Editorials and rants

General Discussions
#1

Opinion pieces liven up a site. They’re interesting, and allow people to spout off about stuff, throwing out ideas and concepts that may or may not be correct or fair.

They can be a good starting point for people (the author or just readers) to then go and write a proper article on some related topic, with proper research and diligence.

They can reveal a lot to the inexperienced reader about particular topics, giving a “flavour” of what is going on in those areas, without the reader having to first learn and understand all the mechanics themself.

But…sooner or later there will be some that are “rant-tastic!” as a friend of mine puts it.

Note: Moderation would not go beyond removal of hate speech etc and anything that veers close to libel or any such. Perhaps we could add “other links that might give opposing opinions” at the end of each piece (if any editor could find any!).

#2

What sort of thing might people rant about?

I have plenty of rants but most of confined to my weblog :slight_smile:

Kev

#3

Mainly it’s for open-ended questions, with no factual, logical answer. Things which are debates by their nature.

The point is that we’d disallow a proposed tutorial or article that was opinions and theories - it has to be factual and precise - whereas this would be an outlet for the kinds of things that by their nature are perhaps irresolvable: there’s no way of making an absolute decision one way or another.

Typical candidates would be opinion pieces on:

  • how viable is java for professional games development?
  • lets multi-thread our java games and get rid of the single-threaded game-loop
  • Java vs C++
  • Java 5: is it worth it?
  • …whatever other contentious issues people think of…

One key aspect is that the template for displaying them would come with a built-in big disclaimer, making it clear that this was opinion rather than fact.

Of course, they’d have to have their own forums :). Whereas I’m not sure how important it is to have forums attached to articles and tutorials (there’s not much to say that isn’t best said in private email to the authors of those), it’s imperative that these opinion pieces be allowed to kick off debates.

#4

[quote]Typical candidates would be opinion pieces on:

  • how viable is java for professional games development?
  • lets multi-thread our java games and get rid of the single-threaded game-loop
  • Java vs C++
  • Java 5: is it worth it?
  • …whatever other contentious issues people think of…
    [/quote]
    But those aren’t good examples because they all have concrete answers:

[quote] - how viable is java for professional games development?
[/quote]
It’s viable, but lacks api’s or a full featured purchasable engine (both are comming along though)

[quote] - lets multi-thread our java games and get rid of the single-threaded game-loop
[/quote]

  • We are all using Java so we are already doing multiple threads for our games… some of us don’t realize it, some of us don’t care, some of us tolerate it and some of us use more

[quote] - Java vs C++
[/quote]

  • Java is faster to build with, C++ runs faster…both have slightly mangled the OOP paridigm… C++ more so, but both are close enough.

[quote] - Java 5: is it worth it?
[/quote]

  • Java 5 is worth it for new applications but don’t bother porting old programs…and yes you should consider it a port.

See… all those questions have concrete, definitive answers or explanations :smiley:

(The above statements are not opinions, only facts)

(The above line may not be factual)