Further to Tom's suggestion of a newbie programming list, I have some thoughts....
At AGDev.org, we have mailing lists and a wiki (website that is easily editable by its members) that people use to describe their work and host tutorials on the topics they are experts in. Anyone can read this stuff but only members can write to it (though anyone is welcome to mail in with comments, suggestions and additions). Our community is made up of some of the most well-known AG developers and many other enthusiastic members. Our main list is not as high-traffic as this one, but posts tend to be either informative or questions that start interesting threads on a number of issues relating to AG development. I would like to encourage people that are genuinely interested in games development (i.e. working on a project now) to visit www.agdev.org and to consider signing up. If you have already released a game, you can sign up straight away. If not, then you can contact an existing member who will be happy to forward your reasons for wanting to sign up to the mailing list. Once this is done, if the other members have no objections, you can sign up. The reason we do things this way is so that only genuinely interested people sign up. This has, so far, prevented us from having flame-wars, keeps traffic to an acceptable and high-quality level and goes some way to ensuring that the community stays positive and focused. Seems to me that it would make sense for those genuinely motivated about and perhaps already partly involved in AG development to sign up to AGDev -- both our groups happily complement each other. With respect to people very new to game programming that need more general guidance, a newbie list sounds like a good idea. I wonder if we could set up such a list on AGDev.org and invite a few of the main members to help moderate and answer questions in the newbie list. A lot of us are under variable and sometimes excessive workloads, however. For this reason it might be nice to have moderators who are active community members here as well. Seeing as we run mailman, anyone can be assigned access/admin/moderator rights. Maybe we could even start a section for Newbies on the AGDev wiki -- if people are interested in this it could be interesting. I've still not had time to look into Richard of AudioGames' site -- what I have seen is impressive, but seems aimed at grabbing researchers' and mainstream games developers' attention -- but f it already does these things then all three of us (Audyseey, AGDev and G-A.com) should think about getting together and directing people who visit our sites to the most appropriate place for them. Just my thoughts, but I would like to see all the key sites in the AG area pulling in the same direction; it gives a much better impression to the ``outsiders'' we want to invite into our community. It should also mean that each of us keeps to our remit and we aren't all wasting effort trying to be all things to all people. Please let me know what you think :-). best regards, -- Matthew T. Atkinson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> _______________________________________________ Gamers mailing list .. Gamers@audyssey.org To unsubscribe send E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] You can visit http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org to make any subscription changes via the web.
