Re: RFOR: Is LGDC really crap?

[Steve Baker <sjbaker1@airmail.net>]

Christian Reiniger wrote:

> > There is an issue with "know your audience".  Much of the content seems
> > directed towards games *players* rather than *developers*.  I don't
> 
> Do you really have that impression?

Actually, I had somehow gotten that impression - but as I read back through
the archives, I have to admit that it *is* well focussed on developers.

My apologies.
 
> > think you should aim at the players - HappyPenguin already has that
> > covered IMHO.
> 
> I really try to *avoid* player-specific content. Of course there are some
> links to and news about games X and Y, but that's simply because that's
> what most submissions are about. People who've written (or are about to
> write) their first game are eager to get much publicity. Of course they
> don't get it via lgdc, but try explaining them that :)

Yes - if there was ten times the volume of content that there currently
is, I'd probably complain about those release announcements - but given
there is an average of just one or two submissions per week, it really
doesn't matter.

> > I'd like to see news about tools that games developers are interested
> > in ("New release of GDB - Has these great features" - for example).  I
> > don't have the time to look at Freshmeat and 99% of the things it
> > covers are useless to me.  When a bug is discovered in something that I
> > care about (Mesa for example) - it would be great to see a report of it
> > and it's eventual resolution or work-around.
> 
> No comment. Well perhaps a little one :)
> I know that kind of stuff is very important - in fact some (longer) time
> ago I posted ~2-5 news items a day. The problem is that (1) I find this
> posting work quite annoying and (2) it's hard to e.g. pick the important
> new features in Mesa or comment on an advanved 3D Gfx tutorial if one has
> never written a single line of OpenGL code.

Yes - which is why you need people who *do* read those mailing lists to
summarize them and send LGDC the highlights.

Take a library like Mesa.  I subscribe to the Mesa developer's list for
two reasons:

  * I like to hear about upcoming releases *before* they happen so I
    can do a beta test before hand and be sure that my stuff will run
    on it.

  * I like to hear about bugs that have been detected and/or fixed so
    that when I trip over them myself, I don't spend a day trying to
    figure out why my program isn't working.

However, those kinds of posts probably make up 1% of the mail on that
list and a condensed version of it would be useful.  In fact, there
could be a good source of content here - looking at a list like
OpenGL-Gamedev that has 200 post-per-week volume and just listing
the *interesting* threads.  Mention things like "New Shadow Algorithm"
in a couple of sentances - don't mention junk like "My program doesn't
work - why?"

I'd dearly love to cut my mail intake by not having to read most of
the posts to most of these lists.
 
> Exactly that would be great, yeah.
> The problem is finding these people. lgdc had *many* "maintainers" over
> the years, but all of them became quiet or disappeared after some
> (typically short) time. Finding good and dedicated people is extremely
> difficult in OSS land (especially when the work to be done is *not*
> coding) :(

Yes - I understand and sympathise (but I *don't* offer my services :-)
 
> But I'm not sure if I want that, if all this really is worth the effort
> for me. I mean, spending all that time on (for me) boring / annoying work
> so that others have a great site (as I said I'm not a game developer),
> only getting the occasional (1-2/year) "Hey, nice site, dude" mail for it.

So why *do* you bother?
 
> ...But seeing that ~90% of the traffic somes from
> the same ~5 people still indicates that it's only useful for a tiny
> fraction of the "community"...

Is it *really* that small?

It's possible that the readership is much larger than the writership
(is that really a word?  It ought to be :-)

I know that on my own lists there are often 100 times as many readers
as writers.  My PLIB developers list has maybe 6 to 10 frequent posters
(which is about the same as the number of active developers) - but over
700 people are subscribed to it!  I guess all of those people find it
interesting/useful or they wouldn't still be there.

> > Just how many active game developers do you think there are?
> 
> I don't know, but surely quite a bit more. Just think of freecraft,
> worldforge, freeciv etc - I don't think I've seen anyone from these
> projects here yet. Probably it's because these "big" projects already
> have their own communities..

Yes - but you would thing that (just as with me) there are subjects
which (whilst game related) do not belong on those tightly focussed
lists.

> > It would be interesting to do some kind of a search on the named
> > authors in the HappyPenguin database to get some kind of an idea.
> 
> Hmmm. "some kind"... :)

Well, right now, I don't know whether all those games were written
by 100 people, 1,000 people or 10,000 people.

> No problem. The mechanism for that already exists. And it just occurred
> to me that the article itself could be displayed in an <iframe>. Hmmmm

Then feel free to dump all my Omniverous biped "ramblings" in there.
 
> > Er - yes - it is. ("ramblings"? **RAMBLINGS**!! Humph! :-)
> 
> Hehe.
> Hmm, Interesting - I didn't actually think about that word. It just was
> so *natural* to use it in this context ;-)

OK - *now* I'm insulted!   :-)
 
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