Game Development

10:01 AM

I skimmed the answer. I think it basically says the same thing.

2:38 PM

I gotta say, I just got on GDSE and just saw a bunch of ridiculous questions like “how to make clash of clans game”. Like, that’s a REALLY vague question and how is anyone supposed to know what you want?

Thankfully @DMGregory closed it I think.

user92578

Actually me, Phillip and Vaillancourt closed that one

noobprogrammer

Oh, well that’s good because I was like “must be a newbie”

DMGregory

It's OK - we get them regularly.

noobprogrammer

Well thanks for getting rid of it; it kinda triggered me 😂

user92578

The question falls very well under the close reason "How to get started", and you can help with closing those questions by flagging them as such, until you get close vote access :)

DMGregory

2:41 PM

Getting into game development is bewildering (as I'm sure you've found, as we did too!) so it's natural to want to ask for guidance. This just isn't the place, but that's not obvious to new visitors.

noobprogrammer

Ya, I remember my first question. It got closed pretty quick, but now i try to ask questions on actual code more, not opinions.

Vaillancourt

Yep. No harm done in asking them. One has to start somewhere. Perhaps someone will give them a tip or two in the comments.

DMGregory

Thanks for sticking around! I know getting your first question closed can be jarring.

Vaillancourt

Yep :)

noobprogrammer

I know, I think I’ve been on like every day

It’s kinda fun

user92578

2:44 PM

I got most of my beginner skills from this chat, of course once I had asked enough on the main site to have chat access

Vaillancourt

My first question closed :)

DMGregory

You can get a badge for that. 😉 (Visiting daily)

noobprogrammer

I know I want to try to get to 100 days!

But it’s really cool how I can talk to people like you who know way more, because I’ve actually gotten better over this last month substantially. Thank you guys for helping me with that!

Vaillancourt

:)

DMGregory

Glad it's helping!

noobprogrammer

3:34 PM

By the way, how did you guys get so much reputation? Was it from asking questions or answering them? Or was it from being on the site for so long?

DMGregory

It tends to snowball a bit once you've been here a while. Every so often I'll get a +10 from questions or answers I wrote years ago that turned out to be helpful to someone today.

noobprogrammer

Oh that makes sense

user92578

I am nowhere near the big numbers, but yeah, a few upvote here and there even though I rarely write answers these days

DMGregory

So, writing questions that don't help just yourself, or answers that will help not just the asker, is a good strategy.

noobprogrammer

Well, I'd say you're at the big numbers, but that's probably because I'm at 77 reputation!

DMGregory

3:42 PM

Time helps too. Tyyppi_77 and I have both been using the site for 7 years now. So it adds up!

noobprogrammer

Well, I'm not planning on leaving anytime soon, so maybe someday I will get a lot of reputation

user92578

Oh wow, has it really been 7 years..? I was so young when I got here :D

noobprogrammer

0

Q: Another try. List don't remove properly

I hve that script: public void ActivateCard(Card card) { Debug.Log("Activating card: " + card.CardsData); if (card.CardsData.creatureName != string.Empty) Summon(card); else CastSpell(card); if (_hand.Cards.C...

unity c#

I just found this really strange question

It is all over the place and I have no idea what the person is actually looking for.

Should I flag it?

nwp

Luck also helps. Sometimes you answer a question that doesn't even really belong on the site and you keep getting upvotes.

DMGregory

Posts with images or animated gifs tend to get more love, so illustrating your posts clearly can also help attract the rep. 😉 (I guess it's easier for someone to drop an upvote if they can see the answer works, rather than have to run the code to check)

noobprogrammer

3:46 PM

Oh ok, well I guess I will do that more then (that is if my code actually works lol)

Pikalek

I collected my through answers. When I became active I was heavily vested in procedural generation & felt that was an area where I had expertise to share. I also took a lot of extra time with some of the posts I made - included things like reference links, book/journal/article recommendations & illustrations.

I also paid more attention to layout - a long answer that's a wall of text isn't as useful (or as upvoted) as something with a clean layout, bullet points, etc that allows readers to quickly determine if the content is applicable to them or not.

DMGregory

nwp's right about luck. A lot of my rep came from answering a few questions that turned out to get a lot of clicks, because they were about a controversial topic or issues that non-specialists wonder about too. So... rep isn't always a fair measure of contribution by any means.

user92578

Yeah my top voted answer is about Godot, which I have never ever used

user92578

I just know how to Google documentation

DMGregory

Haha. It weirded me out when I got a C++ tag badge. I have never compiled a C++ program in my life.

Pikalek

3:47 PM

Yeah, sometimes just knowing how to find answers is the skill needed.

nwp

My top answer is a beginner C++ question and the second highest voted answer is how to use clang-format.

You can't influence your luck, but if you answer a lot you get lucky eventually.

Pikalek

Modern search engines have made a lot of popular stuff more accessible, but obscure stuff sometimes just comes down to experience & recalling that you read something about that once before. And that sort of knowledge base just comes with time & paying attention to things.

user92578

I feel like duplicate flagging is heavily dependant on faint memories of seeing a similar question before

Pikalek

^ Agreed

noobprogrammer

Thanks for the advice guys. I have to go now, my great aunt just passed.

DMGregory

3:51 PM

I'm sorry for your loss.

noobprogrammer

Thank you.

DMGregory

4:28 PM

@Pikalek Do our users even use search engines? 😜 Could have fooled me from some of the questions we get...

Vaillancourt

I'm certain some of them do.

Pikalek

:P

True, sometimes it feels like they don't.

I wonder if there's a feedback loop problem though.

Google ranks SE high & quickly in the listings. Maybe that sends a signal of, ask your question there instead of keep reading?

brug

Googling programming problem requires learning the language to form your searches.

Pikalek

Yes, I hadn't considered that.

brug

When I first started trying to learn this stuff I could spend days Googling what was really a fairly easy problem. But I didn't know what it was called.

I once spent 3 days on a Linker error because I was in over my head.

Vaillancourt

4:40 PM

Yes, on a SE point of view, it's kind of a chicken-and-egg problem: you need rep to ask in the chat, where you'd learn quite easily what to search for, but you need to ask good questions in order to get the rep allowing you to ask.

Pikalek

Yeah. When I hear talk of how "you don't need a degree for X" one of the first things that comes to my mind is, maybe not, but it does help to have a few years of practice just knowing what stuff is called even if you didn't memorize how it's done or works.

I've forgotten tons of content, but my index has held up well.

DMGregory

Thinking more of the questions we get like "How do I do X in Unity" where you can literally copy and paste the question title into a search box and get multiple tutorials or assets that do X.

brug

Well yeah. Then there is just the Gimme teh codez

Pikalek

Yes. Inclusivity is nice, but sometimes I feel it has come at the expense of a ratio that favors deeper questions.

user92578

Mathematics has the Mathematics/Math Overflow separation to deal with that I think, but we have nowhere near the userbase for something like that

Pikalek

4:46 PM

That's interesting, I wasn't aware of both.

Maybe that's for the best, Math Overflow appears to be grappling above my weight class :O

user92578

Yup same

Pikalek

In end of week culinary news, I successfully cultivated koji barley & used some in a nice risotto.

Gonna try a couple more recipes before attempting to corner the rep market on koji questions over on seasoned advice.

Oh hey, @noobprogrammer - I meant to mention to you earlier - I found it helpful to look at high rep posts about things I was interested in. Not only did that deepen my knowledge pool about stuff I cared about, it gave me a baseline for writing better answers.

noobprogrammer

@DMGregory I think the issue is that there is kinda a mentality that “Stack Exchange can fix my every problem without a doubt, which is one reason why I believe personally they come to GDSE first.

@Pikalek Ok, thanks. That’s what I try to do, to see the best format and such.

user92578

5:03 PM

@Pikalek Ooh sounds very nice!

DMGregory

Good advice. Also, nice work on the cultivation and risotto! 😊

Pikalek

Spouse & I liked it alot. It gave a very parmesan flavor to it. Kiddo is a bit more mercurial about meals - didn't love or hate it, probably unrelated to the koji, but hard to say.

noobprogrammer

How do you cultivate it? Do you just buy a product or does it require more work than that?

DMGregory

Risotto and fermented foods can both lean to more of an adult palate, so that's probably to be expected.

Pikalek

@noobprogrammer You can buy pre-cultivated grains; I made mine from spores I purchased online.

noobprogrammer

5:18 PM

Cool, I might have to try that sometime. I tried making yogurt with cultures once, and I'm proud to say that it came out great!

Pikalek

If you liked that process, then you might also enjoy this as well.

Or if you want to stick to dairy, you could try to make cheese or kefer.

noobprogrammer

5:31 PM

I think I'll try making cheese as a start, then probably move up to the cooler stuff later on.

DMGregory

Making games is tough enough for me. 😅

Though admittedly less delicious.

...unless maybe you're making nour

user92578

I like the idea of cooking, just not spending money on ingredients, effort on cooking or doing the dishes :P

DMGregory

I like cooking. Just bad at keeping on top of growing my own ingredients. Had a little hydroponic kit in my kitchen that half wilted and half overgrew. 😂

Pikalek

7:43 PM

Aquaponics is on my bucket list. I think I'd also have to go the counter top route though. I like the idea of an outdoor system, but given the winter months here, I don't think it would be practical for me right now.

user92578

What's the food product of that? The fish? The plants?

Pikalek

8:41 PM

The ideal is both, but it depends on your setup. In the countertop scale stuff I've seen, the fish/animals are decorative & you grow herbs or greens. You might be able to get fresh water prawns going in a tank that small, but I haven't looked into the logistics of that.

DMGregory

10:08 PM

Speaking of lucky answers....

19

A: What is the standard practice for animating motion -- move character or not move character?

Animations in which the character translates away from the origin are said to contain "Root Motion" - because the root bone moves. This allows the animator to directly author subtle non-uniformities in the movement speed, in a "what you see is what you get" fashion. Say the character slows down s...

This one's really not that great, but I guess "What's the standard..." attracted a lot of curiosity clicks?

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