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Valve Developer Wiki
Via Gamasutra, the news that Valve has opened a Developer Community Wiki. From the post: "The system is intended to be a pool of knowledge that mod authors can contribute to, as well as consult for advice on how to use the robust Source engine. The Community is built using MediaWiki, an open-source GNU tool for allowing entries and posts to be edited and refined by anyone with an account. The same technology powers the popular Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia."
It's a WikiMedia tool under GPL.
The wiki is a good tool for collaboration. It's encouraging to see Valve step in with an official one. The flip side is that maybe they'll be reluctant to share any details that reverse-engineer too deeply. Here's a similar wiki for Battlefield 2, that focuses on the python code and it's largely unpublished interface. Because it enjoys independence from EA and DICE, the folks there are digging up pleanty of undocumented details.
You have to have a Source developer licence, they probably check your registered email address.
;-)
The email address does appear to be optional, though - and I didn't get any confirmation email when I signed up.
I've yet to see any vandalism, and it's been public for quite a few days already - but hopefully its mention on Slashdot doesn't change anything...
It's definitely not the first HL2 Wiki - the HL2World.com Knowledge Base has been around for ages, but really hasn't got that much in the way of useful content. Most of the entity documentation seems to have been nicked from the HL2 FGD entity definitions, for instance, and nobody's added too much to it.
However, this new Valve-sponsored one seems to have got past that problem. There's a lot of Valve-authored content in there already, and the enthusiast-written stuff seems very promising. I learned more about the ai_goal_assault entity from this article than I've done from everywhere else combined, for example.
The site's semi-affiliated with the good old VERC Collective and that's always been very strictly (and fairly) moderated with a good signal-to-noise ratio, so good things may lie ahead...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Wiki has a lot of moderation throught the way it was designed. Anyone can contribute, anyone can commit vandalisme and anyone can undo vandalisme (it has an undo button in a sense). I contribute regulary to wikibooks and vandalisme turns up once in a while and is fixed practicly immediatly. Till now it hasn't been much of an issue. Ofcourse I'm not going to post a link to any book I contribute too as a large number of people vandalising the same page after each other can be a problem.
The best mod of all: Half-Life: Scientist. You play a scientist and all you do is cower when anyone approaches you. You also have the cool ability to say "Leave me alone" and "I'm too busy" whenever you see Gordon Freeman.