Re: [Adonthell-devel] Re: Development activity

[Kai Sterker]

On 1/5/07, Jeff Shipley <address@hidden> wrote:

> I was able to get the doc pages from adonthell.berlios.de, but it took a
> while.  The pages were timing out on me a lot.

If you are interested in the API, you can generate that from the
source code using doxygen (http://www.doxygen.org). The required cfg
file is sitting in the doc/ folder of the source.

The accompanying Engine Architecture Doc is also available as a PDF
from http://adonthell.linuxgames.com/download/documentation.shtml . It
might be a little behind the information in the Wiki, but it won't
time out on you ;-).


> I will get the source some
> time during this next week and take a better look at it before I decide what
> areas I am planning on working on.  I need to get a better idea of what is
> already in place and what needs to be changed/added.
>
> I'll let you know how it goes this week.  Do you have any suggestions on
> parts of the code that need the most work?

That would be the widget/GUI system and the map engine. But there are
other parts too, like characters and role playing system. Depends
really if you'd rather work on frontend or backend stuff.


> How close are you to a v0.4 release?

Lightyears away, I fear ;-). Hope that doesn't sound too discouraging, though.

The main reason for the slowdown in development was that we felt v0.3
(the Waste's Edge engine) to be a dead end. So we went ahead and
redesigned the architecture and started over from scratch. We've
ported some of the existing code to the new architecture and wrote
more code from the ground up, but at some point people were finishing
university or getting families, so progress slowed down to a crawl.

That went on for a while until we figured that we needed to draw in
new developers. To help with that, somebody suggested that we'd put
together some documentation to get newcomers accustomed to the
project, so we built the Wiki. (Which of course pulled more resources
from coding, but if it proves helpful to you and others it was
definitely worth the effort).

There is also a certain tendency to perfection, which slows things
down somewhat. So people would rather tweak existing code instead of
adding missing pieces. But again, if that allows people to learn and
improve their skills while also improving the existing design, then
it's probably a good thing. After all, we do not have any deadlines or
obligations to meet, so Adonthell is a nice playground for people to
try stuff out.

Kai

P.S. we don't have an irc channel that is constantly manned, but at
need we can organize a meeting to discuss or explain things if
emailing back and forth would take too much time. For a while we used
to have a monthly meeting too, but as people got too busy, we gave up
on that tradition.