New developer!

[Simown]

Hi everyone,

I've been playing MTG for about a year just casually, using Forge a lot of the time - it pretty much taught me how to play. In the course of playing Forge, I've had a few ideas of my own. I am very interested in contributing to the development of this project.

To begin I'll probably pick up and squash some bugs while I learn my way around the codebase. You are still using Mantis for that? I'm interested in how the AI works in Forge and I'm sure it will constantly improve. I see that someone also started networking in Forge - I'd definitely like to contribute to that in future.

I'm sure I'll learn a lot more about MTG in the process too.

Any questions, don't hesitate to ask here or PM me.

[Chris H.]

Rob initially set up the Mantis bug tracker but as time progressed we discovered that most of the user base found that it was to difficult to use. We now encourage people to post bug reports here at the forge forums at slightlymagic.

For bug reports you should take a quick peek at the forge faq Forge Frequently Asked Questions.

[friarsol]

Hey Simown,

Have you gotten all setup with a working dev environment? Once you get comfortable in the environment let us know. We generally ask new developers to post patches so we can make suggestions of improvements, and screen a bit for code quality before granting full rights.

[Simown]

Hey friarsol,

I have got everything set up, thank you. It took a bit of trial and error to get Maven to play nicely with Eclipse, but it seems to be working now.

In regards to bug reports, I believe the preferred method now is users submitting them in the correct forum? If this is the case, what is the protocol to take on a bug fix that someone else might simultaneously? It seems like sometimes bug fixes get a response, but often not.

Hopefully I'll have a patch in a few days. Any more questions, I'll be sure to let you know.

Thanks.

[friarsol]

In general, most of the devs have areas of ownership where they mostly fix bugs within. Some of these lines blur a little bit, and some other areas are shared.

Traditionally some of these ownership areas have been:

UI, AI, Quest, Card Scripts, Ability Effects, Static Effects, Game Engine (usually split up to a bunch of subareas), Variant Modes.

I'm sure I'm missing some things, but you get the idea.

I would say most devs read through the appropriate threads for bugs (for most of us, that's the Release thread or the svn bug reports thread, but for say drdev, it's probably the Android thread since that's where most of his time is spent these days). So if you just reply to the bug in question, and say you'll take a look, unless someone has already looking into it, you'll probably be pretty safe that it's all yours. It's certainly less opaque to my work environment, but in general since everyone is focusing on different areas, there isn't as much overlap as you might think.

I'd imagine most of the times that this might occur, the issues are small enough that there's not really wasted effort. (Like when Sloth is super fast on fixing card scripts). If you find the thing you are looking into is larger than you suspected it would be, feel free to start a new topic in this forum (Developer's Corner) to try to get some information before wandering too far down the rabbit hole. Forge is a fairly old project, and even though much of it has been rewritten, there's still a lot of historical weight here, and there might be some nuances that aren't clear when only looking in one section of the codebase.

[Simown]

I'll definitely make it known I'm going to be looking at bugs initially. While the bug might have a relatively simple fix but my current unfamiliarity with the codebase will slow my down while I learn the ins and outs.

I'm sure I'll open a new topic or two when I get in to the meat of development. Bug fixes I hope aren't going to be too much of a problem, I spend about 50% of my working hours looking for bugs in software my team has developed. Anyway, we'll see!

My relative newness to Magic might pose a bit of an obstacle sometimes, so keep that in mind when I post a really obvious question in the forum.

Thanks

[elcnesh]

Hi!

Since you said you wanted to help with the networking stuff, let me quickly post some information on that.

The idea to implement network play in Forge goes way back (to long before I joined – I'm only here for a few months now), but the relevant info in the thread starts around this post: http://www.slightlymagic.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=9837&start=45#p156592

I've been working on refactoring the GUI in a way that's compatible with networking, and as of now I'm almost finished; the biggest work left now is refactoring the android code as well. Look for the GuiRefactoring branch if you want to see what's going on.

Once that's done, and all the communication between the model and the views happens between two Java interfaces, we can start implementing actual network features! (I'm actually really looking forward to that, the GUI refactoring is relatively boring to be honest... )

[Simown]

Absolutely I want to help with the networking stuff. I'll have a read of that thread when I get a minute.

As I said, I'll probably spend this weekend familiarising myself with the code and fixing some bugs and then it's full steam ahead.

I'm absolutely awful at GUI work - not that I can't code it, my artistic talent is slim to none Getting actual network features will be great, and I can definitely assist with that, let me know if there's something I can help out with initially or anything I could be specifically looking in to.

Thanks