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Re: Newcomers! Please describe what's confusing about FreeOrion

Posted: Sun Mar 07, 2010 3:12 am
by jsena

Re: Newcomers! Please describe what's confusing about FreeOrion

Posted: Sun Mar 07, 2010 3:45 am
by Geoff the Medio
jsena: While we appreciate the input, the point of this thread is to discuss what's confusing for people who want to contribute to the game design process, not what's confusing about the game itself.

Re: Newcomers! Please describe what's confusing about FreeOrion

Posted: Thu Sep 01, 2011 6:31 pm
by jsena
Sorry didn't catch that with the subject line, but fair enough. I'll remove the content of that post and move it to a new thread. Thanks!

Re: Newcomers! What's confusing about Contributing to FreeOr

Posted: Mon Sep 19, 2011 12:35 am
by skeet70
Hey, just thought I'd throw something in here since I'm in currently in the process of becoming a newcomer.

I'm hoping to contribute more to the programming side of things, though also possibly design as well once/if I get involved enough.
So far the biggest challenge has been (as mentioned above) the sheer volume of everything. There is a massive amount of information, forum posts,
and code, to the point that I just don't really know how to start. I'm getting really sucked into this, because it's an incredibly interesting project (12 hours or so over just the last two days) but I still feel like I'm treading water in a massive ocean.

I feel like what needs to be done/kept up, and I understand this may involve too much work for one undertaking, is some sort of comprehensive "Whats going on now" type thing. Theres so many guides and things of that sort all over here that are fragmented and/or outdated, that as I'm going through all of it it's hard to keep track of whats important at the present. If some "Whats going on Now" thing was created that summarized whats been happening up to this point (in a broad sense) and then was maintained to have incremental posts of the current, it would remove a pretty major barrier of entry to this project. If I could have read one article/page that would have given me a pretty abstract idea of the many facets of the project, I probably would have saved 6 hours or so at least, and many hours in the future I'm sure.

Sooooo yeah. To me, thats the biggest barrier (volume) and where to get started.

Hope that helped a bit!

Re: Newcomers! What's confusing about Contributing to FreeOr

Posted: Mon Sep 19, 2011 1:14 am
by eleazar
Welcome skeet :)

Maybe the new proposed roadmap would fit the bill?

Here's the place to check for programming work.

I'm getting really sucked into this, because it's an incredibly interesting project (12 hours or so over just the last two days) but I still feel like I'm treading water in a massive ocean
Yeah, i know exactly what you mean, i was right there several years ago. But feel free to ask whatever on the forums. Unfortunately even if we had the man-hours to keep all the documentation up to date, getting on board a project like this in the middle of development is going to take a fair amount of reading.

Re: Newcomers! What's confusing about Contributing to FreeOr

Posted: Mon Sep 26, 2011 9:29 am
by Benji
I was working on a tech tech tree last year. I wanted to make something more simple than the huge thing it currently is. I even spent quite a lot of time on getting the game to compile under mac os x. I think what held me back in the end is that the game just wasn't finished enough to play, which makes modding boring. I know, terrible reason... but hey, c'est la vie :)

Re: Newcomers! What's confusing about Contributing to FreeOr

Posted: Thu Oct 27, 2011 4:18 pm
by Radek
Hello there,
I would like to help in creation of this game? How can I do it? Do you have some kind of teams that gather and translate/develop?

Re: Newcomers! What's confusing about Contributing to FreeOr

Posted: Thu Oct 27, 2011 4:45 pm
by eleazar
Welcome Radek :)

We don't really have "teams". People just get on the forums and say, "hey, here's a patch", or "i made this translation", or "i have this idea." If the graphic, patch, translation, or idea is good and works, it will be added to the game. Usually the contributors who have taken time to get familiar with what's been done so far and why have the best chance of making useful contributions.

Here's the wiki jumping off point with links to information on how you can help:
http://www.freeorion.org/index.php/How_to_Help

Re: Newcomers! What's confusing about Contributing to FreeOr

Posted: Sat Oct 29, 2011 3:47 am
by temetvince
Is there much to do around here that doesn't involve programming? I would like to help, even if it's tedious work, but as soon as I see something that even resembles a line of code my eyes glaze over. For instance, I went here http://www.freeorion.org/index.php/How_to_Help and thought, hey I can help with something under the Design section. So I clicked on "techs" (or other things) and all I see is code. It's very confusing.

Is there a list of things to do that is kept simple or well documented? I know the project really needs programmers... sorry I can't contribute there :(

I assume most of the ideas are developed, but the coding of those ideas is not. Is this right? For instance, it's easy to come up with some species and descriptions and stuff, so I assumed someone has done that, but it's more difficult to program them into the game.

So, in short, hi and help me help lol.

Re: Newcomers! What's confusing about Contributing to FreeOr

Posted: Sat Oct 29, 2011 10:21 pm
by Bigjoe5
temetvince wrote:Is there much to do around here that doesn't involve programming? I would like to help, even if it's tedious work, but as soon as I see something that even resembles a line of code my eyes glaze over. For instance, I went here http://www.freeorion.org/index.php/How_to_Help and thought, hey I can help with something under the Design section. So I clicked on "techs" (or other things) and all I see is code. It's very confusing.
Welcome.

You don't need to be a programmer to design content - you just need to become familiar with FO's scripting language, which doesn't require any programming knowledge whatsoever.

In general though, the best way to help is to become familiar with the project first, read some old threads, etc.

If you can produce decent music or 3D models, you could give that a shot as well.
I assume most of the ideas are developed, but the coding of those ideas is not. Is this right? For instance, it's easy to come up with some species and descriptions and stuff, so I assumed someone has done that, but it's more difficult to program them into the game.
That's true in general, though in the case of species, there may or may not be enough really good species, so if you can write a really good species description based on a new idea (or based on an older, less well-written species description) you could definitely do that.

Re: Newcomers! What's confusing about Contributing to FreeOr

Posted: Sun Oct 30, 2011 12:47 am
by eleazar
I started a page with guidelines for play-testing.

http://www.freeorion.org/index.php/Playtesting

Re: Newcomers! What's confusing about Contributing to FreeOr

Posted: Sun Oct 30, 2011 10:42 am
by Toxickilla
Is the best place to see what the most recent revision at this link?

http://cia.vc/stats/project/FreeOrion/

And with how quick it appears that revisions come out, does that mean that I have to rebuild every several days or so to stay semi up-to-date?

Re: Newcomers! What's confusing about Contributing to FreeOr

Posted: Sun Oct 30, 2011 2:37 pm
by eleazar
Toxickilla wrote:Is the best place to see what the most recent revision at this link?

http://cia.vc/stats/project/FreeOrion/
Yeah, CIA works well as anything. There are other equally good methods.
Toxickilla wrote:And with how quick it appears that revisions come out, does that mean that I have to rebuild every several days or so to stay semi up-to-date?
Not really.
1) all my commits are content (art or text files), which means you can swap the old ones with the new ones without a recompile. Of course if the content files rely on new code you might get an error or a crash -- then you need to recompile.

2) I use the OsX binary produced by night weekly, updating content files as i change them. Missing the new code features by less than a week is usually only a minor inconvenience. It works for me.

3) The amount of user-visible changes produced varies greatly in a week. You'll have to play it by ear, maybe run you eye over CIA listings to see if there's anything new you want to see, or that would be likely to impact your game (or to check how many commits behind you are), but compiling about every week or usually less would probably keep you very effectively up to date.

Re: Newcomers! What's confusing about Contributing to FreeOr

Posted: Sun Nov 27, 2011 2:29 pm
by Zireael
eleazar wrote:I started a page with guidelines for play-testing.

http://www.freeorion.org/index.php/Playtesting
Yeah, I've read it, and I'd love to see the newest possible version built so that I can playtest some (I had issues with Tortoise SVN and had to deinstall it, so no downloading from SVN repo)...

Re: Newcomers! What's confusing about Contributing to FreeOr

Posted: Sun Nov 27, 2011 9:23 pm
by Geoff the Medio
Zireael wrote:I had issues with Tortoise SVN and had to deinstall it, so no downloading from SVN repo
There are other SVN clients besides TortoiseSVN.