As assistance is always required, new help is greatly appreciated. There are several ways to contribute to the project; should you wish to select one or more of the following general tasks.
Choose a task from the TODO Listing listing and devise, implement, test and submit a means of completing it. If your method is successful enough it'll be incorporated into the main source tree. Note that it is probably wise to check what the other developers are doing at the present time (reading the mailing list is probably sensible) before starting anything new. This avoids duplication of effort and possibly conflicting solutions.
Useful skills include:
C++
Perl
Docbook
Generic graphics expertise
Patience, commitment and imagination.
Slightly less involved that the previous item, but no less important. Should you find a bug or be especially irritated by one already listed in Known Bugs then submitting a good patch, or even helpful corrollary information about a bug will be most helpful.
Useful skills include:
Test suite design.
Ability to run a debugger
Availability to provide more information on request and test any provided fixes.
Though it can be taken too far, casting a critical eye over the design and other decisions made by developers can serve to reduce requirements creep and other ills. Should you notice anything particularly silly (like re-inventing the wheel for instance) then please do send us a polite note.
Useful skills include:
Experience of the evolution of large projects
Reasonable knowledge of the subject area of Mote.
Finding clever solutions to the problem you have found
This is an excellent way to get involved at a low level and remain at least nominally on the bleeding edge of the project. Simply download the latest release of the source code and associated resources, install, compile and run. Report any problems you find, whether with misleading documentation causing user error or errors in the code itself. Simple as that. Ideally, an army of testers will be able to spot even the most obscure bug relatively quickly saving developer time.
Useful skills include:
Succint, clear bug reporting style
The ability to horribly break things with a mere look!
In addition to the above generic areas, we need specific help in the following areas:
Licensing. Once we have formulated a more protective license we will require someone (or several someones for preference) with a legal turn of mind to examine our arrangements and look for flaws.
When getting involved with project development users should subscribe to the Mote Project mailing lists which are as follows:
This list is used for discussion of the mote game engine and general development topics (excepting plot and bug tracking). This list has by far the most regular traffic of all the Mote lists and is essential reading for all those serious about assisting development.
This list is for those creative types who wish to help write the story behind the Mote universe. Topics for discussion include politics, geography and geology (which handle the distribution of natural resources), economics, the storyline behind the proposed single player game extension and many others. Tolerance is given to blueskying, but keeping the proposals within the capabilities of the game engine would be appreciated. Traffic tends to be bursty on this list as the proposals are much dependent upon the state of the game engine.
Bug reports, including proposed/actual resolutions and relevant information are distributed on this list. Announcements on this list are also crossposted to mote-dev, so it is suggested that users do not subscribe to both.
To subscribe, go to the SourceForge lists page and click "subscribe" for each list that you wish to join. This page will also allow existing subscribers to change their preferences.
In addition, a read through the following documents will provide a grounding in some of the core project concepts:
Note to reviewers: What should new users read? Obviously the documentation and geocrawler (yuk- we perhaps should find something better) mailing list archives is a good start but a select bibliography of theoretical stuff (Gang Of Four, AI, Networking) would probably be nice, considering this project is eventually aimed at non-technical users. It'd be nice if our user base had a hope in hell of understanding what we were blithering about :)