ficed
commented
10 months ago All fair questions! I've updated the main readme with a link to the Qhimm Discord, since there's a Braver channel for discussing the project there. Although it's a bit quiet because progress on Braver happens intermittently - I only tend to work on Braver when I have a few consecutive days free; trying to decipher more info from FF7's files often takes quite a bit of hacking so needs a fair amount of time to make progress.
I guess pending more documentation within the project, things that would be easiest/useful to look at would be:
-The setup utility right now is a very bare bones WPF application I threw together as quickly as possible, so it technically works but isn't great. Would probably be straightforward to improve that.
-Battle graphics are very incomplete. Next steps are going to be "hack the binary files more to decipher them" as we don't have full information on the file formats. This is probably diving in at the deep end unless you're already into file format hacking.
-Battle AI and battle mechanics are technically coded but I know it's not correct! So I guess one possibility to improve this is "pick a fairly simple battle", maybe even the first one from the game, run through it within Braver, and for any attacks and abilities that are doing the wrong amount of damage (...probably all of them...), start stepping through the code to work out where Braver is calculating things wrong.
-The field section of the game is the most complete, but still isn't finished at all. So something that would be useful would be actually tracking which issues remain in which field locations, along with an easy way to check whether they're fixed. I haven't thought too much about exactly how to do that, beyond the fact that there's options for the engine to autosave on every field location change to make it easier to jump back to a certain location when debugging problems with the engine. So...
- Maybe each location with problems could have a Github issue filed along with any screenshots or save files to make it possible to investigate, debug, and check whether a new version fixes them?
- Or maybe there should be a folder in the repo with screenshots/save files/notes on any issues each location has? Then commits can update the screenshots/notes when they fix issues? Perhaps that's better than an issue.
- Maybe add a hotkey in the engine to dump screenshots and save files, to make those prior steps easier? Would need a bit of MonoGame work, but probably fairly straightforward (I'm assuming getting a screenshot out of MonoGame is fairly easy, haven't checked!)
-General quality of life improvements in the engine - support different resolutions, full screen mode, controller mapping? Would require diving into a bit of Monogame code, but probably fairly straightforward as it doesn't really interact with all the FF7 specific code.
I'll leave this issue open for the moment since you may well have follow up questions...
I found this library when I was curious about if there were any open source Final Fantasy VII engines. I would like to contribute, and have done a quick look-through of what's here, but I'm not sure where to best spend my time, especially as a new contributor.
Perhaps add a .md document about current hurdles, or things that require the most amount of time/attention?
Perhaps, even a small breakdown of the libraries/frameworks being used? From my quick clone, I can see that you are using MonoGame.
Also, is this the best place to contact a contributor of this project? I went to the main site listed in the Readme, and there's no contact section.
The main, actionable part of the ticket is above this line, but since I want to contribute, I may as well lay out my background, so you can give me a recommendation on where I can best help.
I am a .NET Developer, having worked with C# Desktop and Web application frameworks. (Especially ASP.NET and WPF) I have not worked with XNA or MonoGame before, so if you want help in that area, I'll probably be slower at first.
Given my background, my personal assumptions as to where I could help best are UI, internal game logic and extensibility (I can make it easier to implement add-ons, scripting, and custom modifications), documentation (Whether it's C# or .md files), and debugging (I hate not understanding problems, which makes me rather tenacious in this area).