There's something I've always found infuriating about new game graphics techniques. The moment a technique is discovered, someone goes and writes up a whitepaper about it. Then, everyone else just links to the whitepaper as the gold standard for learning that technique.
I hate this. I don't know about everyone else, but I don't speak whitepaper.
The thing about academic texts is that there's almost as much of a focus on sounding professional as there is on conveying useful information. Clearly, there are plenty of people out there that find these useful - I for one, do not.
In my opinion, something like a personal blog is actually a far better place to convey these kinds of techniques.
On a personal blog, there is no pressure to maintain professionalism. When you're trying to convey information on a blog, you often go for a friendly or even humorous tone, and try to boil things down to a format most of your readers can easily understand - usually relaying useful anecdotal information such as engine specifics that the author encountered which would otherwise be considered too unrelated for a whitepaper. It's always been on personal blogs and websites that I'm able to gain a much deeper understanding of a subject.
Anyway, those are my two cents on the subject. Whitepapers should die. Rant over.
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