Plan for Ben Garney

Hey guys,

Just a quick plan from the IGC floor (more or less... sort of :P). First off -- IGC 2005 is in full swing. Just got back from it around midnight. Talking to people, playing crazy games, having a good time. I got to play almost a full course of Golf? with its creator. Very fun game. Got to try out the latest Tube Twist build. WOW. The level of quality of games compared to last year's IGC is much higher. Lots of near-complete or complete things out there. Just incredible.

I got to talk a bit on the traditional Friday night "GG Dog & Pony" show. The biggest news that I got to impart was that TDN is finally into beta for SDK owners (people who own TGE, TSE, T2D). Head on over to tdn.garagegames.com and check it out. Don't forget to read the introduction page, it'll give you a more detailed notion of where we are on this monumental, revolutionary project! Short summary - we're a lot closer to making it public than we were before. ;)

TDN pages are also going to start making their way into the Google search on the site, updated nightly of course.

Some of you have already found it on your own - testament to our fanbase and the desire for this product, I'm sure. Congrats, now you're in my database. ;)

This is going to be a cool IGC.

I'd love to give a full report, go on and on, but I have a LOT of pictures and video to organize, and I also need to get some sleep, cuz I have to be at the conference hall in less than eight hours.... Crazy!

Let's just say this is going to be interesting. ;)

-- Ben




Notes added after reading comments - up here so everyone can see it! - follow:

Just to be clear, this is a case of "here's the container, let's start collaborating", not "all the docs are up right now." In response to those who asked, YES, absolutely start putting articles up. For now, just drop me or Adam deGrandis an e-mail if you've got an article posted, and we'll hook it into the hub pages... Don't forget to categorize it!

We'll be having interns, employees, and community members participate in official documentation projects (for instance, porting existing docs into TDN); meanwhile individuals should feel free to get involved. We'll have a page up announcing where we're doing heavy doc work so that you can be sure you're not going to get run over by a big doc dump or something. :)

(Once IGC is over) one of the most useful things you can do to help co-ordinate on TDN is get into the #tdn channel on the GG IRC server. That's where Adam and I hang out, and we also have all the changes to the site streaming into the channel via a bot. We'll also explore setting up a forum area or things like that.

I'll definitely be posting a lot more information on TDN once IGC is over; for now I'm just trying to stay on top of all the AWESOME stuff happening here!

If you do have any problems with TDN, please send me a copy of the source of the broken page, as well as the URL it happened at, and a description of what went wrong. You need a fairly recent browser or the site will look not-good. (ie, latest IE or Firefox is probably good though it should run on older browsers fine. IE5 is a known issue, some images won't work, we'll be addressing that.)

And... once again... Thanks guys, for checking this out and taking the time to use TDN! It's just going to get better from here on out - we've got at least one major surprise coming up in a week or so. (As always... when it's ready. :)

Oh yeah - multiple language support. We do support it; we'll be focusing on it once the site is a little bit more mature (and once we've identified people who can "own" each language - definitely don't want docs that are out of date!). Right now we need to get the basic structure put together, and pound out the bugs, so that we can have a solid platform for other languages to build from.