Assembling the team

Yup, it's there now, and it compiles in Visual Studio 2019 Community - which it didn't before your updates. Not sure what's different than half an hour before, but it looks all right to me.

I'm going to try my next update or two with Visual Studio instead of VSCode and see if I like it more. I might; I've been somewhat wishing for stronger refactoring abilities, and my second-to-next planned update includes a fair amount of refactoring.

But I'm also likely to be more sporadic over the next couple weeks. Holiday events start in earnest tomorrow (12/19), and while I don't expect to be entirely offline, there will likely be an above-average amount of events after last year's all being cancelled.

 

FYI, I just changed my GitHub username from "myjimnelson" to "JimOfLeisure". I have two public repos (c3sat and read-civ-data) that anyone might ever care about (plus some others that...not), so if you've cloned those you may want to update the origin reference, although GitHub will redirect them unless and until someone else claims the name and makes a same-named repository to overwrite the redirect.

 

I must confess that I rather like, "JimOfLeisure."

 

If you require an English language editor at any point, please feel free to reach out. I am very willing to toss in some volunteer hours to make sure everything's spic and span on the writing front.

(It's my job. I can share my work website privately if verifying is necessary.)

 

I should like to offer more or less the same services as Synsensa and anything in the field of writing new entries or concepts for the civilopedia and similar literary endeavours. I'm good with languages except programming ones.

Edit: and the freaking university owes me a degree to actually formalise the above!

 

I'd be glad to join this project. I graduated in 2012 with a BS in computer science and have been coding professionally since then. I worked with C/C++ from 2012-2016, and since then I've worked mainly with C# and javascript. I'd be glad to offer some pointers for getting Git set up and links to learn more about Git. There are some prerequisites before I can start coding:

1. READ. There is a lot of information in these forums that I need to catch up on.
2. Get set up with Discord or any other resources where collaboration happens regularly, and where it will be easiest to talk with others involved with this project.
3. Fix my desktop, since I don't have enough disk space on this laptop for VS.
4. Familiarize myself better with Godot and the existing code base.
5. Get everything installed and make sure the project at least runs.
6. Find a good place to start. I'd love to dive in on features, but I'm not sure if time is better spent on that, or if it's better to focus on infrastructure to help build a solid base (automation, testing, etc.).

It'll take a while to get through all those prereqs, but in the meantime PM me with anything I'll need to know that will help with getting up and running.

 

Nice! It would definitely help to have more contributors, especially as momentum has flagged since we ran into a logjam over on GitHub.

Most of us are using VSCode, which according to Microsoft is lightweight and only weighs 500 MB (oh, the days when that was heavyweight...). Godot 3.4 weights in at a svelte 160 MB, although you'll need a bit more than that for compiled artifacts and so forth. But assuming you've already got Civ3 installed, I'd cautiously estimate 1 GB should be enough for all the dev tooling and the repo. Though it does sound like disk space may be at a premium on your desktop .

It probably depends on your interests as to where would help the most. @Puppeteer can comment on the state of automation; he has made some progress in that area. Starting features... we're starting to approach combat (and reading about the proposed event system would be a good idea for that), but perhaps a better introduction to Godot would be adding BIQ selection ("Civ Content") off of the main screen, which generally fall into the next milestone ("select mods").

 

For automation we currently have GitHub Actions able to build Mac, Linux, and Windows artifacts on demand based off any branch. On the mental to-do list is some additional automation to create a release on demand which would involve slight munging of the artifacts and attaching them to a release/tag.

There is currently no automated testing. My "breakthrough" ... well I've gone back and checked out older versions, and the dotnet commands work everywhere. I don't know what the situation was when I couldn't build/test things with the tooling, but it seems to work fine for me now. So adding a "passes tests" gate–possibly optional–to the build script might be a thing to do. As would be actually making some tests. (Although the build environment is Mono only, and I don't yet know the Mono way to run tests.)

Someday in the future we are going to start wanting to have binary files, either for testing (e.g. include a .pcx test image and a .png externally-converted file to test against) or for in-game assets (so C7 could run without Civ3 assets). My tendency is to want to keep the repo code-only-ish, but then I don't know offhand how we then track and collect the binary assets. But it's a conversation we haven't even started yet, so automation is probably premature unless you know how other projects handle it. And maybe it's not worth worrying about as GitHub has lfs.

 

Oh nice, I already have VS Code set up on this machine and it's configured for pushing to Github with my SSH keys. I see people had issues getting that set up; I'd be happy to advise on that if they need help. As for free Git UI tools, I like Fork; I also liked GitKraken but I'm not sure if it's free any more.

Ok sounds like you're on a good track. I'm not sure how other projects handle that, so I won't dive right in on something like that.

Sounds like I maybe be closer to getting fully set up than I thought... but still lots of reading to do! I'll simultaneously get the repo cloned and see if I can at least get it all running.

 

Said degree was awarded to Señor Takhisis this week in the most underwhelmingly crowdless awards ceremony in history.