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Where to start?

Posted: 12 Mar 2018, 23:56
by abajor
Hi I'm a CS & E student

I have a decent exposure to C and C++ about to get to algorithm's and operating systems.

I've never really worked on large dev project so was wondering.

Is there a good place to start to familiarize oneself with the OpenMW code.

What should one familiarize themselves with first?

Morrowind is one of my favorite TES games, I'd love to get to a point where I can contribute.

I've glanced at the source, and am not really sure where a best place to start is.

Thanks for any advice.

Re: Where to start?

Posted: 13 Mar 2018, 03:03
by scrawl
It really depends on what you want to do. If you're looking to jump in with random tasks as someone with little experience with OpenMW, you can definitely do that but be aware that most of the easy tasks are already taken or get snatched as soon as they're available, and the remaining ones likely require a lot of discussion, reviews, etc, which you might find unrewarding if you were just looking to code.
If you wanted to make a big difference, you should specialise in something and then take over that part of the code base, like AnyOldName3 did when starting on the shadows. In that case you would be looking at a long term commitment though, so make sure you really want that ;)

Re: Where to start?

Posted: 13 Mar 2018, 06:31
by abajor
scrawl wrote: 13 Mar 2018, 03:03 It really depends on what you want to do. If you're looking to jump in with random tasks as someone with little experience with OpenMW, you can definitely do that but be aware that most of the easy tasks are already taken or get snatched as soon as they're available, and the remaining ones likely require a lot of discussion, reviews, etc, which you might find unrewarding if you were just looking to code.
If you wanted to make a big difference, you should specialise in something and then take over that part of the code base, like AnyOldName3 did when starting on the shadows. In that case you would be looking at a long term commitment though, so make sure you really want that ;)
At the moment I don't know that I could be much of an asset. It might be fun looking at some of the Physics, and NPC behavior just to get familiar with how it's implemented etc.

I have to Admit I was inspired by Zaric Zhakarons "What if Morrowind was good video."

So far most of what I've done in my free time (which I don't have much of) is play a little bit with Lazy Foo's SDL tutorial, and modify the moving circle tutorial to have some 2D Kinematics, so the circles Y axis is under the influence of "g" and will fall and re-bound like an elastic collision with a little damping.

I also tried to give the ball vertical Thrust instead of moving with a constant velocity in the y axis which has amusing results.

The other thing I've done is followed the OpenGL breakout clone tutorial, that was fun. Sort of managed to give the Awesomeface ball variable spin when it collides.

Currently at school I'm just working on some simple Finite State Machine programs on a MIPS32 Micro. It's all in good ole' C.

So far we've done polish notation, button de-bouncing using interrupt timers, Made a toaster oven controller and used a binary tree to make a Morse Code decoder. Currently in the middle of writing a program with a partner that links two MIPS32 test boards to play Battleship with each other.

So time to commit? Maybe some during the summer, but otherwise I am just a long time Morrowind Fan Boy.

Re: Where to start?

Posted: 13 Mar 2018, 06:45
by raevol
abajor wrote: 13 Mar 2018, 06:31I'm just working on some simple Finite State Machine programs
Yeyea that automata! :D

Re: Where to start?

Posted: 13 Mar 2018, 22:15
by abajor
raevol wrote: 13 Mar 2018, 06:45
abajor wrote: 13 Mar 2018, 06:31I'm just working on some simple Finite State Machine programs
Yeyea that automata! :D
Nothing like writing a state machine based game using nothing but logic gates on an FPGA.

https://youtu.be/rTYTx82qhZY

Re: Where to start?

Posted: 14 Mar 2018, 03:40
by raevol
abajor wrote: 13 Mar 2018, 22:15 Nothing like writing a state machine based game using nothing but logic gates on an FPGA.

https://youtu.be/rTYTx82qhZY
Haha that's cool.