openmw.org

So, I should start off by saying that I don't actually know C++. I plan to begin actively teaching myself to code in C++ soon.

That said, I am a student studying Electrical Engineering, and my experience with programming has primarily been Assembly. I took an intro course in C, have had a number of classes that relied on MatLAB, taught myself LaTeX, and I just completed a summer internship with a well known IT company working with Java, having had no prior knowledge of the language beforehand. I am willing to learn whatever it is that I need to know to contribute.

My interest in the project is, ironically, in the areas of most apparent need: documentation and the CS. I like to understand how things tick and consider myself to be a meticulous worker, so I actually enjoy writing documentation. My interest in the CS mostly comes from curiosity.

I have not fully completed the Developer Checklist at this time because I wanted to ask: Would there be a use for me? Would I be better off coming back later more familiar with C++, or would I do well to jump in and learn as I go?

Thanks for the hard work you all do!

Documentation is definitely needed, including just tutorials on how to use OpenMW-CS. If you are comfortable doing that, there are plenty of ways to contribute while you are learning C++.

Welcome!

I don't know if you can pick C++ skills up fast enough to start contributing to OpenMW on the go. However any progress on OpenMW-CS would definitely be awesome.

If you find the right problem with OpenMW, actually using C++ shouldn't be the biggest hurdle to fixing it if you've never used it before. A good chunk of the stuff I've done with OpenMW involved figuring out the C++ as I went, having mostly worked on Java, C# and a bunch of scripting languages beforehand. That said, I quite like battling computers which aren't agreeing about what I told them to do, so your experience may vary.

Welcome! I'd like to second that we are in desperate need of documentation. It sounds like you will be more interested in the source documentation than the user docs or tutorials, but absolutely feel free to contribute to those because we need that too. It's unlikely I'll be actively contributing over the next couple of months, but if you have any questions feel free to PM me and I'll try and get back to you asap. My guess is you won't need much help if you taught yourself LaTeX. If you haven't surmised as much, we use RestructuredText parsed by Sphinx, so those would be the places to look on the markup itself. I'm about 3/4 of the way through a step-by-step tutorial on getting everything set up to contribute documentation, but it's aimed at people with much less technical experience than you so I'd just jump in. I won't get around to finishing it until I'm able to contribute here again anyway.