How should I get involved? Give me work to do!

Skizac · Post by **Skizac** » January 19th, 2006, 4:04 am

Hi everybody,

I've been playing Wesnoth for a few weeks, and I would love to help out with development. I haven't coded any C++ for about 6 years, so I'm kind of rusty, but I'm pretty good with C, and excellent with Perl and PHP. I can also write documentation and I have some design ideas.

I would appreciate the help if one of the core developers could give me some work to do. I'd prefer a simpler project to get me started and familiar with the code base. But whatever you ask me to do, I'll do my best to get it done. Wesnoth is awesome and I want to help make it awsomer.

Post by **Noyga** » January 19th, 2006, 5:29 am

Hello,
The best is to try to find out what you want to do, there are a lot tasks where you can help.

You can find some bugs to fix or features request to implement here on the Gna project page, just look at them and pick some you want to do.

There also two major task we aim to do :
- Make the terrain system more flexible. Currently it is letter-based and we already use quite every letters.

- And a even bigger task : Implement Multiplayer campaigns. Currenly WML is proably too much sigle-player oriented, standard campaign features like reacall lists, jumping to the next scenario, ... ect ... are not yet supported. There is also a few problem like using the random variables in multiplayer, they are not well supported, usually the random numbers tend to be differant on each computer in the game so you soon have out of sync errors

About those two there are some interesting notes in Ayin's Todo list.
Currently the ones that work on the terrain system seem to have to little time (but some other people started to look at this), and about MP campaign i don't really know if someone is doing something...

Also if you have other good ideas feel free to implement them and submit a patch on Gna

If you have some design good idea feel free to expose them.
There are currently 3 means to reach the devellopers :
- #wesnoth-dev IRC channel on Freenode (this chan is logged so devs can read the backlog when they are back from away)
- the dev mailing list
- this forum

When you're working with the source, try to use the SVN trunk source if possible, your changes would be easier to apply.

About the documentation, some is of course inside the source there is also a lots of pages on the Wiki, feel free to improve them.

Post by **Boucman** » January 19th, 2006, 6:55 am

cool, a volunteer

unlike Noyga, I wouldn't advice starting with the MP campaigns or multi letter terrains.... these are huge and hard tasks that require a good knowledge of the code...

however, a good way to discover the code would be to have a look at https://gna.org/bugs/index.php?func=det ... em_id=4938 it's about a way to have multiple musics for each factions... usign the utils::split function to separate a list of filenames in the play_music function, you should have most of the job done...

like noyga, I can only advice you to go to the mailing list and on IRC to discuss. once you're done, put your patch at patches.wesnoth.org I'm the one looking at that

bye

toms · Post by **toms** » January 19th, 2006, 3:05 pm

terrain letters: my idea is to use the numbers for custom terrains. Or the special characters
like &,},{,[,#,+<>|.

and for multiplayer campaings: for one scenario is used a [multiplayer] tag.
for a normal campaign scenario, a [scenario] tag is used.

So why no [multiplayer_campaign] tag wich rules that more MP scenarios come?

Skizac · Post by **Skizac** » January 19th, 2006, 6:09 pm

Noyga wrote: You can find some bugs to fix or features request to implement here on the Gna project page, just look at them and pick some you want to do.

Wow, there's lots of stuff in there that I can do. I'll have a closer look this evening and pick out some of the simpler stuff to work on.

Is there some method of "claiming" a bug of feature so that somebody else doesn't come along and do it before I've finished?

Skizac · Post by **Skizac** » January 19th, 2006, 6:11 pm

Looks like Rusty already committed the multiple-music thing earlier today.

I guess I'll find something else to do.

Post by **Darth Fool** » January 19th, 2006, 6:21 pm

I would not tackle terrain letters as your first wesnoth contribution. It is going to require a huge change and is probably not a good place to start. It is also relatively high on my todo list. I would suggest tackling smaller problems for a few reasons. First off, it will provide the developers confidence that you know what you are doing. Reviewing a patch that is 10-20 lines is a lot easier than reviewing a 200 line patch. Second, it will provide you feedback quicker. Development in wesnoth is entirely voluntary, so it is important to try your hand at something that you will enjoy doing. Seeing your early work get into the game quickly will probably make it easier to stay motivated during tasks that take much longer.

So, if you don't have anything in particular in mind and going through the bug list doesn't suit your fancy, here is an idea in the coding arena:

music: there was recently a request to make the music in wesnoth use stereo instead of just mono.

Skizac · Post by **Skizac** » January 19th, 2006, 6:26 pm

About how many active developers does Wesnoth have? Who are the core people who's opinions are most important?

Post by **Soliton** » January 19th, 2006, 6:28 pm

Skizac wrote:Wow, there's lots of stuff in there that I can do. I'll have a closer look this evening and pick out some of the simpler stuff to work on.

Is there some method of "claiming" a bug of feature so that somebody else doesn't come along and do it before I've finished?

Join the IRC channel #wesnoth-dev and ask there, chances are good that some people there know who is working on what even if the specific person isn't available at that moment.

Post by **freim** » January 19th, 2006, 6:28 pm

Skizac wrote:About how many active developers does Wesnoth have? Who are the core people who's opinions are most important?

Check out the gna project member page.

Ranger M · Post by **Ranger M** » January 19th, 2006, 6:30 pm

anyone with the label underneath their name in the posts is important (eg developer, patch monkey) there are some others who's opinions are valued, but I don't know any specifics.

Skizac · Post by **Skizac** » January 19th, 2006, 6:32 pm

Darth Fool wrote:music: there was recently a request to make the music in wesnoth use stereo instead of just mono.

Thanks for the advice, Darth. I'll get started on the stereo thing tonight. Is the music already mixed in stereo and we're just bouncing it to a single channel, or will this require all of the music to be re-mixed to take advantage of the two channels?

Ranger M · Post by **Ranger M** » January 19th, 2006, 6:37 pm

aleksi's is, as she is the one who noticed when she put her's in game to test it instead of running it along side wesnoth with a different program. The others I don't know about though.

Post by **Zebulon** » January 19th, 2006, 6:38 pm

Ranger M wrote:anyone with the label underneath their name in the posts is important (eg developer, patch monkey)

The music is already stereo, but Wesnoth plays it as Mono.

Skizac · Post by **Skizac** » January 19th, 2006, 6:56 pm

Ranger M wrote:
toms wrote: Because the forum members digged him deep into ideas what he can do.
and this is bad because?

Because now I'll do all the work and none of the other devs will have anything to do!

Rarr, phear me.

But seriously, I'm very very motivated to contribute right now, and I hope that motivation stays around for a while. Hopefully it won't take me too long to get comfortable with C++ again.