Questions about joining

Join the team. This area is for people who want to participate in OpenMW's development in one way or another.
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BaronPampa
Posts: 25
Joined: 04 Aug 2017, 12:50

Questions about joining

Post by BaronPampa »

Hi!
Sometime this year my studies will end and my magnum opus* will reach a state when I'm satisfied with it. I should have few hours a week to spare for open-source development then, and I'd be strongly inclined to help with OpenMW. I think I can write decent code, tackle complex problems and I know C++(see link for a code "sample"). I don't have knowledge of game engine development and of graphics programming.

What are the areas where help is most required from your perspective? What kind of contributions would be most welcome for someone with my profile?

On the other hand, the improvements I'd like to see in OpenMW the most are in the graphics area - distant statics, shaders, performance improvements. Do you think it's sensible to start to educate myself about OSG and general graphics programming in order to start working on that? Few hours a week might not be much, but I think they could stack up easily if spent systematically over the course of months and years.

*https://bitbucket.org/brzegorz/neuro-ai/src/master/
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AnyOldName3
Posts: 2666
Joined: 26 Nov 2015, 03:25

Re: Questions about joining

Post by AnyOldName3 »

Competent graphics programmers with free time are a resource we're very low on right now, but they're not the only thing we need. From OpenMW's perspective, it would be better if you started with things you already had a reasonable idea of how to do rather than immediately jumping into learning new things. That way, you become more emotionally invested and are less likely to find something else you want to do before you've done anything :P.

The construction set has a bazillion missing features and might be easier to get into when coming in cold. The engine doesn't have that many pre-1.0 (or optionally pre-1.0) features that are missing and also feasible to do without a good understanding of the engine already, but there are still bugs (mostly with mods that do weird things) and fixing those is a good way to learn your way around the engine's code.
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