Orxonox Primer
This is a little tutorial for all new to Orxonox, a little refresh for all others:
1. Mail lists
We've got 3 major mailing lists:
- orxonox-announce : announcements to all who like orxonox (low traffic)
- orxonox-dev : development stuff just for us (medium traffic)
- orxonox-commit : auto-mail if the svn repository changes (high traffic during development sessions)
- tickets : notifications if a ticket is added or changed
2. Website
You can find our website on http://www.orxonox.net. We have a trac wiki system.
The wiki has got some nice features like the ticket system, where you can set up development requests. The roadmap shows what the current development goals are. Anyone with a account / password (all developers) is able to make changes to the wiki or the ticket system; just by using the account from the subversion system.
3. Forum
There is also a forum. We use it to exchange thoughts, drawings, materials, whatever. You will have to create a new account to be able to post there.
4. Infrastructure
We host serveral services on our server, including svn, mail, irc, and a buildserver. You can find a description of all services and how to use them in the IT User Manual.
5. Repository
Orxonox is programmed by many programmers at the same time. To synchronize the work and to make it available for all, we've got a central subversion server (subversion is a versioning system; the newer form of cvs). Most Linuxes already have svn (subversion) in their software repository (gentoo: portage tree, debian: apt-system), for Windows you need to install tortoise svn, which you can get here: http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/
If you want to read more about this topic, go to:
- A list of SVN commands written by Nico.
- the official subversion guide, written very funnily
- a shorter version
You can download the code repositories in Linux by typing:
yourcomputer $ svn co https://svn.orxonox.net/game/code/trunk trunk
and the data repository (ships, textures, pictures, sounds, etc):
yourcomputer $ svn co https://svn.orxonox.net/game/data/trunk media
6. Compiling and Running
To get Orxonox running on your system, first read how to get Orxonox running.
7. Finding your Way as a Developer
As a developer of Orxonox you will want to communicate over our mailing lists, the wiki, the forum and IRC. If you want to work on the project, check out the page. You will find the current tasks, for the next orxonox release under:
and all tasks, that we have defined yet:
You will see the current changes on the orxonox source and the Wiki on the timeline of our Wiki:
The commit messages will also be sent to your email address, if you have registered to the orxonox-commit mailing list.
8. Understanding Orxonox
It definitely takes some time to understand the Orxonox source code. The best way to get your questions answered is to post them on the development-mailing list. Even better is to just go to the developers and ask specific questions. Once you know where to find which functions, you will want to read some more about special topics in the source files themselves: we use doxygen to comment the code, so you will find comments for every class/function. There are also module descriptions which we are currently working on.
