Game Development

« first day (3254 days earlier) ← previous day next day → last day (1769 days later) »

1:11 AM

@Danny I'd suggest you ask the artist(s) you'll work with to come up with that. If you rely on assets found online, you'll realize that some sites sell "stolen" art, andy offer them for lower prices that what they're really worth.

5 hours later…

Danny

5:52 AM

alright, I will then talk to some artists. Thanks.

7 hours later…

Alexandre Vaillancourt

1:14 PM

Looks like we'll have to add a new item on our todo list...

gamedev.stackexchange.com/search?q=url%3Agafferongames.com

295 links poiting to Glen Fiddler's site..

Almo

1:53 PM

How can I help?

Pikalek

2:17 PM

Maybe just swap out the original links for ones that point to the wayback machine instead?

Almo

So it's about linkrot problems?

Pikalek

Near as I can tell. The first few I tried happened to use links well - there was enough supporting material in the post that they still had value. But then I noticed none of the links were passing through.

It looks like Glen Fiddler is still online via twitter & github though. Maybe he didn't notice the site lapsed?

I dunno, there's probably a lot of links to the Unity docs too. Compared to some of the other outstanding work to be done I'm not sure how this should rank.

Still good to point it out though. Shows how a useful, popular resource can go dark & negatively impact an SE.

Hmmm, based on his Patreon, looks like he intentionally wound down the site to focus on other things.

I wonder if this work could be scripted & handed over to a bot?

Alexandre Vaillancourt

2:40 PM

@Almo Yes, it's a link rot issue.

@Pikalek I'll ask in TL eventually

Apparently, he owns the domain until 2022

Pikalek

There's the kindly bot that has patiently moved many of our images to local hosting.

@AlexandreVaillancourt What's TL?

Alexandre Vaillancourt

@Pikalek Teacher's lounge, all mods chatroom.

Pikalek

Ah. Not to be confused with the classroom.

Alexandre Vaillancourt

Nope ;)

I wonder if a bot would do the job, though. The addresses on the web archive have a timestamp, and I wonder if we could specify only one.

Pikalek

Sort of speaking of which, for a while we had some of the to-do list issues marked as featured question (or something like that anyway) in meta, but it looks like that aged out. Should we maybe put some of this back up on the radar?

@AlexandreVaillancourt I thought in some cases the image post fix it bot was using the wayback machine too, but maybe I'm mistaken.

Alexandre Vaillancourt

2:50 PM

@Pikalek Are you referring to what is being done by Glorfindel?

Pikalek

@AlexandreVaillancourt Yes. Here's an example.

Alexandre Vaillancourt

@Pikalek Yeah, Glorfindel is a user, mod on another site. I'll ask how they do it.

@Pikalek Not sure it helped much when I featured it :P

Pikalek

@AlexandreVaillancourt If you check the link I posted, it in turn has a link to the repo for the bot. There’s a bit of explanation there.

@AlexandreVaillancourt Oh. :( Well, I thought it was nice. But if it didn’t change behaviors much, then never mind.

Alexandre Vaillancourt

4:01 PM

@Pikalek Do you mean this? gist.github.com/Glorfindel83/9d954d34385d2ac2597bbe864466259f

Pikalek

4:35 PM

@AlexandreVaillancourt Yes. I doubt we'd be so lucky as to have a 1-to-1 exchange in terms of converting it to repair links instead of images, but it seems like a good place to start. And he mentioned he's happy to discuss automation of moderating tasks.

Alexandre Vaillancourt

@Pikalek Yeah, the link seems to point to a "what's this about", rather than a bot, but I'm sure he'd help us write something. Gotta get a hold of the API.

And some time.

Pikalek

That all said, there's also an argument for not replacing rotten link via wayback.

Alexandre Vaillancourt

@Pikalek "Links should not be required for the answer to be a good answer"?

Pikalek

Basically that, yes.

Alexandre Vaillancourt

This is right, but I don't think that's a good argument for not replacing links that have rotten.

Specially if the links point to weird sites.

Pikalek

4:45 PM

Right. In this case, it seems like there might be an option to have cake & eat it too.

Alexandre Vaillancourt

Yeah :)

GDSE Meta

Q: What are standard responses to those who not yet understand how this site works?

Sometimes I see newbies who post incomplete or off-topic questions, post comments as answers or write a comment "It works thank you" without accepting an answer. And sometimes I see comments with links to help center articles that kindly explain how this site works. They seem to be based on temp...

discussion

Alexandre Vaillancourt

Woooaaa! Two meta questions within 10 minutes! Party! 🎉🎉

Pikalek

5:00 PM

Happy GDSE-Meta Day?! global_FestiveExplosions.ignite()

GDSE Meta

5:14 PM

Q: What should we do about link rot to popular sites?

As pointed out in chat, we have 295 links pointing to Glen Fiddler's site, which is no longer up. Based on the Pateron he had to support that work, it seems he is no longer working on that content. There was some further conversation in chat about what might be done to improve this situation and ...

discussion

1 hour later…

Alexandre Vaillancourt

6:16 PM

@trollingchar For the "thanks, it works"-with-no-upvote-or-accept, when I see it on posts from others, I leave a message if it's their first time around (checking the activity of the user); if it's on my posts, I just leave it be. I kind of feel rude when people ask to upvote/accept their answer. Looks like begging and telling people what to do.

Almo

6:41 PM

I usually say something like "Hi! We usually click 'accept' on an answer that solved the problem so others can see at a glance that it's already been answered :)"

Alexandre Vaillancourt

6:55 PM

Yeah; personally, as long as it's not on one's own posts, I'm fine with it.

Pikalek

Here's the last one I used:

Welcome to GDSE. Glad to hear you resolved your problem. Don't forget to mark the answer as accepted - we do that instead of things like putting 'solved' in question titles - it's a bit cleaner & works better with the search options. Good luck with your game.

I bit context specific, but mine generally look like that.

I generally do not apply them if I've posted an answer unless OP adds a comment like "great that's just what I needed" or the like

Also, I would caution against using totally canned answers. My own view is that it can make people feel like variables in an equation rather than members of a community. Thus I try to tailor my responses a bit if possible.

Then again, there's only so many ways of saying the same thing.

And I totally stole the 'good luck with your game' from one of the mods :)

Er.. I mean, was inspired to add that by our mods.

Alexandre Vaillancourt

I know Philipp often ends with 'looking forward to playing your game' :) He's a mod too. Just not here.