We now have a documented design process. We've established it because we've started having some fairly meaty design discussions in IRC in the last month or two but haven't really known how to finish it off. Now we do. It'll remain to see how well this will work but we need to start somewhere!

If you consider yourself a designer, coder or tester, and want to get properly involved with Pioneer, the developers warmly invite you to join the official IRC channel. For those not familiar with Internet Relay Chat, it's a real time multi-user chat application dating back from the late 1980s, and it's a great way to get a group of people together to discuss things in (almost) real time.

It is recommended that anybody wishing to contribute to the project, whether designer, coder or artist, joins the IRC channel. Almost all the dev coordination happens there, including lively discussions involving the issues logged on the tracker.

"Spectators" are welcome, but bear in mind that when chat turns technical, you might start to feel excluded. It's not deliberate, it's just that we're concentrating on making a great game for you.

If you wish to use an IRC client, you can find us on Freenode. Most clients have Freenode as a pre-configured option; if you need to type in a server name, use irc.freenode.net. The channel name is #Pioneer.

We want people to be able to contribute effectively. This post covers the things you'll need to get your stuff into Pioneer (excepting any creative tools you might need, such as a compiler, modelling tools, drawing tools, music sequencers, etc).

Where will I need to register, or what tools will I need, to contribute to Pioneer?

Pioneer is maintained in a git repository hosted on GitHub (specifically, here). In order to contribute code or artwork to Pioneer, you will ideally need to be using git yourself. Our preferred means of receiving contributions is as a pull request made from a forked repository on GitHub. This requires registration on that site, and you will normally need sufficient bandwidth to make the initial download of the repository to your own computer.

You will need to develop a familiarity with git. There is a free book which isn't bad at all, as well as many tutorials online.

I am different and/or special.

If you do not wish to use GitHub, we are very happy for you to host a copy of the git repository anywhere else online (such as Google Code, Gitorious, BitBucket or your very own home-made GitWeb site). In this instance, you will still need to have somebody create an issue for you on the GitHub issue tracker to point us to the location of your committed changes, and to describe your contribution. You can get in touch with the developers on IRC or through the mailing list to arrange this.

If you do not wish to use any online git hosting service, we will accept an email (or files located online) that have been created using the git format-patch command from your offline copy of the repository via the mailing list.

If you have simply been hacking on a zipped archive of the source code, and have not been using git at all, there are a a few ways to proceed. In order of preference:

1. Ideally, start using git. If bandwidth is really tight for you, we understand that this might not immediately be possible.
2. If your changes are small, you can use GitHub to fork Pioneer, and edit the files right there on the web site. Your changes can be committed, and a pull request made, without having to re-download the entire repository.
3. As a last resort, make a simple patch (a unified diff is best) and either upload it somewhere where we can reach it (if it's a big patch), or email it to the developers' mailing list.

If you make git commits, and are using some sort of pseudonym or handle, let us know your real name if you'd rather see your real name in the game's credits. You can include this information in the pull request, and it will be honoured.

There is now a mailing list for development discussions. The list is free and open to all Pioneer developers (whether or not they have committed code to the project).

Whilst much of the development chat still takes place on IRC, the mailing list is now the official location for the discussion of Pioneer design, development and direction. This has come about because the GitHub issues tracker, whilst competent, is not a discussion forum, and we're aware of the shortcomings of IRC when it comes to having any sort of permanent record of decisions. The GitHub Wiki will remain as the record of decisions that have been made, and will stand as a design document.

You can subscribe to the mailing list on the mailing list subscription page.

Its a mailing list. You send it an email (plain old email, like your hotmail or gmail account) and it gets resent to everybody on the list.

We stress that this is for core game development. There will be lots of chatter about code stuff. Everyone is welcome, of course, but its not a place for player support & discussion. This forum is much better suited to that.

I have a general idea for the organisation of the whole Pioneer project, but please note: it's just an idea, not a suggestion 🙂

What about making public modules for every important feature that is added to Pioneer, for example:

In A33, there is the new Orbital Information which displays a red orbit line in the map and your actual position, oh btw, my 2 thumbs up for the creator 😎

Now, why not make a module that one can add in the Mod Folder ?

The same would go with any new content.

There would be 2 downloads of Pioneer :

1) one basic program and a Folder with the Modules where the player can freely build and remove what's of interest to him

2) the program with all the features included as an installer

This would also give a better overview of what's the state of Pioneer and make it more easy for folks to build a branch like Genesia or Paragon.

Also with the modular system where each module has a readme of its author, a player could freely contact him on the forum here and start an interesting thread with new ideas etc.

The author's readme in every module will make it easier to update the Quickguide.txt and make the basis for future Pioneer documentation.

XenonS

What about making public modules for every important feature that is added to Pioneer

Mods are limited in what they can do. To take your example, the player orbit and position display in the system view is implemented in C++ and could not have been created as a mod. There are several large pieces of infrastructure in various stages of development that will give mods more power. For example: the new UI system, which has already allowed walterar to provide interesting additions to the F3/Info screen in his Scout+ mod (and will allow much more when the rest of the user interface has been ported to use it). But even with all the intended improvements to scripting power, there will always be a limit to the changes that can be implemented as mods.

So, making everything a mod is out of the question. This is arguably why Paragon exists (its design goals require changes that mods can't make).

Having said that, the idea of splitting the distribution more clearly into an "engine" component and one or more content/feature bundles has come up before (at least on IRC). It makes sense as an idea, and I think it's very likely to happen eventually. It is not really plausible right now though -- too much functionality is tied together in C++. We're already doing a bunch of work (as I said above) to put Lua scripts in control of more things, but until a lot more of that is done there's a very low limit to how much of the game can be distributed as separate mods.

There are also problems caused by the extra overhead involved in trying to maintain a lot of separate mods: you get a combinatorial explosion of possible installation configurations, which quickly becomes very confusing and makes it impossible to test anything properly. And until the scripting API is much more stable any updates to the engine are likely to break a lot of the existing mods, so if you update one you'll have to update all of them (in which case why not just distribute all of it as one package in the first place?)

John B

Hi jpab,

thanks a lot for these details. It's difficult for a neophite like me to really understand the Pioneer structure at a first glance. My idea certainly wasn't 't based on such knowledge.

Bye,

XenonS

To resume briefly :

Mod => act only on Data ( folder)

Total refont or dev => act both on Data and program source ( need to compiling).

Most of the links in the OP are dead now :fie:

I think this whole thread should be nuked, and just replaced with a link to http://pioneerwiki.com/wiki/How_you_can_contribute which we can keep editing and updating as time porgress.

Posts on forums have a tendency to become old, stale, outdated, and/or too long to read.