Should we have tutorials?

This question might have been asked awhile ago but I still think its relevant to reevaluate.

I know there is a small programming tutorial somewhere in the forums. This is kind of expanding on that principle, why doesn't this forum have tutorials pinned as the top post in the thread. For every main subject. We need to give the community a learning and knowledge basis to build off of; waiting for people to come in with all the required skills is not ideal. We can also have kind of like a Q&A for explaining why we do things a certain way as well.
We could even go as far as to create an entirely new thread to keep it separate from the development section.

Also I don't mean explain everything by posts from a forum member but rather have links to professional tutorials such as this one.

Earthium's Opinions on Ogre:

Also I will be re-posting my tutorial on understand 3d spacial dimensions and 3d collision detections regardless of the response on this.

Yes, the forums need tutorials i myself was struggling with modelling awhile not knowing where to start, it took us with crovea 2 weeks of combined efforts to get with the basics.

Regarding tutorials, I think having a collection of links to existing tutorials is very useful.  Having members write their own can be nice, especially for more obscure subjects, but can also be a wasted effort when there are better existing ones out there.  I certainly wouldn't object to anyone creating tutorials if they're willing to put that effort in.  If a tutorial might form a series, it should have its own thread.

Regarding Ogre - your correct in saying that Ogre's userbase is far smaller than that of OpenGL, but thats becuase they are fundementally different things.  OpenGL (and DirectX) is a rendering library, Ogre is a graphics/game engine.  OpenGL allows you to print basic things (points, lines, polygons) to screen and apply shaders, and works at a relatively low level.  Ogre (and other engines) has support for loading models, animations, textures etc. and displaying them.  Comparing them is like comparing a low level programming language (assembler, c), to a high level one (java, python) - OpenGL can do everything Ogre can do, and much more besides, but it would require an aweful lot of work to make it do so.  

Given how ambitious other parts of this project already are, writing our own game engine on top of OpenGL would be somewhat unreasonable at this point.  We had to use some exising game engine, and of those we had to choose from (i.e.: free/open source) Ogre is one of the better ones.  Also note that Ogre is built on top of OpenGL, and I think its possible to call some OpenGL functions directly, if needed.

I think this is a great idea (and as an inveterate tutorial-author I am write on board with helping b-dum tsss). Oh wait, link already-existing tutorials? Even better, less work!

I would prefer a dedicated subforum for tutorials, but not just tutorials. Then, not only would we localise tutorials that might otherwise have many disparate subforums people would reasonably search for them in, but we would also provide a place for technical discussions about other things, like cool papers people come across (so I don't need to rely on my personal thread for those any more :P), PCG articles on the web, and other stuff we want to encourage discussion about even if it isn't directly going to become a Thrive feature. We need a place to encourage technical discussion, because that's how we get and keep a community of programmers that are interested in procedural generation, AI, simulation, and all that other fun stuff that coding Thrive will involve. Frankly, if that's successful, we'll end up having a bunch of programmers who visit just for the discussions around PCG and so on, making up a vibrant developer community that would be like an incubator (hmm there's a good name) for ideas we could leech off into Thrive development. Then, whenever, for example, someone makes a prototype of something they read in a paper, and it would be useful to integrate in Thrive, well, we'd already have an implementation to work off of, and someone who'd probably be thrilled to help include it.

Nick (or another mod), what do you think about making a subforum in Programming for tutorials, papers, etc? I'll populate it, I promise :3

I could have sworn there was a Technical Discussion subforum, but instead I found these subforums, which partially cover what was mentioned: 

https://thrivegame.canadaboard.net/f22-procedurals
https://thrivegame.canadaboard.net/f45-arbitrary-mechanics

What would you guys suggest be created? A new subforum titled "Tutorials"?

Thanks Nick, those work pretty well for my additions, but they don't cover everything -- not everything is a procedural or an arbitrary mechanic (what is an arbitrary mechanic anyway?), and those subforums split discussion pretty oddly anyway. I'd suggest merging those into a technical discussion subforum, and probably putting tutorials in the same place.

Edit -- we could always split tutorials off into their own subforum if need be though. But for that I'd wait untl we have a whole bunch of them.

Okay here are the two new subforums:

https://thrivegame.canadaboard.net/f6-tutorials
https://thrivegame.canadaboard.net/f22-technical-discussion

Btw earthium I moved your recent tutorial into the tutorials subforum, if you don't want it there I can move it back. Also if you guys find any tutorials scattered in the forum I can move them to this subforum (Tritium did you make one on modelling in Blender?)

So with the merging-renaming of Arbitrablah and Procedublah into Technobabblah, and given what we've been talking about as the reasoning for the TD subforum, I took it upon myself to introduce the new subforum. I figured it would need their own rules, and all, to help focus discussion, since it isn't completely obvious what it's meant for at first glance.