This page summarises all aspects about the development of the game, all pages that are not linked in the text can be found to the right in the Quick Links bar. The development process of the game roughly follows the ideas of a meritocracy: the more you contribute and work to improve the game the more you have influence on it. We don’t “hire” and we don’t “fire” developers or artists, and there are no “hidden” forums or discussion areas. The discussions about ideas and features mostly happens in our forum that is sponsored by our friends at FreeGameDev. There is also an #opendungeons: irc channel on the freenode network.

Contributions in all areas are welcome, and needed.

Before you start contributing please have a quick look at our guidelines. If you submit your work directly in a good format we’ll have less work with converting or formatting. But we won’t reject any stuff that pushes the development forward, so don’t be afraid if you are not sure if your work meets the guidelines.

Code

The game is written in C++ and the code is stored in a Git repository. The code is Doxygen documented and we have our own coding guidelines. All the code is distributed under GPLv3. If you worked on the code you have two possibilities to submit your changes to us:

  • create a .patch or .diff file and send it to us (in the forums or in our bugtracker)
  • create a SourceForge account and ask us for write access to our Git repository and push the changes yourself

Graphics

The game uses full 3D graphics for all models and 2D graphics for the menus. All the media files are stores in a SVN repository. Ogre3D is the graphics engine used, and CEGUI is used for the in-game GUI. The graphics are licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0. For contributing media the same possibilities as for code exist:

  • attach it to a forum post or to our bugtracker
  • create a SourceForge account and ask us about write access to our SVN repository and push the changes yourself

3D graphics should be in the .blend format by Blender. 2D content for the menus should be in the .png format.

Sound and Music

Sounds and Music are recorded in the Ogg Vorbis format. Our audio engine is SFML. The audio files are licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0. Audio files are contributed in the same way as graphics. Simple sound effects are stored in .flac files. More complex sounds and also music should ideally also be in a source format depending on the application(s) used, such as .aup files (Audacity) as well as compressed in .ogg files.

Public relations (website, manual, ideas…)

Contributing textual content like wiki, manual pages, blog posts, ideas and feature request is very easy. You only need to come over to the forums and write it. The game manual is written in LaTeX, but you won’t neccessarily have to learn it. For blog posts we can give you an account on our CMS.