Contributing

Contributing to The Forgotten Server

Hello! Third party patches are essential to keep The Forgotten Server great. We want to keep it as easy as possible to contribute changes that get things working in your environment. There are a few guidelines that we need contributors to follow so that we can have a chance of keeping on top of things.

Introduction

Generally, bugfixes and improvements to existing code, as well as the implementation of official Game features and content, should be part of the The Forgotten Server core while custom functionalities should be released on the forum to avoid burdening the core with code that is potentially useful to only a small subset of users.

Getting Started

• Make sure you have a GitHub account
• Open an issue in GitHub, if one does not already exist.
  • Clearly describe the issue including steps to reproduce when it is a bug.
  • Describe your configuration, following the provided template.
• Fork the repository on GitHub

Submitting an Issue on GitHub

When you open an issue, you should include as much description as possible of the issue you are observing or feature you're suggesting.

If you're reporting an issue, you should describe your setup, and provide the steps to reproduce it.

If you report a crash, make sure that you include a backtrace of the crash generated with either gdb or Visual Studio (depending on your build environment). For the backtrace to be useful, you need to compile The Forgotten Server in debug mode.

Making Changes

• Create a topic branch from where you want to base your work.
  • This is usually the master branch.
  • To quickly create a topic branch based on master; git checkout -b my_contribution master. Please avoid working directly on the master branch.
• Make commits of logical units. Each commit you submit must be atomic and complete. Each commit must do one thing, and do it well. Make separate commits for separate fixes, even if this causes commits that only affect one line of code.
• Check for unnecessary whitespace with git diff --check before committing.
• Make sure you follow our coding style guidelines.
• Make sure your commit messages are complete, describe the changes you made, and in proper English language. Make sure you mention the ID of the issue you fix.
• Make sure your changes don't accidentally break anything when, for example, The Forgotten Server is compiled with different settings.

Making Trivial Changes

For changes of a trivial nature to comments and documentation, it is not always necessary to create a new issue in GitHub.

Submitting Changes

• Push your changes to a topic branch in your fork of the repository.
• Submit a pull request to the repository in the OTLand organization.
• The dev team looks at Pull Requests on a weekly basis, compatibly with the amount of patches in review queue and current workload.
• After feedback has been given, we expect responses within two weeks. After two weeks we may close the pull request if it isn't showing any activity.

Other ways to help

• You can help us diagnose and fix existing bugs by asking and providing answers for the following:

  • Is the bug reproducible as explained?
  • Is it reproducible in other environments?
  • Are the steps to reproduce the bug clear? If not, can you describe how you might reproduce it?
  • Is this bug something you have run into? Would you appreciate it being looked into faster?

• You can close fixed bugs by testing old bugs to see if they are still happening.