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[racter]

Hey yall!

If you haven't run across or used it before, StackOverflow.com is a very successful programmers' Q+A site.  The company has another offering called StackExchange.com, which lets you deploy StackOverflow clones quickly+easily.

I have a feeling that a SO clone focused on game development could be helpful (and I was surprised to see that there wasn't one already), so I'm considering signing up for a 45-day trial with StackExchange to start one & see how it goes.  After the 45-day trial there's a tiered pricing scheme based on traffic; it's a significant but not outrageous cost, which would be (to some unknown but probably modest extent) offset by advertisements & donations.

I have 3 questions!

1. Am I crazy and something like this already exists?

2. Does this sound even remotely helpful?

3. What would be a good name for the site?

[Triplefox]

Someone did start one:
http://questions.gamestruction.com/

And as you can see by looking at it, it's actually really tough to get a community running from scratch. I've been bitten by the community-project bug a few times - with a variety of topics in a variety of ways - and for the most part, I've never been very successful. It helps if you have the star power to attract a critical mass from the outset, or a topic that naturally invites high traffic. If you don't have either of those, you have to make the site a destination for other reasons besides the community. TIGSource built itself up from both the blog posts and from Derek Yu's success with Aquaria and Spelunky.

So before you start anything - whether or not it's based on StackExchange - think about how you'll go about building up the traffic. "Build it and they'll come" has a very low likelihood of success. Niches are a stronger option long-term, but they take even more work to get started since the existing "hooks" won't be there. It really has to be considered in a business-like "find the market, supply it, maintain the organization" fashion even if you aren't out to make money, otherwise it just won't get off the ground. Personally, I have elected to restrain myself from "announcing" a community project. If I end up with one, it would be by accident.

As for the StackOverflow paradigm, I think it's different, but not necessarily better. It does do a good thing in that it discourages both the fluffy, repetitious discussion of forums, and the content-free organizational mess common to wikis. It would probably be a good thing to try contributing to that "Gamestruction" site. I'm sure it was started with good intentions, maybe we could promote it a little.

[racter]

Someone did start one:
http://questions.gamestruction.com/

Oh nice, thanks!  I dug around for a while but somehow didn't come across this.

And yeah you're definitely right-on about community-building/attracting, it's a very tough nut to crack.

[Mipe]

40 views for "How do I become a full time indie game developer?"
70 views for "How much money can a flash game make?"
29 views for "If you had to make 100k in one year from indie game development, how would you go about it?"
27 views for "How do you sell games online?"

Actual design, technical and such questions have none or next to no views. Nice to see what people really think when they talk indie games.  

[Danmark]

Forums that deal with game implementation already provide more than adequate Q+A. However, you'll find that the same questions are endlessly asked and answered, and none of that information is readily available (any FAQ I've seen has been helpful but incomplete). What about an encyclopedia of game development?

[Bad Sector]

Actual design, technical and such questions have none or next to no views. Nice to see what people really think when they talk indie games.  

Being able to live (and if possible live comfortably) by doing what you love is the dream of most sane people and indie games is one of the cases where it is actually possible to make this dream a reality.

Making games and making money from them are equally important. The problem, however, is that while there are heaps of information and communities about how to make games, there is very little information about how to make money by making games.

Personally the only relevant community i know is the indiegamer forums, which are mostly business oriented (not to say that there aren't technical posts, but the non-tech posts are the majority). However, from a quality point of view, the information there is not comparable to the information from a tech-oriented community such as gamedev for example.

[mcc]

Forums that deal with game implementation already provide more than adequate Q+A. However, you'll find that the same questions are endlessly asked and answered, and none of that information is readily available (any FAQ I've seen has been helpful but incomplete). What about an encyclopedia of game development?

Something that I've been wishing existed for awhile and half considering setting up was like an OpenGL wiki.

The OpenGL and OpenGL ES documentation is kind of spread all over the place, and it's missing a lot of information you need. For example most of the important features in OpenGL are implemented as extensions, and from looking at the descriptions of the extensions you can't usually get the information you're most interested in: which platforms and video cards support this extension, i.e., is it safe to use the extension at all. I was thinking about just copying the manpages and extension descriptions for the different versions and extensions of opengl to a wiki somewhere and then starting to fill in video card information to add the compatibility information.

Not sure if this is something other people would be interested in, or if a wiki of this type could be useful for storing other kinds of game programming information.

(One thing I'll note, iPhone programming-- which seems to practically all be game development anyway-- has a whole bunch of Q&A/FAQ type content of this type on the wiki thing at cocoadev.com. The site mostly consists of stuff like this. Also I think I've actually run across some iPhone questions on the main Stack Overflow site itself.)

[kometbomb]

The OpenGL and OpenGL ES documentation is kind of spread all over the place, and it's missing a lot of information you need.

I agree OpenGL documentation in itself is extremely poor. Compare that to practically any other API or library that actually give useful results when you google for a function name. With the Windows API you always get the relevant MSDN page first etc. With OpenGL you get a damn man page with no hyperlinks or anything or if you're especially unlucky you get an extension text file with 90 % information for mainly hardware developers. On the other hand, if you look at most dev wikis out there for the same information, you get a lot of unfinished articles, ugly code or just plain bad advice. (I dare you to even take a look at the OpenGL forums, which are full of the usual 'spergin sticking to a standard which of course is fine as long as you should actually get something done.)

Sorry for the rant.

A game dev stack thingie would be useful given it had the same advice as available otherwise but sorted by the quality and usefulness of the advice, which StackOverflow et al. does. In that sense StackOverflow is much more closer to a FAQ than a forum, which is a good thing: forums have a lot of advice but not necessarily well-organized or collected under one topic, and FAQs are hard to write and require a lot of effort and coordination to include most of the relevant stuff.

Go for it.

[Bad Sector]

I don't know what you're seeing but here:
http://www.opengl.org/sdk/docs/man/xhtml/glGenTextures.xml
I can see hyperlinks just fine at the end of the page which point to other relevant GL functions. There even hyperlinks in main body.

I'm not sure what you're looking for actually. I never had an issue finding information about GL functions. There a lot of information out there and, as they say, Google is your friend (when it comes to searching stuff).

Comparing the GL docs with any other doc... i can see many libs lacking documentation, or not being documented properly or having outdated docs. OpenGL must be properly documented btw. It isn't an implementation but a specification (which, btw, isn't why it doesn't tell you which card supports what - it isn't supposed to tell such things, vendors are supposed to implement the API as it is described and its their fault if things do not work as the GL spec says).

[kometbomb]

I don't know what you're seeing but here:
http://www.opengl.org/sdk/docs/man/xhtml/glGenTextures.xml
I can see hyperlinks just fine at the end of the page which point to other relevant GL functions. There even hyperlinks in main body.

Ok, the situation is better now then. But you used to get a text file as the first result. However, if you search for "GL_ARB_OCCLUSION_QUERY" it gets much harder to tell which link to click first (and the first result indeed is a text file). I used to dig up some constants off some Java class documentation because it had them in one place instead of hundreds of text files (didn't want to use GLEW).

The documentation also lacks practical examples which is usually where I jump if there's one. You can find a lot of stuff on forums but you can't be too sure if the examples are 100 % error free.

[Klaim]

Just to say : a stackoverflow for game developers would be a great thing.

IF


it have a straightforward url (not an underground community sub-domain) AND is somewhat related to a specific community like... TIGSource for example?

[You Blister My Paint]

There is no reason to not use Stack Overflow for game development related questions, as long as they are related to programming. There is already a decent amount of game development questions on the site already. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/game-development

The main advantage of using Stack Overflow over some game specific sub site is that the existing community is much much larger.

[racter]

There is no reason to not use Stack Overflow for game development related questions, as long as they are related to programming. There is already a decent amount of game development questions on the site already. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/game-development

The main advantage of using Stack Overflow over some game specific sub site is that the existing community is much much larger.

Nice username

I had this same thought before I started looking around for a game development specific StackOverflow clone, but I guess the idea of a more focused community is just appealing to me in and of itself.

But yeah there's the game-development tag as you linked, and also:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/game-design
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/game

And of course more technology/use-specific tags:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/opengl
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/collision-detection
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/actionscript
etc.

Very cool!

[Klaim]

I think a totally GAME oriented stackoverflow would allow people to concentrate on games and their technics (be int game design, on paper, in programming, with cards, etc.).

So, it wouldn't be about game programming but creating GAMES, theory, practice, whatever the medium used. Having straight questions about game balancing, game code organisation or even game context/scenario theory, with answers approved by experienced people will greatly help the community to grow and be more mature on the knowledge side.

[Mipe]

Well, one thing... game development and generic programming do overlap rather often. It also overlaps with math, design and whatever other topics game development involves.

It is not a bad thing if the system is shared by different communities.

[Klaim]

Yes but if we go that way then why separate super users, server admins and programers?

Because even if the domains overlap (programer, graphist, game designers, paper, code, dices), the view angle is different.

So by having a stackoverflow for game creation you get a view angle that is different from a generalist code stackoverflow and others. You can see a lot of subjects that are common on those sites. If you're a programmer then you'll have two potential sources of searching, choosing the game oriented for game domain specific questions, the coder oriented for more fundamental coding questions.

Theory of space partition question for example would have a lot more answer on a game oriented stackoverflow than in the current one. After all, it's a community based on .Net web developers, there is not a lot of game developers, and they are all about programming, not "making games".

If a faq.tigsource.com could be available with this site engine, that would help concentrate forum question on important discussions.

[Mipe]

I guess that is a good point... it could work well with the TIG community.

[kometbomb]

Yes but if we go that way then why separate super users, server admins and programers?

There's much more overlap in game programming and general programming than in general programming and shell scripts and installing MySQL or whatever black magick ye bearded ones practice. I don't want to sound like a smug bastard, which I am, but I don't think a good programmer ever thinks any algorithm is strictly for games. And if it is, it is very probable it's very common and well-documented (think sprite collisions). Space partitioning results in 34 pages of results on SO, the first one being a pretty informative question about which algorithm to choose for 3D purposes.

I think if there should be a separate community it probably should be about game design. That's really something that couldn't be on StackOverflow since it could be about art or just preferences in level design and there's really a lot to learn in that kind of stuff.

[nikki]

I think if there should be a separate community it probably should be about game design

This is the thing I agree with

the rest is mainly computer science, and either pseudo-language OR so specific it belongs somewhere on a forum around that specific language

[Klaim]

I agree too, that's why I was talking about GAME in general, game design being a bit restrictive I think because if you think about it it's a lot about mixing technical skills to make games (code, graphs, etc). So if it's about Game, then you can have a majority of game design, and the rest on technical game-related stuffs (that can be better answered somewhere more specialised on the technical domain, but it's not a problem to have answers there too).