INFO | GitHub Coders

[giftfish]

For about a year and a half now, we've been putting a lot of effort into adding polish and functionality to the toolset. The move to GitHub, a new website, a growing wiki, new logoing, new icons, new GUI, ditching lots of old tools, making new ones, and much more.

Since last fall we've also started putting more effort into making the repository itself a bit more robust, and putting in place features to help promote toolset longevity. We now have the following documents and policies in place:

• MIT License
  
• Code of Conduct
  
• Code Contribution Guidelines
• Style Guide
• Contributor License Agreement (CLA)

Collectively, it's important to have all existing coders/admins on the same page about these policies. It also makes it about 100x easier to onboard new coders, where all this information is clearly documented. Previously, many of these things would be discussed with the coder, personally, once they showed interest. Or perhaps not discussed at all. Now, potential new coders can read about how we do things before they even join us. And, the fact that the policies now clearly lay out how to contribute and what our expectations are as a community, it makes it easier for them to contribute. Finally, it saves us time. It reduces the obligations of the existing coders/admins (since we have very few coders to start with), and it lessens the load on the remaining coders when one decides to go AFK.

On top of this, there's the longevity factor. We'll likely reach a point when we have no coders and development ceases. We, in fact, did reach this point in January 2016. Kfreon and I announced an end to official development, and then a day later Sir stepped in and it was full steam ahead on the GUI overhaul, lol. So, things can change... rapidly. Having all of this in place makes it easier to start/stop development, or to hand off development to another team. A new team could of course ditch/change whatever policies they want, but at least we've given them an organized project to start with.

Still missing are two things:

• New WPF tool templates
  
• Toolset Development Roadmap
  

The former likely will not be finished until sircxyrtyx finishes work on the Audio Editor, as it's serving as the guinea pig for the creation for the template. The latter is something that myself, kfreon , and Sir need to spend a lot of time discussing. We have an internal roadmap, but it needs to be fine-tuned and flushed out more before we can post it publicly. There will be a time when we ask the community for certain feedback in relation to that roadmap, but now is not that time

We'll update this post with more info, as needed. Thanks!

[benji]

Somehow... I hadn't seen all of these before. Odd.

To go along with all these contributing guides, how about a guide to actually approaching toolset code for the first time? As mentioned in one of the guides, the code has many idiosyncracies, and is not the most intuitive to pick up and start working on. Things that I would have liked to know from the start include using MEPackageHandler.OpenME3Package to open packages, using ME3Directory for paths, how pcc object references start at 1 but some variables such as "Index" and "indexValue" hold 0 for the first export, while variables like "UIndex" hold 1 for the first export, etc.

[giftfish]

Jan 18, 2017 5:00:41 GMT benji said:

Somehow... I hadn't seen all of these before. Odd.

They've been in the works since last fall, but have been rolled out slowly to Git. The CCG and CLA were only added a few days ago. The CLA you won't see until your next pull.

Jan 18, 2017 5:00:41 GMT benji said:

To go along with all these contributing guides, how about a guide to actually approaching toolset code for the first time? As mentioned in one of the guides, the code has many idiosyncracies, and is not the most intuitive to pick up and start working on. Things that I would have liked to know from the start include using MEPackageHandler.OpenME3Package to open packages, using ME3Directory for paths, how pcc object references start at 1 but some variables such as "Index" and "indexValue" hold 0 for the first export, while variables like "UIndex" hold 1 for the first export, etc.

These are good suggestions. We'll add them to the Style Guide, which is where other information of this nature is. If you have any other suggestions along these lines, feel free to put them in the thread.