Hi folks!
With the addition of two new moderators (OTO and myself) BlenderArtists is at last looking to expand the GE forums. Fligh, OTO, and I have come up with a sketch of the planned changes, which we now submit for discussion prior to implementation.
The proposed change is to split the current Game Engine forum into two subforums, these being:
Game Engine Support. This is the question and answer forum. Here is where you ask questions (“How do I…”) or discuss game engine developments (“When is OGRE…”). Here is not where you would post screenshots of your game, new tutorials, or cool light bloom demos. This forum would probably also contain all the old content of the current forum.
Games, Demos, and Resources. This forum is reserved for content which would be fun and useful to others. This includes everything from games and demos, to tutorials and resource .blends. Simply put, this is where you post things that you want to share with the community. (The idea is that in here your new game will not be swiftly buried by people asking how to make raelly cool MMORPG. ;)) Note that the title (Games, Demos, and Resources) is only a placeholder, if you can think of a better title please speak up!All righty? Now it’s time for you to tell us what you think of the plan. Love it? Hate it? Want to change it? We’re doing our best to make everybody happy, so don’t be afraid to speak up.
How about: Work in Progress; Finished Projects; Game Engine Tests; Game Engine-Modeling and Texturing; Game Engine - Logic and Python; Game Engine - Other.
That’s a good idea. By splitting the forum, it will be easier for beginners (like me) to find informations on how to use the GE, and for people with complete games or demo to show their work. I can’t see any problem with this.
The reason we have only suggested two forums is that having so many is bound to cause confusion and make things more difficult to moderate. Especially since we’re starting with only one forum, a transition from one to six is bound to be far rockier than one to two. More could potentially be added in the future, but in the immediate future I don’t think it would be wise to create more than three.
well, blender has more than just the game engine accessibility .
I suggest,
Blender Game engine help… basic help for all game topics
Blender + other game engine help (for exporting to 3rd party render /game engines like Ogre, Crystalspace, quake 3, etc)
Game Producers (all the “OMG let me start a new team, and everyone else does the work” posts can go)
Game Programmers … all the code snipplets, and code tutorials here, THIS INCLUDES LOGIC BLOCKS, and any other way known to program the game engine. (GLSL, python, Logic block,etc)
Game artists … Where people can get critiqued on game art… tutorials go here too.
I also think that we should have some type of mark to identify people in the forum.
have classes like this set up :
“has never made a game”
“has made a real time presentation (can be a game demo)”
“Game in progress”
“Completed (x) ammount of game’s”
This way we can actually see who knows what they are talking about, and who is just blowing a bunch of useless bullsh!t untested theory’s up new users asses.
I have a feeling this is why there are not many blender games in existence. Way too much mis-information from day dreamers, rather than from actual game developers.
I think a WIP game would fall under the category of demos. The 2 categories you guys came up with are just about right, but I’d tweak it just a bit, moving “resources” into the main forum. This way everything instructional would be in one section, leaving the Games forum for showing off and getting feedback. Try and get the star ratings for the Games and demos forum.
Game Engine: Support & Resources
Game Engine: Games, Demos, and Works in Progress
Skullbunny read my mind, so I’ll just second that - the main concern as I see it (having been here for a very long time) is to seperate the instructional/help from the WIP’s/showing off.
I think that’s the best start at least.
It sounds great that they want to split the forum into several parts. Althought it would be better to have 3 parts, named:
Game engine Support
Game engine support, posting bugs, patches, and external game engine solutions. For example applications that are used with games (Font creator for blender) and such
This forum part includes a sticky:
Game engine bugs
how to report bugs (link to bug reporter)
Ogre project
people working on ogre integration can post here builds, so it stays clean, nice blog and always on top
Bullet project
Same as above except that it contains bullet developement information + link to website and stuff
Games, Demos, and Resources
People working on projects, games and learning resources can post here there topics.
Finished games and demos (sticky)
Sources and tutorials (sticky)
Game engine questions
People having questions game engine related can ask them here
FAQ (sticky)
people still always ask the same question, now there has to be an official up to date FAQ page which is a must have. Also some rules.
So why the engine questions forum part? because when people post projects, games, tutorials or another stuff it’s always afther a few hours almost on the bottom of the page because there are soo many questions posted each day / hour that you’ll only see complains, repeating questions and hard to figure out whats some cool content to read else then only questions. So this forum part keep the rest of the forum clean, and good moderator should keep an eye on it that people only post questions here and not in another topics
That’s my idea on how we should moderate it. In those forum parts we can make a few stickies to have some sub-forum parts, but only if they are for good use.
I had this idea when I was moderator of the game engine forum, but great to see someone trying to really split it as long it’s still on blenderartists
