GarageGames Chats - Everyone Please Read

#21 I think this thread is dangerously (and unnecessarily) close to flame wars. What clashes right now is simply two mentalities. As I possess something from both of them, I'll allow myself to summarize what I've learned so far:

*IRC is needed in a community like this. Especially because of the fact that responses in forums are well-rounded and spelled, it is sometimes hard to see the person behind them. Maybe your next partner or employer. IRC conversations can reveal many good (or bad) things about people.

*IRC has its shortcomings as time-based media (sorry for lame definition). For worldwide community such a shortcoming is especially painful.

*IRC has another shortcoming - problems with information storing, systemizing, editing. Log files are more stone-carved than forum threads, if one has additional question, he/she basically has to brace up for additional chat session or whatever.

*Forums have shortcoming as well and it is delayed response. Thanks to overall mood, there are practically no forum threads left unanswered in GG community, but delay can kill especially people who maybe access Internet three times per week. (Well...its possible, right?)

Bottom line:

* IRC is best medium for brainstorming and socializing sessions. I cant imagine better way of communication for beta testers searching for solution, fans advising new features, team gathering, job interviews. Or simply asking for advice on some cryptic error.

* Forums are best for articulated, long discussions on topics such as Justin mentioned. I can not imagine why anyone would need immediate answer on question about team building or publisher habits. If you find answer tomorrow, its still ok, isnt it?

Bottom-bottom line:

*IRC sessions should be specialized, general questions on which moderators will answer must be announced before. This way one can see is it or is it not worth attending session. No "awkward silence", just pure business. Suggestions for questions can be gathered in separate forum where each thread is dedicated to certain upcoming session.
In my point of view, it is the best way to use both ways of communication at its best.
Specialized forums should be created as well (see Justin's post).

Ufff... thats it. Maybe not Stephen Hawkings-depth reading, but you got the idea :)

#22 I have gotten more done in the IRC channel in the last 2 years, getting questions answered, thinking out good dev ideas, etc, than any other medium for TGE participation.

As for ease of use, and this particular IRC:

http://www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=forums&page=ircChat

Click on the chat link, right hand side of every page on this site ;)

It's a good place to get quick answers. And it's moderated (much to the chagrin of many an IRC veteran). I think that people who don't use it, are missing out :)

#23 I would just pipe in with my opinion that the #garagegames IRC channel is actually a very useful place to be. I idle there 24/7. Not a day passes that I dont hand out or receive at least 3 useful pieces of advice relating to Torque programming. It sometimes takes an hour for someone "in the know" to see your question and respond to it...so it might not be useful for people with dialup who cannot afford to idle professionally like I do.

I realize the point of this thread was moderated chats and I dont have anything new to add there...just wanted to throw my $0.02 in there about the usefulness of the #garagegames channel.

#24 Got to agree with Paul. I used to hang around in the channel a lot when I first bought a license and would always have a couple of nuggets of information at the end of the day that have been useful months later. Yeah it can be really quiet for a couple of hours at a time but eventually it all gets active :)

Being in the UK its the awkward times more than anything else that stops me being at the moderated chats, but from reading the logs usually they have something worth reading.

#25

+--------------+---------+-----+-------+
| Chat Program | Windows | Mac | Linux |
+--------------+---------+-----+-------+
| AIM          |    x    |  x  |       |
| ICQ          |    x    |  x  |       |
| MS Messenger |    x    |     |       |
| Yahoo Chat   |    x    |  x  |       |
| Trillian     |    x    |     |       |
| IRC          |    x    |  x  |   x   |
| Jabber       |    x    |  x  |   x   |
+--------------+---------+-----+-------+

Let's see... out of all of the Major chat systems... Only Two are able to be used on all 3 platforms by a native client. IRC and Jabber, and of the two I'm not sure Jabber will support confrencing. Yes AIM and ICQ do provide a web/java based version of their client. But I haven't tested it under Linux so have no idea how well it will perform.

If there is another platform agnostic chat system that I'm missing that will support large scale conferencing, with moderation tools... I haven't seen it.

Yes this is 2003, but NEW does not always mean better. IRC is an open protocol that can be implemented on pretty much any system that can get access to the internet.

#26 Yeah, what Paul and Labrat said :)

#27 I use ICQ in linux.

#28 No one has said all chats had to be friendly only to people in North America. As many of the IRC regulars know, some of us are around till the wee hours of the morning.
But no one suggesting geographically friendly chats have suggested times. Sure Rick and Tim might not be able to attend but it doesn't mean there aren't other experienced programmers using Torque that cant. Beffy is in germany and he's quite well respected in the channel.

I'd just like to point out that while Justin supports forum-based discussion, he's also an avid user of the IRC channel, unfortunately, he has been entirely too busy to do anything lately that is not business related.

#29 IRC is great if you've got the time to babysit a chat screen. Personaly I prefer forum based dicussions (as long as it's decent forum software) since I can read and respond when I want not at some arbitrary time. Plus forums WAY better for finding stuff 6 months later.

#30 I have kept my mouth shut, but cant any longer.

Sebastien tried to come here to make things better, and all you guys can do is shit on him and put down the media in which he is trying to improve on.

Thats pretty damed sad.

#31 As a professional, full time indie, I found the times the GG chats were scheduled to be inconvenient. Late in the afternoon in my time zone.

As someone else pointed out, with little chance to actually interact during the chats, it was easier to just read the log at my own convenience.

Finally, most of the topics didn't really interest me much.

Perhaps an alternative to chats would be having people write short articles once a month, collect them and post them as a newsletter. The topics could be like Justin Mette list above. To keep the articles from being a burden, they could be kept short (500-1000 words).

-David
Samu Games

#32 Only responding becuase we were mentioned at the top of the thread. I use IRC, and I have MSN but never use it. I am not going to install any other PM unless there is some compelling reason for me to do so.

I prefer the immediate nature of IRC. Forums are okay too, but I don't know if I'd be for having a BraveTree forum would be such a great idea. Do you get one when you ship a game? When it is decided that you are 'good enough' to get one? I don't want this to turn into some sort of elitist club.

We do want to be available for anyone to help anyone that we can(within the contraints of not being able to get anything done).

I am wondering if the current forum format would not suffice? Maybe a more general forum for dev house that have shipped games (grouping what exists as Justin has suggested above)?

I do like the idea of a countdown timer on the site, and maybe times for weekly chats on certain topics, so people can drop by IRC if they have a specific question for someone, or just pop in if it happens to be going on?

I like the idea of a newletter, or a monthly gouping of articles. I know that I probably would not be contributing much of anything to it as it takes time to do and it has little value for me.

#33 Badguy... you missed my "native client" statement. I am well aware that there are clones of ICQ, AIM, Yahoo! Chat and MS Messenger for Linux. The issue is that these clients were created by people who had to reverse engineer the protocol. Protocols that keep changing and can at any moment break those clients.

IRC chats are just as searchable as a forum, if they are logged and posted to the web.

So back to the origional question from the first post in this thread that everyone complaining about IRC as a medium neglected to answer.

Quote:
So I'm asking everyone to give thier suggestions. Prefered Times or Prefered Topics or both. So what is it going to take to get you people to attend these chats.

Who cares what realtime medium will be used to host the chat.

WHAT do you want see discussed.
WHEN do you want it to happen. (GMT, PST, CST)
WHO do you want to discuss it with.

#34 i think people are missing the point of some of this. IRC is different entirely because its real time.

If someone wanted to post an article they could. But the IRC stuff is generally for instant feedback (i.e. question and answer sessions).

I find the IRC chats with chris very good, ok, there's not a billion people in there, but I dont see that as a downside :)

I dont think we need a "this is better than that" sort of discussion, but we should look at if there are ways to improve participation?

Perhaps its just too niche for many people, which is fine.

I do like the idea of an updated newsletter coming back though, wish someone would pick up that particular ball :)

Phil.

#35 It sounds to me like those that enjoy using IRC are already attending the chats:

Quote:no one outside of the regular GarageGames IRC regulars ever attended

The rest of us that don't hang out in the IRC channel detailed why we don't, even for scheduled chat.

Is anyone reading this thread an IRC user who doesn't attend the chats? I think your input would be very valuable if you are out there lurking.

#36 I use the IRC fairly regularly ([HOW]-Ed), but am unable to attend chats because of the time they are normally held. I'm on the West Coast US and can't attend till about 1800. I'm still at work or commuting prior to that.

-Ed

#37 To Robert Brim:

Sebastian may be trying to make things better, but he immediately jumped down the throat of a GG regular who, like me and many others here, don't use IRC. You'll have to ask Sebastian why he thought it was necessary to do this, but that doesn't fit my definition of "making things better". He seems to like blunt talk, so he got blunt talk in return - *after* slamming badguy. Many GG people find chat extremely useful, and I can see why they do - but I don't. For me, chat - no matter what client or server is used - is a complete and utter waste of time and energy. I have better things to do than online socializing. I don't expect other people to schedule their activities around my schedule, and I sure as hell am not going to slot my own precious free time to suit someone else's schedule unless I can bill for it.

There is probably a method or system that is better than both online chat or forums like these. If one's mandate is to find better ways to serve a game development community then one would be well-advised to listen to what I'm saying about the uselessness of chat in my opinion and try to find a method that satisfies me *and* those that feel that forums don't cut it. One approach that would be a small improvement would be an 'active queue' (the 'Forum Threads' item in the 'What's New' box on the right) that was larger than the current 4 items. Another approach could be a read-only chat log forum, where any currently active scheduled chat session is updating a read-only log in real-time. Then one could see the building thread as it is being built and perhaps to jump into the chat session if it seemed useful. Another approach is a bonfide attempt to make joining a chat session less confusing. Before everyone jumps at me to tell me how to make it work, let me point out that I didn't say "My suggestion to you to improve chat attendance is to tell me how to use it, or tell me which client I should use." I said, "make it less confusing". If you want to resolve that, fine. If not, then fine too. I don't have a problem with chat being confusing, but I know that many do.

The sad thing in this thread is Sebastian's immediate and total inability to accept that people may not share his enthusiasm for the use of chat. I wouldn't have even responded to this thread at all if Sebastian had not attacked badguy. Browbeating people into helping you is not a successful strategy.

#38 We had nice turnout for the scheduled chats, but after a while, the moderated nature of the format is what took it down. Pre-answering all of the questions made for stilted conversation that was like reading a forum or interview, but very slowly.

The immediate nature of chat is what is cool to me. I love going into a channel and answering questions and conversing, but that does not scale very well. Once you get 50-100 people in the channel, the noise level gets so high that the usefulness goes away.

I agree with Ken that Sebastian was fairly heavy handed in the way he presented his initial question, but especially his response to the first post.

-Jeff Tunnell GG

#39 Well, firstly, sorting out the time differences is a bugger.

But, you post the news on the 29th for a chat on the 1st? That's just not enough notice. I would have gone had I checked the site but I've been busy with my birthday over the past weekend. Some of us can't check every day.

--Ed

#40 Mark: The people attending the chats are only attending because the chat happens to get held in the channel they were in. Much like if someone walked into your office and decided to hold a seminar. Your only attending cause you happened to be there beforehand.

Ken : I'm still curious as to what times are preferable since time is the re-occuring problem.

Jeff: Does this mean you'll visit us again sometime soon? :)

Everyone: Maybe I was a little heavy handed but then very few people have answered the initial question either.

What times would you like to see and what topics do you want. I didn't ask weither or not it was supposed to be on IRC.

I'd like to thank Harold "LabRat" Brown and Joe Maruschak for re-asking the questions even though while they weren't heavy handed, did not get a responce either.