How to help FreeCol

How to help FreeCol

I would like to help the FreeCol project, but I am not a developer...

There are still a lot of ways to contribute.

Playtesting and bug reports

If something breaks, file a bug report. Good bug reports are often the start of important progress in FreeCol. A good bug report has:

• plenty of detail about what happened
• why you think this is a bug
  • which often requires an attached FreeCol.log file if the problem is a crash, or hang, or unexplained unresponsiveness
• detailed instructions on how to reproduce the problem
  • which often requires attaching a saved game

Check first for recent reports for similar sounding cases as duplicate reports are rarely helpful. Otherwise, give your bug report a title containing key words related to the problem, and always remember, we can not see what is on your screen. Make one bug report for each distinct problem --- we have several reports that talk about multiple issues, and they are harder to handle as it is often unclear which parts are fixed.

Beware that if you use the anonymous/"nobody" account on Sourceforge you will be unable to attach/upload files, and that there is a file size limit which can block some FreeCol saved games (in which case it is easiest to use an external site and post a link). If you want to cut down a log file, the interesting bit is usually near the end where you had trouble, so you can often edit it down to just include the bit where the stack trace is, but always include the first 20 odd lines as well as that includes useful version and status information.

And please do not be discouraged if there is no comment, let alone action on your bug report. They are read, and valuable to the project. Alas, there are a lot of bugs/reports, and very few active developers. But once a bug report is there, it never goes away, and eventually a developer will look at it. A few years ago there were more than 400 open reports, but after some sustained effort this was reduced to below 50. OTOH, good, reproducible bug reports are more likely to be fixed at once.

Finally, if your bug report boils down to "The AI did something stupid", believe me, we know. This is not worth reporting ATM until the AI has received a lot of attention.

Bug progress

We have a lot of bug reports. Some of the bugs are long fixed, but the report was never updated. Pick one, try to reproduce the problem described, and add a follow-up comment on the current state of the bug.

This is especially useful if the problem is in areas like translation and you have the relevant language skill. Chances are strong that the developers do not, and are reluctant to close a bug that only occurs when that language is selected.

Another useful case is if you run an unusual operating system, and by "unusual" I mean `not what most of the developers are running', which lately mostly means "not linux". There are many operating system specific bugs on the list. If you are running the OS referred to, see if the bug is still there.

Colonization 1 compatibility

It is a key goal of the eventual FreeCol 1.0 release that it contain no known incompatibilities with Colonization 1. Do you have an old copy of Col1? Play it a bit, compare it with FreeCol running under the "classic" ruleset, and report differences. Remember to check for existing reports under the Pending Features bug tracker though. Or look at one of the many bug reports where the behaviour of Col1 is in question, do some experiments and add a follow-up comment. Some developers have never played Col1, and are constantly asking "What would Col1 do?" (WWC1D?). Indeed there is now a wiki we collected the questions that are blocking progress.

Historical content

The lists of native settlement names would benefit from attention from someone who actually knows something about native American history.

Sounds

There is an open bug Missing sounds listing sounds that FreeCol already tries to use but are missing. All that is needed is a suitable sound file, and this would work. Make or find us something suitable! Note though that all sounds must be licensed compatibly with other free licenses used by FreeCol. "I just found this on the net" is not sufficient.

We are currently using ogg format for sounds (112kb/s at 48kHz) but conversion can be done if necessary.

Graphics

There are ongoing discussions of improvements to the tileset/s on the forums. In particular we are missing several combat animations and missing images for the small and medium fort and fortresses.

Translation

All translations of FreeCol are provided by the volunteers at translatewiki. If you have found a problem in a translation, please go there to fix it. Only the translatewiki maintainer commits changes to FreeCol translations.