Game Development

On Role-playing Games we've kept "gm-techniques" as a tag for "things the GM does" because we need that catch-all, but this one doesn't have that subject constraint

TheGreatDuck

@doppelgreener meta isn't a word I'd use to describe it.

doppelgreener

hmm

Overly broad then. A supertag that could apply to almost all questions. A technique is just a way of doing a thing, and "ways of doing things" is what Q&A sites cover in general.

Kinda like the [rules] tag we blacklisted & burninated on RPG SE.

It's more important to tag with what the thing is you need techniques for.

TheGreatDuck

of course

but meta means self-referencing

which it isn't doing

Alexandre Vaillancourt

Which seems to be the case for the questions with techniques!

TheGreatDuck

that's a real stretch

Alexandre Vaillancourt

12:23 AM

The doc of the site uses "meta tag" to describe the tags that don't really describe the issue covered by the question.

user4704

"meta" is used in the sense of "more comprehensive" or "transcendental"

TheGreatDuck

ugh

that's a horrible use of the term

user4704

That's nice.

user4704

That is still how the term is used on SE in reference to "meta tag."

TheGreatDuck

....

it's a misuse of the word meta

user4704

12:25 AM

Okay.

user4704

I'm not really interested in arguing the etymology of the term.

user4704

@AlexandreVaillancourt Have you been making pre-emptive removals of stuff like "api" and "library" as well?

user4704

I haven't really followed the discussion on that meta thread but I'm fairly certain it's going to reach a similar consensus.

user4704

So I've been excising them.

doppelgreener

There's an explanation of meta tags here which kind of explains in what sense we're using that name.

Alexandre Vaillancourt

12:28 AM

@JoshPetrie I have removed those I encountered when removing 'engine'.

user4704

cool

TheGreatDuck

@JoshPetrie I'm referring to the dictionary definition, not an etymology.

@doppelgreener so they're meta because we discuss them on meta? That's... silly.

user4704

It is what it is.

user4704

@doppelgreener Do you use community wiki at all, btw?

user4704

(On your site.)

user4704

12:31 AM

Shog's reference to it in one of the quotes on that thread reminded me I've been trying to come up with a good use-case for it here, and failing

TheGreatDuck

community wiki is good for when people just want content that others can edit and improve later on

or for if people don't want answers attributed to them in terms of rep and whatnot

doppelgreener

@JoshPetrie Not any more. We decided it was pointless for just about any purpose we could imagine.

17

A: How should we use Community Wiki, Part III

Community Wiki seems pointless. After reading through the history of CW on RPG.SE, and the blog post about CW, it seems like there really isn't much use for Community Wiki here. The main arguments that I have for this actually come straight from that blog post: If a question is valuable eno...

TheGreatDuck

like if they got the answer from other people's comments and stuff

user4704

I mean for questions.

user4704

Making an answer CW because you don't want the rep attribution is reasonable.

doppelgreener

12:34 AM

@TheGreatDuck Well the thing is we can already do that even if it's not CW, thanks to suggested edits, so that one's gone too.

user4704

Yeah, the only reason to CW an answer is to divest the reputation.

user4704

Transforming questions into CW is a mod thing that we don't really do any more, but the feature still exists. Most arguments for it, on this site, have boiled down to effectively trying to use it to keep otherwise off-topic questions around.

TheGreatDuck

@doppelgreener if one is compiling old comments into an answer, then... it is really inappropriate to claim the positive rep.

user4704

That's arguable.

user4704

Certainly people feel that way, but others feel like doing the work to compile and write up the answer is justification enough.

user4704

12:36 AM

(And also you're subjecting yourself to the possibility of negative rep as well, so)

doppelgreener

@TheGreatDuck If all they're doing is compiling comments without editing, it's probably a crap answer. If they're revising it to be a suitable answer, then they get the rep for that. The people who left material lying around in comments lose out, too bad, they should've posted an actual answer.

Likewise I don't expect anyone to disown reputation for improvements people suggested to their post, so getting rep for things other people commented is normal. So is updating your post to reflect things other answers have brought up, so getting rep for things posted anywhere is normal.

TheGreatDuck

@doppelgreener I'm referring to places like Math.se where sometimes people post the actual answer in a comment and (years later) there is a specific group that is a subset of the site dedicated to turning these old answers into actual answers to clear out the unanswered sections.

doppelgreener

@TheGreatDuck Good. Give them the rep for doing that. Sucks to be the person who didn't bother writing a proper answer.

Too bad, finders keepers, etc.

TheGreatDuck

@doppelgreener meta posts say otherwise.

doppelgreener

I don't care though.

TheGreatDuck

12:38 AM

sorry, but the community prerogative is the community prerogative.

doppelgreener

Which community though?

TheGreatDuck

plus, most of the people doing that are moderators

SE

doppelgreener

Sorry, there isn't a SE community prerogative on this.

user4704

SE isn't just one community, and the acceptability of converting comments to answers varies widely.

TheGreatDuck

all communities are SE

doppelgreener

12:39 AM

Each site works this stuff out on their own and determines what works for them.

user4704

Yeah; we certainly have no particular compunction allowing people to convert commentary to answers here (Game Development). We encourage it, really.

doppelgreener

On RPG.SE we have zero tolerance for answers in comments, delete them without question, and are fine with people pinching that material for an answer (if it's any good, in fact, we encourage it).

TheGreatDuck

fair enough, but I don't see how telling people not to ever use a feature is at all reasonable. It's their post and their choice...

doppelgreener

(There's links in that post. Which reminds me to go install the link color script on this PC...)

user4704

Who is saying not to use a feature?

TheGreatDuck

12:40 AM

@doppelgreener I'm not referring to complete answers. Just comments maybe giving a hint or something.

doppelgreener

@TheGreatDuck We delete those on RPG.SE too.

user4704

@doppelgreener I'd love to be more aggressive about that here.

TheGreatDuck

that's ridiculous

user4704

But I don't have the manpower.

user4704

And the backlog is huge.

TheGreatDuck

12:41 AM

if a question is nothing more than homework or something than a comment is what should be posted...

user4704

I can't imagine RPG.SE has too much trouble with homework questions.

4

TheGreatDuck

@JoshPetrie RPG is explicitly banning community wiki.

@JoshPetrie oh

nvmd then

user4704

@TheGreatDuck For questions.

doppelgreener

Even if we did, we'd still delete comments attempting to leave hints on questions.

user4704

(at least as far I read in the answer)

user4704

12:43 AM

Community wiki questions are not a feature users have.

user4704

Specifically conversion-to-wiki. Maybe they can still initially post as such. I dunno.

TheGreatDuck

oh so it's an agreement amongst mods

doppelgreener

@TheGreatDuck We did not ban them. We just decided we don't have any scenario in which we should use them. We won't ever CW a question, and we don't see any scenario under which an answer "should" be CW.

user4704

Mostly it's an agreement (or at least a consensus) among the community.

TheGreatDuck

oh

user4704

12:44 AM

(The site-specific community, not the SE-wide community per se.)

TheGreatDuck

i thought you were going to delete anything from the past that is CW due to a bug or something

user4704

(Maybe there is a network consensus reflected on Meta SE but I don't spend enough time there.)

TheGreatDuck

as in all CW is being removed.

user4704

We almost never delete things.

user4704

As a general rule.

TheGreatDuck

12:45 AM

what about when the harddrive fills up?

user4704

Usually the stuff that is considered delete-able deletes itself automatically

TheGreatDuck

mmk

Stephane Hockenhull

The site is text and the images are hosted on imgur ...

doppelgreener

Storage space is ludicrously cheap. It is just about the single cheapest thing websites can get in droves.

TheGreatDuck

@doppelgreener I'm concerned about the 32 bit virtual memory space filling up and the site literally running out of memory indices to store memory.

then you cannot purchase more memory

you've ran out of addressing space

doppelgreener

12:50 AM

safe to say we do not personally have to be concerned about that

TheGreatDuck

i meant what does se do?

Stephane Hockenhull

Either you're trolling or you're a time traveller from 2002

TheGreatDuck

?

doppelgreener

you are worrying unnecessarily

TheGreatDuck

sorry

64 bit

Stephane Hockenhull

12:51 AM

There's this thing called 64bits processors now.

user4704

The site is (a) most likely hosted on 64 bit machines

TheGreatDuck

@StephaneHockenhull typo.

user4704

And (b) does not need to be kept completely resident in memory all at once on any one machine

Stephane Hockenhull

64bit of text questions/answers, even if the whole site was held in memory it's going to take a while to fill that address space.

TheGreatDuck

I wouldn't be too sure of that. Millions of people use this site. And we can all type pretty fast.

but fair enough

user4704

12:54 AM

I am very sure of that.

user4704

There's way more than one machine powering StackExchange.

TheGreatDuck

I was referring to @StephaneHockenhull

user4704

Ah.

TheGreatDuck

@JoshPetrie that still doesn't fix the addressing issue. One still has to be able to get a pointer to that memory index.

user4704

@TheGreatDuck It doesn't have to be a linear index like that.

TheGreatDuck

12:56 AM

ugh

good point

user4704

For example, you can keep the all the data on a disk that has such restrictions.

user4704

Or multiple disks.

user4704

Now you can use one 64-bit "address" (number) to refer to which of the many, many disks the data is on.

doppelgreener

I work in professional web development. Google has indexed the entire internet. The Internet Archive has archived a goodly portion of it. Big Data is a thing; that is about specifically storing and working with so much stuff that ordinary computing techniques can't handle it -- and it's a field decades old and very advanced. Memory is cheap. Space is cheap. Virtual memory space is not even relevant to this kind of data storage let alone a limitation.

user4704

And another to refer where, within that disk, the data is.

user4704

12:57 AM

That kind of segmented addressing mechanism is how you overcome many storage limitations like this for "big data" problems.

user4704

Also how we used to overcome in the dark ages when 16-bit machines were the new hotness.

TheGreatDuck

actually they overcame the old spaces by upgrading the fundamental hardware

granted, that's a technique good for PC applications

probably irrelevant for servers.

user4704

...no, not entirely

user4704

Before there was new hardware to upgrade to, we used segmented memory systems to effectively address more data than was directly possible.

TheGreatDuck

oh

user4704

1:02 AM

16-bit Windows with its near and far pointers was a thing for quite a while before 32-bit hardware was even available for it to run on.

Stephane Hockenhull

Even if it was hosted on a 1st gen AMD 64 with 48bits of virtual address space that's 140737488400000 bytes ( 2^47 because one half is used by the OS kernel ).

at a high of 84WPM (5 characters each) that's 420 chars/minutes.

So it'd take one person, 637536 years non-stop of typing to fill 47bits of address space.

Even if we factor in cut&pasting and all the data management overhead it's not going to fill up any time soon.

user4704

There are production systems in use today that have segmented memory architectures.

TheGreatDuck

well whatever

user4704

@StephaneHockenhull Nice, I thought about doing that math but then I decided I was lazy.

TheGreatDuck

I think we're beating the dead horse at this point. :p

@JoshPetrie you good with game maker?

user4704

1:03 AM

Never used it.

TheGreatDuck

darn

Stephane Hockenhull

And 14.59 years for 1 person to fill up a 32bit address space (3GB user / 1GB kernel split)

TheGreatDuck

@JoshPetrie I thought maybe you could help with this. gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/142003/…

:p

I feel like it should be easy yet I just don't see it.

user4704

shrug

TheGreatDuck

fair enough

docs are hard to find stuff in

:p

user4704

1:10 AM

It's more that I don't understand the boundaries of the problem from the question.

TheGreatDuck

boundaries?

user4704

Yes. What the problem is, why it's a problem, what the constraints on the solution are. Et cetera.

TheGreatDuck

...

what is unclear?

user4704

Basically I find your problem to be unclear.

TheGreatDuck

specifically what

user4704

1:12 AM

I don't know what you are trying to do, or why, or what you're having trouble with.

user4704

Other than the fact that you want to "pass arguments" to a thing that doesn't apparently accept them.

TheGreatDuck

yeah

what more detail would you need than that?

I'm asking how to do a very specific thing? Why do you need to know why I need to it or for what purposes? That's irrelevant.

user4704

Is it?

TheGreatDuck

I'm asking how to do something.

doppelgreener

1148

A: What is the XY problem?

What is it? The XY problem is asking about your attempted solution rather than your actual problem. That is, you are trying to solve problem X, and you think solution Y would work, but instead of asking about X when you run into trouble, you ask about Y. The Problem This can lead to frustrati...

user4704

1:14 AM

The answer is to call the execute_string function after enabling the context passing register in the settings file.

TheGreatDuck

huh?

user4704

Exactly.

user4704

Do you know what the context passing register is?

TheGreatDuck

you're just making shit up.

sorry

user4704

Yes I am.

user4704

1:14 AM

Because I don't understand the domain of the problem.

TheGreatDuck

that's not relevant

I'm asking how to pass arguments when executing a string.

because I want to pass arguments to string when I execute them

there is no underlying problem.

I'm just asking about a feature.

user4704

Right. A feature that I know nothing about.

TheGreatDuck

And it's my job to explain the entire language to you?

user4704

No.

TheGreatDuck

so why are you saying my question is flawed?

user4704

1:17 AM

I didn't say it was flawed, I said I found it unclear.

user4704

Since I know nothing about the feature, I can't help you unless I know instead something about the reasons why you might want to do this, or what you can or can't consider valid solutions, etc. Then I might be able to speculate or make an educated guess by poking in a particular direction.

TheGreatDuck

exactly

unclear as in off topic and immediately needing to be closed and deleted

user4704

Obviously not.

TheGreatDuck

what?

unclear is a reason to close...

user4704

"Unclear" isn't a binary state.

doppelgreener

1:18 AM

Unclear does not mean off topic, unclear does not necessarily mean it's going to get closed, closed questions don't necessarily get deleted.

TheGreatDuck

@JoshPetrie that's not the same as a vague question. That's just not knowing how to answer it.

user4704

If I thought your question was so unclear as to be unanswerable by anybody I would have closed it instead when I edited the tags.

user4704

But I don't think it's unclear enough to close.

user4704

I think it's unclear enough for me to be able to provide any kind of reasonable guideance.

TheGreatDuck

fair enough

I have a very low-tolerance policy on unclearness.

:p

personally speaking

user4704

1:19 AM

I think the way you've worded the question requires an answer from somebody with fairly extensive Game Maker knowledge. I have almost no knowledge of it, having mostly only poked around in documentation.

TheGreatDuck

@JoshPetrie umm... it's a matter of just finding a different variant of the function

user4704

@TheGreatDuck I don't like answering questions like that.

doppelgreener

Can I suggest that we move past this conversation, because I'm not sure what is being sought after at this point.

(other than an answer from someone who is declining to provide one)

user4704

Hm, I wanted to get under 475 engine tagged questions today

user4704

But I think I'm just going to take the easy way out and remove five more from closed questions.

user4704

1:22 AM

Much less work involved.

TheGreatDuck

@JoshPetrie fair enough. It's hard to find even competent users of the engine. I'm finding weird shoddy answers all over the place. I might make a meta post soon if this continues. People clearly don't know how it works.

user4704

2:00 AM

I'm not sure why you'd need to make a meta post for that; if answers are wrong, downvote them, leave a comment explaining why, and move on

TheGreatDuck

It seems like almost all of the posts regarding game maker are flawed

and that's not an exaggeration.

user4704

And or write a better answer

TheGreatDuck

You misunderstand. I don't have time to write nearly 300 replacement answers.

I was thinking of maybe trying to see if people could start cleaning it up. :p

I mean, I would understand if it were just a few, but most of the answers blatantly ignore the languages rules altogether claiming things like "These things about scope are true in all languages ever written".

it's almost like people are doing it on purpose. Or maybe the users of that engine are just a bunch of amateurs who don't know how stuff works. Ugh.

Alexandre Vaillancourt

2:33 AM

@TheGreatDuck You can't propose work to be done on the site if you're not ready to do it yourself. E.g If you think a tag should be removed, you have to be ready to go through all the questions and remove it yourself. If you ask people to be cleaner about game-maker, well you'll have to be prepared to clean up the tag yourself...

Stephane Hockenhull

TheGreatDuck

@AlexandreVaillancourt You completely misunderstand. I'm conjecturing that literally everyone on this site is being completely incompetent.

@StephaneHockenhull that's largely irrelevant in a situation where I'm concerned that people might be intentionally upvoting and propagating misinformation because they don't like the language or people asking about it. Some of the answers don't even compile.

@AlexandreVaillancourt Honestly, this site would be better off banning all Game Maker related questions. it's gonna make the site look bad.

and deleting all 300 questions would be far easier than trying to edit and/or remove/replace that many incompetent posts.

Alexandre Vaillancourt

@TheGreatDuck I don't understand; you're part of the problem if you have accepted those bad answers.

TheGreatDuck

when did I say i accepted them?

I'm saying that the entire question base needs to be reexamined and mass purged.

that needs moderator support

Alexandre Vaillancourt

How can they help you if they don't know enough about game maker?

TheGreatDuck

2:48 AM

I'm proposing that we just delete them all and start from scratch

or perma ban them

Alexandre Vaillancourt

Perma-ban what? Questions?

TheGreatDuck

(the answers and the answerers)

Alexandre Vaillancourt

In any case, that's not going to happen.

TheGreatDuck

there are certain people who I will not name who are largely the problem it would seem

Alexandre Vaillancourt

Not really. It happened a couple of times that I answered a question, which was accepted because it was the best one at the time, then was un-accepted in favour of a newer, better answer. This can happen.

TheGreatDuck

2:52 AM

no i mean like the answers are so wrong that it would be like saying the product of 11 and 12 is 39.

they don't even make sense to anyone who uses the program and they even claim that they've never used game maker nor read the documentation

Alexandre Vaillancourt

Again, downvote, leave a comment and write a better answer. If you can make this place a better place for game-maker users, they'll come, and the game-maker content will end up being much improved.

TheGreatDuck

you seriously want me to go write 300 answers?

we should be banning people for not writing answers competently

or at least putting the stuff through the review queue

Alexandre Vaillancourt

How do you judge that?

TheGreatDuck

because there were posts indicating that the person knew the answer was wrong and was basically telling the asker that "it was what they deserved for using such a shoddy language"

I wasn't joking when I said an intentional propogation of misinformation

Alexandre Vaillancourt

If the post is literal about this, you could try to use the 'flag for moderator' option to bring individual posts to the attention of the moderators.

2

TheGreatDuck

2:59 AM

fair enough

I didn't think of that

Alexandre Vaillancourt

I'll go to bed now :)

I have read your question, but I'm sorry I don't have a clue about what I could give you for an answer....

TheGreatDuck

@AlexandreVaillancourt fair enough. I'm just feeling very dissatisfied about the general lack of quality here.

Alexandre Vaillancourt

@TheGreatDuck You can help :)

TheGreatDuck

@AlexandreVaillancourt that's not the point. It's as if this place is trying to be useless.

:p

no offense

Alexandre Vaillancourt

Ah, well that's not the feeling I have.

I'll go now; good night ;)

TheGreatDuck

3:10 AM

ok

TheGreatDuck

5:35 AM

@JoshPetrie You may want to rethink choosing not to close the post for unclearness. Read the documentation on the execute_string function which I claimed was not at all useful. Honestly, I'm shocked that I've never read the documentation on that thing... I've just been assuming how it works. gamemaker.info/en/manual/409_06_scripts

basically, the answer to my question is "read the ***** documentation on the functions you use"

XD

user4704

1:35 PM

@TheGreatDuck Just because an answer is trivial or involves reading the documentation doesn't make it unclear.

doppelgreener

There are frequently times I have posted relatively simple answers to questions based upon documentation, but I was able to understand and piece together the documentation & pull together sources because of the expertise I have in the technology in question. Documentation is written by experts, and sometimes it's only easy to understand what the documentation is saying when you already know what it's telling you.

Alexandre Vaillancourt

2:49 PM

@doppelgreener Documentation is sometimes written by experts :P

user4704

3:55 PM

@AlexandreVaillancourt Can you accept gamedev.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2432/… yet?

Alexandre Vaillancourt

4:11 PM

@JoshPetrie Done!

user4704

4:22 PM

Thanks.