Criusmac had more determination (time?) than I did to actually get involved, but reading his post it seemed like he was fighting obstacles to try and help. I think you are losing a lot of potential help.
Woo hoo! I got mentioned! Err, really fast that. I'm not sure I'm involved even yet. I'll consider myself involved if I successfully manage to create a patch. What I did though was see an obvious, but somewhat complicated problem that needed to be fixed, get some additional info from the person who wrote the accepted proposal (of visibility), and then hunted around the source for other code that did what I wanted to do. A few copy/paste later, and I've at least started, though it sure isn't pretty. I still suspect this is beyond my abilities, but I suspect the worst that can happen is I fail, and nothing gets done. At least the ideas posted seem better than they originally were, in my opinion anyway, which means time wasn't really wasted.
- Pretty much everything a player will see is focused on 2.2.1 which is over a year old. Its pretty obvious once you hit the forums that 2.2.1 is barely a memory in anyone's mind, but if you don't look at the forums you will hit up an incomplete manual and fiddle around with 2.2.1 and thats it.
If a dev release works decently well maybe make a note of it on the wiki with some comments on where it will break so people can try a dev version without trying to figure out which ones could potentially be playable.
My attempts to generate a patch are a bit different than the requested method of grab the latest dev version, and apply the changes directly to it. I decided to do my work on the stable version directly. I decided this since my changes (visibility) do not exist, in part or whole (as far as I know) in the latest dev version. It's a bit riskier since the code is a good year old, but I don't have to worry about any of the latest bugs that may have cropped up, or been fixed. I don't have to download dev versions and test my code against them (yet). Since I know where in the branch I got my files from (2.2.1), a merge patch is possible which means it should be easy to merge my code into the latest development version when I'm done (free tools exist to do this). Once that's done, I can see if my code still works. So, for me, having a stable release is all I need since if something goes wrong, it's probably a bug introduced via my code, and will be easier to locate and fix. There's a lot of assumptions I'm making here and there, but for the most part, any assumptions I make don't actually change anything. For example, if it turns out I can't merge my changes into the latest development release, I'll just download the dev release later, and manually merge my finished changes in. Still a lot simpler than developing on the dev release itself. Maybe this would work for you as well?
- The technical area of the wiki looks like my personal wiki. Stuff is all over, linked to all over. Its completely unclear what is current and what isn't and most of it has a large amount of assumed knowledge associated with (its not wikified). This works fine for my personal wiki, the directory is password protected and no one other than myself should ever see it. It probably works fine for most of the developers here, but it is a heck of a hurdle for someone trying to learn.
I gave up with trying to learn anything general about what people want done. I picked a task that I felt was needed in the game, and I'm concentrating on it alone. I saw the wiki, but I don't think I did anything with it. The proposals page (
http://ufoai.ninex.info/wiki/index.php/Proposals) is a great place to find something you want to do, and I'm really lucky what I wanted to do happens to have an entry.
- I don't know about a CMS, I mean the monthy updates are great but what else are you going to put there? The daily SVN logs? Forums are fickle, information gets lost and few new people read anything but the stickies (if that) unless they are searching out something specific. I would try and make the wiki the focal point, make the main page updated with current notes and have at least all the pages that link from the main page be well designed and up to date. There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of activity on there though.
The forums are absolutely horrible to search through here. Things I saw by randomly reading I can't find again even with a few keywords to help. The wiki does seem like a good focal point, but it should be accessible from the forum page somehow via a link. It would have saved me a lot of time if I had known it was so connected to the forum's ideas. As for updating things, it might be possible, but I can't imagine a quick and easy way.
Anyways I am trying to be constructive I hope no one gets offended; I am probably not saying anything that is new or that anyone doesn't already know, but thought it might help. I am software engineer and am just finishing up two months of documentation work and just about want to kill myself (which is why I was hoping to jump in and start coding something neat), I know the pain of trying to write junk to explain complex things to people who know nothing. If I can motivate myself maybe I will try and start doing a 2.3 user manual on the wiki or trying to figure out what needs to be update and how it might better be organized, it would be a good project for learning to code and figure out how things work and what needs to be done...
I personally don't see how a 2.3 user manual will help until 2.3 is a stable release. This user manual you suggest is for people new to the game, right? If this is true, then they should be playing the 2.2.1 stable release anyway. Playing a dev release is, well, ugh? (ugh = bug ridden, crash prone, unbalanced, and who knows what else). What drew me to this project is the eye candy, game play, complexity, and probably a few other things, like todos. I like complex things, as can probably be seen in my own terrifying posts. It is tough to pick a starting point, but mine I saw from within the game itself (and it bugged me), so it was easier for me. Whether or not I can do it, only time and luck will tell. My suggestion is similar to others here though. Download Code::Blocks and use it since that's all people seem to use here. Once you have successfully compiled the code, you can start changing it, and hopefully it'll be improved when it's done. Doesn't have to be big, doesn't have to be complex, I'm sure anything you do will help out, as long as it works properly. I like to keep a d20 (20 sided die) around to help me make decisions like this.
