using what's publicly known. And your situation seemed odd, because it did not fit with what we know.
Digging around a bit more, and going back to the basics, reading the help center page on question bans, I found this little paragraph at the end of the page:

If you're unable to improve your existing questions, you'll get the chance to ask a new one 6 months after your last question. If that question is positively received, you may be able to continue asking questions; if not, then the ban will be reinstated.

(The emphasis is mine.)
The way I read it, it means that if that question-after-a-6-months-ban does not get upvoted, you'll be banned from asking questions again.
This seems to fit your situation: your new question did not get upvoted.
I suggest you revisit some of your old, deleted questions, improve them, bring them on topic, make them answerable and "up-voteable" and un-delete them. If there are questions in the comments, edit the question to address these, etc. This might help raise the question ban.
I'm thinking of your question about how to play a sound with OpenAL. You could try and add more details about your current implementation to narrow its scope.
You could also try to reword your question about the architectural patterns in a way that it presents a specific issue that you have with a pattern that you need to use in you specific application.
As stated on the help page I quoted above, "Stack Exchange cannot lift question bans by request.", so I assume that the ball is in your court now.

Thanks for your answer. About improving the deleted questions,  According to these answers: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/131156 , https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/117895 . I think reputation under 10k users can't see/un-delete their question. So I think it's best for me to try asking somewhere else. Thanks for looking into my problem :)

@123iamking I have undeleted these two questions, if you want to rework them (keep in mind that there are some system algorithms that automatically delete closed questions after some time). Also, you might want to visit our [chat] if you want to ask questions that are not on topic on the site.

Thank Alex, you are so kind :)

I don't know but after my new question get one upvote (https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/q/158905/86408), I'm still banned from asking question. Maybe the system works different than we thought.


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Why was this "vs." question put on hold?
Decision Tree vs Behavior Tree
This is an old question, with highly voted question and answer. It was put on hold as "primarily opinion-based". Although it was inviting a comparison, it wasn't asking for subjective answers like "which one is best", or "which one is better". I think the answer does a great job at sticking to facts, giving an overview of each, and illustrating the pros and cons. It wasn't attracting opinion-based answers or comments.
Why was this one put on hold?

It seems I went too fast on that one, sorry about that.
It's reopen now.


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Is my question OK for this site?
I asked on SO but received nothing. Would I be more appropriate to ask this question here?
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50615850/improve-movement-of-space-aliens

I think we already have a question that covers this situation. The basic idea is instead of having a named variable for each alien, instead you have a list or array of aliens, and you can check collisions against each item in the collection with a loop. If we can find the existing Q&A we'll share a link for you.

@DMGregory Great! I'm looking for something like the original space invaders algorithm, that will do.


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Can't sign into my Stack Exchange account
Not sure if this question is really relevant to this page since it doesn't really have anything to do with game development but I thought that at least the administrators of this page should know and see if they could help me. I can't talk to the administrators directly because for some reason you have to have reputation to comment on YOUR own questions. Whenever I go to the sign in page I enter my email and password and press sign in. It takes me back to the homepage still not signed in. I know I'm not entering my password wrong because it tells me when I do. The administrators were asking me why I keep using different accounts, this is why. I can't use the account I created. If anyone knows why this is let me know

Hi @RedDragon2001, next time try using the Contact Form (https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/contact) for technical help with the Stack Exchange network

sorry you're having trouble with this login system.
Ordinarily you can comment on your own questions regardless of reputation. But because you're signing in with a new account every time, the system doesn't know you're the same person, so it's unable to give you that privilege.
StackExchange has a special feature called "unregistered accounts," designed to make it easier for people to contribute without making a big commitment to site membership. A user can sign in with just a name and an email address, without authenticating with a password. Instead, it uses cookies to associate your browser with this temporary account. If you decide you want to stick around long-term, you can register your account, providing a password that will let you sign into the same ID from anywhere.
Every post I've seen with your name so far has been from a different unregistered account. If you're hopping around between browsers / devices, using internet cafes, or private browsing features, that might be the reason: your cookies aren't able to follow you from one session to the next, so the system is unable to verify that you're the same user.
You can solve this by registering your current account and providing a password, then following the steps here to request merging it with your previous accounts. Then you can authenticate yourself using your login & password to sign into the same account even without the cookie.

Your question was migrated here to meta because it was about the game dev stack exchange site rather than game development itself.
Each stack exchange site has a meta site. You can learn more about what meta is & how it works here; a summarized version is:

It's a place for Stack Exchange users to communicate with the Stack Exchange company & each other about the Stack Exchange sites.
It functions a bit differently in terms of tags & voting.

If you have other questions about the site or questions about questions ('why is this question considered off topic', etc), this is probably the place the ask them.


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Should I not include a user's name when they help on an answer I gave?
I'm still learning proper etiquette, and I'm not sure how to handle this.
Recently I gave an answer here, and a couple of people gave some extra information as comments to my answer. In order to make my answer more complete, I added their suggestions to it, and also included their username, like Edit: (thanks to @username), because I thought it was the proper thing to do.
Today my answer was edited to remove those lines.
I understand that those lines do not contribute to the answer, so they "shouldn't" be there, but on the other hand, it would seem unfair to just add them to my answer without mentioning who helped, as it would seem like it's my sayings.
Should I not include these lines in the future? Should I include people's suggestions from comments if I think it will improve my answer?
Thanks a lot

Personally, I think it's a good practice to give credits for feedbacks in comments. In addition to mentioning the commenter, I usually also add the direct link to the comment.
However, comments are also 2nd-class citizen, or in other words, temporary "Post-It" notes:

Comments are temporary "Post-It" notes left on a question or answer. They can be up-voted (but not down-voted) and flagged, but do not generate reputation. There's no revision history, and when they are deleted they're gone for good.

Looking at the current state of your answer, it's clean from comments. Meaning that the mods have deleted them rightfully since you have incorporated them on your post. However, assume if your revision was used instead, it might be confusing (though probably understandable) why you thanked them on the post without any references since the comments have been deleted.

So, to answer the questions:

Should I not include these lines in the future?

You could include it, but when it's removed, assume the comment has done its purpose.

Should I include people's suggestions from comments if I think it will improve my answer?

Yes, you should. That's the main purpose they comment on your post.

Also, consider not adding "Edit:" on the post. Future readers don't need to know if the post is edited or not. If they want to know, all edits are recorded on the revision history.

Thanks for the link about why "Edit:" is not the best idea! So would the best solution be to improve my answer based on comments, and maybe on the bottom of the answer insert something like "thanks to  and  for improving this answer" ?

I understand that you want to give them credits, but I don't think there's a good way to give them credit on the post for this particular case (this is my personal opinion, not mods or the community). Best case, you already had given them credits and the revision history shows it as a proof.

Thanks for bringing this up in meta!
I think it's great that you want to give other users credit for the improvement done to your answer, that's a good trait to have when working in great teams! As Andrew T. explained in his answer, the "Edit" part generally adds noise to the answer, and that's why I removed these parts from your answer.

Should I not include a user's name when they help on an answer I gave?

Keep in mind that users here have the ability to change their username, so referring to users name (such as @JohnDoe) might be creating confusion for future readers. Linking to their profile, however, will make sure they receive the proper credit, as this will never change, even if they change their name. (This is a great suggestion from DMGregory, by the way ;p)
I edited the Answer you linked in the Question to reflect this, as we always like to experiment and improve the way we do things.

"Keep in mind that users here have the ability to change their username" Wow I did not know that, so it make sense to avoid using usernames on answers. Thanks a lot for the extra information!


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Is it okay to repeatedly disrupt conversation in the chat room by posting images?
I was surprised to find out that it's not against the rules to repeatedly post images to the chat room to disrupt the ongoing conversation as long as the image is not an advertisement.
I'm especially talking about messages like these:
https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/45070687#45070687
https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/45052657#45052657
https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/45053817#45053817
And no, I'm not complaining about someone discovering the "this is fine" easter egg, I can totally understand that someone wants to try it out.
This question was prompted by yet another completely disruptive message which has since been deleted.
I was told by a moderator that it's room dependent how this stuff is handled. What's our take on this?

May belong on Meta.SE

if someone decides to start disrupting with images than tell them to go to sandbox

In general it is fine to post images, even repeatedly.
However, it is not fine to disrupt the chat (particularly away from on-topic game-development stuff in our case) or annoy others in the chat. So if at any point any otherwise-acceptable behavior starts to become a nuisance, it would be appropriate to:

ask the offending user to stop, and explain why
ask a room owner to intervene
contact a site moderator
flag the offending posts

(in that order, probably; note that the last option in particular is a "nuclear option" because it will go out to all 10k users and moderators on the network, which is probably more than is really necessary unless the images are particularly egregious.)

I remember in high school once at the beginning of a school year where the student sitting in front of me kept banging his chair on my desk. I asked why, and he said sorry, that he used to have a wall behind him, where he could bang into, and that he did not realize that this now would annoy someone. He stopped banging his chair on my desk.
Josh is right, it is not fine to disrupt the chat.
However, they might not be aware that they are disrupting the chat or being annoying, that's why they should be asked nicely to stop, and explain why (yes, that's the first step Josh mentioned).
Another option: the chat offers an ignore this user feature, available when clicking on the offending user's name in chat. When all else fails, there always this option that can be used. (But I honestly hope that this does not become the de facto solution.)

also there is the sandbox which you can tell the offending user to go to and post their images their.


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What's our stance on self answered questions that don't show any research effort?
I've seen a couple Questions go by in the past where the user asked the question, then answered it immediately.
Often, these questions were simple, a little bit more elaborated than this example:

How can I smurf?

The posted Answer was effectively answering the question.
However, there is this text when we hover the downvote button:

This question does not show any research effort [...]

So, even if the user answered their Question, the Question per se does not show any research effort (at least in the cases I've seen), which would mean that they'd be quite downvotable.
Do we have a stance on this?

As with any low / no research questions, they decrease the signal to noise ratio, which is never ideal. In some cases I've also wondered if they are attempts to game the reputation system.

I get the feeling that this post was triggered by a post that I recently made

@Pikalek idk about rep system, but there is a medal for it, so odds are its people trying to be all " 'cheivies! "

I had a self-answered question over on Arqade last week, I'll admit that the question portion did boil down to "how do I smurf?" but it was a question that had no prior exposure on Arqade and one where I'd had to do quite a bit of research to answer (as its a poorly understood and not very well known game mechanic). And I posted it as a "not all of this information was in one place" sort of post. Forming the question in a good way after having done all that research is hard, so I just did my best. Q got a downvote soon after, but just the one. It currently sits at +2 with the answer at +3.

Outside of exceptional cases, I think it is sufficient to let any down (or up) votes the community feels are warranted provide the necessary feedback mechanism here.

I think these kinds of low-quality self-answered questions come from a misunderstanding of the goal of StackExchange. It isn't great at being a help desk; instead it is designed to build up a knowledge base to help future readers.
A better way to use StackExchange is to:

Use a search engine to see if there's an existing solution to your problem
Search for an existing question similar to yours
If nothing is found, ask a good question according to https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask.

It's why there's a prominent "Questions that may already have your answer" section in the "Ask Question" page. A good question has enough information to be answered by someone else, and enough specific information to be found by someone else having the same question. A good answer has enough information to be followed by someone else. When answering your own questions, you need to keep this in mind.

Like this one? :)
I post that example because, while the research isn't there per se, I still feel like the Question is valuable to other people.
When I was trying to resolve the issue, there were no stack traces and only the one generic error with no meaningful description. I searched for answers all over the web, but given the low market penetration of EclipseBlue (an IBM build) there were no solutions available.
I think in situations like this, a lack of documentation on how exactly I blindly groped in the dark is excusable. It still gives a solid description of the problem and the steps to solve it.
My metric is the usefulness of the question.
Q:"How to smurf?" A:"create a new account" is hardly useful to the future generations, and so would garner a down vote from me.
Lacking links or steps to get to the answer generally isn't a problem so long as it could conceivably be helpful to someone in the future.
As Josh points out, it's your vote; do what you want with it.
I'm just giving you a window into my thought process.


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Is "general feedback on game" on-topic?
I am working on an Android game scenario inspired by Moon Patrol. I am making progress and I don't have any very specific problems. I have posted the code on Code Review and the beta version is available for beta test on Google Play
I want feedback but I don't know what to ask. Should I not ask because I don't really have a technical problem, I just want feedback in general from some specialist?

That is what code review is for. General feedback on game are not really welcome here(there are exceptions) but in general if you want feedback you should go to chat or code review

Generally, open-ended "feedback" on just about anything -- game ideas, actual game products, intended mechanical or technical designs -- falls under either the category of "primarily opinion based" or the category of "too broad" and is thus off-topic here.
Questions that propose "this is how I'm going to solve , is this good/bad/any ideas?" fall into this category, but are generally easier to edit into something on-topic by rephrasing them as "how do I solve " and encouraging the asker to re-post their intended solution as an answer, submitting it to feedback and votes.
It doesn't seem possible to do this in a general way with "what do you think of my game" questions, so I think you're better off asking them elsewhere (either on SE as noted in some comments, or on another site altogether like GDNet.


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Can we have syntax highlighting on meta?
The following code example on meta renders without any syntax highlighting, despite a syntax highlighting directive:
from math import sqrt

class Triangle:
    def hypotenuse(self):
        # equation 2
        return sqrt(self.a**2 + self.b**2)

(The directive used here is <!-- language: lang-py -->.)
On mainsite it renders fairly prettily:

The lack of syntax highlighting impacts the readability of meta documentation, such as in this Mathjax documentation here which includes the above  Python block — as a screenshot, not as an actual code block, so as to get the code syntax highlighted properly to demonstrate what this would look like mainsite.

For what it's worth, it looks like there is syntax highlighting on SO meta; when I did a quick copy / paste of this question over there, the preview rendered both with color coding.


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Disagree with downvoted question
I asked this question and got downvoted immediately.
Implementing a score system similar to Moon Patrol
I disagree that it should be a bad question. Now I cannot ask any more question because of this and I feel very discouraged because my effort is good.

Is there a question you wanted to ask or simply complain about a single downvote?

@Tyyppi_77 Why doesn't this site work as intended?

@NiklasRosencrantz Possibly relevant: things another user did to get un-banned

Thanks for sharing this in meta.
I'm sorry you have trouble with the site. Unfortunately, question bans don't happen overnight, or from a single question:

At Stack Exchange, asking questions is a privilege, not a right. If a user cannot demonstrate, after asking a reasonable number of questions, that their contributions are making the site better (or at very least, not making it worse) then they will be blocked from asking further questions until they have demonstrated their ability to contribute positively.
(Source, emphasis mine.)

Looking at your profile, aside from making me happy that you've been around for so long , we can see you had some questions that have been downvoted in the (distant) past. Stack Exchange does not disclose what governs question bans—even with mods—but reading the help page linked above, it seems to be related a lot to all of your questions scores, mainly those questions with a negative score.
And by all, I mean that you should consider the closed and the deleted ones too.
So, I suggest you follow the guidance from the help center page linked above and try to improve your questions. Take all the comments that you have received into consideration, they often provide very good feedback on why people downvote.

At a glance, you generally seem to add a lot of code that is not relevant to the question. If the code that you need to add seems to big, perhaps you should simply describe the algorithm.
Also, often, asking off-topic questions brings down the anger of the gods, which causes users to downvote, for some reasons. If you can find some good ways to bring these off-topic question on-topic, you'd probably get some upvotes, and/or maybe some users could remove their downvote, if they're still around (disclaimer: I give no guarantee, as I have no control this—I'm just a mod).
In the future, avoid asking questions that are off-topic. You might want to discuss this in the chat, where off-topic stuff is allowed and where other users could give you a hand, at least to get you started.

You have some deleted questions that have negative scores. When you've tried your best with those that are not deleted, and you find yourself stuck again, please @AlexandreVaillancourt ping me in the comments, we'll see what questions you could improve once un-deleted (I won't just undelete them now because the system might deleted them within 24 hours if you don't edit them).


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Cross posting with Stack Overflow
I was recently sent to Algorithms for calculating vertex normals in 2D polygon via the newsletter, it seemed like an interesting problem so I took a shot at it and got an accepted answer. I later stumbled across the same question asked by the same user on stack overflow, I've commented with a link on the question above, but I guess I was wondering what the policy on this is? It seems like it could be on topic on both sites, and it looks like there are good answers on both, so perhaps tis isn't an issue?
On the other hand it seems like most of the technical questions on this site would be on topic on Stack Overflow, so is it right to try and decide to post on the one which seems like the best fit, or should it actually be encouraged to cross-post?

Thanks for asking this in meta. Unfortunately, it has been asked before, and the policy has not changed since then. It's not only a [gamedev.se] policy, it's a network wide policy. I have closed the question you linked to because of that. The general guide we give is that the question should be asked on the site that has the most chances to receive the best answer. If the question is in the context of gamedev, perhaps it's better asking it here instead of there.

Here are related questions: Programming Questions: Here or “Belongs on Stackoverflow”? - How do you decide when to post here vs. on SO? - Generic programming questions are off-topic, period. Right?


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Do we need a tag for quads?
Do we need a tag for quads?
As a follow up to Do we need tags for 'rectangle', 'circle', 'triangle', 'hexagon' and 'shape'?, I was working through removal of the rectangle tag & I encountered some questions with the quads tag. To me it seems as meta as 'triangles' & 'polygon' both of which were flagged for removal.

I thought about raising the issue as a comment to the prior question. I decided against it since some people might care more about quads than the other tgas, but might not have noticed discussion about it if it was edited/commented into the old post about other shape tags. If it should be added to the other post, let me know.

All the [tag:quads] have been removed / replaced.

In my opinion, we don't need these tags. Posts that are tagged "quad" likely could be tagged something else more useful.