Gridarta: How to help
Helping is always welcome. There basically are two ways how you can help:
- Helping as a User
- Use Gridarta, test beta versions and provide feedback, e.g. bug reports and feature requests.
- Helping as a Developer
- Develop Gridarta using your Java skills.
Helping as a User
- Requirement: You need to be a map maker for Angelion, Crossfire or Daimonin.
- Subscribe to the gridarta-news and gridarta-user mailing lists.
- Report bugs to the Gridarta SF Bug Tracker or the Daimonin Mantis Bug Tracker.
- Report feature requests to the Gridarta SF Feature Request Tracker or the Daimonin Mantis Bug Tracker.
- Participate in the Daimonin
Map Editor & Mapping
Forum. - Participate in the IRC Channel #gridarta at irc.freenode.net.
Helping as a Developer
- Requirement: You need a firm knowledge of Java.
- Subscribe to the gridarta-commit, gridarta-devel, gridarta-news and gridarta-user mailing lists.
- Report bugs to and solve bugs from the Gridarta SF Bug Tracker and the Daimonin Mantis Bug Tracker.
- Report feature requests to and solve bugs from the Gridarta SF Feature Request Tracker from the Daimonin Mantis Bug Tracker.
- Participate in the Daimonin
Map Editor & Mapping
Forum. - Participate in the IRC Channel #gridarta at irc.freenode.net.
Useful information for developers
- Daimonin Wiki: Guide to the Editor Code (not necessarily up to date)
- Gridarta Homepage
- Gridarta SF Project Homepage
- Gridarta Development Documentation (part of Gridarta Homepage)
How to start
- Read the development documentation.
- Checkout your copy of the Gridarta source code from Subversion. (The development documentation contains instructions for that.)
- See what you can do, or alternatively ask for a concrete task to be assigned to you.
- Submit your first development steps as patches to the gridarta-devel list.
Once the existing Gridarta team sees that you're doing a good job and would be a valuable member of the Gridarta development team, you should give them your SF account information and they will add you as a member to the Gridarta SF team and get a Mantis developer account. You will then also receive an Open Source License key for IntelliJ IDEA, the IDE used by the Gridarta developers.
What you should know
The IRC Channel #gridarta at irc.freenode.net is the most important information exchange amongst gridarta developers, besides the issue trackers. Joining it regularly is very helpful.
Ragnor, Zergus and Cher have extremely high standards, regarding programming in general as well as Java programming in particular. So if your patch isn't accepted or gets highly modified, that's normal.
It's known that the project doesn't work well with NetBeans. We're working on this issue, but with low priority. It should work with Eclipse, though not tested. The IDEs used by the current development team are Emacs, IntelliJ IDEA and Vim.
