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Where can I start?

Posted: Mon Mar 14, 2016 9:12 pm
by Hugin
I stumbled into the DarkStar project and FFXI private servers about a week ago and I am blown away at how well done everything is. I got servers up and running in no time at home and even the coding seems to be well written and clean. I had a passion for old school FFXI and it was a dream come true coming across all this stuff.

That said, I'm a coder, system/network admin, and project manager "IRL" and I have some free time I'd love to use to help out in any way I can but I'm having some trouble finding the best place to start. There seem to be multiple different "work lists" that offer varying degrees of detail on what can be worked on, with varying degrees of when they've been updated last, etc. These are the three places I'm seeing at the moment:
  1. https://wiki.dspt.info/index.php/Worklist - Very short list with very little detail about the nature of each bullet point mentioned. Doesn't seem to be updated regularly
  2. https://trello.com/b/hBZnfihW/darkstar-project-roadmap - Seems to be tailored more for the main development team rather than newly interested contributors such as myself
  3. https://wiki.dspt.info/index.php/What_Works - Not really a work list but seems like it could be used as one. Seems incomplete and with information discrepancies with other sources
As I'm having trouble finding a place to get started, perhaps a good place to start would be by doing some organizing, cleaning, and documenting? I'm more than happy to do some technical writing so things are better documented. Unlike most coders, I'm not at all opposed to doing some of this :)

I'm also happy to spend time tackling stuff that's simply tedious, boring, and time consuming if there are things other people have been avoiding or putting off. I'm fairly familiar with Lua and have some experience with C++ which I haven't used recently.

Lastly, is there a reason the DSPWEB project has been retired/cancelled? My biggest technical passion is PHP web development and I'd love to work on something similar to what the DSPWEB project was intended for but I'd probably prefer to work mostly in PHP, moving to more of a JS/REST API focus after several useful features have already been implemented in PHP. I'm open to suggestions if the dev team would prefer a different approach.

Let me know your thoughts as I'm dying to help out!

Thanks,
-Hugin

Re: Where can I start?

Posted: Tue Mar 15, 2016 1:43 am
by kjLotus
The best bet for stuff to do is our issue tracker on github (we really appreciate people fixing the small bugs before trying to implement anything) - https://github.com/DarkstarProject/darkstar/issues
If you don't know what you want to try, just come ask in IRC, there's probably a bunch of things that'll be fresh on peoples minds.
Documentation isn't really something on the radar, it'd probably just end up as something else I have to maintain (and I personally don't really see much value in documentation for things that aren't libraries/APIs)
DSP web was canceled because Exor decided to stop working on it.

Really, IRC is a good place to ask questions, there should be people in there around the clock (we got europeans and north americans!) to help you out.