Sigh, ignore Rod, its 1st April and he's an American.
The reason the graph isn't showing our work this month is because we have stared adhering to a new policy of all new development being done in a branch and merging that work in when it is completed. According to
this github help page commits only show up on the activity graph when they are in the default branch, in our case that is master.
Here is a proper summary of what we have been doing:
- Nathan has been working on Shipyards in the Shipyard-Frontend-Finish branch, he almost finished with that and I'd expect that to me merged into master before then end of April.
- Rod, Se5a and Myself have been working on a better foundation for the Project going forward (the stuff Rod was talking about last month). This work is being done in the ECS-Switchover branch and on the irc channel. Some details:
- We have decided to go with a Entity Component System as the underlying framework of the game. We have drawing heavy from the Artemis ECS for the design. It is worth noting that we have changed some normal ECS terminology for Pulsar, Components have become DataBlobs (or DBs for short) and Systems have become Processors. We did this to avoid confusion with Ship Components and Star System (it was getting very confusing). Rod has started implementing this.
- We have decided to use A message passing system for UI <-> Game Library communications, Se5a has done some excellent work on this.
- Other then arguing with Rod about entity Manger implementation details I've been working on Unit Tests for Rod and se5a's work.
- We have also come to decision on how other things will work, including how we will utilise threads, a new WPF UI and using JSON/BSON for saved games.
- In other news Rod has managed to get us approved for an Open Source License for ReSharper. Big Thank You to the guy from JetBrains for that
So that was March. the goal for April will be to make some serious progress migrating the existing code into our new ECS, which is looking like a major refactor and could take a while. Don't expect to us to get it all done in April is what I'm saying
Finally I'd just like to include a recruitment pitch, the new ECS system in many ways gives us a clean star (no matter how massy the git repo looks), so it is an excellent time to get involved in the project. We need people who:
- Are interested, seriously if you are interested then that is all you really need to know
, you can learn the rest "on the job". - Can code C#, tho any language will do, we'll teach you C# (hell Nathan learnt C# to work on Pulsar)
- Have experience with WPF/XAML.
- Can do nice Art (we want to make a pretty UI)
- Can work with JSON (there is a lot of data to be setup, research, names, gases, etc.)
- Want to work on pulsar (seriously this is the important one, even if you don't know anything else YOU CAN LEARN )
If you want to get started I'd suggest logging onto the IRC channel #Pulsar4x on freenode, there are usually two or three of us online, and having a chat (you can do it in a
browser, just enter #Pulsar4x as the channel).
