Dear players, modders and members of the community,
Often it seems like this game is developed in secret by a close circle of official devs, and to contribute you have to be a member of this select group. So far we have done little to disperse this myth and attract more developers, but the fact is that Gang Garrison 2 is an open source game, and anyone can submit changes and improvements the same way the official devs do. We want to remind people of this and create new channels for the general public to contribute to the future development of GG2.
In the past we have obscured our plans for development, but keeping the general development discussion out of public view has caused a dissociation between us "official devs" and other talented developers in the community, to the point where mods are created to correct flaws in the game, instead of actually submitting these improvements to the main project. While it is necessary to have project leaders and a private discussion area, there is little reason to keep everyone in the dark about the actual development, and we want to make planning for the future a much more community-oriented activity.
We feel that the "Feature Requests" forum nurtures the view that you should request things, and hope that someday a developer will come along and do them. While it is good to have a way to discuss new ideas, the focus needs to shift from "What could the devs do" to "What can I do". However, to this end you should have a place where you can plan and organize development of a new feature, if you decide that you want to make it a reality. For this purpose, we will create a new, public "Development Discussion" board that we all can use to plan new releases and discuss GG2 programming and feature implementation questions. It will also have sticky posts about how development of GG2 is organized and how to work with the source from our repository. Guidelines for coding style and for handling bug reports may follow.
I have already retired the old "Bug Reports" section, which has taken up its zombie space on the forum for long enough. Using a proper bug tracker ensures that issues will not be forgotten, they can be assigned to developers, targeted for a specific version and managed in many other ways. And just as anyone can work on features, anyone can work on bugs as well. You need no special privileges to discuss a bug report or to change its status (with some restrictions), so anyone can develop and submit a bugfix and then mark the bug report as "fix committed". Don't fiddle with this too lightly; You should read up on what the statuses mean first, and when it is appropriate to use them. We will probably need some guidelines for that as well. However, don't be too afraid of making a mistake either - I keep an eye on all activity on the bug tracker (and hopefully, other people will start doing the same), so mistakes should be noticed and will be corrected.
In summary, I hope the new
Development Discussion board will make GG2 development more accessible for talented people like you.
If you are interested in learning to contribute or have any questions, feel free to post here or drop by the IRC (#gg2_dev), as we want to do everything we can to make future development of Gang Garrison 2 far more transparent and community driven.
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Topic: New board: Development Discussion (Read 9388 times)
