This site is about the development of games. How one chooses to develop a game is irrelevant. What matters is that they make a game, not how proficient they are at a language, or how indepth their understanding and grasp of math or networking is. There is no need for constant correction and ridicule. What there is a need for is praise and commaraderie.
What you do in your own time, on your own computer is entirely your thing. But if you post it here, where a thread can reasonably expected to be one of the top results in Google. This forum is not just for the hobby developer's, it's also an important resource for professional programmers in the field of game development as well as many more people in game-adjacent fields.
If code anyone posts follows horrible practices or is plain wrong then they should and must be called out otherwise this place is not a resource worth anything. There are plenty of places on the web where you can get practically useless advice but unless you already know it's useless (in which case you would not have needed the resource) there is no way for you to know that because there are no commentators or at least no competent ones.
The same goes for facts: wrong, inaccurate or misleading facts must be confronted and corrected (with appropriate sources as needed).
The preferences and opinions one has concerning any aspect of game development should not be something to be publicly classified as being correct or incorrect, good or bad. right or wrong... If it works, it will suffice. If someone is happy with their work, your negativity is nobody's business.
That's just plain horrible to read. If we are talking about design ideas, you may have a point (although I would consider sensible comments on the lines of "something pretty much exactly like that was tried in X and Y and it really did not work out well" to be a matter of courtesy before I dump a significant portion of my life into something which already has obvious examples to learn from first.
However, your choice of words suggest you mean this primarily in regard to programming, not designing. A lot of people, especially newbies, appear to be gravitating towards C or C++ (or at least something they believe to be C++) as their language of choice. In these languages you simply cannot go "it works, it will suffice". In C++ that just means "in this particular situation on this particular compiler, it appears to work". Tomorrow, when you add one more line of code it might stop working and instead blow up in your face. Or it appears to keep working for weeks and blows up then (those bugs are always great fun), perhaps even before an essential deadline.
You can get away with an attitude like that (within reasonable limits) in some languages, but as a general rule, no. Not at all.
Why should everybody here strive to be writing professional quality code? What about making games for the fun of it? Is that not a valid pursuit? Who are you to judge? We are all human.
First, in my opinion any non-trivial programming requires a certain amount of dedication. If you do not strive to become a better programmer while you are programming, you should not do it at all. I'm also starting to suspect that what you think is "professional quality code" might in fact be things like "learn your standard library" and "understand a few things about your tools".
Some take pleasure in doing things simpler ways, be the bigger man and deal with it.. Some of us are tired of you sharing how wonderful you think you are by throwing your nay-saying two-cent opinion in to the mix. But, this site will be what it is destined to be. It can either foster the growth of the community, or it can disappoint and offend everyone away.
Again, what you do in your own time on your own computer is your own thing. If you want to display something to the public without any reasonable feedback, maybe you want a blog instead. The essential point of a forum is discussion. If the only comments allowed are back patting, they have no point and they have no purpose at all.
Nobody here is a god, even if they are professional game developers. Everybody here is just another human being, with their own perspectives and feelings. But some things are best left unsaid. I wish we were all here for the same thing, to help and to learn. That's what would make this site great.
Bolding is mine. There is no learning without notification of errors, problems or better ways.
For those that have been around, the IOTD was once truly an "image-of-the-day". People from all walks of life were doing different things all the time. Now it seems like hardly anybody is doing anything, and new images are few and far inbetween. Either newcomers aren't learning, or old timers aren't teaching. I'm definitely seeing a lot of activity on the beginners forum, that's for sure.
There are quite a few things wrong with the site. Loss of functionality compared to the old forum. Features that were meant as a replacement/upgrade but are nowadays broken. The decision to suspend the IOTD but not notifying people properly about it or showing that somehow.
The management and technical implementation of the site indeed leaves very much to be desired. The competence and honest (even if sometimes brutal) criticism in threads and attention to factual correctness is the site's redeeming quality though. Take that away and I (and I would suspect many more) would see no point in coming here. Then it can be just like one of those many places on the web where people who believe they know what they are doing are talking and the result is on third plain wrong, one third inaccurate and one third correct (mostly by accident).
All I can think is that something somewhere along the line is discouraging people. I'm only here because I've been doing this for a long time, but if I just showed up here today, I don't think I'd stick around very long, and would probably abandon all hope of making a game after dealing with this scene.
I see a lot of good indie games being around. I bought several of them. In fact I'm nowadays spending much more money on old pearls on GoG or indie games than I'm spending on what is commonly called AAA games.
People should share what they know, and what their experiences have been. But that won't happen with egos in our midst.
Again, you seem to want people to teach and people to learn but with just back patting. There is no learning without pointing out that what you know so far is insufficient or wrong.
