Posted: Mon Aug 27, 2012 5:47 am Post subject:
Unoficial forum for Ares at PPM?
Subject description: I need AlexB's, Graion's and everyone else's input on this subject.
I've been exchanging PMs with Deformat for a while, where he requested an unofficial forum for Ares at the RA2 Editing Forum and he claims that AlexB and Graion Dilach would support it, while Renegade apparently sees no problem with it. By no means this forum would replace the official Ares forum. It's just to make Ares more known, accessible and get more feedback outside Renegade Projects.
I wholly approve of this. Would also help to consolidate tutorials and help to organize information pertaining to modding with Ares. _________________ ~~~Stay calm & be one with Yuri~~~
You can call me Jem if my Username is too long.
good idea. Since i don't plan to register on another board (too much work to browse this and find everything needed from there), having a well ordered place for Ares here would be very convenient.
\EDIT
Something useful would be
-a quick start/installation guide (not a fancy 100 pages manual)
--maybe with links to the original page
-a subforum for tutorials
-a subforum for coding tips (i mean the C#,C++ part, not the ini stuff)
-a subforum for bugreports
-a subforum for wanted featurs
(hopefully not too much subforums)
I know there are somewhere (well hidden behind several links ) already many of these things answered, but tbh i'm not interested in browsing for several minutes (hours) to find everything needed on forums and pages where i haven't been before. Last edited by Lin Kuei Ominae on Mon Aug 27, 2012 7:04 am; edited 2 times in total QUICK_EDIT
Not sure if it would help if you add coding help for C# etc. Since it will mostly be used by modders who are interested in anything but programming Ares. _________________
I could support/move/write all those thingies LKO listed. But IMO it does not need a subforum, maybe just a sticky which has the topics particularly to that question gathered. Tho I'm against moving bugreports to PPM from the tracker, rest are fine. _________________
Orac wrote:
Any opinions you get from here will be honest, because so far nobody has really cared enough to lie to avoid hurting your feelings.
RP wrote:
I like this guy, that Graion Dilach. He seems to know one or two things about people. Mister Dilach can identify a moron in less than five posts!
Tho I'm against moving bugreports to PPM from the tracker, rest are fine.
It would be wise to put here a direct link to bug tracker and give good explanation how to properly report _________________
Work is much like a wife. It feed me. It f*ck me. QUICK_EDIT
Sure, that one would be fine. The reason I wouldn't see the bug reports moved is that it already happened once this year and it'd be too much pain for little gain IMO and if it'd be scattered then it would be a haywire to manage them.
I am willing to cooperate. But bugreports are better to be on a tracker than in random topics. _________________
Orac wrote:
Any opinions you get from here will be honest, because so far nobody has really cared enough to lie to avoid hurting your feelings.
RP wrote:
I like this guy, that Graion Dilach. He seems to know one or two things about people. Mister Dilach can identify a moron in less than five posts!
Proper links to the main page which then also has easy access (maybe even without extra registration; have already enough passwords and usernames to remember ) would be fine too. Things like bugreports would be indeed better collected at one place.
Though I just found already bugreports on 2 or 3 different places,
-the official forum
-I remember finding them on some kind of excel chart on the developer page (is this the tracker?)
-the tracker you're talking about
Thus i thought it wouldn't be a problem if there is another place collecting bugs etc. _________________ SHP Artist of Twisted Insurrection. Main Nod building SHP creator.
Okay?
And another place for bugs would probably confuse the developers. It's okay to have everything nice and tidy for the devs.
Ares just passed through a whole reorganisation, so another one would just screw things even more.
From my point of view, would be like this:
-Main Forum
Here we would have a thread with all the links to the stuff. We would also have a beginner's introduction to Ares.
--tutorials - A nice idea, but hopefully to come up with more discoveries/methods of creating a better gameplay, not something already explained in the guide. The guide does it very fine with a simple CTRL-F in the browser: http://ares-developers.github.com/Ares-docs/
--coding tips (programming stuff) - I guess that's up to the devs.
--help forum - for those who can't handle stuff and have coding issues. QUICK_EDIT
I doubt we could avoid posting bugs here on forum by newbies, but there must be someone (moderator?) responsible for mirroring findings to official bug tracker. _________________
Work is much like a wife. It feed me. It f*ck me. QUICK_EDIT
I doubt we could avoid posting bugs here on forum by newbies, but there must be someone (moderator?) responsible for mirroring findings to official bug tracker.
Actually, if newbies post bugs here we can attempt to check them and then try to report them to the official bugtracker, for the sake of not having a bugtracker filled with crappy requests. QUICK_EDIT
It would be wise to put here a direct link to bug tracker and give good explanation how to properly report
The new bugtracker isn't hard to learn how to report stuff. The old one was very unintuitive in some cases, and could really scare people away.
The only real problem with the current one is lack of an "edit" option.
You still need to register to join, though.
BTW, the link to the bugtracker is on Ares website (and i think it's hard to miss if one actually goes there).
Also, i don't see a subforum for wanted features (or at least it will end up working not exactly as expected). Ares already has that available on the bugtracker. Adding a subforum for wanted features would create a lot of request threads, and i'm sure many would duplicate feature requests already existing on the bugtracker. I don't think we'd find someone willing to manage both places at once...
I think the FAQ sections on the website needs updating, though... If any "how to"s are done, those could really use porting to the website (currently, these sections there are empty...).
And i think a link to the online manual should be on the website too. Currently, you have to dig a bit to find it, as the link is available in a few non-obvious places. QUICK_EDIT
We dont need one anyway, there's already way to many wanted features as is. Not to mention already implemented features that have gone untested. Lets get the current ones out of the way first.
This is why the devs are frustrated to begin with. Everyone wants to throw in "I want this" but wont raise a finger to help implement it.
But yes, I like this idea of having an Ares forum here. _________________
The enemy shall be injected with toxic poison - Venom QUICK_EDIT
The new bugtracker isn't hard to learn how to report stuff. The old one was very unintuitive in some cases, and could really scare people away.
The only real problem with the current one is lack of an "edit" option.
You still need to register to join, though.
Well, it still not intuitive enough for non-english speakers. Small and illiterate post here and official report are two big differences. _________________
Work is much like a wife. It feed me. It f*ck me. QUICK_EDIT
Of course I would support a forum here to get in touch. It should be a good place to improve feature requests by collecting different opinions.
For the backtracker usage: Yes, adding bugs is a little more complex than posting in a guestbook, but if I as a dev would have to go through the forums and synchronize the information, this wouldn't be fun for me. (Not that I haven't done it before to some extent, but it's not a hobby of mine.) _________________ QUICK_EDIT
I truly despise the blueprint section(for those who doesn't know, its the place where you post feature requests). It looks like something from the 1990 and there is not even a post comment feature, just this useless whiteboard.
Moving it here would be good because we could discuss the requests. QUICK_EDIT
I was not intending to replicate data. We'll link modenc for Tutorials for Ares and our own RA2 Tutorials Vault, the bugs section on launchpad.net, the official page, forums, etc. QUICK_EDIT
As I have pointed out multiple times in the conversation with Deformat, the official place for Ares user interaction is the Answers section at Launchpad. It has been since spring.
Quoth my news post on the topic:
Renegade wrote:
LaunchPad's "Answers" section is kind of like a forum crossed with an FAQ section. If you want to ask a question about Ares or find the answer to something not in the manual, this will be the place to go.
The very same forum you linked to also tells people to go there in the Ares section of the header.
So while I appreciate the effort, I'd appreciate it more if people were directed to the right place.
¥R_M0dd€r wrote:
I truly despise the blueprint section(for those who doesn't know, its the place where you post feature requests). It looks like something from the 1990 and there is not even a post comment feature, just this useless whiteboard.
Moving it here would be good because we could discuss the requests.
And this right here is one of the reasons the community managed to burn out coder after coder.
Had you actually read the corresponding news post eight months ago, you'd have noticed the very first line regarding feature requests was
Renegade wrote:
Feature requests go wherever the hell you want.
The emphasis isn't even added - it's in the original.
The entire point of Blueprints is that you don't put your feature requests in Ares-space. You draft your request wherever the ztype you want, and create a Blueprint as a static linking point, so that people can always go to https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ares/+spec/yrms-awesome-feature, no matter if your draft is currently in a wiki, a forum thread, pastebin or a static website. You can come up with your idea on Revora, discuss it on PPM, flesh it out on etherpad and ultimately put it on wikia, and as long as you update the spec URL in the Blueprint, you never have to give people an updated link - you just keep linking to the Blueprint URL, while the developers can work with the Blueprint element for release planning and bugtracking purposes.
Blueprints gave the community as much freedom as it could possibly have in drafting feature requests.
So despite the fact that all of us told Deformat we'd be fine with it, and despite the fact that there's probably more Ares-related forum discussion here than anywhere else, and despite the fact that there's still an Ares forum at RenProj, it's just not the official Ares forum, and despite the fact that there's general forum population support for the idea...you still don't want to create a forum?
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Unoficial forum for Ares at PPM?
) already many of these things answered, but tbh i'm not interested in browsing for several minutes (hours) to find everything needed on forums and pages where i haven't been before.
