[Archived] I want to help

Most commented-out parts indicate that some part of code was rewritted / improved. It’s not necessary to remove them as long as they may be helpful if new code is wrong. These are usually removed by devs after few months, if they are sure this code won’t be needed anymore.

I’m not sure if code clearing will help anyone join the project (it looks clear enough now IMO), but documentation certainly can. We have entire Wiki to be filled with technical details. Also, player’s manual, entires and especially general info about the project are areas for improvement.

Warmonger, but if the new code is wrong you can always use version control system to “travel back in time” :slight_smile:

Comment just above or just below is much easier to notice and to handle. SVN is really poor at browsing the history of changes of a function. If I had super-fast blame tool integrated with IDE with a sider for selecting last revision to take into account, then version control would be better than those comments indeed.

github.com/kot-behemoth/VCMI/bl … rities.cpp

Do you really still think that git or other distributed systems are worse? :wink:

Well, if someone wants to check if sticking with “bullet-proof” SVN is better:

Mercurial intro: hgbook.red-bean.com/
Git intro: book.git-scm.com/

I personally use mercurial + HgSubversion extension for working with SVN repositories. I recommend trying that in spare time. Docs: mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/HgSubversion

About amount of dead code that can be removed: bitbucket.org/exine/vcmi-patche … code.patch

No, I think they are better than centralized systems in principle. I’d really like to have a well-implemented distributed version system. Let me just write my recent experience with bazaar. I’ve cloned VCMI repository (without any problems) and ran blame tool on one of files (to be precise, not the command line tool but a graphical interface for it). It worked almost perfectly, was very fast and did everything that I wanted (including selection of last revision to be shown). There was just one small glitch: after selecting last revision some revision numbers were truncated to last three digits.

I don’t write it as a complain nor bug report. I just want to point that DVCSes seem to be quite stable now but they still have some minor problems. Bazaar seems to be the best for my taste (non-hash revision numbering, good tools for Windows) and I can use it even without any changes in our main repository. It seems to be worth a try (I just need more time for VCMI).

VCS in command line? Most Windows users are too afraid to use command line for tasks it suits better but some Linux users seem to go too far in the opposite direction.

I think that comments are not worth removing. What bad could happen if it stays there? And they may be helpful for those who don’t browse the history of changes all the time.

TortoiseHg - mercurial in TortoiseSVN GUI
Actually CLI is awesome for developement - I like it better than any IDE. However I like netbeans and eclipse when it comes to Java developement.

Of course nothing happens, they’re comments, but after few generations of those they just make things harder to read :wink:

About bazaar - I don’t consider it as mature. On other hand, mercurial is used at Mozilla (moved from CVS), by python developers (moved from SVN), OpenJDK, Atlassian (large project management software developer, moved from SVN), Google and many, many more. Git is used by Linux Kernel developers, Android, Ruby on Rails, KDE, Gnome, Debian, and many, many more too. I personally prefer mercurial with it’s ease to use for beginners and being powerful for advanced users, not to mention fantastic extension system (look at Mercurial Queues and HgSubversion), however both git and mercurial are fast, powerful and used in large scale projects.

Hey all-

Another C++ programmer and avid HoMM3 fan here looking to help out. I was thinking of looking into AI, since that’s a subject of interest to me at the moment (and I’ll be taking a course in it shortly). Is that something that still needs work? I don’t see any adventure AI code (in trunk, at least), though at least the stupid battle AI looks reasonably easy to read.

Anyway, I guess I’m looking for pointers/suggestions to get started.

Thanks much!

EDIT: I should probably mention that I’m not ENTIRELY clueless when it comes to AI, since I’ve done a little (very simple) work with it.

It might also be worth noting that I more or less know what I’m doing with SDL and SVN, and am already on SF (as “capn_fish”; I probably should have thought of that before registering here).

Hi.
Currently we have 2 AIs - outdated GeniusAI and better StupidAI. Also there is work-in-progress adventure map AI (Tow is working on it).
There may be some areas that are still missing in battle AI like spellcasting but it will be better to contact Tow at first - he should know more about that.

To get started you can also check for some bugs on our tracker or implement some missing features. There is TODO list on our wiki that you can check but it became quite small lately.

Tow & Tow Dragon have quite ambitious plans about AI, including their programming Challenge project. I strongly recommend contacting them first before taking any others steps.

Hello, as I wrote in the Mac OS X thread I am an objective c / java programmer and a heroes 3 fan.

I saw your project and I instantly thought it has a lot of potential and I would love to help. I don’t have experience in writing C++ code but I read a few books and I am sure I will bring some value to this project.

I created sourceforge and mantis accounts both with the same username: cipone23. If someone could assign me some small tasks at the beginning and guide me through the process of submitting the code I could get started right away.

Thanks

Hi,
I’m of course H3 fan and I’d like to help in other way than others.
I’m a musician.

I can make with friends a soundtrack [something climatic :smiley: ]

Can it be also rock/metal or rather not ?
Just describe what do you exactly want

Waiting for quick response ; )

lilith, a new soundtrack for main menu would be cool. Rock/metal is OK but I would appreciate soft rock more than hard. BTW, I like piano’s sound :).

You’re the artist, do what you like best! :slight_smile:

Main Theme for Heroes 3 is already done. This is just homemade and we’re gonna rerecord it in few months with all the changes necessery. I’ll make a new topic with all details about it. Enjoy.

PS. We are still working on the rest of soundtrack ; )

forum.vcmi.eu/viewtopic.php?p=7102#7102 - topicabout soundtrack where u can listen and download main theme

Hello all,

I just wanted to let you know that I want to get involved again in this wonderful project. I started something at the beginning of this year but I was very busy with learning Java EE ( I wanted to change my job and move to a bigger city).

Now that I have done those, I will have lots of time on my hands for volunteering this project and I want to get really good at C++, not to mention how much I would like to contribute to the rewriting of H3.

Starting December I will look on the Mantis bug tracker and start by fixing some bugs I found there.

Thank you for this opportunity.
Ciprian

hey i changed to unsupported resolution 1600x1200 for my monitor so i have error when starting vcmi. what is command to change resolution in vcmi client ? i tried to enter something isaw in manual didnt work, i just can change it to 640 in compatibility options. many thanks

Hi. Either edit file config/settings.json or just delete it completely to reset settings to default.

Hello everyone,

I’m a french engineer specialized in C++ programmation, espacially 2D/3D things.
As a big fan of HOMM since Heroes 2, I would like to help this great project.

To start slowly with VCMI, I could look into the translation feature ?
I like playing games in my language (french), and I could translate the game.
I haven’t seen any translation support in the sources, but I haven’t read it all !

thanks

Hi. Welcome to forums :slight_smile:

We don’t have proper translation support (like gettext) but vcmi should be able to use your localized copy of H3. Assuming that such version was released to begin with.
There are some minor issues related to this like lack of encoding detection (vcmi uses utf-8 while H3 uses one of Win125x encodings) but apart from this vcmi should work with localized copies of h3.

Actual support for translation (preferably via boost::locale to avoid extra dependency) would be great but:

  1. Translating H3 in “normal” way by keeping dictionary (english string -> translated string) may be problematic due to copyright. So for H3 translation we’ll have to find some other way.
  2. Non-text data. H3 have notable amount of non-text data that needs translation - voiced campaign intros, main menu buttons that are actually images with “built-in” texts, etc. This makes translation support a bit more complicated.
  3. Right now we have very few “own” texts that need translation (check launcher + config/translate.json). So for vcmi itself translations are not highly important feature.

All in all - go ahead if you’re interested in this. Support for translations is one of features that we’d like to have but never got to actually implementing this. If you have any questions - feel free to ask.

I think it would be good to edit the first post in this thread (from 2008) or start a new one, as there is a chance someone reads it :wink:

EDIT: Done, it’s here