Thus spake “awmiller.andros”:
Hey all,
I know most of you developers are busy developing, but I was wondering
if anyone has some docs or can point to some threads for a kind of
jump-in guide for developing VASSAL. I am an adept programmer, however I
have learned the importance of developers using the same tools, and I
work in engineering 40hrs a week (ie this is a hobby for me, I would
love a kickstart). So please help me if you can, I would like to know
what you tools guys prefer and maybe what your favorite place to jump in
is.
I work in Vim. I believe Brent (and some others) work in Eclipse. I take
the view that a Jedi builds his own sword, and that it’s beneficial for
the project to have people using a diverse set of tools. If you have
tools you prefer, use those (so long as they impose no requirements on
anyone else).
There’s not a lot of developer documentation, unfortunately, and the
3.2 codebase is very old and gnarly. There’s a page in the wiki about
setting up Eclipse (vassalengine.org/wiki/Eclipse_setup),
though I’m uncertain as to whether it’s current, and there’s a small
amount of stuff here:
vassalengine.org/wiki/Faq_programming
vassalengine.org/wiki/Developers_corner
(One of my goals for VASSAL 4 is to have proper documentatiton, for
developers, module designers, and users.)
The present state of VASSAL 3.2 is that we’re working on bug fixes only,
not adding features. (We released 3.2.12 yesterday.) Our bug tracker is
here:
vassalengine.org/tracker/
If you go to ‘New Bugs’, you can see bugs which mostly haven’t been
examined in detail. Brent and I have culled out most of the duplicates,
and I’ve looked at a lot of these enough to determine that I can’t fix
them in less than 10 minutes, but probably a lot of them could be fixed
with a bit more effort:
vassalengine.org/tracker/bug … st_id=3015
Anything marked as ‘External’ is a bug in some dependency of ours—
those are not bugs we’re going to fix, and are there so we can track
if/when fixes happen.
If you go to the ‘Most Frequently Reported Bugs’ page, you can see what
we get many reports of:
vassalengine.org/tracker/dup … gedsince=7
Most of these are bugs someone has looked into without finding a
solution (and sometimes without finding even a cause), so I wouldn’t
expect any of these to be easily solvable—but it would be great to
have fixes for any of them, if only to stem the flow of bug reports they
generate.
For VASSAL 4, I’m working on some design documents which I hope to
publish soon. After I’ve done that, I’ll want everyone who’s able to
scrutinize the design. Until that’s ready, however, I want to keep
people focused on fixing bugs in 3.2.
–
J.