Wouldn't you agree that the post was too stupid to take seriously?
No. I think it was written by someone who is probably new to game development and almost certainly by someone for whom English is a second language. The way he uses English words suggest to me that he might be Eastern European, but that's only a guess.
Beyond naivety and marginally less than perfect English, he was polite and well mannered. I expect he will have <insert expletive>'ed off by now, and I don't expect he'll come back either. No doubt he'll tell his friends not to visit the community, and encourage them to use whatever engine he settles on instead.
I'm sure many of us - myself certainly included - have been guilty of lacking patience with people whose first post is them explaining that they're 12, have a wonderful idea for a MMORPG and they just need 4 programmers, 6 artists, 2 musicians and a team of server/web programmers to build it. This wasn't one of those posts though. It's a perfectly legitimate question, and just because TV doesn't have any kind of built-in support for day/night cycle doesn't mean that other engines don't. In fact I know one for certain that does, but even if it was a naive question, that was the worst it was. He wasn't asking for people to write his game for him, or give him the complete sourcecode to a complex game because he doesn't know where to begin.
I'm surprised that the TV mods don't actually take a harder line on these sort of posts. Normally, I'm in favour of quiet moderation. Most of us are perfectly capable of bickering, arguing, debating and then the next day forgetting whatever it was we were discussing and giving the person we were arguing with a helping hand with something. But when people who are brand new to the community get told to <expletive> off and don't come back until they're experienced ( which begs the question how they're supposed to get experience if no community will take them, but perhaps it's only this community which considers itself too good for them ) it's literally taking money out of the pockets of the developers. It's not just one lost sale, it's a lot of lost sales. Because I don't know how many of you use other game programming forums, but I do know that in most of the ones I use, the TV community has a wide reputation for being incredibly unfriendly and unwelcoming to newcomers.
With this thread fresh in my mind, I'd be hard put to argue them down. Which is a damn shame, when you consider that people like Zak, Blind, and lots of others are actually very helpful to people of all skill levels.
