Adjust the search options for google and other search engines to get better results for “Blender Game Engine”. (edditing robots.txt or the sitemap.xml)
There is a lot of content on BA (and elsewhere) that just needs higher visibility. For instance, Monster’s guides are all excellent, but they are hidden away. I think demos, reference material, and rote tutorials are all fine and dandy, but what needs to be ‘front page’ is a more conceptual description of how BGE works.
If you have a more solid conceptual understanding of the game engine, you actually know what you are looking for when you go looking. Otherwise you end up trying to do everything in a way that is not inline with how BGE is organized, because that part is tucked away in a 3 year old post in a forum you do not frequent. I hear a lot of people say things like ‘bge is good for testing, but i will stick with X for production’.
I think what this actually means is “I have no idea how BGE works overall”.
BGE needs a website. .some other websites on “How to make FPS,TPS,MMORPG etc” from start to Finish. .and also Blender Game Engine News just like Blendernation
Haven’t replied on this until now, but the ideas mentioned here are generally all good.
I wouldn’t want the site to be unprofessional, or to be full of ads, but even a simple ad off in the corner can drive a little revenue - perhaps even enough to finance development of a new feature every few months. I mainly just wanted a site that kind of ‘focuses’ BGE users.
I mean, if you were to pick up the BGE one day, where would you go for help? If you never typed in “Blender Game Engine Forum”, you might not get here (when this is generally the largest collection of tutorials and resources for the BGE). I think it just needs to be more focused so that new users aren’t turned off by it. I mean, if you just looked on Blender.org, you might not even know just how powerful the BGE can be and what it can do. There’s not really any link between the cool games being made here and shown on YouTube (which could use a playlist for BGE games), and blender.org. Just a little more info about the BGE in general would be nice, I suppose. Maybe just modifying the Wiki would be a good idea.
Some years ago i created a few pages to collect and categorize threads in resource forum. You can find the links in the stickies. The purpose was to keep good resources visible rather then to hide them in the large pile. So we get a catalogue of fone things. Even if it not much text to write it is still a lot of work to find “good” resources. Rating threads would help but is rarly done.
My problem is that I really do not know how to work with the wiki ( in terms of structure e.g. Where to place tutorials, where to place resources etc.). But i do not have that much time either. I can’t upload images ( as far as I know).
Finally a wiki is a perfect place for textual tutorials.
I think that updating the wiki.blender.org is always a good idea, i saw that some links are not working anymore. However its not the place for reviews or downloading games. It also would be nice if there was a place for funding only on blender game engine functionalities i dont know if there is enough interest because its not on the official website either. I would like to see a good structured website only on BGE topics for beginner and the more advanced users. It would be greate if you can make a single page showing al the games sorted on topic/genre making it possible to play and download with one or two ads that people oustide this community would like to visit aswell maybe they can donate if they like.
I like to help. (respectively I’m helping currently)
I’d updated some images (they showed the Game Engine 2011), some links and Keyboard-shortcuts.
Also I’m maintaining the german sites (adding new facts and so on…)
I would help where I can. I might find some colleagues to help as well. However just official blender sites no side initiatives. I think its good to mimic what Unity3d does. http://www.unity3d.com/learn.
So you’ll end up with four main resources:
1: wiki: Manual (exact description of features etc)
2: wiki: Learning guides (quality tutorials! ie http://www.unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/modules)
3: Community Forum (BA)
4: BGE api
So main focus would be learning guides and updating the manual?
Ofcourse we need showcases as well but first things first, we’ll conquer the world later
I have a colleague who works for the wikimedia foundation. I think it would be wise to use some macro and/or templates to make life easier to maintain I’ll ask him for some advice.
Just a thought, but a good start to boosting the materials on wiki.blender.org might be to convert the already existing and excellent tutorials floating around here to the wiki format. Things like Monster’s BGE Guides and SolarLune’s tutorials are awesome for newcomers like myself, but having them scattered all over the place in different formats makes them harder to find and utilize. If they were part of the actual documentation, in the tutorials section of the wiki perhaps, then they’d be accessible right alongside all the other documentation, and could be more easily updated as new versions of Blender come out. Not only that, but if those documents were on the wiki, it might inspire others with tutorials to put them on wiki.blender.org as well, making it one big BGE resource on the official Blender documentation site.
If anybody would want help with this, I could give it a go in my free time. I’ve played with wikis a little bit in the past, wouldn’t mind getting the chance to learn how to work with one and get some solid docs on the Blender page.
