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Yandros for C++ coding.


New Horizon

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I received an email from Yandros, who is interested in looking into our remaining tasks in coding. We could either offer DR coding, so we could free up our existing DR coders to spend more time on the AI....or perhaps Yandros would like to work directly on the main mod and do AI coding? :)

 

I'll let Yandros discuss this with the rest of you coders though.

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Yes.

 

I have seven years' experience as a software engineer, although the last 18 months I've been writing requirements and not code, plus before that I was a team lead for several years, and in that role didn't do as much coding as I had when I was a grunt. But I should be able to work in any well-documented C++ system given some time to study it. I would prefer not to work on code that interacts with DX, GDI or anything related to graphics or rendering (aside from standard Windows GUI elements like dialogs) as I have no background in that. My degrees are actually in Math and Secondary Ed; I had a few entry-level CS courses, but am mostly self-taught over many years of being interested in programming, starting with TRS-80 and Applesoft Basic many years ago. Naturally, when I entered the field, I learned much, much more on the job than I had ever taught myself.

 

When I was actively programming, the code I owned was middleware - windowless apps which called into different DLLs for both low-level function and to display GUI. I have more background in C than C++, but I did lead a complete redesign of one of the systems to migrate from C to C++, and have also done some other OOP projects on the side. I have a basic knowledge of HTML, CSS and XML.

 

My free time will be pretty limited given my work schedule and busy family life. I spend maybe 1-2 hours a day M-F and 2-3 hours a day on weekends working on my T2 missions, and I can give up some of that time to begin working on this, but don't expect high output from me necessarily, particularly on the front end when I'm coming up to speed. But I'm happy to give it a try, as I miss programming.

 

 

I'm sure you have more questions, so fire away.

Death's Cold Embrace: A Thief 2 campaign due in 2010

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I don't really know, I guess I need more info on both. My first inclination would be the mod, as it sounds a little more technical, like I could work on some fo the behind-the-scenese stuff. But that's only a wild guess at this point. :blink:

 

If someone can point me to some docs on both DR and the Mod and give me a little more detail on what areas need attention, I can try to get a better feel for which might be a better fit for me, if either.

Death's Cold Embrace: A Thief 2 campaign due in 2010

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Hi Yandros! Good to see you here.

 

The editor code is possibly better designed (mostly thanks to OrbWeaver's and greebo's efforts, no thanks to the GtkRadiant guys who we inherited the source code from ;)). The mod code is written in id software's style (or lack thereof) and is therefore somewhat messy and mostly undocumented. On the other hand, it's possibly more interesting to work on a game than an editor. And IMO it's more important than the editor right now; the editor is very usable and contains most of the necessary features already, while we still need to do a lot of work on the main mod.

 

If working on AI tickles your fancy, that's probably the area that most needs attention right now. We definitely need more mod coders, at any rate.

 

Most of us have very busy "real lives" as well, so no worries about that.

 

As for documentation... There isn't a lot of developer-oriented documentation yet (something we're working on right now in fact), but here are a few pointers.

 

Our internal forums have lots of tidbits scattered around in them, but you can't see them at the moment. Most of our organised documentation is on our wiki: http://www.thirdfilms.com/darkwiki/index.php

 

There's some developer-oriented editor documentation here and some dev-oriented mod documentation here.

 

It's also useful to refer to documentation on Doom 3 itself from time to time, so here's a link dump from my Doom 3 bookmarks folder. Not all of this will be useful for you immediately.

 

http://www.iddevnet.com/doom3/ - id's own documentation; somewhat limited in scope but a good introduction

http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic...sc&start=20 - Trevor's SDK Related Tutorials, probably the only decent Doom 3 SDK tutorials around

http://www.modwiki.net/wiki/Doom_3 - Good general D3 editing wiki

http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/index.php - General D3 forums, occasionally useful for the odd D3-related question

http://www.modwiki.net/wiki/Script_events_%28Doom_3%29 - A partial reference for scripting work

 

Feel free to ask questions about anything you need clarification on.

My games | Public Service Announcement: TDM is not set in the Thief universe. The city in which it takes place is not the City from Thief. The player character is not called Garrett. Any person who contradicts these facts will be subjected to disapproving stares.
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Thanks for all that! I'll start reading through the wiki tomorrow, but it sounds like the mod is the place for me to try and help out.

 

I guess I need to actually install Doom 3 now, I've been putting it off as I don't have any real interest in the original game itself. I'm concerned about my aging system, though - I meet all the min reqs (although some only barely), except for RAM. I only have 256MB, and the box says 384MB is required. Am I going to need to add some to even install? I have a spare 128 or 256 DIMM in another PC I can probably put in mine if needed.

Death's Cold Embrace: A Thief 2 campaign due in 2010

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Mmm. It's going to hurt, but you can probably scrape by as long as you turn all the quality settings to minimum. You'll probably still get single-digit FPS in some TDM maps (Dram's Blackheart Manor for example, which Dram is still in the process of optimising), but most of the barebones test maps should run fine and that's all you'll really need for starters.

 

Optimisation (particularly of AI) is one of the other things we're working on right now. :) It might actually be helpful to have a coder with a slower system on hand; most of the coders here have fairly fast machines and that makes it a bit harder to identify performance issues.

My games | Public Service Announcement: TDM is not set in the Thief universe. The city in which it takes place is not the City from Thief. The player character is not called Garrett. Any person who contradicts these facts will be subjected to disapproving stares.
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Hi Yandros - glad to hear you are joining in the fun! 256MB sounds unlikely to me but worth a try. I originally had 512MB with no problem that I recall other than I was limited how many other programs I could have running at once.

 

BTW, once all installed, if you want a crash 'one day' course in editing just to get the 'feel' b4 u start in coding - check out the wiki beginner guide HERE -it's not quite finished but enough for you to learn in a day or so what took me 6 months! :)

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The Mod sounds like a better fit to me as well -- if you don't like GUIs or rendering you won't like working on the editor that much (there is of course work in other areas, but it tends to very dominated by the interface for obvious reasons).

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@Yandros : I can send you the current TODO list for mod coding so you can see if anything sounds interesting. Usually when someone is just starting on mod coding, we try to give them a small, fairly well contained task to work on.

 

It used to be that these tasks could be done as a stand-alone mod to D3 and merged in later, so you didn't have to download all our assets and source, which takes some time. I'm not sure if we have anything like that right now though, at this point we're somewhat far along so most of our stuff builds on things we've added in the past. I'll think about that. Until then, I'll send you a PM with the TODO list within a day or so.

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Okay, I PM'd the list of programming tasks. It's pretty huge right now, but should give an idea of what things are available to work on. Ideally a good starting task would be fairly small and self-contained, so you don't have to immediately jump into the undocumented horror that is Id's SDK. :)

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My apologies, but now is turning out not to be a good time for me to try and take on something like this. I've hardly done any work at all on my FMs the last few weeks and things don't look like they'll improve much in the near future. It would be best for me to put this application on hold and come back when I see having some time to actually contribute. All of this just came up in the time since I initially responded to NewH's request for applicants.

 

I'll email NewH at some point in the future when I'm ready to pick this back up again, or just revisit this thread and let you all know.

Death's Cold Embrace: A Thief 2 campaign due in 2010

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My apologies, but now is turning out not to be a good time for me to try and take on something like this. I've hardly done any work at all on my FMs the last few weeks and things don't look like they'll improve much in the near future. It would be best for me to put this application on hold and come back when I see having some time to actually contribute. All of this just came up in the time since I initially responded to NewH's request for applicants.

 

To bad, but I appreciate it, that you tell us this honestly. :) Most people simply dissapear without giving any notice at all. Hope to see you back when you have more time and everything sorted out. :)

Gerhard

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