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Is there a significant difference between the `spritesheet` & `texture-atlas` tags?
Is there a significant enough difference between spritesheet & texture-atlas to warrant separate tags?
My understanding of the terms is that the former is more often applied in a 2D context whereas the later is more often associated with 3D, but I feel like I've seen exceptions in either direction. Do we need them both? Can a person be an expert in one, but not the other? Should one be a synonym for the other? Are there better options?
Presently, spritesheet has 174 questions, 22 followers & tag info, whereas texture-atlas has 87 questions, 2 followers & no tag info.

@Gnemlock Thanks. Odd that didn't turn up in the Related posts when I was submitting. And I didn't think to cross reference the top users - good call.

Oh, looks like Related posts are from Meta, whereas the post cited by @Gnemlock is from regular GDSE - just noticed as I tried to request close due to duplicate & wasn't allowed to do so.

While sprite sheets are a kind of texture atlas, I think there is still utility in the separate tags because the contexts in which you use both terms sometimes (perhaps often) differ significantly enough.

As per both request, and author confirmation that this does clarify parts of the question, I am reposting my comment as an answer;
ultimately, I believe the two tags are quite different from each other, and there is a distinction between the users who answer them. They should not be merged together.

The two terms are quite different from each other
Initially, I had never heard of a texture atlas, before. I have had some experience with spritesheets, but I had never even heard of the term texture atlas. I did not have to look far for a good definition; Somebody has already asked "what is the difference between a sprite sheet and a texture atlas?", here on the main site. The answer quite clearly defines a distinct difference between the two terms, and the author even comments on the asker's presumption that they are both the same.

"A sprites-sheet (often refers to a large image that) is supposed to contain the animation frames of a specific 2d character or projectile in a game." ... "A texture-atlas (is often taken to mean a large 2d image that) contains many textures."[sic] - Answer submitted by Zehelvion
"Everything is that same, bits containing ones and zeroes." - Further comment submitted by Zehelvion

I can see how there are some disctinct similarities between the two terms; but I would not use the term "spritesheet" to define a texture atlas, and I would not use the term "texture-atlas" to define a spritesheet.

There is a clear distinction between our top users
If we look at our top users for both spritesheet and texture-atlas, we see a distinct set of different users (with the exception of Kromster, who is in the top three for both. Excellent job!); this tells me that you very well can be an expert in one, and not the other - at least, within the scope of this website.

What further improvement could be made?
Can we make a further improvement? Yes. It is clear that the two tags have similarities, though not enough to warrant merging them within the scope of this site. Perhaps we could improve usability by writing up a guideline for the texture-atlas tag; at present, it has none. A guideline has now been published to the texture-atlas tag.


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Can we please pay a little more attention to our edits, guys?
I am sometimes directed to the edit history of various other questions, and I have noticed a clear trend; minimal edits.
I thought I would take the time to write up post asking everyone to be a bit more careful with their edits, after noting that no such post has been previously made (at least, under the editing tag). Many of these edits aim to improve a sentence in the post, but miss problems with the rest of the post. I have also seen edits that aim to make a correction, but only correct a single instance, when the original mistake exists in multiple instances of the post.
There are lots of valid reasons for this type of activity
I think it is completely acceptable that most of these edits are made in good faith:

We are all human, we all make mistakes, and can not be spot on 100% of the time.
Grammar is a pain in the butt. I have only met one person in my life who had perfect grammar; and she was my primary school grammar teacher.
Some of us (I assume) are not native English speakers. Props for learning a second (or third, fourth etc.) language - especially one that is known to be so obtuse, at times. These users, I feel, deserve a little extra slack when it comes to these things.
I admit that some times, users may not necessarily take the same interpretation of the post as I do. I find it acceptable that, in these cases, previous edits may have neglected areas where the user felt they might be varying too far from the original post due to difficulty in understanding the original post (lets be honest.. every now and again we get one that is really hard to understand, despite asking an acceptable on-topic question).

In summary
In summary, keep doing the good job that you guys do; but when you perform edits, please try and be a bit more careful to avoid minimal edits.

I'm not sure if I understand what problem we're trying to solve here. I agree an edit that fixes everything should be preferred over an edit that fixes one thing - but is there an inherent problem with a one-fix edit that I'm missing? I've never found the edit review queue to be overwhelming, for instance, so I don't think it's a volume issue. What specific harm are we trying to avoid?

There used to be a "too minimal" edit rejection reason, which was removed for similar reasons as to those @DMGregory seems to be arguing: sure, maybe the edit could be more significant, but that doesn't mean the edit is harmful.

What I mean is, I've started encountering edits that were literally single characters. I am not even sure how these edits make it through in the first place; As far as I was aware, you need to edit more than a single character to be able to confirm the edit.

In fact, the most minimal edits I encounter are not from users who are subject to review.

I can make single-character edits, at least (see the edit history of this post), it wouldn't surprise me if others can.

I ran across an edit in the queue where the edit had done a pretty good job of fixing up the post.  The only problem was that one i had become O instead of I.  I tried to do an "improve edit" and change the O to an I but the thing wouldn't let me make a one character change and I couldn't see anything else wrong. (Well, that's not true, I found another sentence that could be capitalized, but at two characters it wasn't enough). I ended up skipping the review.

I generally think any improvement to the question is acceptable.
The purpose of the suggested edit review queue should be to

help train new editors in what constitutes a valid edit so that they know what to do when freed of the training wheels and
to provide a springboard to potential subsequent improvements to questions by more senior editors.

It shouldn't be about "punishing" new editors whose proposed changes don't meet some arbitrary (and often subjective) bar of what constitutes "too minor." That's a slippery slope.
Further, impeding incremental improvement of the site content because a bigger single change might have been possible seems silly. If one feels a better edit could or should have been made, one can approve and improve the question oneself.

I have removed some of the content of my question. Where I was trying to support a bigger issue, I think it was misconstrued as the primary problem. In fact, the most minimal edits are users that do not need to be reviewed. For example, I see instances of "It's officially called " where only one instance of the incorrect name is changed. As mentioned in the question comments, today I encountered a single character edit. My understanding was that these type of edits were "too minimal" by definition.

"Tiny, trivial edits are discouraged," (per the help); that is not "tiny, trivial edits are not allowed." Plus the "too minimal" rejection reason has been removed. I thus stand by my assertion: if it makes the post better, who cares if its a single character edit? I don't see any reason to look down at incremental progress (with no associated cost) simply because it's "not incremental enough".

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Could we rename the tags 'api' and 'sdk' to 'api-development' and 'sdk-development'?
The current excerpt of api is:

Application Programming Interface - the specification of the methods, classes, structures etc of software libraries and how they are to be used when developing applications using those libraries.

... and the excerpt of sdk is:

Software Development Kit - a set of tools, documentation and other resources aimed to help a programmer develop for a specific platform, application, framework, hardware etc.

These excerpts correctly describe what APIs and SDKs are. However the focus of the tags is vague as there is no tag usage.
Most of the questions tagged with one of these come along with another tag, such as opengl, unity, android. In most cases, the api or sdk tag is redundant because the other tag implies an API or a SDK (e.g. OpenGL is an API).
This has the downside of adding noise for an expert API or SDK developer looking to answer more questions, or for a developer interested in creating their own API and SDK and seeking knowledge about it.
I suggest we rename the tag 'api' to 'api-development', and 'sdk' to 'sdk-development' in order to clear up their purpose.
With this, we'll need to review all of the tagged questions and make sure they're appropriately tagged.

Are these tags even useful? Of the 47 currently tagged with SDK, I think the tag is noise on 45 of them. Of the ones using API, the first page of results seem to be questions that would need the tag removed as well, if we were to rename it.

@JoshPetrie I guess we could merge them into api-sdk-development. There would be a couple of questions that could use that tag. This would require to check each question and retag them, then create tag synonyms for api and sdk.

What then is the fundamental difference between "API and SDK" development and "engine" development (and the corresponding material difference in questions tagged as such)?

@JoshPetrie There are none. We can add to the list framework and libraries too. [tag:framework] and [tag:libraries] seem to be used like API and SDK: in addition to other tags, with a reduced amount of questions tagged as such. [tag:engine] is often used along other engine tags, but it seems more popular from users searching for engines (281 closed questions on 906) or other users working on their own engine. Most of the tags with sdk, api, libraries and framework could be removed, the others could be changed to `architecture.

engine looks like it is going to be harder to remove as it's been used a bit more. It also looks like it's being overused though..

As per my answer in the related meta, no.
The only usage I can see for these tags are in contexts that are too broad, or otherwise have more specific context, where said tags are only being used as meta-tags.
As such, they should be blacklisted, not renamed.

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How should we use the engine tag?
A question came up in the review queue, where the user had used the engine tag. My immediate thoughts were to ask why they were using the engine tag, as they had not mentioned anything pertaining to an available or custom made engine. I suspect the tag might be being used improperly; but I digress.
What is the actual intended use for the engine tag?

I can see two common ways this tag might be used:

The asker is using a specific game engine.
The asker is creating a game engine.

If they are using a specific game engine, I see engine as a meta tag. It describes that they are using an engine, but the specific engine tag should be used, instead; unity or xna, for example.
If they are creating their own engine, I can see how engine might be appropriate. Game engines differ greatly, but there are a lot of core similarities; I can easily see how somebody would be an "expert" in "engines", in this context.

It appears others disagree; perhaps I am wrong. The current usage guideline tells me what a game engine is, but not how to use the engine tag:

Game engines are a collection of libraries and tools that provide a framework to create games.

To me, engine seems like a meta tag no matter how we slice it. I certainly agree that there's little point in doubling it up with unreal or unity, et cetera.
It does make some sense to consider it the tag one would use when one has a question about a custom engine or one that there is no tag for, except that

for the most part, users can just create a tag for the latter case themselves
questions about "custom engine development" in the most general sense (i.e., when no other of our available tags would fit the scope) are almost certainly too broad

So my recommendation would be to blacklist engine as a meta tag.

@Gnemlock Blacklisting a tag means to remove it from all the current questions, and add it to the blacklist. It also means that we'll have to check once in a while that it has not been added again to new questions.

Adding a description to the tag to that effect isn't that helpful, since once we remove the tag from all questions the tag eventually goes away and I don't think old descriptions will be preserved if the tag is re-created (and in any event, I don't trust people to read them).

I added the engine tag to the blacklist topic. It is not cleared out though; with 700+ questions that will take some time.

It's cleared now :) https://i.stack.imgur.com/7VbpV.png


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There is a tag for 'chess', should there be a tag for 'pong', 'breakout' and 'pac-man'?
I asked a while ago a question about whether we needed the tag for chess, and the community felt that, yes, we needed the tag.
Tags being there to help users find interesting question, I see often new game devs asking questions about 'simple' games such as 'pong', 'breakout', 'snake' and 'pac-man', and I often feel that they could have searched a bit more before asking their question.
To help these new game developers find more resources on this site, should we introduce tags for 'simple' games such as:

pac-man and pac man and pacman
breakout and arkanoid
pong
[There is already a tag for snake, although it could cover more questions.]
[There is already a tag for tetris, although it could cover more questions.]

I generally don't think we should introduce tags just because we have similar tags, but instead we should let those tags show up organically as actual questions are asked where they are the best fitting tag for the specific question.

By that you don't mean that "these tags should not be used at all", but rather if someone asks about it and tags the question as such, and it fits the question, "sure, let them have it", is that it?

That's basically it, yes. I especially don't think it's particularly worthwhile to go back and mass retag existing questions; it seems like a lot of work to look at every question containing the word "pong" and decide if that question fundamentally needs a pong tag or if that's ancillary to the real question, et cetera.

Doesn't retagging also churns old questions back to the front page?

@Pikalek Most methods of updating the tags will count as "edits" and thus bring the questions to the front of the "active" view, yes (which isn't a problem or reason to avoid it, usually, but can be a little annoying for people who use the "active" view primarily).

The intended use of tags is to represent a category that might attract specific experts. I can see how chess would be worth a tag; chess is a very complicated game, and as such, I would expect that there could be some experts in chess game development.
In contrast, I do not perceive the likes of pac-man, breakout, pong and arknoid to be as complex to warrant expertise specific to these games. In fact, I see some potential issues with the way two of the proposed tags have been used, so far:

tetris has currently only been used on two duplicate questions. They both roughly ask 'can I make a legal Tetris clone'. I would not expect a tetris expert to be as reliable in answering these sort of questions as I would a legal expert. In these cases, tetris appears to be a metatag, and should be removed.
snake has currently only been used on a handful of questions. They all appear to specifically ask in regards to completing a mechanic for snake, specific to the developing platform that particular user is using. Once again, I would not expect a snake expert to be able to reliably answer questions pertaining to any random development platform. I would expect the expert in that development platform to offer the reliable answers. As such, once again, I consider this tag to mostly (if not, completely) be used as a metatag.

I am therefore against creating tags for the further mentioned 'beginner games'. If new developers look for resources, they are likely more interested in finding said resources relevant to their platform, regardless.
I would also suggest we consider whether we need the tetris or snake tags. I am on the fence, on this matter, but there seems to be a clear misuse thus far. At best, they need a clear usage guideline.

I don't think it's because a game is 'simple' that it prevents developers from being 'experts' in these games. If a developer has successfully released a snake game, they might want to help others with the big issues that new developers face (which are simple issues for more advanced developers).

Also, if a developer has appropriately released a Tetris game, they are more likely versed in the legality of it than a developer who has not, as tetris has a particular aspect to it. In any case, they'll have to consult with a legal expert before releasing the game.

@AlexandreVaillancourt, that involves quite a few assumptions. The notion stands; I'm listening to a legal expert before I listen to a particular title expert in regards to the legal aspects of that title. Furthermore, you can release a million snake games on one platform, and still easily be oblivious to how you would perform even the most basic functionality on an alternate platform you have never used.

"and still easily be oblivious to how you would perform even the most basic functionality on an alternate platform you have never used." This is also assuming a lot of things. I've never really done anything with Unity, but it's the 3rd tag on which I have the most upvotes. The tags are there to help users answer questions; if the question is about the mechanic of a snake in a snake game, a non-expert c# programmer could come up with a perfect snake algorithm written in non-perfect c# and still answer the question.

If the question is about a language issue, but is tagged 'snake', then perhaps the 'snake' tag is meta and should be removed from the question. But that's an issue with all the questions, not specifically with the tags proposed here.

Tetris is NP complete & there are experts that grapple w/ the related consequences of that, so the capacity for expert questions exists. To date, no such questions have surfaced here, & the potential for such questions isn't necessarily grounds for keeping the tag; I do agree that thus far, it's been used as a meta tag.

likewise, if a tag is currently only usable as a meta tag, it currently has no value on this site.


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How do we feel in regards to questions that ask if a certain piece of technology is capable of a certain feature?
How do we feel in regards to questions that ask if a certain piece of technology is capable of a certain feature?
I am sure I already found a relevant meta discussion, in which we discussed this in regards to being a "opinion-based" or "what technology should I use" question. However, for the life of me, I can not find it, now. I am sure I favourited it, but it seems I have cleaned out my favourites, since. I tend to do that from time to time, as articles appear less relevant.
The answer I read, which seemed logical and actually changed my viewpoint, briefly stated that these specific questions were okay; provided it gave an absolute set of requirements.

The question would not be a "which technology to use" question, because the user is not asking "which technology to use". They have already found the technology they wish to use, and rather, would like to clarify if it is capable of certain requirements they have.
The question is not opinion-based, provided there is a specific set of requirements that allow absolute answers. For example, "does this technology support efficient workflow" would not allow for an absolute answer, as it comes down to each individuals interpretation of efficiency, and comparison to other systems. "Does this system allow for 3D graphics" does allow absolute answers; it either does, or it doesn't. As such, this specific set of requirements was proposed as a heavy requirement for such questions, or at least, as far as I can remember.

Regardless, this all makes sense, to me. Before reading this previous article, I would have swayed against all questions that asked if a certain technology was capable of a certain feature. In cases I have encountered, these questions could still be considered poor quality due to a lack of research, but lack of research is not a valid close reason.
Note that this is very different to asking for a list of all technologies featuring a specific feature.
What are your thoughts?

I merged this question with its duplicate to move @DMGregory's answer over there as well. It also merged the comments.


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Is "IAP" a synonym of "microtransactions?"
We've had microtransactions for some time now. We've recently created iap. Are these tags the same (and thus, should iap be a synonym of microtransactions)?
Note that the excerpt for microtransactions currently contains the text "also referred to as... in-app purchasing."

The next question is "Do we need such tags?" Can one be an expert in micro-transactions? In IAP? Or are they expert with a specific IAP implementation, as suggested by Draco18s answer?

That's probably a separate question. I don't think "IAP" specifically refers only to Google Play's API in general, as implied (although the two uses of the tag currently do). I do think the tags should remain, as I think one can definitely be interested in the more soft-science aspects of microtransactions relating to effective strategies and display, and such.

Yup, different question :) Maybe we'll need to revisit it when there are more questions tagged with these tags.

I just realized that there is this tag which is already used [tag:in-app-purchase]; you might want to merge them together and make on synonym of the other.

Good find; done.

Originally, "microtransactions" implied size.  That is, they are literally "micro" "transactions".  They were supposed to be tiny tiny payments of like 1 cent, or fractions of a cent.  I don't think that anybody doing IAP is using "microtransactions" at all, at least by the original meaning of the word.

I think microtransactions and IAP are two different concepts:

microtransactions deals with the business model
iap deals with an implementation of the business model.

You can very well create a game that has no in-app-purchase but has microtransactions (what if you need to go on the website of the MMO to do the transaction), and you can have in-app purchase without it being a microtransation (you can buy the full game).
They should not be synonyms, and the text of microtransactions should be modified to remove the part about in-app billing.

This is a good point; I was originally leaning towards the idea that they're fundamentally the same, but now I do think it might be premature to merge them. We don't really have the distinctions you've defined in actual practice, yet, but merging them would make codifying that distinction much harder.

Agreed. Further, I think it's possible to be an expert in each of these topics, making both relevant tags. An expert in microtransactions would be someone like a monetization designer, with experience in designing mechanics to work with purchasable content, and in pricing/balancing this content. An expert on In-App Purchases would be someone like a developer with experience in store APIs & payment platforms, or a UI/UX designer with experience developing storefront interfaces. While these skillsets can often overlap, I think it's good to distinguish "what can players buy" vs "how do they buy"

I see the distinctions you make but I do think the words are used interchangeably in many cases. Would a new user posting a question or searching for answers make such a distinction?

@TartleWizard If there is potential confusion, I suppose we could make the distinction clear in the tag usage.

Yes
In-App Purchases (IAP) should be a synonym of microtransactions as there is no way to do one without doing the other (although a $100 price tag might not be considered micro the code, apis, and so on involved are identical).
The only case I can see for having them be separate is is iap is referring to a specific microtransaction API, in which case it should be renamed (assuming we want the tag) to accurately reflect that, e.g. google-play-iap or unity-iap.


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Why was my "very low quality" flag rejected on this non-formatted code-only question?
I recently flagged this question as very low quality and the flag got rejected. I've read posts such as "please flag responsibly" and this answer on the very low quality flag, and while this question isn't as extreme as in those examples it seems to be in-line with the flag description:

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

It contains no actual question what so ever except for the title. Severe content problems.
It contains only code and that code is poorly formatted to the point of almost being unable to read it. This weighs especially heavily since the tagged language is python, a language where formatting is important. Severe formatting problems.
The only way to make this question reasonable is to edit the entire post. Unlikely to be salvageable through editing.

Bearing this in mind I reason that the question is very low quality. Was my use of the flag wrong? Should it only truly be used when the post has nothing to do with programming or games what-so-ever (such as the farting grandpa example)?

I rejected it.

There was a question there ("why does my code freeze?"); it was in the title of the post, not the body.
There were formatting problems, but they were not so severe as to be unsalvageable. In fact, all I had to do was select all the code in the post and hit the {} button to add the missing four-space indent needed to mark it up as code.
The edits I made were actually relatively minor, I just shortened the title, restated the question in the body, and fixed the code.

Overall the edits took me less than a minute to do. The only reason I didn't make the edits in question when I first saw your flag was because I was on a phone at the time, and editing posts on a phone is hard.
The VLQ flag is primarily intended to address posts that look like this:

hiiiiiiiiiiiiiii i hav problem game crash plzzzzz halp lolollolool iu4hiuhasufhalskhfal skufhleqr fuherlifhuqli4f8ql4fi8hlkuhfalskdfuhlasdhfalsdjf lfu4hfp 8hp 83p qrfy adhfalsdjhf

(which I made up, but is not dissimilar to posts we've had to delete in the past)
The "can only be salvaged by editing the whole thing," thing is not about whether or not you have to touch every line of a post. That's fine. It's about whether or not the edit has to rewrite the entire post, synthesizing a valid post (question or answer) from thin air.
It is true this question probably needs further work by the OP; I'd like explanation of what exactly is meant by "second start screen" and trimming some of the irrelevant code would help with the wall-of-text effect (edit: having had a chance to skim the code, I also removed everything that wasn't the second_start_screen function).
But I definitely don't think the post was beyond saving.

Keep in mind that the intention behind the very low quality flag is to identify posts that should be deleted, asap.
And a post should be deleted in such a fashion when it causes harm, e.g. it is spammish, or is abusive (threatening a particular community, for instance); or when it contains unintelligible content, as mentioned by Josh.
In this case, the post was in none of these categories.
There is the flag 'should be closed/unclear what you're asking', that could have been used in this case. If the author (or a member of the community) is not willing to improve the question, the question would have been deleted by the system at some point in the future.
In the case of the farting grandpa, I know the other post suggests that you should flag it as low quality; however you could also flag it as 'should be closed/Other...' and describe what you feel is wrong with the question. "[...] has nothing to do with game development." is perfectly acceptable, and the users reviewing the flag will totally agree with it.

I'm curious to know the reason behind the downvote :)


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What's the point of the tag [programming]?
On the main site we have the tag programming, which has this description

Computer programming (often shortened to programming or coding) is the process of designing, writing, testing, debugging, and maintaining the source code of computer programs. This source code is written in one or more programming languages.
The purpose of programming is to create a set of instructions that computers use to perform specific operations or to exhibit desired behaviors. The process of writing source code often requires expertise in many different subjects, including knowledge of the application domain, specialized algorithms and formal logic.

There is no usage guideline.
I feel this tag is both redundant and very broad; some of the activities described above have their own tag:

designing -> architecture
testing -> testing
debugging -> debugging
is written in one or more programming languages -> c#, c++, java, etc.
including knowledge of the application domain -> opengl, mathematics, physics, etc.

Should every programming related question be tagged with this tag? If so, it would mean that a lot of questions here would need to be tagged with it, perhaps rendering it irrelevant. If not, should we narrow its guideline to a specific activity (e.g. Programming is the action of typing code.)? Or should we consider removing/black-listing it?

May be useful if the question is language-agnostic but is about programming?

I have just run across the [tag:scripting] tag; I feel it shares the same issues that you highlight, above. Perhaps it should be bundled in with this meta; perhaps not - I am not sure, myself.

@Gnemlock I personally think that scripting has its value here, so I don't think that scripting should be removed. I wouldn't mind that the consensus here be to remove the 'programming' tag, just like I would not mind that the consensus be to leave it as is, or narrow its scope. It should be a different meta post.

I have started to clean up the usage of the [tag:scripting] tag lately, trying to apply it to general scripting questions ("How to allow my players to mod via script"), and remove it from questions about a particular script ("How to fix this Lua script", "I'm writing a Unity c# script and I have this issue").

I don't really like this tag, but I am not inclined to throw my vote onto the "blacklist" pile for this, I don't think.
I worry that doing so is a slippery slope for similar tags like game-design, and that by moving immediately to blacklist the tag as we normally due for less-prolific tags might be creating a more weighty precedent than simply counting the uses of programming implies.
So my vote would be to preserve the tag, but refine its usage guidelines.
It should not be the case that programming is applied to any tag where code appears, or where the user is doing programming to achieve some more specific goal (that can have more specific tags applied).
I think instead there might be a window for the tag to be about scenarios where programming theory is at the heart of the question, much like game-design should be about the more soft-science aspects of the domain. I don't mean questions about designing the architecture of a system (there's architecture for that), per se, but rather more for questions about the process of programming that might be game-specific.
game-design has a lot design-process questions that I think are really interesting and provide some of the most unique content that GDSE can offer, such as

How can I dissuade alliances?
How to encourage players to not lessen their own gaming experience with mods and cheats?
What is the design rationale behind melee retaliations in turn-based games?

I can see a path to changing programming to be a space for equivalently soft questions about programming practices and concepts. For example, questions I'd consider good uses of the progamming tag I'm proposing:

Decoupling input from game states / entity behavior
How do I avoid writing Manager classes?
What properties should be private, public, and protected?

These are about the philosophy or mindset that should be applied when programming a game (yes, one of them is closed, but I think it's a reasonable question to have in our brave new less-strict-on-general-programming-questions world).
Similarly,

What exactly is a 'set of states'?
Are AAA games still made with programming languages?

are about terminology and practices of programming. Finally this question is an interesting cross-section of programming and game design conceptually, and this question isn't precisely a request for a technical architecture but more a query about potential theoretical approaches to a problem.

Conversely, none of these questions are good examples of the tag:

Finding the intersection of a plane and a ray
2D racetrack collision bounce using angle of reflection (bounce angle)
Calculate speed vehicle physics 2d racegame
AddForceAtPosition() not working as desired
LibGDX - Image width is not set to resetting to zero when full width
How are the same items generated with slightly different attributes?

All of these are examples of questions when source code is involved, where programming is being done as a concrete activity, but where that activity really just the vehicle to implement the problem & solution, rather than the topic itself.

Perhaps a programming-theory tag as the synonym of this one? I really do think we should make it distinctive.

Yes, I think that's a good idea, and can help cement the use-case (because users will see the synonym remap when they try to tag with 'programming').

By programming theory are you referring to things like patterns, best practices, etc or do you mean things like theoretical computation? Alternatively, is there a question that fits well with your proposal?

I don't want to be too specific about it, really, I'm just thinking stuff that is more soft-science and theory oriented rather than concretely about "problems in source code." I'll comb through the backlog of programming-tagged questions to see if I can find some good pro and con examples of the usage I'm proposing.

Maybe questions like this one, @Pikalek?

I agree w/ not over specifying. I just want to make sure I actually understand your proposed intent; e.g. academic & colloquial use of theory can be quite different. A few pro & con examples would be great.

Also worth a note, at least two of those questions were originally tagged as game-design and in reviewing the tag I proposed programming as a replacement because I wasn't aware of other tags that might be a better fit. So, I vote for an update to the usage of programming to include a list of common, more specific tags. Specifically the two "2D race" related ones.

In my opinion, ´programming-theory´ or ´software-engineering´ shouldn't even be ailased in Game Development SE. If someone would want to ask a question that can potentially have those tags, I think Software Engineering SE would be a better fit for those questions.

I still don't understand exactly what you're proposing, @S.TarıkÇetin. Are you saying we "do nothing, keeping the programming tag" or are you saying we "get rid of the programming tag and replace it with nothing?" Can you post what you want as an answer so we can get a sense, via votes, of how the community as a whole feels about it?

@Josh No, programming tag should stay, I agree with you on that. I am suggesting we should add neither programming theory nor software engineering as an alias of programming tag.

@S.TarıkÇetin If that is your position, and the position you want the site to take, you should write it as an answer here.

I have made this change to the usage guidance and created a synonym from programming to software-engineering.

I feel this tag may have originally been used in the same vein as the engine tag; in fact, in working through the removal of the engine tag after previous meta discussion, I have had to use the programming tag in light of having no better option; in such cases, I have also been of the opinion that such questions were off-topic, due to being too broad, or going against a more recent rule-set in regards to what we consider on or off topic.
In most cases, the better option would be to use the specific language tag. In most cases, I can see that questions still use the specific language tag; programming appears to be used as a meta tag. I can only see two practical reasons a question might be better tagged as programming; both of which have a relation:

Questions that are specific to programming, in general. Such questions would be too broad for our scope, or be better posed on Stack Overflow; the user is always going to have a specific language (or set of languages) relative to the system they are using, whether that be a pre-built game engine such as Unity or CryEngine, or a custom engine they have previously built in a specific language.
Questions that ask about general programming in relation to an engine they have not built, yet. As brought up in previous meta, these questions are also generally too broad; for this reason, we are in the process of blacklisting the engine tag, given that it has no other practical use.

As such, my vote is to blacklist this tag. It might take some time; but with only 572 questions, it should not take as long as engine. We should also keep an eye on new questions, as this tag appears to be more popular with new questions, as a meta tag.


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Is my question invalid? If not, then it received downvoted and no answers
Quake Physics ported to Unreal Engine?
The above question is a generic one, and of significance. It should be a pivotal explanation about the fundamentals of game engines.
This is an abuse of SE and myself. I was provided no details as to how the engine works to prove why it would unsuitable. At best, stating that it's unsuitable with no basis is an incomplete answer. Down-voting is not warranted.

Note that votes, in meta, are often used as agreement or disagreement. I can not speak for everyone else, but in this case, my downvote symbolises my opinion that this question is not a useful as meta discussion, and sounds a lot more like a rant. Remember that not all questions are suitable for the Stack Exchange, and we don't necessarily have to answer your question on the base sentiment that you posted it. Maybe we do not think this question would of enough use to the community to find out for you. You seem to think this is an easy question to answer - why don't you research it, yourself?

Note that in such cases where you have a good question, it helps to show some research (especially given that "shows no research" is a hard written reason for downvoting). If you find the answer, yourself, awesome! Post your question, anyway. Answer it in the same posting. Self-answered questions are as much of use to the community as others, and can net you some reputation to boot.

I'm not wasting anymore time on these distractions. Stack exchange is for receiving help from the community, not being bashed for not already knowing the answer.

My question alone has more research than I still have yet to receive from the "answer" section of the website.

You might think so, but apparently some users (who voted your question down) might believe otherwise. Why is your opinion about the amount and quality of your research as reflected by the question you asked any more or less valid than theirs? They are entitled to their views, as you are yours. Neither of you should be prosecuted for them.

Because I already have done the research, and if there was anything on the internet that stated anything, then I wouldn't have had to ask, then would I? Seriously, stop arguing just for the sake of it.

Refusing to state a single detail about the engine in question is not how this site operates, and you should know that. A simple "hey, the collision is wired too tightly" would suffice, but I'm not going to argue anymore. It's clear you aren't aware of the topic and are just making empty general statements.

Is that all you want? A simple reason why this task would be hard? I can definitely offer that (in the comments on your question itself).

I see that. Thank you and thank you for your understanding.

Perhaps it helps to ask why people are downvoting you? I personally downvoted because the question does not fit in with the SE formula as already discussed and because of your attitude towards other people in the community. But I believe that everyone makes mistakes and I, myself, remember my first question and reactions to the inevitable downvotes. So I've removed my vote in hopes that you stay with the community.

I do think this question is off-topic. It's directly asking if there is anybody out there who ported Quake 3's physics to Unreal. This isn't really about solving a particular game development problem, it's about surveying for the list of people who have solved such a problem. That's effectively a list-generation question, which we consider off-topic.
The implication in the question is that you want to do this yourself. The implied follow-up is about how you could port the physics. That is a massively broad question, as there are several possible approaches to revamping a large engine's core physics simulation. All of them require a significant investment in knowledge of both the source and target engines, and conveying that knowledge in an answer on StackExchange would be almost impossible.
Thus, I closed the question.

As to your complaints of abuse and unwarranted down-votes, well... I don't agree with you. Votes are how SE operates, they are how the SE community indicates that a question is good, useful, and demonstrates research effort (versus one that isn't good, or isn't useful, or does not demonstrate research effort). Every user is fully vested with the power to decide where and when to apply their votes; there is intentionally no oversight or administrative window into that voting system.
The only recognized abuse is serial voting, which is automatically corrected periodically by the site software.
Rather than focus on your perceived "injustice" as far as your question's score is concerned, focus instead on trying to figure out why some members of the community might have found the question poor, not useful, or lacking in basic research.

This response could be used for literally anything. Enough of the group think. I have done my "basic" research, in that I have personally seen every line of code of the quake engine's physics. You would have done the same thing in my position. The fact is, I am still right. There is absolutely no reason why anybody couldn't list ANY basic information about how the unreal engine would not be compatible. And the reason for that is because it is completely bogus. And as proof, there are already 2 people that have done it. So, thanks.

So, that should be sufficient proof as well that I have done prior research, which is why I came to stack exchange.

@HTDE That's true, it could be used for "literally anything," and it is very similar to responses I have provided users in a situation similar to yours. It's a simple fact of the matter that StackExchange is not suited to certain kinds of questions, and yours (as currently written) is one of them. You might consider asking on a more general forum like GDNet instead.

Yeah, Josh go ahead and continue to ignore the meat of my argument, you know, the part that unequivocally settles the dispute by proving you wrong with facts.

If you're not going to participate in the discussion in good faith, you're not longer going to be welcome to participate; I will only remind you once of our policy to "be nice" to your fellow community members. The "facts" that you are referring to are not clearly presented, and it's not clear whether or not you are objecting to the down-votes at this point or to the fact that the question was put on hold.

Just please try to understand the points I have made.

You, and as nicely as I can put this, have ignored those points.

I'm trying, but your combative responses are not helping get your points across. As I understand it, you are upset about both the down votes your question received and the fact that it is (now) on hold, is that correct? I cannot do anything about the down-votes. I literally do not have the power to see who did it, why they did it, or to undo them. It is, however, possible to have a dialogue about why the question is on hold.

Down-voting is not warranted.

Generally, users vote on the basis of the content of the post.
But users being human, sometimes their feelings take over and vote for some other, sentimental reasons.
Maybe they felt attacked or insulted by the things you wrote, or by the way you wrote them, so they used the tool they had to express their dissatisfaction with regards to your actions here: they downvoted.

I suggest you try to see what warranted the downvotes in the first place, then move on and try to do better the next time. Ultimately, it's just a number beside a bunch of text. And there is always a way to make the number by your name go up!
StackExchange sites network is a great place to learn all sorts of things, and to share knowledge.
But your have to get yourself familiar with the rules; we all had to learn how it works, but once you do, it's a nice place to hang!
With the reputation you have across the SE sites, I assume you know the basic mechanics of the site, so I suggest you go on and read the help center.
And be patient :)
I hope to see you again, soon ;)

P.S. By the way, users tend to downvote posts where a user complains about downvotes; but I haven't noticed this behaviour when the user asks about downvotes.

P.P.S. I once landed on this page on meta.se when wondering why one of my posts was downvoted. It helped me shrug it off and move on.

In fact, this exchange appears to be especially forgiving in regards to "why the downvotes" comments. I have seen exchanges where asking "why the downvotes" has a direct relation to acquiring 2-3 times the downvotes, with no feedback (which, in my opinion, suggests poor behaviour).

Thanks Alexandre. I do really appreciate your advice here. If I may, though, how could I have asked this question better? I try to go by the rules, but in contradiction end up getting ruled by people's whims. Josh the other mod ultimately did go back and give an excellent answer. My dissatisfaction is that means there actually were people who could've given an answer but I had to be ignored and spent more time on this meta. At the same time, I'd rather mods not have to be the ones to be bothered to answer everyone's questions.

@HTDE I think the way you asked the question was ok. You said in comments that you had researched that a lot; it did not show in the question, so maybe having displayed a bit more of what you actually researched could have improved the reaction, or would have prevented your post from receiving the first downvote. But your question could still have been seen as off topic, and ultimately closed. The next steps would have been to ask calmly here in meta why your question was closed, and not assuming that it was perfect and on-topic, without critiquing the answer that you got.

I understand you would like a full answer, but users will give you the tip they can; you can use the comments to ask for more details or to ask them to expand the answer, but you can't force them to do so (tip: they don't need to be told that it's not a complete answer ;).

"My dissatisfaction is that means there actually were people who could've given an answer" Maybe, but maybe not. Keep in mind that the traffic here is much less than what's on SO, so it's expected that your question gets much less attention than over there; the nature of your question is not typically what a hobbist game developer will do, and that's often not what a professionnal game developer will be allowed to talk about according to the NDA they signed with their employer, so there is some kinds of knowledge that will be harder to find here.

Alternatively, you could also have brought that in the chat, since you have enough rep for that, maybe someone could have helped and maybe not.

@AlexandreVaillancourt I apologize for the way I reacted. I'll remember these points next time. Like I say, I often feel like I have to be a mind-reader and I just got frustrated, but I'll try ;)


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Can we merge [gles] with [opengl-es]?
The tag gles only has one question and it's actually about opengl-es can we make gles a synonym of opengl-es and merge them?

Since the tag only has one usage and it's going to be destroyed soon, I move for replacing it and merging the tags. I believe this is just the obvious choice here, but other inputs are welcome.

This has been done.


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Do we need the [old-school] tag?
Do we need the old-school tag? Current stats: 24 question & 7 followers.

You should mark Josh's answer as accepted :)

No, it's a meta-tag describing the domain of the question or an ideal goal of the project the question pertains to.
It should be burninated.

I've done this.

I think we should keep it, but refine it's usage, then rename it.
Questions with the old-school mainly deal with

Old hardware
Reproduction of visual and audio effects older games had
Historical questions about old games and how they were made.

I think we should keep the tag on the questions which relate to the graphics and audio styles as seen in the old-school games (just like we have a tag for pixel-art), and remove it from the other types of questions.
Then perhaps we should find a better name that reflects it, such as old-school-effect or old-school-style.

What is old hardware or older games? I would not define PlayStation, or some partially-early Windows games to be considered, for example. However, I know that others would. I feel this tag is too broad for this suggested used. Unless, of course, we can reach a concencus of period (say, "pre-2000"). But then, how do you handle the future? Does it stay at "pre-2000", or does it become "pre-2001" next year, and "pre-2002", the year after?

@Gnemlock With the amount of questions that would be tagged as such, I don't think there would be much trouble managing it. And I would not use years, but maybe more which consoles would fit the description, so the description would stay constant, without needing to update it year after year.


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Why is there no [boo] tag?
There are a couple of questions relating to Boo, and they're tagged with scripting.
Can we re-tag them with boo, or the tag has been removed for a reason not written here and should not be re-introduced?

 Because no one uses Boo.

You can take your tongue out of your cheek, that's pretty true. Unity has even removed support for it.

@Byte56 Just wanted my comment to be clear that I wasn't being entirely serious. I'm sure someone somewhere LOVES programming in Boo.

Ghosts, for example. I'll show myself out.

There is no boo simply because noone has created one.
If I had to speculate, I would say that the absence of this tag may have actually led to users using more generic tags, such as scripting. This seems to be further supported by the fact that all scripting questions that reference "boo" were created by new users.
The logical thing to do, here, is simply create a boo tag. It is a tag pertaining to a specific programming language that is used in game development, no matter how uncommon. There is no reason why such a tag would be blacklisted, and it isn't.


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Should we have an Internationalization tag?
We already have a localization tag, however Localization and Internationalization are distinctly different endeavors. I think this question about the differences sums it up well.
In short Internationalization (i18n) is more closely related to application development, while localization is a bit wider ranging from assets (art, sound, text, etc.), to legal issues.
Examples
The localization tag doesn't have many questions, currently, but a good number of them are more accurately internationalization:
Getting the right currency based on user data:
How to get the player's country name to change the currency system in Unity?
Choosing language programmatically:
Choosing Language on Mobile Game
How to render Unicode:
How do games handle rendering Asian unicode text?

And there are some properly tagged as localization:
This one is localization because it's asking what colors to apply, but not how to make the game capable of switching the colors: The meaning of colours in other cultures

At least maybe add internationalization as an alias, if the distinction is too minute?

don't you mean an internationalisation tag? :P

Since few people know the distinct difference between the different concepts perhaps the use of a more general tag is appropriate instead? Or perhaps just make them synonyms (even though they are different concepts) to make it easier on users?

In the general case, if

a tag would apply to questions we actually already have and
is not redundant with some existing tag and
wouldn't require drastically altering the usage of some existing, you can create and apply that tag yourself without asking here.

Although it's certainly nice to see the discussion.
An internationalization tag seems like a reasonable enough idea to me.

I agree, there's enough a difference to make a new tag, but I think we're using localization the same as internationalization right now (which is a problem and shouldn't be the case). I also think that we should make the community aware of this new tag as best we can so that we can curate new questions better and maybe offer edits on older questions.

I found a recent enough question that it merited swapping tags. And with that also added info for the internationalization tag. I think if/when that's accepted, I'll post an update to the localization tag info to reflect.

I think there is enough difference between the two concepts to have a tag for each of them.

I think we are pulling at hairs, differentiating between the two; especially for the point of 22 questions, where the referenced material provides a clear and contextual link between the two terms. I more commonly hear the two terms used in replacement for each other, and to be perfectly honest, I was not aware that there was a distinct difference; and there does not seem to be a big one. At least, not big enough to warrant entirely different tags.

Let's take a closer look at the referenced definitions:

"Internationalization (i18n) the process of changing your software so that it isn't hardwired to one language/locale/culture.
Localization (l10n) the process of adding the appropriate resources to your software so that a particular language/locale is supported. It's bigger in scope than just this Wikipedia entry, but it's a good start.

These definitions only provide one clear difference: internationalisation refers to adapting software to be compatible with other languages; localisation refers to adapting software to be compatible with other languages and cultures.

Let's take a look at the next two highest-rated answers (emphasis mine):
The second highest reads

"According to Apple:
Internationalization is the process of designing and building an application to facilitate localization. Localization, in turn, is the cultural and linguistic adaptation of an internationalized application to two or more culturally-distinct markets."

The next highest reads

"Internationalization prepares your application for localization. For example, you might encode characters stored in your database in Unicode (utf8mb4 instead of latin1), moving strings to resource files, enabling the use of date, time and currency formats, etc.
When you wish to sell, for example, a Chinese version of your app, you'd then localize it by hiring a translator to build the zh-CN resource files, and use a new date/time/currency format."

In fact, using one term to describe the other is a common pattern across a lot of the answers supplied to the referenced question.

It is clear, at the very least, that these two terms are heavily entwined. It is difficult to find a clear definition of one that does not involve using the other.
Furthermore, through the described differences, I fail to see how one might be knowledgeable in one without the other. Especially when the clearest definition of "internationalisation" I can find effectively reads "making ones program more adept to localisation".
At best, they should be synonyms; but given the fact that only one of these tags actually has usage, I have to question whether we really need to create the other simply as a synonym. They say you shouldn't fix something that is not already broken; this feels like we are trying to fix something that doesn't exist, yet.

An artist could have many questions about creating localized content, and know nothing about the methods used to make an application work internationally. A programmer would be more apt to answer an internationalization question, while a citizen of a particular region a localisation question. Part of the purpose of tags is for people who want to answer, to find questions that relate to their expertise.


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Can I ask questions about OpenGL here? Or should I take them to Stack Overflow?
I am reluctant to post this on Overflow since they mostly do not answer noobish questions. But I have an issue understanding of "how to put together" what I learned and need some advice how to proceed with the design of my game in OpenGL 3. I am doing this for the learning experience and the fun, I am not a professional. So where is the correct place to ask this?

Questions about OpenGL are welcomed here, however, like Stack Overflow, we handle specific issues, and by this I mean that if you ask about "what to learn next", or very broad question, it will be closed.
If your question is along the lines "I have this piece of code, and this other piece of code, and I'm trying to do XYZ, but it does not work for reason ABC [or it does not work and it gives me GHJ instead], what am I doing wrong?", generally the question is not downvoted and not closed.
I guess the thing to do would be to ask the question and see if it gets closed, then ask what you could do to improve it if it does.

Well, I do have a specific issue. My question is basically how to properly set up my VBO and what information I should lay out in it. As in, Vertices, Color, Position and Viewmatrix or if I should chose another approach. Basically, I am unsure how to set up OpenGL properly to have a "proper" 2D Environment.

@Assylum From my experience, I think your question fits this site and will not be closed.

@Assylum - just to add to this: I would strongly suggest searching here first to see if your issue is answered in a previous question; VBO setup, layout & usage is quite a common topic and even an on-topic question remains subject to being closed as a duplicate.

@LeComteduMerde-fou https://computergraphics.stackexchange.com/questions/5148/what-is-the-best-practice-for-data-in-a-vbo My thread was more or less well received and answered over on computergraphics. Thanks for the additional information though.

As Alexandre points out, we do take OpenGL questions (we even have an opengl tag with over 3000 questions), though we do have additional requirements to consider such questions on-topic.
On the off chance that you wish to ask a question regarding OpenGL that may not necessarily be on-topic either here, or at Stack Overflow; it is worth noting that there is a Computer Graphics Stack Exchange. Once again, you want to ensure your question is on-topic for their scope, but given they focus specifically on computer graphics, you might find them more lenient in assessing questions specific to OpenGL.


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Should we alias programming to "programming-theory" or "software-engineering?" Or...?
Per the recent discussions at What's the point of the tag [programming]? the consensus on the programming tag is that we'll keep it, but heavily re-scope it to try and focus more on theoretical and process-oriented topics.
To that end, I'd like to create some tag synonyms, but I don't believe that "programming" is appropriate as the target of those synonyms, because I don't think it helps convey the new, narrower scope.
What should we call the target of "programming?"

We should call it software-engineering; fundamentally the scope of the tag is similar to that of the Software Engineering SE: methods and practices of building software (games, specifically), including the theoretical.

There is already a [tag:software-engineering] tag. In the case this answer is the most popular, I guess you'd only create a tag synonym.

Yes, that's what I'd do. The meaningful distinction between the software engineering tag and the new scope of the programming tag is almost nil, imo.

But if we read the description of the software-engineering tag, it seems quite different from what programming currently covers...

Currently covers, yes, but it seems pretty inline with what I think the new scope of the programming tag should cover.

If we go with this, we should consider keeping programming as an alias. In my experience with students and recent grads, I don't think anyone has asked me about becoming a "software-engineer" as opposed to a "programmer". So I expect, while they may mean software-engineering, they're more likely to use the programming tag and not find software-engineering with out that alias.

@Chris Right, that's what this is proposing. When a user types the "programming" tag on a question, it will get replaced with whatever alias we end up selecting as a result of this meta question.

I have now done this.

We should call it programming-theory, as originally suggested. It is succinct, and not terribly dissimilar from the current programming tag, so users will be less surprised by the tag system replacing it for them when they type programming.

I don't like this for two reasons: "programming theory" isn't really a thing, and it implies computer science rather than software engineering.

This mega post contains all the questions that have the tag software-engineering. Since the merge of the tag programming, some of these don't really need the tag software-engineering as the scope is different, so all of these questions tags should be revised.
The idea is that whenever you have time to review a couple of them, review them (either retag the questions or leave them as is, as needed), and then remove the questions from this list.
Once all the questions have been reviewed, we'll be able to delete this post.

Is storing all game objects in a single list an acceptable design?
Throwing Exceptions in C++ game DLL's? Pros and Cons
Are there cases where globals/singletons are useful in game development?
Finding other programmers to help on a project
Asset Library Class or passing Asset's through constructors
Implementing behavior in a simple adventure game
What is wrong with my Item collection/Itemcounter Script
Are AAA games still made with programming languages?
What basic non-games related computer knowledge should a games programmer possess?
Keybindings in Unity
Software engineering theory for hobbyist developers
What's the best phone for game development?
Converting DirectX 9 code to DirectX 10
How do I update individual sprites within a spritegroup in pygame?
Finite state machine in C++
How are the same items generated with slightly different attributes?
Why do most games save the players team as a short int in the player class and not as a pointer to a team object?
opengl memory issue - quite strange
Event-driven Communication in a Game Engine: Yes or No?
Is Test Driven Development viable in game development?
Technical differences between square and hexagon for a grid?
Does C# have a future in games development?
What are the Starting Games I need to make?[Best steps for a beginner Game Developer?]
How do I implement a racing clock that shows elapsed time?
How to set HUD elements position and size depending of resolution
How to rotate a surface in pygame, without changing its shape
Quantity of dropped/spawned items in container
How to handle a player's level and its consequent privileges?
Decoupling the entity from whatever controls it
Representing a high-resolution deformable solid in 3D
Selecting Dictionary item based on custom classes instead of keys
Design patterns in Game Physics
How to write "Hello World" for N64 purely from scratch?
What is the point in using API such as Open GL or DirectX when there are game engines?
How should I design an easing class in C++?
Effective methods to continuously update movement in a tower defense game?
Game companies - Involvement of programmers in the design process
How can I run a .jar file with XNA?
How should bots be recognised in a game?
Getting player cube to move left or right in relation to camera based on camera's rotation
How do I implement a programming system in my game that is both accessible, powerful, and fast to code in?
Implementing a wait function in a game script
Best way to gain C++ working experience for a job in games (coming from C#)
Game programming course materials: What should it include?
Newbie game programmer - Where do I start?
Conceptual question regarding Belief-Desire-Intent agent
Should our group try to make a game?
Cocos2d Sprite 3D position
How to make "Shaky mouse cursor" Before shoot the target Like in a Dart Game?
How do i get my tilemap to move at the same speed as my character
Implementing a FSM with ActionScript 2 without using classes?
What's the difference between a "Gameplay Programmer" and a "Gameplay Engineer?"
Mobile Multiplayer games and coping with high latency
Trophies programming design pattern
Confused about this Timer function C++
Why should I write a computer program if I don't know exactly how the program gets run in its entirety?
How can I create an extending chain like the hookshot in Zelda in Unity?
How can I move and rotate an object in an “infinity” or “figure 8” trajectory?
Entity Component System based engine
Turn a single player game into multiplayer game
Snake game made in processing
How to implement mutable functionality at runtime?
How to make minecraft like world round?
How to create a text-based game?
How would I go about programming atmosphere for a game?
Trying to use yield to wait for a few seconds to avoid the sounds from Interfering with each other
How can I maintain a rectangular formation when units are added or removed?
Will there be any more books in the Game Programming Gems series?
Problem with Collision Detection
Networking in a strategy, city management game
Does an indie game developer really need to know graphics programming beyond the basics?
What language for Indie dev?
Manage a large number of independent actors in real-time
Making a game for multiple platforms
Passing data between engine layers
Calculate speed vehicle physics 2d racegame
How to implement auto-aiming / auto-targeting
I have a game based on combining 2 ingredients to create a product. What is the best way to code this? (Unity)
Are there such things as online development projects?
Generate planet like heightmaps
Which programming language should I start with in game dev?
What exactly is a 'set of states'?
How to to convert UV coordinates to texel coordinates and how to convert texel coordinates to "array coordinates"?
Is it essential that I learn Try/Catch and Finally statements for Game Programming, or is it something I can come back to?
What can I do to make sure that I have the energy to work on my game while working full-time?
Engine programming, is it supposed to be enjoyable?
Little and big endianness in games
How can be data oriented programming applied for GUI system?
Tangible benefits to speed-coding your personal game projects
RPGMakerVX - Changing item_max?
Why are games built on cross-platform engines sometimes exclusive to Windows?
Check if an object is facing another based on angles
Make an object slide around an obstacle
Map editor undo function - Not actually setting values to tiles
What are some great papers/publications relating to game programming?
Are there places in the gaming industry for people who are artistic and programmers?
How or why are major video games programmed so reliably?
3D Location Handling
Rotating a 3rd person camera toward a target
Limitations of p2p multiplayer games vs client-server
the basic or important thing that i need to learn from C#
Where can a game developer/programmer get freelance jobs?
Computer Games Technolgy or Software Engineering?
Showing range on hexagonal grid
For Indie Developers should abstraction or development speed be prioritized?
Game-oriented programming language features/objectives/paradigm?
How should I proceed next with my programming skills?
How do bullets work in video games?
How should I handle functions, where two classes have equal use?
How to handle game states for a single-player / multiplayer game?
Cross platform low level graphic API
How should I check if a player has completed an achievement?
naming conventions in game code / vocabulary
Should each UI screen contain the list of screens on the stack or should I use a manager class?
What properties should be private, public, and protected?
Is there any potential downside to procedurally programmingh in DirectX 11, without classes?
How do the Box2d and Bullet physics simulations work internally?
OpenAL - alGetSourcei and AL_BUFFERS_PROCESSED gives junk
Best solution for "level string"?
How do I generate surface normals?
Expandable 2d environment by spawning and controlling individual tiles
Experiences of test-driven devleopment in large projects
making a game in 2D(C++). SDL or openGL? Or, why not both?
What should every graphics programmer write
Clickable hex grid in c#.net
Atmospheric Scattering
How do I detect UI button presses on Android
C++: Smart pointers, Raw pointers, No Pointers?
How do videogames store information offscreen?
Are there any clever methods of regulating bandwidth usage for voice chat payload packets?
Does Big O really matter?
Level Implementation
What will AMD Fusion or likewise hybrid CPU/GPU will change for the 3D programmer ? Are they potentially faster?
Get Facebook Picture in Cocos2d-iphone V3
What are some programming design patterns that are useful in game development?
What do gameplay programmers do?
Match-3 Shuffle Required?
What scripting language would you recommend for a C++ game project?
Simple game engines / development tools made with artists in mind?
Vehicle audio recording
What should I consider when evaluating libraries, engines and frameworks for making a game?
Arc'd jumping method?
What are the advantages of having component logic in a "system" versus the component itself?
Do "write once run anywhere" engines require platform specific code for multiplayer?
Subscriber with many publishers: unsubscribing
Deep copying or cloning in actionscript 3
Where do i start with game development when i'm terrible at art and 3d modelling?
Problem with Update(GameTime) Methods and Pause implementation
Recent mainstream games written in pure C? not C++ what was/is the point?
Cyclic Dependencies
What are the restrictions of 3g online games
What tools should I consider if my aim is to make a game available to as many platforms as possible?
Is there a 3d animation software that prioritizes working with code rather than GUI?
Unity - protect MonoBehaviour-derived classes from instantiating via new in C#
What can I do to avoid one-off flags and checks throughout my code?
Are interleaved vertex data formats better than non-interleaved formats?
Amount of Data Calculated in a Game
Game Development Resources?
What should a game engine do?
https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/q/133323
Low coupling and tight cohesion
What's next to learn?
Unity PhotonView - Ownership problems when synching objects
Finding the intersection of a plane and a ray
Is video compositing feasible?
Game programming books?
Why is 3D game development supposed to be so hard?
How much memory usage is too much in a Flash game?
Adaptive Characters: AI Solution Needs a Problem
Beat detection and FFT
Making game constants/tables available to game logic classes/routines in a modular manner
What do I need to consider before making any class singleton?
Game Maker (and others): what data type is colour and how can I compare them?
What is "tools development?"
Pointers in C# Unity
How to find if an object is facing another object given position and direction as separate vectors
Networking/Packet Design
Are there games with player programmable vehicle control behaviour?
Trying to create a UE4 blueprint or script to recognize set shapes
What research areas exist in game programming?
Mouse location is off due to camera
How to do collision detection on marching cubes terrain?
Networking gampeplay - Sending controller inputs vs. sending game actions
How could you parallelise a 2D boids simulation
Stopping Animations For Player In Java Using Slick2D
Can't parent the standard FPSController during gameplay
How to make a "Camera" in Java
Organizing platformer game into classes
How can I get textures on edge of walls like in Super Metroid and Aquaria?
Stat Multipliers: from Base Value or Iterative
Andengine onAreaTouched TouchEvent not working - ACTION_OUTSIDE & ACTION_CANCEL
Pickup another book or submerge into XNA
Should I use a visual tool or code myself?
Help for structuring classes
At which school levels do you learn to make games form scratch?
Efficient 2d Java Line of Sight for a lot of entities?
When should I acquire game objects with dependency injection, find-with-tag, or singletons?
VS deployment problems
It is worth adding 'futuristic' features to our game, or should we put our focus elsewhere?
What are some good game programming short courses?
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???

https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/q/37645


text:
Should we make [unreal-editor] a synonym of [unreal] tag?
Last year, we've discussed if it would be a good idea to remove the tags unity-editor and inspector (the latter mainly referring to a tool from Unity) because they did not add anything significant to the site.
As such, unity-editor as been defined as a synonym of unity, and inspector has simply been blacklisted.
Should we do the same thing with unreal-editor: make it a synonym of unreal-4? Or does it really add value to the site?
At the same time, should the tag blueprints be kept or should we also make it a synonym of unreal-4? I understand that someone could be very knowledgeable with the feature, but it seems like a very specific part of a single engine, and where the search feature of the site would do just about the same job as the tag.

I am only so very lightly familiar with unreal; I would vote to do the above, but I have to ask, is there such a great difference between the versions of unreal that would warrant specific tags for unreal 4, over (say) unreal 2 and 3?

If not, it might be a better idea to go with the [tag:unreal] tag

I think it is reasonable to alias unreal-editor to unreal.
I think blueprints is worth leaving alone, though, because it's a fairly complex sub-domain of the Unreal ecosystem and I can definitely see a place for a set of users who use Blueprints in Unreal extensively wanting to peruse those questions (and similarly for people who use Unreal exclusively with C++ to want to hide them).

How to tag unreal egine questions considering the lighting,editor, particle system, blueprints.... ?

@Wildfire You can express combined topics by using more than one tag — eg. including the [tag:lighting] tag with the [tag:unreal] tag to ask about lighting in Unreal.

I have done this.


text:
We've blacklisted [engine], should we do the same for the other similar tags?
This is a follow up of a previous question about doing something with the tags API and SDK, which made me realize they were not alone, and that they might be useless.
It is also a follow up of this question asking about the usage of the engine tag, where the conclusion was that the tag was not needed as it was a meta-tag.
Should we do the same for the following engine-like tags, where the descriptions are ok but, don't contain tag usage?

api
framework
libraries
sdk

Is there a case where one of these could not be tagged with their specific API/Framework/Library/SDK, or with architecture, or with software-engineering, or with another more specific tag?

If you feel a tag should be added to this list, please add them, or leave a comment.

I've removed all of the uses of "sdk" and put it on the blacklist.

Same for 'framework'.

I am of the opinion that these tags should be blacklisted.

You would not be able to use the tags by themselves to adequately tag a question, unless the question was only specific to general context. Such context would probably be to broad for our scope.
To more accurately use the tags, you would have to also use the more specific tag to provide context, in which case these tags are only being used as meta tags. On brief review, this appears to be the current most recent usage of these tags.

I could argue with this by saying, that you can use them by themselves when you want to make your own engine/framework/library, but that doesn't add anything to the questiom and thus they're still pointless.

@Bálint, that was my reasoning behind use of the engine tag. It was pointed out that such questions are also too broad for our scope, by nature.


text:
Do we need a "no clear problem statement" close reason?
I've only been active (again) on the site for the past couple of weeks, and an awful lot of the programming questions I see contain:

an explanation of what someone's doing, possibly making vague references to some troubles they're having along the way
some code
a question of "any ideas?" or "thoughts?"

The problem is: these questions don't state what problem they're asking us for assistance with. This site isn't intended to work like code review (I think) where we look for arbitrary things to point out — we need to be pointed in the direction of what kinds of answers we should be providing. It's not clear if the troubles they're describing are what they currently need help with, especially when they describe multiple.
I've recently been casting close votes of these as Unclear. Some examples:

How do I duplicate the Candy Crush level menu in Objective-C or Swift?
Quaternion.LookRotation on z-up gameEngine
C++ Class to Void Pointer, Data Lost?
Determining If a Point is Within Bounds
Accelerometer for x at any angle
Insert 3d text to the front face of a cube GameObject (I think)

Many of these don't seem to get closed as unclear or get much attention at all. I've had mixed success leaving comments trying to get them improved. I think questions like this lower the apparent quality of the site, and at least for me it's frustrating because it makes it harder to find pearls among the sand. (An overabundance of poor quality programming questions was, in fact, why I previously went inactive.)
Is there something we can do to improve close rates & handling of these questions? Would we benefit from a version of Stack Overflow's "no clear problem statement" off topic close reason to succinctly state our requirements to people?
(This is a genuine question, since I'm relatively new back to the site after a while & I will not have as good an overall picture of the site's circumstances as all of you reading this. I'm open to the idea I might be concerned over nothing serious, or that the close reason will be a poor way to go about handling this.)

The text of Stack Overflow's "no clear problem statement" close reason:

Questions seeking debugging help ("why isn't this code working?") must include the desired behavior, a specific problem or error and the shortest code necessary to reproduce it in the question itself. Questions without a clear problem statement are not useful to other readers. See: How to create a Minimal, Complete, and Verifiable example.

We don't need the "reproduceable code" portion of this since we have the following close reason already:

Questions about debugging a problem must provide a minimal, complete, verifiable example of the issue so that readers can diagnose it without needing to guess, read all of your code, or engage in extensive back-and-forth dialog. For more information, see this meta thread.

I see no practical benefit from a "no clear problem statement" close reason. We already cover these issues across two separate close reasons, and as such, a third would be redundant. Furthermore, I see conflicting issues in the mentioned examples; clear issues in why they should not really be closed for the mentioned reason, and clear issues in why they should be closed, anyway.

In such cases where you can not tell what the user is asking, we already have the practical close reason of "unclear what your asking". Asking them for a problem statement seems a bit counter productive; we don't actually want a "problem statement", technically. We want a question.
In the linked questions, there is a clear pattern of not asking a question, where it is otherwise very clear what the user is asking. "I am trying to do this, but this does not work". In such cases, it is much easier to simply add the question, ergo "why is this not working". The ones that are really bad have already been closed; and not after the fact - they were closed before you posted about it in meta. I address this fact because it implies that this is not a case of having been dealt with because the questions were brought up, in meta. They took the natural course through the close voting queue, and the community handled them.

In cases where you have the problematic "debug my code" questions, the "verifiable, minimal example" close vote seems more than adequate. The only thing it does not clearly cover is the lack of a question; again, we can use "unclear" in these situations, if the question is not so blatantly obvious that we can not just simply edit them in.

Thanks, I'm glad the meta community feels the unclear reason is enough.

Do we need a “no clear problem statement” close reason?

I don't think we do.
I think the

unclear what you're asking
Please clarify your specific problem or add additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it’s hard to tell exactly what you're asking. See the How to Ask page for help clarifying this question.

fulfills what you intend to do here.

Many of these don't seem to get closed as unclear or get much attention at all.

In the cases of the Any thought? questions, I think it's generally interpreted as "What am I doing wrong and how can I improve it?" or "I've built it like this, but I'm not sure it's the most appropriate way; am I on the right path or is there something I could improve?" In either case, I think the post could be edited to improve and highlight the actual question.
If the actual question can't be interpreted from the rest of the post, then the unclear what you're asking close vote should be used.

Is there something we can do to improve close rates & handling of these questions?

I think mods don't hesitate to close questions that are blatantly unclear, but I think if there is a slight way to interpret it in a way, they will not cast their vote on them. So I guess having more active users reviewing the questions that are waiting in the review queues would do the trick :) This would help set the tone by the community.

Agree that the review process could use more attention. I hope reviews are stopping a great majority of poor content that I never get to see, yet sometimes I look at new posts & cannot fathom how they made it past a screening.

Maybe we should petition to enable review screening, like they do on other exchanges? Every so often, a "bad post" is dug up from the past. If the user fails to act appropriately, they get banned from that queue for maybe a week.

Might be worth taking a look at how people have been using the First Posts queue

When I asked about getting a close option for free resource questions, I was informed that we get 3 custom close options and maybe a fourth under special circumstances.
I don't feel the benefit of gaining that option outweighs the loss of removing one of our other custom close options ("general programming should be on SO," "how to get started," and "debugging a problem") or that the situation is different enough from 'unclear' to warrant asking for a fourth option.

Unclear, too broad, and opinion based aren't custom, FWIW. Our custom ones are "general programming should be on SO," "how to get started," and "debugging a problem." Custom reasons show up under the "off-topic because..." drill-down.

Yup, that was clearly an error on my part. I've updated my answer accordingly. Thanks for catching that.