Suggestions For Improving The OGRE Ecosystem and Community

Anything and everything that's related to OGRE or the wider graphics field that doesn't fit into the other forums.
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Enhex
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Suggestions For Improving The OGRE Ecosystem and Community

Post by Enhex »

Hi there,
I want to bring up few suggestions for improving the OGRE ecosystem and helping the community grow.

Ecosystem
Right now OGRE's ecosystem have a lot of addons and plugins which haven't been updated in years. That's a problem because users cannot tell if they still work, and most users will not bother with checking if they work. And if they do, it would be nice to have an easy way to tell the world the thing works.
We can learn from Wordpress a way to deal with it. Wordpress uses a compatibility rating system for it's plugins. That means that when a user checks out a plugin, he can see other user's feedback to be able to tell if the plugin works with his version of Wordpress.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/

Tutorials
Though OGRE's tutorials are great, some of them are outdated. That gets in the way of new users who are already took the decision to invest in OGRE and discourage them.
I suggest doing what SFML did, which is having versions of the tutorials for each release of the library. This way you don't throw away tutorials for the old OGRE releases, and make sure there's updated tutorials for the new one.
If nothing changed a tutorial can simply be a copy-pasted, but it still needs to be copied.
http://www.sfml-dev.org/resources.php

Website
The current website has too many walls of text, and new visitors are most likely to get lost in it.
You have to ask yourself what people are looking for when they visit the website?
When someone first finds out about OGRE he'll want to know what is OGRE, and would probably want to see images and videos that showcase OGRE. Right now the gallery on the website have 4 images of a ball. There are some great looking projects made with OGRE, and taking few images and embedding some trailers will benefit everyone.
If the visitor is looking for help, he'll want to get to the forums. Currently the link for the forums is at the bottom of a 130 pixels wide side menu.
A visitor may be looking for the OGRE documentation, which again also suffers from the same problem as the forums of being hard to find on the website.
These things should be easy to find, and draw the visitor's attention.

Bullet physics for examples places the links for the forums and documentation at the top left corner of the page, among "home" and download.
Bullet have 4 options in its menu, OGRE have 30. From a UX design perspective the more options you give a user, the less likely he is to make a choice. Keep it simple.


Conclusion
I don't expect these stuff to happen overnight. It will require time, people and effort to do. But it's still important to keep these stuff in mind. It will help the community grow, and in turn the community will have more people to give back to the OGRE project and help it thrive.
I think there should be somebody responsible for this kind of stuff, because responsibility cannot be distributed among people.
I would also like to read what do you think about these suggestions, and invite you to make your own.
al2950
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Re: Suggestions For Improving The OGRE Ecosystem and Communi

Post by al2950 »

I think you have some very valid points and good ideas. I especially like the idea of having tutorials linked to released versions of Ogre. However as always it needs someone to commit to some time to do this!

Hopefully someone from the Ogre team and chime in on this post.
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c6burns
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Re: Suggestions For Improving The OGRE Ecosystem and Communi

Post by c6burns »

I think posts like these serve to highlight how little ideas are worth at the end of the day. In 20 minutes I could produce more ideas than the community could contribute in a year. To echo what al2950 is saying, time and effort are the real commodities.
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Klaim
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Re: Suggestions For Improving The OGRE Ecosystem and Communi

Post by Klaim »

al2950 wrote:I think you have some very valid points and good ideas. I especially like the idea of having tutorials linked to released versions of Ogre. However as always it needs someone to commit to some time to do this!

Hopefully someone from the Ogre team and chime in on this post.

Actually there was some discussion about something like that in the last few months, but I think the lack of resources (people/time) makes it difficult. The Ogre Team is already full with several imminent releases (I think, looking at the JIRA).
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Re: Suggestions For Improving The OGRE Ecosystem and Communi

Post by drwbns »

The website would need a complete revamping in order to do this which I'm guessing - isnt an easy task. It would take some very skilled programmers to reorganize all the forum threads which was discussed before. There also hasn't really been a vote on what new layout would best support Ogre's efforts and the communities involvement. I'm sure the dev's would all definitely have to discuss any proposed changes. I think if any changes are done, it should really be a complete redesign that would suit both newcomers and advanced users alike. I think a team would be needed for a successful redesign. I'm not sure who actually has access to the website data but maybe whoever is webmaster would like to reply to this thread along with anyone that can prove they can do the job and is willing to along with any ideas that would work better than what is here now.
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c6burns
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Re: Suggestions For Improving The OGRE Ecosystem and Communi

Post by c6burns »

I don't see why there is a focus on the website and the OGRE team. I really don't think that many people visit ogre3d.org looking for the SDK and are unable to find it. Also anyone can access the wiki and that's where the lion's share of effort is needed (at least IMHO).
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Re: Suggestions For Improving The OGRE Ecosystem and Communi

Post by drwbns »

I think the main reason why a website redesign keeps getting talked about is because I think most people feel as though a lot of the information , comments, suggestions, solutions to problems, etc all get lost in the forum topics and aren't really tied to the wiki meaning that a lot of good solutions lose their value when people have to hunt for them.
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