Taking Matters into Our Own Hands: A Proposal for a Fan-produced SMAC Remake

[cazfi]

Longturn (slightly modified freeciv for multiplayer games played turn/day) community lives in http://www.longturn.org/

[cazfi]

Originally Posted by cazfi

I maintain so called stub-ruleset, that is meant to be used as starting point for developing new rulesets from scratch. I'll update it against latest freeciv development version for you to use (unless you rather start by modifying some of the existing rulesets) http://www.cazfi.net/freeciv/rulesets.html

I now have stub-ruleset updated to be compatible with freeciv trunk revision 21779 (one I committed 15 mins ago). What is the proper way to contribute to your project? I could email it to someone with some instructions of how to turn it into usable ruleset. My email is

[rcb]

@cazfi, I'll send you a private email on that address. I am sure we will find out something for you to do

[cazfi]

Got your mail. I'll try to reply soon, but cannot promise it to happen this night.

Oh, don't expect me to do too much for your project. I'll try to help get you started, but I'm not going to be too active after that (will be following you, though). I've got enough projects already, and of those main freeciv project takes a lot of my time (As http://www.ohloh.net/p/freeciv/contributors/summary puts it: "cazfi generated more than 50% of all commits during the past 12 months.")

Meanwhile freeciv 2.4.0-beta1 release is coming, and list of contributors is already updated to match. These are the people (minus those who have contributed to 2.5 development only) for you too to thank for what you get as starting point of your fork: http://freeciv.wikia.com/wiki/People

[cazfi]

I don't know if you can take any advantage of it, but current random map generation does produce height map. This information then influences what terrain is selected for each tile. Height information just never leaves map generator module.

[Kilkakon]

Does the documentation have flowcharts or UML diagrams to look at?

[rcb]

@Kilkakon, I don't think so. The tools of development - mailing list, source code and bug tracker - are more-or-less sufficient documentation, if you are already familiar with the code. Of course, this means a rather steep learning curve, but although this is a problem in almost every open source project, it is rarely attended to. There are automated tools to show class hierarchy for C++ code (it's called Doxygen), but since freeciv is C, I'm not sure if Doxygen can cut it.

I also want to point out that one of the former devs of freecivAC will add me as a developer of that project on sourceforge, so that I can update the project there. So I will adopt that project name as well, and pick up where they left off.

My first task is to get freecivAC to a playable state - which should take quite a while. As soon as I have something worthwhile to share, I'll do it on the forums. In the meantime, I'll mostly do stuff using the freeciv dev tools.

[Kilkakon]

The point of documentation is to help those who aren't familar with the code get up to speed on it quickly! And yes Doxygen is great, but this program is in C for some reason.

Still, I'm happy to at least take a look every now and then at the project.

[cazfi]

Syntron hosts doxygen documentation on his own server, but as our doxygen related work has so far resulted in only conffile to use doxygen with (no doxygen markup in code), this is of limited usability: http://syntron.homelinux.org/doxygen/freeciv/html/

[Kilkakon]

Did anything come of this?

[Buster's Uncle]

I pinged rcb two weeks ago, asking for occasional progress reports, but no dice so far.

[green1]

Hmmm... no updates on the ancient geocities era project page either he was supposedly given the keys to, either.

Who knows. Maybe he took one look at it and saw it was going to be 20 tons of work and the freeciv engine would not do what all he had in mind.

Either that or pesky RL..

[Kilkakon]

Yeah, it's strange, there was a huge buzz of activity and then nothing. :O

[rcb]

Hi! Sorry, I had to put freecivac on hold, because of unforeseen extra work I'll have to do for my master's thesis (in computer science, but unrelated to games). @Busters Uncle, how did you ping me? I don't recall receiving any mail...

[Buster's Uncle]

It was a PM at AC2. People usually have email notification, so it's as good a way as any, usually.