Why do beginners always want to start from such insanely hard things like RTS or MMORPG?

Because you didn't ask them if they can make pong.

Also because those are fun and that's what they care about.

It is like "I've never played scroll shooters but want to beat Touhou on lunatic difficulty no miss no bomb send me teh guides"

Sounds like a fun challenge. Roguelike mode, see how long you can last. Even more fun with friends when you just try to beat each other and add in beers.

I last no more that one stage with misses and bombs.

That's good. At least you won't hog the controller. If you make a game for fun and the learning experience without the pressure that it must feed you for years you can afford to set dumb goals and not care.

I remember how someone wrote a bot for nethack. It used starting items to guess the RNG seed and exploited it. It didn't fight monsters. It made the game never spawn them. It didn't search for items. It wished for all of them at the first fountain. It didn't search for portals on the Planes. It forced them to be in the adjacent tile. The most epic superpower.

@SpartanDonut Donut!

@trollingchar people want to make the games they like playing. They like playing rpg or mmo so they want to make one. They dont like to play pong so they dont make it

also someone who hasnt made a game doesnt know that theyve picked something hard

this chat became quite empy, compared to 3 years ago...

All the chats did. I haven't heard a good theory what happened.

oh, that's sad, I have a warm memory of chat life here 3 year ago...

@nwp I've sometimes wondered if the "be nice" mandate might have had some unintended side effects in that regard.

I don't now if they coincide. Could be. After seeing this I'm no longer sure those effects are unintended.

@Pikalek Here, it did.

@nwp Hadn't seen that post & I found it informative & interesting - thanks. Regarding the timing & coincidence - I wondered the same. I searched for the post about it & was a bit surprised to see that it's now almost 5 years old. But then I also considered that user/participation attrition probably wouldn't be an immediate crisp break. The rate of growth would soften it some & some dissatisfied subject-matter experts would hold out longer than others.

There is an image with graphs of messages per day of the biggest chatrooms from Shog9 I believe and they all drop like 30% within 1 month or so and never recover.

I'm also not saying it's the cause. I do think it's a possible & likely factor. In reality, I suspect no one single thing is responsible for what we feel is a dip in the chat community.

@nwp Huh, maybe I typed that too slow then.

There is also the chance it just doesn't matter. There is enough influx of fresh blood that stackoverflow can afford to churn through people and never run out.

Probably not true for other sites, but I believe other sites are much less negative.

Yes, that's what I meant by rate of growth softening the break.

yeah, I wouldn't be shocked to also find that we might lag behind a bit in terms of cause & effect.

@Rhys donut's not been around for quite some time

The cause is well understood. The meta posts of "please stop fastest gun in the west and help vampires and answering dupes" are probably as old as meta and keep coming. I'd love to know the rational behind it. I don't believe it's ignorance or incompetence, I'm fairly sure there is reasoning behind it.

Might just be "Don't change a working recipe".

The rationale behind what? "Be nice"?

No, the rationale behind "We know answering duplicates is bad and closing duplicates is good, yet our reward systems does the exact opposite and we will not fix that no matter how many times you complain on meta or how many subject matter experts leave."

Ugh. Did I really just make a class called CircleDemoThing in a package labelled other? Am I out of coffee? Are these related? [shakes 8 ball]: "signs point toward yes"

@nwp Ah, okay, that context makes sense to me now.

@Pikalek quite clear, ah?

@Leggy7 I wasn't necessarily trying to be ironic there. Unfortunately.

@Pikalek trash package "other" could be included in my DDD speech in the forthcoming month

smile intended, :)

how much rep is required?

but chat with 0 rep is a can of worms you do not want to open

your concerns are valid. but the alternative is worse :(

I think so

@Josh I'd imagine if anyone could joining the chat without reputation, it would make it an easy target for trolls, although I see what you mean

anyone can create a new account

you ban them from chat, new account, boom they're back

yes

but they want chat to take less management

@Almo my first thought

it's only an auxilliary in that it keeps people hanging around the site and it generates traffic with the RSS feed on top

I'd say it doesn't happen often, because it's not worth it for them. If the reputation restriction is off, it will suddenly be worth it

I think there's an important difference between 0 rep versus 0 rep with interesting question that doesn't quite fit the SE model (as in the example @Josh gave).

I'd prefer something like mods get a tick box on a user's profile where they can allow chat

so if you or DMG see one of these you can go "boom you have chat access"

I think that would make less work than allowing 0-rep chat

That sounds like it would work, this way you can invite anyone

yeah

@Josh Which circles back to the post about spending more time petitioning for SE tools than doing other SE stuff.

would be great if we could get a test on that

for like a month or something

I've had a blog in the past, and did the mistake of allowing anyone to comment. Within days I had random people posting about visiting some random site to "work from home" or other nonsense

and my blog wasn't popular at all

I don't know how SE works.. who can decide stuff like this?

@Josh sad but true

@Josh It was just a random blogspot site, nothing too professional.

I've seen some spam here in the past, I do agree it doesn't happen often, but its usually removed within minutes

@Josh Does a clean up show to regular users? For example some [removed] lines?

Yeah, that's what I meant. I don't chat everyday, but I probably check on chat at least every other day & typically skim the back logs when I do so. I've rarely seen redactions here in chat.

@Josh Does that have any deleted answer? Because I can't see any, maybe I need more reputation?

If we're talking about spam in general, I saw some a few days ago in an edit review. Similar thing to above, massive copy pasta vomit.

Looking back, the site already flagged it as likely spam. Looks like a couple of 'yup, that's spam' clicks was enough to send it back to the abyss.

Something slightly off-topic, but I always found the animation when someone logs into chat silly. First time I saw it, I though it was only for me when I log in, but then I realised it also appears if someone else logs in.

I can't imagine what it would look like if like 10+ people log in around the same time

you mean the icon joining the list on the top right?

if so, I think they get consumed form a queue

Yeah that's the one.

so not all users are displayed?

All users are displayed

@Josh There's nothing wrong with globals IMHO. Every game has a core and injecting it everywhere is too much unnessessary overengineering.

@trollingchar Globals have their place, but I've worked on projects where everything (and I mean everything) is a global variable, and it was a nightmare to work on

@Josh I also encountered a user with low rep asking how to make NPC relation system. He got only 3 upvotes and did not proceed to chat.

@Almo oh really? i just happened to pop in on one of the days he was here too then!

@TomTsagk They should be used carefully. I don't even let them be anywhere except the static core (except constants)

There are cases which they make sense. for example in constants. I think the biggest issue is when people don't know how to use them and they think "it works, so it doesn't matter", and then you end up with some spaghetti code which is impossible for other people to understand

@TomTsagk It's the case with everything, not only globals.

Some people use patterns this way.

@trollingchar true, although assuming one is using encapsulation properly, then a new person can get an idea of how the project works, even if its not properly organised. This becomes nearly impossible with globals

I asked, but he had low rep and I couldn't invite him.

@Josh My philosophy is that there should be a filesystem-like hierarchy. You know, we can access a file by absolute path and by relative path. Absolute path is bound to global core, and relative to this object.

wait, it's not closed yet?

@Josh Well, then we should change the subject.