question for developers; help for my dissertation

by **darkprince** » 15 Apr 2011, 07:58

Hello everyone,

I'm a student of computer science and I'm planning on graduating in july. My graduation project consists in analyzing the metrics of a number of open source programs. Among the other programs, I chose this game and although studying most of the metrics starting from the source code is quite simple, there is one last thing that is not as simple as I thought.

Long story short, I need to know roughly how many lines of code have been reused from other open source projects. This includes both libraries that have been included with the project and code that has been embedded in your game(for example, reused classes, methods or just some algorithms). Of course the second type of reused code is more difficult to find and I haven't found any other reliable method than to ask the developers and hope they answer back.

I realize that keeping a record of how many lines of code have been "copied" form other sources can be bothersome so that is why I would be happy even with a rough percentage. Please remember that the data I hope you will be willing and able to give me will be used only for research reason and it is very important for my graduation to be successful. Any help would be much appreciated.

Thank you for your time and understanding

Corneliu Ilisescu

by **ubeefx** » 15 Apr 2011, 10:48

Well here you have some insider info about Magarena.

This project has mostly unique code written by me. You can see this in the consistent coding style and formatting.
It was written from scratch. It used to call "Magic Tournament", then "Magic Arena" and finally Magarena.
It made it open source to get input how to further improve it and to share it, because it was not viable commercially.
So this project started as closed source and did not have the intention originally to become open source.
The game and engine design is done by me and the AI is based on several of my own ideas.
It uses only the standard Java libraries available in Java Runtime 6.
If I would have copied a lot of code from other projects, I would have made proper references.
The icons and images used in Magarena come from searching on the web, I am no artist.
I am however a senior software developer with 12 years of work experience, mainly Java. Game programming is a hobby.
It is interesting because you can get directly in touch with users from all over the world, which is not always the case professionally.

Good luck with your graduation project!

by **mtgrares** » 21 Apr 2011, 18:00

I started the Forge project. When I stopped working on Forge didn't use any external libraries or code. Joke, my code is lovely and others people code is crap. Even though it is a joke, it seem to apply in many situations.

My background is just a Information Science computer major with no commercial experience. I'm Java Programmer Certified.