Alternative Forums

[Joozey]

I suggest to make a few more forums to dump the posts that don't fit in any other forum. Some of the suggestions might not be needed yet, but can be of use later, when the community becomes bigger and forums get spoiled with inappropiate topics.

• A Beginner forum, with a sticky containing links to tutorials, tools, templates and other usefull information to help them started.
  Could contain a reference to a sticky in every library forum which contain further information about a specific console to develop for as well. Would also serve the purpose to keep beginner questions and stuff out of the other forums.
• A Tools forum (isntead of a specific grit forum) for people to ask questions about tools in general.
  A sticky with some information about tools you could use for what purpose, and what tools not, could be helpfull.
• A Scripting forum (C, C++, ...), for people who can't solve their problem and are in need of desperate help.
• A Contribution forum for people to contribute stuff to the community such as models, graphics, tools, roms etc.
• A Showcase forum, maybe even Showcase2 as well, to have a spot for new projects.
  Showcase2 could be used for released projects, so that junk and jewels are seperated.
• -A Misc forum to put all the posts in that still don't fit in any of the forums. Would mainly serve a purpose for bored people to kill time.

Regards,

Joozey

[WinterMute]

Interesting suggestions.

A beginner forum could be interesting, perhaps a "New Users Start Here" section or something similar.

I intend the various library forums to be used for those specific platfoms, including C/C++ help so I'm not sure we need extra sections for scripting.

The tools forums will expand in future as new tools are made available. I'd like to keep them separate rather than lumping everything in together so information is easier to find.

Offtopic, Contributions and Showcase I'm really not too sure about at present. I think we need to get a few more members in here and see what people expect from the board. I'd like it to be primarily for technical support and programming rather than encouraging people to post their latest project. Having said that I'm open to providing what devkitPro toolchain users want to see here.

[amellors]

When I first saw the suggestion for the contribution forum I thought of my XCode stuff, a place for the community to upload stuff that they would like in the distribution.

Also a newbie forum/guide would be an excellent place, since I spent a week or so blindly stumbling across tutorials before I fround the IRC channel.

[Lemming]

Having a showcase section of the forum would compete with gbadev's forum, I'm not sure if that's a good or a bad thing.
It would probably attract more users to this forum, but the releases would be scattered over multiple boards, and users would have a harder time when looking for homebrew. It would have less palib though...

If there is one though, I support the separation of complete releases, and alphas/betas.

[BigRedPimp]

The only thing I can think to add is a category for announcing team projects. A good example of a post to such a forum would be a project to work on a DS-specific UI library like the one Patater made.

[iD4rK]

Just wanted to say hello here ^^

Nice you guys are still working on the scene.

Good luck to you all.
iD4rK

[jared]

i hope the xcode stuff makes it into the contribution forum - i use xcode essentially as a text editor these days, even for unrelated projects, because setting it up has been such a pain.

also, i think a hardware section would be good. i'm a computer engineer and so i'm more of a hardware guy myself. i'd like to see if other engineers might work together to help develop some interesting hardware devices -- i see the two DS slots as something like the old GeekPort on BeBoxen from back in the day.

anyone else here feeling hardware-motivated?

[eitje]

Hello! I'm here because I donated some money to the site, which I found by looking for DS development info; I thought devkit* seemed to be the right tool for the job, and I figured I could give some for the cause. Anyway, I'm a software developer myself, though I work in finance rather than gaming, and I think it should be fun to give this stuff a shot, although it will be quite a down-shift (metaphorically).

Now, here are things I know: there are plenty of "starter" documents in wikis & forums across the internet. Some of them seem easier, some of them seem harder. As a starter, I'm not sure which documents are valuable, and which are garbage; this leads to reading MANY documents, and finding common themes amongst them. Through that process, I notice that some of these docs were written against older versions of your tools and, as such, may no longer be applicable.

Given that this small bunch of folks, here and now, presumably contain the creme-de-la-creme of the devkitpro community, it would make sense to ask for their initial expertise, then, in the identification of appropriate documentation. My suggestion is as follows:

For each toolchain, sticky & lock a beginner's thread with a description of how to do the initial setup (maintained with each new release, as necessary) for each toolchain, as well as links to good tutorials, articles, and threads regarding each toolchain's usage. Make sure to lock it so that only mods or trusted members can modify it; it should be a reference guide for the new, not a "how do i...?" breeding ground.

I know the majority of this would be lame & boring documentation aggregation, but - as the proposed central forum for the projects in question - I believe it's a good idea to get this stuff out of the way ahead of time. Also, I don't know if a general "Newbie" forum is a good idea, since you might end up confusing your intended audience (people that are generally lost regarding your tools in the first place).

...and it would make my life easier, too.