CONTRIBUTING.md

Development guidelines

Workflow

Initial build:

• Compile the project (described in the next section)
• Copy all .dll and .exe files from build/ to your game directory
• Copy the contents of bin/ to your game directory

Subsequent builds:

• Compile the project
• Copy all .dll and .exe files from build/ to your game directory (we recommend making a script file to do this)

Compiling on Ubuntu

• With Docker:

  Make sure to install Docker and make, then run make debug. The binaries should appear in the build/ directory.

• Without Docker:

  This scenario is not officially supported, but you can see how it's done by examining docker/Dockerfile and docker/entrypoint.sh for the external dependencies and meson.build for the local files, then tailoring your system to match the process.

Compiling on Windows

• Using WSL:

  Install WSL (video guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RTSlby-l9w)

  • Run Powershell as Administrator
  • Copy and paste the following command: Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux
  • Restart the computer
  • Go to Windows App Store
  • Install Ubuntu

  Run WSL and continue with the instructions from the Compiling on Ubuntu section.

Coding conventions

While the existing source code does not conform to the rules because it uses the original Core Design's naming, new code should adhere to the following guidelines:

• Variables are lower_snake_case
• Global variables are g_PascalCase
• Module variables are m_PascalCase
• Function names are Module_PascalCase
• Macros are UPPER_SNAKE_CASE
• Struct names are UPPER_SNAKE_CASE
• Struct members are lower_snake_case
• Enum names are UPPER_SNAKE_CASE
• Enum members are UPPER_SNAKE_CASE

Try to avoid global variables, if possible declare them as static in the module you're using them. Changes to original game functionality most often should be configurable.

Other things:

• We use clang-format to automatically format the code

• We do not omit { and }

• We use K&R brace style

• We condense if expressions into one, so:

  if (a && b) {
  }
  

  and not:

  if (a) {
      if (b) {
      }
  }
  

  If the expressions are extraordinarily complex, we refactor these into smaller conditions or functions.

Code formatting

This project uses clang-format to take care of automatic code formatting. To ensure your code conforms to the standard, please run make lint after each commit. If for some reason you can't run it, don't worry, our CI pipeline will show you what need to be changed in case of mistakes.

Branching

We commit via pull requests and avoid committing directly to master, which is a protected branch. Each pull request should have at least one approval before merging. We never merge until all discussions are marked as resolved and generally try to test things before merging. When a remark on the code review is trivial and the PR author has pushed a fix for it, it should be resolved by the pull request author. Otherwise we don't mark the discussions as resolved and give a chance for the reviewer to reply. Once all change requests are addressed, we should re-request a review from the interested parties.

New version releases

New version releases happen automatically whenever a new tag is pushed to the master branch with the help of GitHub actions.

Supported compilers

Please be advised that any build systems that are not the one we use for automating releases (= mingw-w64) come at user's own risk. They might crash or even refuse to compile. Pull requests are welcome, but those other toolchains will be always considered supplementary.