A call for new contributors

Announcements regarding Wesnoth and the Wesnoth Project.

Moderator: Forum Moderators

Post Reply
User avatar
Pentarctagon
Project Manager
Posts: 5496
Joined: March 22nd, 2009, 10:50 pm
Location: Earth (occasionally)

A call for new contributors

Post by Pentarctagon »

Back in 2015, a dire warning went out about the state of Wesnoth's development - the entire Wesnoth project was in danger of slowing to a halt; "the ship is sinking".

Fast forward to now, and I'm glad I'm able to say that the situation is no longer quite so dire. The project's internal structure has been significantly improved, changes and fixes are coming along at a slow but steady pace, and 1.16 is right around the corner.

That said, Wesnoth was and remains chronically understaffed. While the Project Council has most positions filled, there are still vacancies, and even for the areas that have maintainers we often have nobody to take their place if for whatever reason they are no longer able to contribute. We have a very high "bus factor", so to speak.

Wesnoth's codebase is also large, aging, and fairly complex - much of it created when there were more active developers than there are now. What this often means is that we're not able to make the kinds of foundational overhauls and upgrades necessary to keep up with the rest of the gaming universe. The poster child for this would be Wesnoth's continued use of software rendering, but there are a variety of unaddressed bugs and feature requests both simple and complex nearly a thousand long listed on Wesnoth's GitHub site.

And so, with 1.16.0 scheduled to be released in less than two months and development on 1.17 to begin in earnest soon after that, we're again sending out a call for new contributors. While we are most in need of skilled C++ developers (with C++11 and later) who are willing to help us investigate and solve the foundational problems that Wesnoth faces, there are things that nearly anyone can help with, from simpler tasks in C++, the Lua and WML used for content scripting, Python used by various external tools, and even things like play testing and giving feedback on updated campaigns.

Additionally, Wesnoth lacks art for a variety of unit animations - anyone who would be interested in lending a hand updating existing unit sprites or creating animations should take a look at the Art Forum as well as contact our current art director doofus-01.

For anyone who would like to join the Wesnoth team and help out, there are a variety of open issues on GitHub - just pick one that sounds interesting or challenging! For simpler issues, you can look through the Good First Issue tag as well. And of course, if you have any questions or want to talk with us directly, we're available here on the forums, on IRC, and on Discord.
99 little bugs in the code, 99 little bugs
take one down, patch it around
-2,147,483,648 little bugs in the code
Post Reply