ErikH2000
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Schik wrote:
From the sounds of it, since it is open-source, I can grab the latest released source and make my own modifications, but I\'m not at all interested in splitting off my own little \"SchikDROD\" or anything, I just wanted to contribute to the real deal.

Hmm. I thought I was going to scare all the coders away, but here you are! Thanks for all the interest in helping. Let\'s see what we can do.

For the time being, we\'re going to work from SourceForge\'s public CVS server. At least until the next release with the editor. We might keep developing from the public server for a long time, and just wait for a product competition problem to arise before using a private CVS server. So from now to many months later, you\'d have access to the latest source. That\'s one thing.

You\'d also be welcome to propose an improvement to the game you\'d like to write, I could give you a thumbs up (pre-approval for inclusion in the game), and then when you are done, send a CVS DIFF-generated patch. We\'d then put your changes into the product, assuming we could get it to work easily and the code quality looked good.

This style of contribution would work much better after the next release is made. Right now we are just fixing bugs and completing a few tasks needed for the release. New bugs should be going into the task manager, and you might discover one on your own. For bugs, it would be excellent if you could provide a patch that fixes the problem.

If any of this sounds good, I should add you to the SourceForge project so that you can add tasks and assign tasks to yourself. It prevents people from duplicating each other\'s work. For example, Mike Rimer wrote his own fix to the diagonal exit problem at about the same time you did. (Sorry!)

-Erik

____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
dev journals | twitch stream | youtube archive (NSFW)

Schik
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

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erikh2000 wrote:
Hmm. I thought I was going to scare all the coders away, but here you are! Thanks for all the interest in helping. Let\'s see what we can do.

You\'ll have to try harder than THAT to scare me away. The main reasons I want to work on DROD are:
- It\'s a great game. But I finished it - I need more.
- I work at a driving simulator, which is interesting, but I\'ve always wanted to work on a game. This seemed PERFECT - a game I absolutely love, and it\'s open source!

erikh2000 wrote:This style of contribution would work much better after the next release is made. Right now we are just fixing bugs and completing a few tasks needed for the release. New bugs should be going into the task manager, and you might discover one on your own. For bugs, it would be excellent if you could provide a patch that fixes the problem.

I see that there aren\'t that many open tasks on sourceforge. Are all the tasks that are in sourceforge going to be implemented for 1.6?

erikh2000 wrote:If any of this sounds good, I should add you to the SourceForge project so that you can add tasks and assign tasks to yourself. It prevents people from duplicating each other\'s work. For example, Mike Rimer wrote his own fix to the diagonal exit problem at about the same time you did. (Sorry!)

That would be great, I\'m schik on sourceforge. And that\'s actually good that Mike fixed the bug as well, I\'d like to compare our solutions.

One last thing - It looks like Linux support was worked on a long time ago, but never completed. While I don\'t have a Linux box, I do have several SGIs, and I see that SDL does support Irix. At some point (not sure what your priority is on this) I could work on porting it if that\'s desired.



____________________________
The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way it treats its animals.
--Mahatma Gandhi

ErikH2000
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

Rank Points: 2794
Registered: 02-04-2003
IP: Logged

Schik wrote:
You\'ll have to try harder than THAT to scare me away.

Good deal!

I see that there aren\'t that many open tasks on sourceforge. Are all the tasks that are in sourceforge going to be implemented for 1.6?

Yeah, but there might be one or two that aren\'t.

That would be great, I\'m schik on sourceforge.

I added you in.

One last thing - It looks like Linux support was worked on a long time ago, but never completed. While I don\'t have a Linux box, I do have several SGIs, and I see that SDL does support Irix. At some point (not sure what your priority is on this) I could work on porting it if that\'s desired.

It won\'t get into 1.6, but yeah I would love to have the game ported to Irix (and then much more easily ported to Linux, OSX, and the other Unix-based O/Ss).

The last bastion of platform dependence is in Files.cpp/h. Wrapping the file access routines would probably be a good place to start, if you were interested. That may be 90% of the porting work, so maybe take a look at CFiles and see what you think.

A few other things to think about, related to this task:

* On O/Ss that support unicode filepaths, we would like CFiles to support them as well. The CFiles methods should be revised to take unicode strings, and if an O/S does not support unicode, convert the unicode chars to ascii (strip the extra byte).

* We want one set of source code for all platforms. O/S-specific code should be conditionally compiled using #ifdefs.

This is also a good task that can be worked on independant of the upcoming release. We don\'t need to put your changes into this release, and the CFiles interface should stay the same, so we get an easy merge later.

Sound like a good way to start?

-Erik

____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
dev journals | twitch stream | youtube archive (NSFW)

Schik
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

Rank Points: 5381
Registered: 02-04-2003
IP: Logged

Brick wall #1:

fmod doesn\'t support Irix, and it\'s binary releases only.

I suppose a silent Irix DROD is better than no Irix DROD at all? The Irix port, in my mind, is really just a stepping stone to the Linux/OSX ports. I imagine a *whole lot* more people have Linux or a Mac than Irix, and once it works on Irix, someone with access to other OSes could tidy up the details.




____________________________
The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way it treats its animals.
--Mahatma Gandhi

ErikH2000
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

Rank Points: 2794
Registered: 02-04-2003
IP: Logged

Schik wrote:
Brick wall #1:

fmod doesn\'t support Irix, and it\'s binary releases only.

Well, it depends how much time you want to spend on it, but we might be able to find another library to use just for Irix builds.

I suppose a silent Irix DROD is better than no Irix DROD at all? The Irix port, in my mind, is really just a stepping stone to the Linux/OSX ports. I imagine a *whole lot* more people have Linux or a Mac than Irix, and once it works on Irix, someone with access to other OSes could tidy up the details.

That\'s a reasonable approach. The Irix sound could possibly be added on a second pass.

-Erik

____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
dev journals | twitch stream | youtube archive (NSFW)