I’ve been an admirer of Vassal for some time now, and I’d like to get involved with development of it.
I’ve been developing in Java for over 10 years now, so I have a lot of experience there.
I’ve been wargaming for many more years than that. Let’s just say I was very excited when Squad Leader came out and even more so when ASL was first available.
I have pulled the source and am all set there.
I have registered on sourceforge (usercode is the same as here, jimcot).
I have not set up jabber for vassal, though I have used jabber for other stuff. Do you use it for development communications?
If you’ll have me, can someone set me up in sourceforge so I can work on bugs?
No. The talk about Jabber/XMMP which you see on the forum has to do with
the new game server. Brent is working on getting us switched from our old
game server, which is a custom piece of software, to one which is a standard
Jabber server. VASSAL clients will be communicating game data to each other
using Jabber, starting with 3.2.
You’re added.
Are you familiar with SVN?
If you’re going to work on bugs, you’ll want to make yourself a branch
from the 3.1 branch, not from the trunk. (This is because the trunk is
a big mess right now.) When you fix a bug, let me know what changeset
the fix is in (i.e., the revision number), and I’ll review the code and
merge it to the 3.1 branch. It helps us isolate changes if you only fix
one bug per changeset.
Most of the bugs in our bug tracker are due to automatic bug reports
generated by uncaught exceptions. A lot of these haven’t been investigated
beyond checking whether they’re duplicates of some other bug. Often these
lack clear descriptions of what caused them. For any bug like this, if you
can document how to reproduce it reliably, that’s a step toward fixing it.
Yep, I already started looking at some of the open ones. If I find a way to reproduce them, I’ll add comments. I figure it’s a good start towards learning the code.
Great. Feel free to start as many branches as you need under
VASSAL-src/branches/. We’ve tended to name branches after ourselves
when they’re devoted to one-person jobs.
Feel free to dive in an fix whatever you can see how to fix, too.
BTW, the older the bug is, the more likely that somebody has already
wrestled with it some, so older bugs will tend to be harder to solve.
Starting from the most recent ones might allow you to make the fastest
progress.
One more thing: Just because the bug is assigned to someone, don’t assume
that means it’s being worked on. Sometimes we’ve used that as an indication
of who will eventually work on it, instead of work in progress. So if you
look at any bugs like that, just ask what the status is to avoid duplication
of effort.
It’s been a quiet time for development over the last 6 months. Joel has been very busy and I have been spending a lot of time trying to nail down the new Jabber Server interface.
Feel free to ask any questions at all, no matter how technical on the Devlopers forum subsection. As well as bugs, look at some of the simpler enhancement requests. I find working on these very instructive and are a lot more ‘fun’ than fix bugs all day long!
If you have not done so already, I would recommend that you pick a game and try and build a module for it. Most of the VASSAL improvements I have done over the years have been to fix inconsistencies and missing functionality I found while trying to build modules.
