How can we (the community) help?

[dreyas]

posted on February 28th, 2016, 8:58 am

Last edited by dreyas on February 28th, 2016, 9:18 am, edited 2 times in total.

I was inspired to make this post by something said in another thread:

So, to everyone who demand a faster progress: This mod is for free. If you want the game to be made faster, lift your sleeves and carry your part. I've done it myself and you know what? I'm proud of myself now, because I do something. The road is long, yes, but its worth it. Time to grow some backbone.

On that note, I'd like to open this thread up to everyone on the forums, to list their specialties and abilities, or questions they have for the devs, in order to help get project NX moving along.

Perhaps we can do monotonous tasks and free the devs up to do what they do best. I'd like to have the developers chime in here as well, and tell us what they'd like a hand with.

[dreyas]

posted on February 28th, 2016, 9:02 am

Last edited by dreyas on March 1st, 2016, 6:34 am, edited 1 time in total.

From the Developers:

Two buttons on the Fleet Ops page come to mind: in one of them (Team) you can find open positions. E.g. we are always looking for C++ programmers, voice artists & music producers, and 3D modelers & texturers.
- Dominus_Noctis

If you are a C++ developer and you are interested in game development, you can also help by simply using http://ezengine.net and giving us feedback. Doesn't need to have anything to do with FleetOps, every bug that you find, or every feature that we can improve in collaboration will ultimately help the FleetOps project as well.

Even writing code documentation or unit tests will free up our team's time and therefore help. We accept pull requests through GitHub (https://github.com/ezEngine/ezEngine).
- Jan

[ This post will be updated as members of the Dev team reply! ]

posted on February 28th, 2016, 1:15 pm

Well, I'm not on the dev team, but my work on Tryptic's Mod is an attempt to keep some progress for the community. The thing is, I just don't have much time to work on it right now.

If anyone is interested in helping, I would have to show them the methods that I use and teach them how to make changes to Fleet Ops 3.x.x. So far, nobody has had the time and determination to get through the learning stage to the point of working on changes.

I also have a near-complete design for a 6th race, the Cardassians, including most of the ship models and early numbers for their stats. This project would require a LARGE amount of coding, and possibly some additional ship/station models, but if anyone wants to work on it, I can show them the progress so far and explain my profile-robbing technique that would make it possible.

Of course, none of this is affiliated with the Fleet Ops dev team or the NX project, it's simply an exercise in learning to code and an attempt to update STA2 - Fleet Ops while we wait.

posted on February 28th, 2016, 3:30 pm

Hi Dreyas,

Two buttons on the Fleet Ops page come to mind: in one of them (Team) you can find open positions. E.g. we are always looking for C++ programmers, voice artists & music producers, and 3D modelers & texturers.

posted on February 29th, 2016, 2:01 pm

I'm not sure if my WIP Chapman Track Creator qualifies me for the team, but I am willing to help you in my spare time.

posted on February 29th, 2016, 5:13 pm

Dominus_Noctis

Have you for got how to write a news post or we only get one once a year now???

And if you say there no news well kind of bad ( Sorry not kind of IS BAD) 1 year later and you have nothing new you can tell us about in a news post WELL (NEED I SAY MORE)

RIP NX

posted on February 29th, 2016, 9:32 pm

If you are a C++ developer and you are interested in game development, you can also help by simply using http://ezengine.net and giving us feedback. Doesn't need to have anything to do with FleetOps, every bug that you find, or every feature that we can improve in collaboration will ultimately help the FleetOps project as well.

Even writing code documentation or unit tests will free up our team's time and therefore help. We accept pull requests through GitHub (https://github.com/ezEngine/ezEngine).

That said, I know that the FleetOps team is pretty hard at work, we had a meeting a few weeks ago to discuss technical details, and it's really quite impressive with how much passion and dedication the guys are working on this. It's not easy doing a full time day job AND any larger project over a longer period of time. The project is definitely in good hands.

posted on March 3rd, 2016, 4:11 pm

Hmm i like how a none FO Dev was the only Dev to even say anything about how FO is going how nice.

Thanks Jan none Fleet Ops Dev I hope all going well with your project.

I guess Fleet Ops Dev still don't like to talk anything about NX.

posted on March 3rd, 2016, 11:06 pm

@dreyas: I got your PM. I read it on my smartphone and later forgot about it. Currently i do not check the forums on daily basis.

Dominus and Jan basically said what would help NX the most. If you are interested in one of the open jobs, contact us. Donations help as well. Some assets like a soundtrack are nearly impossible to get for free in a decent quality.

Other than that, we have gathered a huge amount of feedback from the community over the years about features that Fleet Operations should support. Most of which was just impossible previously with Armada 2. We have heard your ideas and are in the processes of implementing these or have them implemented already in NX.
The community will be able to help us after NX has entered alpha stage. We'll want a lot of feedback when we show you what we have got.

posted on March 5th, 2016, 1:42 pm

Dear Developers!
I would like to throw in a thought. Wouldn't it be nice to monthly post the latest ezEngine achievements in the news thread. Sure, you are working on the fundamentals of the game, hence this would not provide your followers with any fancy spaceship renderings, we all definitively crave. But neverteless it would at least show, that the project is under constant developement, not dead, as it appears from time to time. On the other hand, perhaps it's just me who would care about nerdy coding achievements and it would not do the bulk of the community any favour. As I said, just thoughts.

With best regards
mimesot

[Jan]

posted on March 5th, 2016, 2:26 pm

Last edited by Jan on March 5th, 2016, 2:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: typo

I can totally understand that some people are interested even in the low level coding aspects. As a developer, I find such things often way more intriguing than the shiny render trailers

If you want updates about ezEngine itself, I can see to maybe post something every once in a while. It would basically be what we also post here http://ezengine.net/ just not tied to our official releases, which are rather infrequent.

A few things first, though:
1) We are NOT working on the "fundamentals of the game". That is done by the FleetOps team So I can really not give you any insights into what the game code progress is. From the list below, you may realize, that we are working on even more basic stuff than that.
2) The ezEngine team is ~60% working on our editor, which FleetOps will likely not use. So a lot of our time is spent on things that do not directly affect NX. The good news is, however, that working on the editor is a pretty good test case for the underlying engine technology and thus often leads us to bugs or missing features, which affect NX as well.
Therefore I will omit news about our editor from the list below.

That said, here are the more interesting things that we did since our last release. Feel free to ask questions, if you want to know details.

* Added a random number generator, based on the WELL512 algorithm
* Every ezWorld now has a default random number generator
* Added a preliminary PhysX integration
* Every ezWorld now has its own clock
* Simulation of ezWorlds can now be paused
* Added ezWorldModule, which allows to hook into the initialization and update of ezWorld, enabling custom plugins like PhysX or Fmod
* Component managers do not need to be explicitly registered anymore
* Added ezSpawnComponent for spawning prefabs at runtime
* Added ezTimedDeathComponent for deleting nodes after a timeout
* Added ezCameraComponent for managing runtime cameras
* Added ezInputComponent, which sends input event messages to components on the same node
* Added an editor to configure the input bindings and save it to JSON
* Added a renderpipeline asset for data driven renderer configuration
* Added ezWorldReader and ezWorldWriter for exporting and importing scene or prefab data in binary form
* Added ezPrefabResource for binary prefab loading at runtime
* Implemented line and point rendering in the D3D abstraction
* RTTI types can now have attributes, e.g. for for categories in menus
* Added Surface assets for defining physics properties (fricition etc.)
* Added ezDeferredFileWriter for only writing files to disk after everything succeeded
* Added ezStaticCast and ezDynamicCast for easier and save casting of reflected types
* Added ezAngle as a supported type to ezVariant
* Changed component initialization order a bit to make writing init functions easier
* Refactored ezGameApplication to handle all engine initialization
* Added ezGameState which is the base class to build all C++ game logic in, works closely with ezGameApplication
* ezGameApplication now automatically loads plugins for a project through a config file
* ezGameApplication now automatically configures input bindings for a project through a config file
* ezGameApplication now automatically sets up data directories for a project through a config file

posted on March 5th, 2016, 5:26 pm

On the other hand, perhaps it's just me who would care about nerdy coding achievements

I would also love to have posts about those "nerdy coding achievements."

---

1) We are NOT working on the "fundamentals of the game". That is done by the FleetOps team

So that's why you're not listed on the Team page.