13 replies to this topic

[LuciferX]

Let me first say, Great board, seems to be a great community here.

However, I feel that there are a few things that your board lacks to be called a true Development board.

One: a section for people who are trying to start a team, aka the help wanted section.

Two: a services offered section, aka the opposite of the help wanted, the help offered section.

Also I would like to be able to change the skin of the board, I have a hard time reading the colors at Blue, I need it to be diffrent colors


Keep up the great work, B)

[NomadRock]

The first two are very good ideas, I also recommend them. The third is already in the works, should be here soon.

[Nick]

My personal comments:

LuciferX said:

One: a section for people who are trying to start a team, aka the help wanted section.

This would attract way too many hopeless newbies. Teams are best started with your college buddies, not with oversea people. I've never known any of such teams produce anything interesting.

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Two: a services offered section, aka the opposite of the help wanted, the help offered section.

The whole forum is a 'services offered' section. If someone posts a question, we try to answer it.

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Also I would like to be able to change the skin of the board, I have a hard time reading the colors at Blue, I need it to be diffrent colors.

Calibrate your monitor and/or buy a TFT. There's nothing wrong with this blue.

Sorry if I sound pessimistic, I don't intend to. It's just that, there's a risk that an 'improvement' becomes something negative. GamenDev.net has a lot of this extra functionality, that it becomes non-functional as a whole...

[NomadRock]

Newbies will be attracted anyways, this is a way to concentrate them into one part of the forums so they dont mess up the rest of them.

By services offered he means a place to post that you are a musicion and you want to offer some music for a project. It is true that college buddies are the best way to get a project going, but sometimes this isn't possible. It is also the case that business post to boards looking to recruit, there should be a place for this type of talk.

Some people just dont like blue, this shouldn't be a problem, CSS was designed for this very purpose. It seems like you are having a bad day, Nick, eat some ice cream!

[Nick]

NomadRock said:

Newbies will be attracted anyways, this is a way to concentrate them into one part of the forums so they dont mess up the rest of them.

But it's like inviting them. I mean, intelligent newbies with good beginner questions are always welcome, but I've never seen anything good come out of teams created on forums. And if they see they don't get much useful response in that forum (in their opinion, because they often can't take the constructive criticism), they'll start posing in the other forums as well. So you have them either way, the only question is, do you want a junk forum like that or not? Personally, I would rather see this site keep its quality high...

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By services offered he means a place to post that you are a musicion and you want to offer some music for a project. It is true that college buddies are the best way to get a project going, but sometimes this isn't possible. It is also the case that business post to boards looking to recruit, there should be a place for this type of talk.

Good point. We have a Code Spotlight, and an 'IOTD' soon, so maybe there could be some central way to present artwork as well? People could then be free to post links to their website/resume...

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Some people just dont like blue, this shouldn't be a problem, CSS was designed for this very purpose. It seems like you are having a bad day, Nick, eat some ice cream!

I'm on a diet, my girlfriend ate all the icecream today. :unsure:

Seriously, I'm only trying to help. It's always great to hear suggestions, but it's impossible to implement all wishes and sometimes it's for the better that they are not implemented at all, even though at first they sound great. The webmasters (that's not me, I know) have to look at it very critically and should put their foot down whenever there is doubt about something...

[SnprBoB86]

Nick said:

My personal comments:

LuciferX said:

One: a section for people who are trying to start a team, aka the help wanted section.

This would attract way too many hopeless newbies. Teams are best started with your college buddies, not with oversea people. I've never known any of such teams produce anything interesting.

I can not stand to read those "Help wanted" posts, but it is not (entirely) true that nothing has good has ever been produced by people who have only ever communicated online. Just look at Counter-Strike!

I think a "Getting Started" page would be a great idea. With links to answers to common questions. I also think that moderators should ensure that newbie threads are quickly resolved with links to the appropriate part of the getting started page and then the thread should be closed.

[davepermen]

there are _some_ good projects that are based on the internet. but they are mainly mods, or done by quite advanced people actually.

i don't know of any gamedev.net or flipcode team that found themselfes by such a post, and now has a big known game out. not even a small one, actually.

problem is, they won't care. they won't post into the "Looking for Help" forum anyways, because they will note it's not the forum most people are in. ergo, they will post in a more popular one..

you have to take them as spam. even while some are serious, most are, on most pages, just spam.

[Ed Mack]

If they really want to start a game project, send them to sourceforge and get them to work untill people join them :)

[Nick]

Ed Mack said:

If they really want to start a game project, send them to sourceforge and get them to work untill people join them :)

Exactly. It's not like the stream of newbies is unmanagable, as long as we don't invite them too much. I don't mind replying to them once in a while in the regular forums to put them on the right tracks. This approach has always worked fine for flipCode, while GameDev.net tends to be flooded with newbies...

[NomadRock]

You do raise a good point, Nick, that newbies will post in the other forums if the help wanted forum doesnt get answered. You may indeed be right that there is no solution to the problem and we can only do what we can to make sure it doesn't get worse.

However, I still think there is a valid stream of job offers that should go somewhere and some very good composers who need a place to get their work out to programmers like us. I think that maybe we should not try to be a content repository though. Maybe we should pick one good place for people to put things. I personally dont know of many good places to show off music or models randomly, but maybe we should decide on one or two places to send people and agree to go there ourselves when we need content. Just a thought though.

[TheNut]

To this date, only 2 people out of about 20 actually contributed a tangible service to a project. Either my luck is bad, or there are more lazy people out there than I thought possible. A help-wanted/offered section, while intended to be helpful, might only hinder people by putting reliance on a group of people that may, in the end, contribute nothing. From my point of view, get as many free resources as you can (art/music/sounds) from the web and apply for the rest on a site like Gamasutra or DeviantArt. If you really want to cut down programming work, get a free engine like Ogre3D, analyze it over a period of a day or two, and start working with it. From my experience, I’m better off to work an extra week on the game then to spend a week finding someone and extending the project 2 weeks more because he never contributed.

What is really needed is a website that offers these free resources to the public. Not like renderosity or 3dcafe, but a nice and elegant website databasing the thousands of free resources available.

I really wish my University had prospective students. I know that we could have gone far too. Alas, relying on students to help you is equally as unlikely unless you happen to be in the right place at the right time. Only 2 people in a faculty of 500 were actually interested in making games, and I only got to know them at graduation. What luck huh?

[davepermen]

hm.. most people prefer a lazy-life.. the whole world is built on that :D

i was quite lucky, at my school there where quite some..

[LuciferX]

Hey, Are you calling me a noob?! All I want is to get a small team of coders to write the next MMOLRPG, of course we're coding the whole engine from scratch, so might take a few weeks ;)

[anubis]

what ? now you are telling me that this is taking a few weeks ? i only got a few days left before vacation is over !!! i thought this would be done over the weekend :)