I’m interested in doing some development for VASSAL, but had some questions before I started.
First, on the wiki (http://www.vassalengine.org/wiki/doku.php?id=faq_programming), it implies that VASSAL is targeting Java 1.4, but I see generics being used in the Prefs class, so I assume this is outdated. What version is VASSAL targeting now? If the wiki is out of date, is there a good place to go to see what features are currently be added or planned to be added to VASSAL?
What I want to add first is a new global preferences section to allow users to configure their keybindings for standard commands such as save game, zoom, show/hide counters, etc. Would this feature be welcome, and are there any potentials problems/conflicts that I might run into adding this feature?
Finally, to learn the codebase better, I was planning to try fixing a few bugs. Are there any open bugs/issues that would be good for a newbie to fix?
We’re targeting Java 1.5 now, and have been for quite some time. (I’ve
updated that part of the wiki to reflect that.) Most of the information
on that page is outdated, unfortunately.
The wiki is in a sad state right now. Part of this is due to the fact that
we’re close to moving to a new web site (presently I’m the bottleneck for
this), and so I’m expecting to have a lot of cleanup happen after that.
As for planned features, we don’t have a good list right now—that’s
someting I’ve been planning to put in the new wiki once it’s ready. As
we’ve suddenly had an influx of volunteers, I think I’ll try to make up
a list tomorrow of everything I have partially coded or planned just so
everyone knows where we’re headed. (Brent should do the same for the stuff
he’s working on, when he gets back from what I’m guessing is a nice holiday.)
One potential problem is that the whole preferences system is changing in
3.2, and we won’t put new features in a 3.1 release, so this puts a feature
like that in limbo. I have a good chunk of the code for the new prefs system
written already, but haven’t had enough time to finish it yet. If someone
is waiting on me for that, then I’ll try to finish it sooner rather than
later.
Something which would be a good think to make part of such a project is
to add standard key bindings for things which have no key bindings at
present. Lots of menu items are like that right now.
We desperately need somebody to go through unassigned bugs and determine
how to reproduce them, if possible. Right now, Brent and I just can’t keep
up with the pace of bug reports, and having someone triage them would be
very helpful.
Could you add me to the project on Sourceforge so I can start going through the bug reports? My Sourceforge account name is Narcisse42. I notice that the most recent ABR was caused by an outdated module with custom code. Hopefully, I can find and clear out more like this.
You won’t find too many like that, as someone (often me) has at least tried
to give accurate titles to everything reported before Monday of this week,
and also to filter out everything which is due to outdated versions of
VASSAL or outdated module versions.
Custom code ABR’s usually will get moved in to support requests.
They aren’t bugs so much as we need to notify the mod developer to recompile
the custom code they use to be java 1.5 compliant.
If its an outdated module it may already have been fixed ( and its usually
always the same few modules…) - check under support requests for that
module in its comments
Great to hear from you. Any help you can give us is greatly appreciated. VASSAL is a large system and you will find it takes quite a while to find your way around it. Managing bugs may sound boring, but it is actually a great way to start building your internal mind map of how VASSAL works.