If you notice my sig, you'll see that I run an online community dedicated to OpenGL programming (and the many facets thereof). I started the community back in March 2002, and I love it to no end. It's relatively small (especially compared to Slashdot), but its an awesome place to hang out and talk with other people interested in OpenGL, game programming, and Linux. Now, enough about my community, here are my ideas about the article.
Regular users will develop a sense of community ownership. As a whole, their content contributions probably outweigh yours...
This could not be more true. Running my site is a full time job (along with school). I rarely get to answer the questions that my members have. Luckily, I've recruited some top notch moderators who answer questions and keep the forums inline. If it weren't for them, members wouldn't come back. Adding to that, I must say also: a lot of your members will know more than you do! Get over it, learn from it. I'm only 18, and have had a limited time using OpenGL, whereas I have many professional programmers in my community. Most people love to help.
Besides letting community leaders and members perform administrative work (content production, content moderation, software development, content rating, the donation of hardware or bandwidth fees)...
This is crucial for a site to survive. At my site, we have tutorials. So far, I've written all but 3 of the tutorials. Tutorials, especially ones as long as mine, take a long time to write. One idea I thought up was to ask members to write tutorials. You'd be surprised how many members want to write tutorials and get work displayed, and on somebody elses website no less! If you need help paying for the site, set up a donation link (PayPal is easy, even with all of the warnings). Many members are willing to contribute something to the site, especially if they see it become something tangible (like prizes to a contest).
Encourage community archives. Provide a way to address individual bits of history (messages, chat logs, event histories) in finely-grained units.
This is a must. New members will want to research to see how the site came about, and things that occured during the sites lifetime. I think that people are very interested in history. They want to know about the past. Keeping archives is not very hard, especially if you can set up an automated system.
You will never please some users. A few will stick around only to see your next mistake. They tend to be vocal. Their pessimism doesn't make them wrong, but it can be grating.
Again, this is where moderators and other regulars to the site come in. When someone on the forums posts something degrading or offensive (yeah, sue me for censoring people, there are some things that are not appropriate for an OpenGL forum. I don't want my forum to be full of SPAM), the moderators immediately step in and either edit the post or delete it entirely. If a user is being particularly harsh, and I am not there to quell them, a moderator will say, "Hey, listen, Vic works his hardest on the site. He's not perfect, and he'll take care of you. Just have some patients." It's a very rewarding feeling when people want to help you with your site without pay. Occasionally, when I make a news post, I'll thank my moderators for their hard work so they know their work is appreciated.
Simplicity may appeal to some users. The lack of sophistication (reply notification, searching, revisions, and access controls) may put off some users, and an ugly or awkward user interface may get in the way sometimes, but a community can grow in spite of the mess.
This is very true. Thus, I approach my community two ways. There is the main news page, the main page of the site, and then there are the forums (similar to any message board you see now). The main page (and subsequent sub pages), are very simple. A DIV in the middle of the page is all that is needed for news. I use style sheets to control the data in there, and all in all, it comes out very nice. I am currently redesigning the main page to add a few more visual controls, but its still very basic. However, when you click on the Forums link, you go to the much more "complicated" forums. There, you can post messages, be alerted of replies, send private messages and email, search for past posts, etc. It doesn't hurt that my forums looks particularly nice.:)
Finally (I promise, this is my last point), you need something to keep repeat visitors. There must be a way for visitors to interact with the site. No one wants to just read news posts and view a few tutorials. When they are done, they won't come back (I feel this was an underlying assumption in the article, though). Two more ways to keep visitors: Contests! Yes, they cost money, but yes, people love them. Especially when they can get a free Radeon 9000 or 256MB of Crucial RAM (hint hint) from entering it. Even better: use the donations other members made for this. The second way is to give visitors free stuff without you having to pay for it. For example, anyone who is a member of the forums, have more than 10 posts, and contribute well to the community can have their own subdomain on the site (and an email address and a free MySQL database/PHP support). This is better than a lot of hosting plans. Members can use the subdomain to show off their work or write tutorials on a different facet of OpenGL. I require NO ads, but I casually suggest that if they want to link to me, I'd appreciate it.
Well, thats all about me and my online community experience. I wouldn't trade it for the world.
As a semi-professional (i.e., I only do it when I have time and someone is willing to pay) engine programmer, I think I can offer some insight.
First, visit my site, OpenGLForums.com. Its geared toward OpenGL obviously, but there is an abundance of talented 3D programmers there who can share knowledge with you regardless of the rendering API you choose to use.
With that out of the way, I recommend the following:
OpenGL Game Programming - Kevin Hawkins and Dave Astle
OpenGL Programming Guide 3rd Edition - Mason Woo, Jackie Neider, and Tom Davis
3D Graphics Programming - Sergei Savchenko
Game Programming Gems 1 and 2 - Assorted authors
Physics for Game Developers - David Bourg
Thats just from my personal collection. Unfortunately, there aren't many books on engine design. The most valuable information you'll find is in the communities (like mine from above), or other sites like gamedev.net, flipcode.com, nehe.gamedev.net.
Good luck with your quest. Its one of the most rewarding ones, I think.
-Vic
Re:How many other websites have been around this l
on
Slashdot Turns 5
·
· Score: 2
If this affects sites like Amazon.com, I'm sure that Amazon could sue they hell out of them. Sure, they've barely turned a profit, but they've got to have some awesome lawyers.
I don't get this about sites like this with this much traffic. Why can't they take the time to make their sites comply with the W3 standards, or at least use better CSS and HTML to make smaller pages.
There are probably 400+ occurances of the FONT tag in the HTML output alone. This could be cut down considerably by just replacing it with CSS.
Why is the page using tables? Tables were not made for layout! Those news sections should be DIV's or P's or even SPAN's at the very least.
One would think that Google (friggin Google!) could take the time to make a better coded site. The bandwidth would drop considerably, and probably save a few million a month on bandwidth alone.
"having to install perl and all of the required modules".
I am not a sysadmin (and I'm not trying to troll here), but how hard is it to install Perl? At my company, my boss and I installed Perl in a few minutes (30 or so). Surely it can't take that long to install Perl and a few modules, especially if you install Activestate's Perl.
-Vic
I recently realized the same thing...
on
Exercise for Geeks?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
That I need to get in shape as well. I am a large person, and I knew that all that sitting in front of the computer downing Dr. Peppers and pizza slices was not good. The first thing I did was give up drinking Dr. Pepper, cold turkey. In one summer, from not drinking Dr. Pepper (I drank water and iced tea occasionally instead), I lost 27lbs, just from not drinking 300 wasted calories.
Then I started to work out. I do a lot of cardio exercises to get my heartrate way up. Thats when you start to loose a lot of weight. And it can be fun to. Find an exercise bike, get a good book/magazine, and start reading. In an hour, you will have lost a ton of calories, exercised a lot, and finished 50+ pages in your book. There really isn't a downside. If you can't get a book, find a TV. Two episodes of The Simpsons and you are done. Thats it.
After I do cardio, I go lift weights extensively. Mainly upper body since the cardio takes care of the lower body. In just 3 weeks of doing weights, I've increased my bench max from 115lbs to 155lbs. Its that easy (wow I sound like a piece of SPAM).
The last thing to do is aerobics, especially kickboxing. Its fun, its really a good exercise, you get your heartrate up, and usually there are tons of dainty, hot chicks in the room with you.;)
At any rate, just eat right and work out is what it comes down to. You don't have to look like Ahnuld, but then again, you don't have to look like Jabba.
If you go to that link now, you will find that that is the information about the Army game developers. Conviently, it also has the number 666 as its ID in the database.
Coincidence? I think not!:)
-Vic
i thought this would be obvious
on
Geeky Child Names?
·
· Score: 4, Funny
I also work in an animation shop (www.epicsoftware.com) and for the past 7 years, we've been using Lightwave. We started using it in 1995 with version 4 (or 5 I believe). It cost something like $2000, which blew me away back then that software cost that much. I had always thought MS Office for $99 bucks was steep.
Anyway, we've been using Lightwave ever since and never looked back. It has all of the features that all of the major packages have (last time I checked, anyway) and its a ton less money.
I think a seat of Maya base price cost around $12,000, while Lightwave is only $2500. Its an awesome deal. The Lightwave 6.x file type is pretty much an open standard, and you can find translaters written by third parties out there (there might even be some on sourceforge). A
I'm sorry but you had several mistakes in your post.
First, tables, provided they are coded correctly, are HTML, and XHTML compliant. They would have to be, as tabular data (what tables were made for) still has to be displayed on some sites.
WASP is saying that to make a layout like their site does not require tables, and it doesn't. You can use some fancy positioned div's, and spans and you'll have a very nice site.
Also, the (b) tag is not depricated. However, (strong) should be used in place of it in most places.
No, the HTML behind/. would fail WASP tests and the regular W3C validator tests.
this link from amazon has an incredible CVS book. It's written by one of the original authors of CVS, and goes into both Linux and Win32 CVS usage. I definitely suggest picking up a copy.
I am also running a contest (not using Crystal Space per say) at http://openglforums.com. Its all about OpenGL programming. Everyone is invited to come and try out. The contest has a Blade-centric theme!
One of the most informative sites I have been to that teaches like you did is https://www.gameinstitute.com/gi/. You could perhaps show your college this and get some ideas from it.
Hope this helps.
-Vic
people believed this guy?
on
The Magic Box Hoax
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"Priest, a 40-something ex-con who dropped out of high school in rural Citra, had devised his invention just a year or so earlier."
My respect for Intel just went down a notch for believing this guy who has a record like this.
Along those same lines, if you have ever been to www.monster.com, they have a page that you can bring up ASAP (if you have it open, of course) that looks like an official document to read so that if your boss catches you online at monster.com, you can quickly switch and look like you're working.
Slashdot Mirror
If you notice my sig, you'll see that I run an online community dedicated to OpenGL programming (and the many facets thereof). I started the community back in March 2002, and I love it to no end. It's relatively small (especially compared to Slashdot), but its an awesome place to hang out and talk with other people interested in OpenGL, game programming, and Linux. Now, enough about my community, here are my ideas about the article.
:)
Regular users will develop a sense of community ownership. As a whole, their content contributions probably outweigh yours...
This could not be more true. Running my site is a full time job (along with school). I rarely get to answer the questions that my members have. Luckily, I've recruited some top notch moderators who answer questions and keep the forums inline. If it weren't for them, members wouldn't come back. Adding to that, I must say also: a lot of your members will know more than you do! Get over it, learn from it. I'm only 18, and have had a limited time using OpenGL, whereas I have many professional programmers in my community. Most people love to help.
Besides letting community leaders and members perform administrative work (content production, content moderation, software development, content rating, the donation of hardware or bandwidth fees)...
This is crucial for a site to survive. At my site, we have tutorials. So far, I've written all but 3 of the tutorials. Tutorials, especially ones as long as mine, take a long time to write. One idea I thought up was to ask members to write tutorials. You'd be surprised how many members want to write tutorials and get work displayed, and on somebody elses website no less! If you need help paying for the site, set up a donation link (PayPal is easy, even with all of the warnings). Many members are willing to contribute something to the site, especially if they see it become something tangible (like prizes to a contest).
Encourage community archives. Provide a way to address individual bits of history (messages, chat logs, event histories) in finely-grained units.
This is a must. New members will want to research to see how the site came about, and things that occured during the sites lifetime. I think that people are very interested in history. They want to know about the past. Keeping archives is not very hard, especially if you can set up an automated system.
You will never please some users. A few will stick around only to see your next mistake. They tend to be vocal. Their pessimism doesn't make them wrong, but it can be grating.
Again, this is where moderators and other regulars to the site come in. When someone on the forums posts something degrading or offensive (yeah, sue me for censoring people, there are some things that are not appropriate for an OpenGL forum. I don't want my forum to be full of SPAM), the moderators immediately step in and either edit the post or delete it entirely. If a user is being particularly harsh, and I am not there to quell them, a moderator will say, "Hey, listen, Vic works his hardest on the site. He's not perfect, and he'll take care of you. Just have some patients." It's a very rewarding feeling when people want to help you with your site without pay. Occasionally, when I make a news post, I'll thank my moderators for their hard work so they know their work is appreciated.
Simplicity may appeal to some users. The lack of sophistication (reply notification, searching, revisions, and access controls) may put off some users, and an ugly or awkward user interface may get in the way sometimes, but a community can grow in spite of the mess.
This is very true. Thus, I approach my community two ways. There is the main news page, the main page of the site, and then there are the forums (similar to any message board you see now). The main page (and subsequent sub pages), are very simple. A DIV in the middle of the page is all that is needed for news. I use style sheets to control the data in there, and all in all, it comes out very nice. I am currently redesigning the main page to add a few more visual controls, but its still very basic. However, when you click on the Forums link, you go to the much more "complicated" forums. There, you can post messages, be alerted of replies, send private messages and email, search for past posts, etc. It doesn't hurt that my forums looks particularly nice.
Finally (I promise, this is my last point), you need something to keep repeat visitors. There must be a way for visitors to interact with the site. No one wants to just read news posts and view a few tutorials. When they are done, they won't come back (I feel this was an underlying assumption in the article, though). Two more ways to keep visitors: Contests! Yes, they cost money, but yes, people love them. Especially when they can get a free Radeon 9000 or 256MB of Crucial RAM (hint hint) from entering it. Even better: use the donations other members made for this. The second way is to give visitors free stuff without you having to pay for it. For example, anyone who is a member of the forums, have more than 10 posts, and contribute well to the community can have their own subdomain on the site (and an email address and a free MySQL database/PHP support). This is better than a lot of hosting plans. Members can use the subdomain to show off their work or write tutorials on a different facet of OpenGL. I require NO ads, but I casually suggest that if they want to link to me, I'd appreciate it.
Well, thats all about me and my online community experience. I wouldn't trade it for the world.
-Vic
Don't use UPS!. Heh.
-Vic
First, visit my site, OpenGLForums.com. Its geared toward OpenGL obviously, but there is an abundance of talented 3D programmers there who can share knowledge with you regardless of the rendering API you choose to use.
With that out of the way, I recommend the following:
- OpenGL Game Programming - Kevin Hawkins and Dave Astle
- OpenGL Programming Guide 3rd Edition - Mason Woo, Jackie Neider, and Tom Davis
- 3D Graphics Programming - Sergei Savchenko
- Game Programming Gems 1 and 2 - Assorted authors
- Physics for Game Developers - David Bourg
Thats just from my personal collection. Unfortunately, there aren't many books on engine design. The most valuable information you'll find is in the communities (like mine from above), or other sites like gamedev.net, flipcode.com, nehe.gamedev.net.Good luck with your quest. Its one of the most rewarding ones, I think.
-Vic
TDN - toolshed.down.net
ToolShed.Down.Net, its the #1 fan site for the band TOOL, and its been around for 7 years, and I don't even think its ad supported.
-Vic
If this affects sites like Amazon.com, I'm sure that Amazon could sue they hell out of them. Sure, they've barely turned a profit, but they've got to have some awesome lawyers.
Why don't Amazon just shut them down?
-Vic
I don't get this about sites like this with this much traffic. Why can't they take the time to make their sites comply with the W3 standards, or at least use better CSS and HTML to make smaller pages.
There are probably 400+ occurances of the FONT tag in the HTML output alone. This could be cut down considerably by just replacing it with CSS.
Why is the page using tables? Tables were not made for layout! Those news sections should be DIV's or P's or even SPAN's at the very least.
One would think that Google (friggin Google!) could take the time to make a better coded site. The bandwidth would drop considerably, and probably save a few million a month on bandwidth alone.
(I'll step off my soap box now)
-Vic
Check http://www.debian.org/partners/.
Chances are, one of the sponsors there (specifically Brainfood, which provides machines and hosting) uses Debian on their servers.
Might be worth sending them an email and seeing what they say.
-Vic
"having to install perl and all of the required modules".
I am not a sysadmin (and I'm not trying to troll here), but how hard is it to install Perl? At my company, my boss and I installed Perl in a few minutes (30 or so). Surely it can't take that long to install Perl and a few modules, especially if you install Activestate's Perl.
-Vic
That I need to get in shape as well. I am a large person, and I knew that all that sitting in front of the computer downing Dr. Peppers and pizza slices was not good. The first thing I did was give up drinking Dr. Pepper, cold turkey. In one summer, from not drinking Dr. Pepper (I drank water and iced tea occasionally instead), I lost 27lbs, just from not drinking 300 wasted calories.
;)
Then I started to work out. I do a lot of cardio exercises to get my heartrate way up. Thats when you start to loose a lot of weight. And it can be fun to. Find an exercise bike, get a good book/magazine, and start reading. In an hour, you will have lost a ton of calories, exercised a lot, and finished 50+ pages in your book. There really isn't a downside. If you can't get a book, find a TV. Two episodes of The Simpsons and you are done. Thats it.
After I do cardio, I go lift weights extensively. Mainly upper body since the cardio takes care of the lower body. In just 3 weeks of doing weights, I've increased my bench max from 115lbs to 155lbs. Its that easy (wow I sound like a piece of SPAM).
The last thing to do is aerobics, especially kickboxing. Its fun, its really a good exercise, you get your heartrate up, and usually there are tons of dainty, hot chicks in the room with you.
At any rate, just eat right and work out is what it comes down to. You don't have to look like Ahnuld, but then again, you don't have to look like Jabba.
Hope this helps. -Vic
Mirror: http://openglforums.com/switched_back.html
http://www.pcgameworld.com/company.php/id/666
:)
If you go to that link now, you will find that that is the information about the Army game developers. Conviently, it also has the number 666 as its ID in the database.
Coincidence? I think not!
-Vic
Linus?
That thought that this article was related to the 3D modeling program?
-Vic
I also work in an animation shop (www.epicsoftware.com) and for the past 7 years, we've been using Lightwave. We started using it in 1995 with version 4 (or 5 I believe). It cost something like $2000, which blew me away back then that software cost that much. I had always thought MS Office for $99 bucks was steep.
Anyway, we've been using Lightwave ever since and never looked back. It has all of the features that all of the major packages have (last time I checked, anyway) and its a ton less money.
I think a seat of Maya base price cost around $12,000, while Lightwave is only $2500. Its an awesome deal. The Lightwave 6.x file type is pretty much an open standard, and you can find translaters written by third parties out there (there might even be some on sourceforge). A
At anyrate, my vote goes to Lightwave.
Hope this helps.
-Vic
I'm sorry but you had several mistakes in your post.
/. would fail WASP tests and the regular W3C validator tests.
First, tables, provided they are coded correctly, are HTML, and XHTML compliant. They would have to be, as tabular data (what tables were made for) still has to be displayed on some sites.
WASP is saying that to make a layout like their site does not require tables, and it doesn't. You can use some fancy positioned div's, and spans and you'll have a very nice site.
Also, the (b) tag is not depricated. However, (strong) should be used in place of it in most places.
No, the HTML behind
-Vic
There is an IE theme you can use called (surprisingly) The IE Theme.
Get it from http://mozdev.org/.
-Vic
I guess the server is on their DSL line as well beacuse its been a Slashdotted.
-Vic
this link from amazon has an incredible CVS book. It's written by one of the original authors of CVS, and goes into both Linux and Win32 CVS usage. I definitely suggest picking up a copy.
Hope this helps.
-Vic
http://wearables.unisa.edu.au/images/projects/beng un1.jpg.
If there is one thing that gets chicks, its gotta be that suit.
-Vic
I am also running a contest (not using Crystal Space per say) at http://openglforums.com. Its all about OpenGL programming. Everyone is invited to come and try out. The contest has a Blade-centric theme!
-Vic
Looks like the site is already down.
;)
Mirror at http://openglforums.com/spider/index.html
I even took the pop-ups off for you guys, aren't I nice?
-Vic
One of the most informative sites I have been to that teaches like you did is https://www.gameinstitute.com/gi/. You could perhaps show your college this and get some ideas from it.
Hope this helps.
-Vic
"Priest, a 40-something ex-con who dropped out of high school in rural Citra, had devised his invention just a year or so earlier."
My respect for Intel just went down a notch for believing this guy who has a record like this.
-Vic
The download was VERY slow for me, mirror at php-4.2.0.tar.gz.
-Vic
Along those same lines, if you have ever been to www.monster.com, they have a page that you can bring up ASAP (if you have it open, of course) that looks like an official document to read so that if your boss catches you online at monster.com, you can quickly switch and look like you're working.
-Vic