Pokitto Magazine Contributor Questionnaire

Greetings Pokitto community!

We are looking to start a community driven Pokitto Magazine! Since it is a community driven project, I’m making this questionnaire to see how many in the community would like to contribute their knowledge and experience to the magazine.

So! A few questions:

  1. Who would like to contribute?
  2. What would you like to contribute?
  3. What would you like to see in the magazine?
  4. Would you like to help create the magazine beyond writing content? (Such as for roles like Editor, Designer etc…)
  5. Comments or questions of your own?

Replies can be pasted in this topic for review. The magazine isn’t official nor is it 100% guaranteed to happen. But I for one, and a number of others in the community, would really like to see this happen! So lets see what everyone in the community thinks!

1 Like
  1. @Hanski
  2. Here are few. I do no mind at all if someone else would like to take one or two of them.
  • “Using the Joystick n’ Rumble Hat with Python” or
  • “Pokitto Robot Car project” or
  • “Getting Started with Python Editor”
  1. Something for everyone: beginner & advanced level articles, HW & SW projects, C++ & Python, interviews, game reviews, pixel graphics…
  2. Just write content
1 Like
  1. @spinal
  2. I really don’t know, possibly something about something.
  3. basic pex examples/experiments, simple code type-ins "how it all happened by @jonne "
  4. sure, don’t know how good I’d be though.
  5. I’ll get thinking.
2 Likes
  1. @HomineLudens
  2. A post mortem about the making of “Abbayes de Morts” for Pokitto
  3. An article with optimization for classic games (platformer, shooters) for low spec hardware
  4. Thanks but no.
  5. Wish you best luck @torbuntu, good initiative with this project.
3 Likes

@Pharap, would you care to write some advanced C++ article? Something along the lines of e.g. “How to use templates” or “Using fixed-point arithmetic in games”. Just a copy-paste one or two of your thorough explanations from the forum, and you have almost done it :wink:

2 Likes

The forum actually has a massive amount of great knowledge accumulated that could be copied into an article

2 Likes

Depends when/if I get chance and what things people would be most interested in reading about.

That could be drastically different depending on what people actually want to know

Actually using a template is a lot easier than people think:

// Congratulations, you've used a template
int value = std::max(0, otherValue);

And even writing templates isn’t that hard for simple stuff:

namespace std
{
	// Congratulations, you've written a template
	template<typename T>
	constexpr const T & max(const T & a, const T & b)
	{
		return (a < b) ? a : b;
	}
}

(And yes, std::max probably is implemented like that, or at least it will be equivalent to that.)

The difficult part of templates is actually combining various techniques to do high-level arcane magic,
and understanding SFINAE.
(*Hides daedric shrine to Hermaeus Mora*)

That’s also a lot easier than people think.
I have already written a basic intro to fixed points.
Ultimately they’re just mixed fractions, but the denominator of the fraction is always a power of two.

Admittedly adapting FixedPoints to work for Pokitto might not be immediately obvious.
I should probably get around to hosting an adapted version somewhere.
There’s one bundled in Physix if anyone needs it.

1 Like

Great!

For templates:
I think just having a “What is a template?” and a “Some simple examples” chapters would be enough.

For fixed-point numbers:
The Wiki article looks fine. Should we just copy it?

That is a good reason to have it (and fixed-point numbers ) in the magazine for (supposedly) a wider audience that the forum.

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  1. Me, @torbuntu or someone else. This is quite easy to do.
  2. A developer interview about the Python Game Jam winner: @dir3kt (if he is willing to do it). Maybe few words about the GameJam itself.
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I for sure would be happy to make small contribution to the magazine.

BTW I’m a bit sorry to be off Pokitto… Got very busy with some projects in … err… Unity lately. Hopefully I will have more time to go back to Pokitto coding during summer.

3 Likes

No need to apologize :smile: the magazine is still very much in a planning phase. There is time.

1 Like

When you get tired of the complexity of Unity, you will come back to Pokitto. Nice and easy. I used to code for Unity too.

1 Like