What is holding you from contributing to freeciv?

Can you help improve your favourite game? Hardcore C mages, talented artists, and players with any level of experience are welcome!
Lachu
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Re: What is holding you from contributing to freeciv?

Post by Lachu »

1. No skills in writing good looking code or with keep code clean
2. Small English skills
3. No knowledge with Freeciv internals, like iterators, specenum, bitvector, etc.

In my opinion, there's should exist people with small C knowledge, which could edit code to make it looks better. Maybe I will help in this scenarios, because I don't know how well C i know (on University I have got 5 degree from programming, but I'm not sure my skills are worth this degree).
cazfi
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Re: What is holding you from contributing to freeciv?

Post by cazfi »

If coding freeciv seems like too demanding, easier task could be working on documentation tickets.

S2_6 documentation issues metaticket: http://www.hostedredmine.com/issues/698197
S3_0 documentation issues metaticket: http://www.hostedredmine.com/issues/698198
cazfi
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Re: What is holding you from contributing to freeciv?

Post by cazfi »

And if someone would like to work on bigger subproject more than on random patches, here's some subprojects that would benefit from someone taking active role on them:

- gtk4-client
- Maintaining (and further developing) gtk3- and gtk3.22-clients
- Maintaining (and further developing) sdl2-client
- 3D (opengl) support for gtk3.22-client
- Better UTF-8 support, and more, using ICU
- AI modules
- Development of the ruledit ruleset editor
- Code markup for doxygen documentation
- Windows development environments
- Improving interfaces between regular freeciv and freeciv-web
- Sandbox ruleset
- Fine tuning alien ruleset towards production quality
...
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dunnoob
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Re: What is holding you from contributing to freeciv?

Post by dunnoob »

cazfi wrote:- Better UTF-8 support, and more, using ICU
Just in case, ICU is like nuking spies, it will certainly help for whatever you want, if it is remotely related to locales and charsets, but it might be overkill violating KISS:

Freeciv only needs basic UTF-8 and a few legacy SBCS (single byte charsets) including windows-1252, Latin-1, and maybe another ISO-x / windows-y / KOI-8z for Cyrillic. It would be nice if stuff supposed to be presented in alphabetic order (names of cities with an airport, or similar) appears in a sort order based on Latin for names in the Latin script, and I hope that ICU helps to fix this unreported (?) bug.

The wiki claims that ICU is a must-have (logo on the features page) and that i18n is a PITA, but maybe that's exaggerated. ICU would be yet another huge dependency, like the magick stuff on top of more than one libpng in different states of decay, only to produce map images as GIFs or (shudder) JPEGs on boxes without FFmpeg/Magick/XnView/...
cazfi
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Re: What is holding you from contributing to freeciv?

Post by cazfi »

One thing we would like ICU to help us is correct capitalization of game messages on languages that are not so lax about it as English, e.g., if a unit name appears in the beginning of a sentence in a given translation, it should start with a capital letter, but not if it's in the middle of the sentence.
Some lists should be sorted alphabetically by the rules of the localization in question, not by the rules of English or by their ASCII value.
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