T2D Real Time Networking TDN Article

#1 Tom,

I was just looking though this article (very good btw) and something occurred to me that I'm not sure about and that maybe you can answer although I could post it up on the TDN forums.

When people, such as yourself, create cool articles like this, are they being linked from some official jumping-off point? Lots of the pages I see are not being linked from anywhere which makes me wonder if lots of this great content is not being viewed because it's living detached in cyber-space.

I haven't used this WIKI system so there's maybe some menu-option I'm missing but if not, I guess it'd be a great idea to put in a section from the main T2D page where people can put in misc links?

Please educate me in the ways of the WIKI! ;)

- Melv.

#2 Hmm.. good question. In this case, no, its stand alone, thats why I posted this thread. Usually you have to edit some other page somewhere to link it up. Thats what I did for past articles, but since this one is very much a work in progress I figured I'd leave off on linking it from the main pages (or wherever would be relevant) til it was a bit more complete. For example, the multithreading article I wrote I linked from both the 1.4 What's New page and the main TGE page. That said, I believe there is a master index that links everything and also there's the Recent Changes page.

I don't know what the official word is, but that's my take on it.

T.

#3 There are of course the base landing pages, but in general it's the responsibility of article authors to link-back to other articles, the landing page, or other "breadcrumb" pages to make the articles more accessable.

One technique I use is to do a search for terms and phrases that I think might apply to my new article, and edit those terms/phrases wherever I find them in TDN to provide links to my new content.

In my opinion, this is one of the both strengths and weaknesses of a wiki based format--people need to link the information to where it's most useful. Linked well, it can provide for an incredible research/learning experience, but if people don't link (and continue to add additional links to new or old works as they make sense), then information can get orphaned easily.

#4 Tom,

Thanks, I'll speak to the GG guys then. Perhaps we need some kind of "sandbox" section that people can put in for ad-hoc or WIP pages until they can be linked into the main body of links in a more structure way.

I'd hate for these pages to become detached and lost if the original authors don't make any noise about them.

Thanks again,

- Melv.

#5 Stephen beat me! :)

- Melv.

#6 There is a search feature to list all orthoned wiki pages.
tdn.garagegames.com/wiki/Special:Lonelypages

Might be worth checking in on that every few months to see if any T2D pages are not linked back to anything and have been forgotten about.

Although judging by the number of pages listed, maybe I've mis-interpreted what the page is for :P

#7 No, that page is functioning properly.

The lonely pages list works to find stuff that's not been linked from anywhere. Meanwhile, the hub pages are all unprotected, so that people can link from there as appropriate... Maybe I'm missing an important piece of the solution, though?

#8 @Ben: I think we're good actually--people are just kind of discovering best practices here in this thread as they start to use TDN more and more!

#9 Agreed.

For my part, I guess I'm just trying to get to grips with a totally open, self-administering documentation system!

- Melv.

#10 Btw if we talk of the TDN: Shouldn't T2D be renamed to TGB somewhen? ;-)

#11 Yup, it will be someday.

#12 @Tom or Melv ,

After sending the datablocks and ghosting the objects, what do I need to do to get the TGB scene graph to work with the ghosted objects.

Thanks