Difference between revisions of "EasyCoding"

Latest revision as of 17:23, 29 April 2024

This page is outdated. For an up to date list of good starting issues, see here.

This page is here to document easy to do coding tasks. It is not here to double the feature request database, and should only be filled by people that know the code well enough to judge the difficulty of a given task.

If you are such a person, you should feel free to edit this page.

If you're not, you should post a feature request and discuss your idea on the forum or IRC or Discord. A coder with better knowledge of the code might give you the green light to add your feature here.

Anybody should feel free to add "clues" to any tasks, that is entry points, traps to avoid, person to contact to discuss and so on.

If you plan to work on a feature, write your name at the bottom of the feature, with the date. Note that if you are too long at working on a feature we'll "free" it back (that is if you're not working on it. If you have problems implementing it, just tell us....)

If none of these are to your liking, feel free to check our bug tracker with a broad spectrum of tasks.

Engine related features

Make a "map diff" tool to visualizes changes between two version of a map

Maintainers of maps often make small tweaks for balance purposes. For someone who doesn't know the map like the back of their hand it may be very difficult to spot exactly what changed. There isn't any really good way to do this right now -- using the 'diff' tool at command line doesn't give good results for .map files.

Such a tool would be helpful for someone who maintains a map pool containing maps made by others, also for someone who wants to browse a repository and examine balance changes on several maps, which could be instructive for someone who wants to make and balance their own maps.

There's any number of ways to actually do this, one might be to have a feature in the map editor that takes the name of another map and adds map labels to indicate what hexes changed. It could also be a command accessible in debug mode when playing the game, or it could be an additional command-line argument (--diff [map1] [map2] ?) for the game. (It could be a standalone application but that's probably going to end up with much more work for you.)

https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/issues/2323

Note that the current status here is that a "map diff" tool now actually exists as a GitHub action that runs on pull requests with changed maps, although there are some bugs with it that could be fixed, and having a native "map diff" tool that runs as part of Wesnoth itself would fit the original request better.

Add an option to not store replays

As noted in https://wiki.wesnoth.org/SavefileWML all normal savefiles usually contain [replay] and [replay_start] tags that usually take over 50% of the total savefile size and are only used for providing the possibility to replay scenarios. It's be nice to have an option to skip these information to reduce the savefile size. Alternatively one could create a tool integrated in a load/savegame dialog to remove the replay information from a given savegame file.

See the feature request https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/issues/1457

MP related features

Add possibility to switch off mod dependency checking

MP modifications can define dependencies. Currently there's no way to force a "broken" configuration, although overzealous use of the system by UMC authors could make this feature useful. Add an option to the MP game creation screen to switch on/off dependency checking. Ask lipk (forum)/lipkab (IRC).

https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/issues/2324

Make a header for the add-on when we organize scenarios by add-on in the MP create dialog

Using an established GUI technique to signal when one block of scenarios for an add-on ends and the next begins would make it much easier to use this dialog, if the user has several add-ons.

See one proposal here: https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/issues/1365

Timer pause button

Longstanding feature request here: https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/issues/1237

Request is for either a button, or a simple chat command like :pause, :unpause, to allow players to put the timer on hold if they are interrupted.

Ideally would be accompanied with a multiplayer-only scenario attribute "number_of_pauses" which decreases each time a client pauses the game. Pause should use a blindfold object to black out the screen, and send a chat message automatically when it occurs / resume occurs. For an example of how it might look, start a local hotseat mp game and enable the Preferences->General->Turn Dialog option. (This behavior was introduced in this commit: https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/commit/bab03d554bea92f1ce6f585ef1123202173a3491)

Wintermute/happygrue also has other ideas about how the timer should/could work. For example, instead of their client ending their turn, the networked opponents could be required to "confirm" the time out. (This is probably a networked MP-only idea.)

A very fancy implementation might instead of a counter, allow the other players to vote on whether a pause request is granted.

Make sure that the paused client still responds to network commands, so that it is possible to kick a person who pauses and then doesn't ever unpause.

Add a "concede" button

Often times in mp, players concede the game before their leader is actually killed. When the game ends 'officially' the map is revealed, which can sometimes be instructive for the losing player. Additionally, it makes it easier to analyze the results of many games, for purposes of balancing, or for maintaining a ladder. So while it may seem small, this would actually be a pretty useful feature.

There was a PR to fix this, but it never got merged due to being broken: https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/pull/535

This could be implemented in lua.

Show [options] values in the mp lobby gameslist

It'd be useful for a newly-joining player to see the chosen [options] of a mp game, since most likely there isn't enough space we could for example wigher show the options via an extra dropdown button in the lobby or show them in the mp waiting dialog instead.

See the featurerequest https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/issues/1514

WML-related features

Support variable poison properties

See a feature request here:

https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/issues/1339

Events Manipulation

[event] persistent="yes" - creates an event that lasts for the rest of the campaign
[disable_event][/disable_event] disables the event within which it appears (useful with conditionals). A more complex take on first_time_only=yes/no.

This is largely possible with event IDs, but could be useful when multiple copies of an event should be floating around

https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/issues/2326

Improvements to AI

Existing bugs or undesirable features

Most of these are probably relatively easy to fix, although we can, of course, not guarantee that.

Bug: Adding a candidate action mid-turn does not include it where it belongs in terms of its evaluation score. Instead, it gets added at the end of the candidate action list and might not be executed on the current turn, because other CAs with lower scores get evaluated first.

https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/issues/2345

Bug: ai.get_new_enemy_dst_src and related functions have several problems:
- They use the current moves of the enemy units, which generally are all zero.
- Hexes occupied by other enemy units count as not reachable.
- Working around this with a Lua wrapper makes this actually slower than ai_helper.get_enemy_dst_src, which makes the functions pretty much useless, as speed is the only thing speaking for them.

https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/issues/2346

GUI2 features

Although mordante developed a new GUI system, GUI2, some dialogs still use the older GUI1 and could be improved or transferred. mordante has since disappeared, leaving GUI2's core code unmaintained; shadowm and vultraz should be able to answer most GUI2 (and even GUI1) related questions in his absence.

Information on the wiki can be found under GUIToolkit on the wiki.
The source code is under src/gui/
All mainline GUI2 WML resides in data/gui/

Make games sortable in the lobby (open slots, total number of players, era, XP modifier, gold per village, fog/shroud)
The biggest feature yet to be converted to GUI2 is the in-game Help documentation (first available from the main screen).
- There was an initial effort to convert Help to GUI2, but appears to be pending on the implementation of a rich-text label widget.

Miscellaneous

Debug mode

New debug command functionality (setting additional status.variables, possibly terrain)

woptipng / wesnoth-optipng

For lossless png compression we use woptipng, a script using an external toolchain (ImageMagick, OptiPNG, Advdef, oxipng). Perhaps the performance could be improved by using oxipng or PNGOut instead of advdef. This task includes:

a quick profiling of compression ratio and decompression speed for all relevant tools
if it provides a higher compression while not significantly slowing down decompression, adapt woptipng to use PNGOut or oxipng (whichever makes more sense)
note that there is a separate repository for woptipng: https://github.com/matthiaskrgr/woptipng (with its own issue tracker, etc.)

@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
-== Foreword ==
+'''This page is outdated. For an up to date list of good starting issues, see [https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3A%22Good+first+issue%22 here].
-This page is here to document easy to do coding tasks. It is not here to double the feature request database, and should only be filled by people that know the code well enough to juge the difficulty of a given task.
+This page is here to document easy to do coding tasks. It is not here to double the feature request database, and should only be filled by people that know the code well enough to judge the difficulty of a given task.
 If you are such a person, you should feel free to edit this page.
-If you're not, you should post a feature request and discuss your idea on the forum or IRC. A coder with better knowledge of the code might give you the green light to add your feature here.
+If you're not, you should post a feature request and discuss your idea on the forum or IRC or Discord. A coder with better knowledge of the code might give you the green light to add your feature here.
 Anybody should feel free to add "clues" to any tasks, that is entry points, traps to avoid, person to contact to discuss and so on.
-If you plan to work on a feature, write your name at the bottom of the feature, with the date. Note that if you are too long at working on a feature I'll "free" it back (that is if you're not working on it. If you have problems implementing it, just tell us....)
+If you plan to work on a feature, write your name at the bottom of the feature, with the date. Note that if you are too long at working on a feature we'll "free" it back (that is if you're not working on it. If you have problems implementing it, just tell us....)
+If none of these are to your liking, feel free to check our [http://bugs.wesnoth.org/?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3A%22Good+first+issue%22 bug tracker] with a broad spectrum of tasks.
+== Engine related features ==
+=== Make a "map diff" tool to visualizes changes between two version of a map ===
+Maintainers of maps often make small tweaks for balance purposes. For someone who doesn't know the map like the back of their hand it may be very difficult to spot exactly what changed. There isn't any really good way to do this right now -- using the 'diff' tool at command line doesn't give good results for .map files.
+Such a tool would be helpful for someone who maintains a map pool containing maps made by others, also for someone who wants to browse a repository and examine balance changes on several maps, which could be instructive for someone who wants to make and balance their own maps.
+There's any number of ways to actually do this, one might be to have a feature in the map editor that takes the name of another map and adds map labels to indicate what hexes changed. It could also be a command accessible in debug mode when playing the game, or it could be an additional command-line argument (--diff [map1] [map2] ?) for the game. (It could be a standalone application but that's probably going to end up with much more work for you.)
+https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/issues/2323
+Note that the current status here is that a "map diff" tool now actually exists as a GitHub action that runs on pull requests with changed maps, although there are some bugs with it that could be fixed, and having a native "map diff" tool that runs as part of Wesnoth itself would fit the original request better.
+=== Add an option to not store replays ===
+As noted in https://wiki.wesnoth.org/SavefileWML all normal savefiles usually contain [replay] and [replay_start] tags that usually take over 50% of the total savefile size and are only used for providing the possibility to replay scenarios. It's be nice to have an option to skip these information to reduce the savefile size. Alternatively one could create a tool integrated in a load/savegame dialog to remove the replay information from a given savegame file.
+See the feature request https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/issues/1457
+== MP related features ==
+=== Add possibility to switch off mod dependency checking ===
+MP modifications can define dependencies. Currently there's no way to force a "broken" configuration, although overzealous use of the system by UMC authors could make this feature useful. Add an option to the MP game creation screen to switch on/off dependency checking. Ask lipk (forum)/lipkab (IRC).
+https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/issues/2324
+=== Make a header for the add-on when we organize scenarios by add-on in the MP create dialog ===
---[[User:Boucman|Boucman]] 20:48, 3 October 2006 (CEST)
+Using an established GUI technique to signal when one block of scenarios for an add-on ends and the next begins would make it much easier to use this dialog, if the user has several add-ons.
-== Animation related features ==
+See one proposal here:
-=== Victory animation ===
+https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/issues/1365
-'''an animation to be played by the surviving unit during the death animation of the other unit'''
-this should be fairly easy to do, just duplicate all death animation code, and modify the unit_die function to change the state of both units.
+=== Timer pause button ===
-ask Boucman for extra help
+Longstanding feature request here:
+https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/issues/1237
-* unit_display.cpp
+Request is for either a button, or a simple chat command like :pause, :unpause, to allow players to put the timer on hold if they are interrupted.
-* unit_type.cpp
-* unit.cpp
-* unit_animation.cpp;
-=== En Guard animation ===
+Ideally would be accompanied with a multiplayer-only scenario attribute "number_of_pauses" which decreases each time a client pauses the game. Pause should use a blindfold object to black out the screen, and send a chat message automatically when it occurs / resume occurs. For an example of how it might look, start a local hotseat mp game and enable the Preferences->General->Turn Dialog option. (This behavior was introduced in this commit: https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/commit/bab03d554bea92f1ce6f585ef1123202173a3491)
-'''An animation to replace the standing animation when the unit is next to an ennemy'''
-slightly more tricky than the previous one, you should copy most of the standing code, but beware that this should be invisible to external callers. the call to get_stats should be looked at
+Wintermute/happygrue also has other ideas about how the timer should/could work. For example, instead of their client ending their turn, the networked opponents could be required to "confirm" the time out. (This is probably a networked MP-only idea.)
-ask Boucman for extra help
+A very fancy implementation might instead of a counter, allow the other players to vote on whether a pause request is granted.
-* unit.cpp
+Make sure that the paused client still responds to network commands, so that it is possible to kick a person who pauses and then doesn't ever unpause.
-* unit_type.cpp
-* unit_animation.cpp
-=== Special tags for Extra_anim ===
+=== Add a "concede" button ===
-'''special tags in the animate_unit event to call standard unit animations'''
-one of the big limitation of the extra_animation tags is that you need to modify the unit itself to have the extra anim. Most anims can't be easily called that way. It would be interesting to have special tags that would be recognised to call the standard animations (attack, defense, etc...)
+Often times in mp, players concede the game before their leader is actually killed. When the game ends 'officially' the map is revealed, which can sometimes be instructive for the losing player. Additionally, it makes it easier to analyze the results of many games, for purposes of balancing, or for maintaining a ladder. So while it may seem small, this would actually be a pretty useful feature.
-the tricky part is to handle correctly the "offset" parameter, and add all the WML handling to "fill in" the information we won't have available (non-existant filtering criterias)
+There was a PR to fix this, but it never got merged due to being broken: https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/pull/535
-this is more tricky than the two above, and I would advise doing one of the other two first to understand how it work
+This could be implemented in lua.
-ask Boucman for extra help
+=== Show [options] values in the mp lobby gameslist ===
-* unit.cpp
+It'd be useful for a newly-joining player to see the chosen [options] of a mp game, since most likely there isn't enough space we could for example wigher show the options via an extra dropdown button in the lobby or show them in the mp waiting dialog instead.
-* actions.cpp
-=== Animate flags during a [delay] event ===
+See the featurerequest https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/issues/1514
-currently, the [event] tag calls SDL_delay() and blocks the game completely. It would be trivial to change it to a loop that would call event::pump() every 10ms to have all animations updated
-the tricky part is to make sure the screen is somehow "locked" and that player can't play during that time (should be the case, simple checking is needed)
+== WML-related features ==
-grep should give you the file to change
+=== Support variable poison properties ===
+See a feature request here:
-== Scripting ==
+https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/issues/1339
-=== Campaign Server Signing ===
-Currently, the campaign server will rename uploaded *.py files to *.py.unsigned, so untrusted code cannot get executed. It would be nice to use  some sort of signing for .py files (instead of having to log in to the CS and un-rename them).
-The change for this would probably be only on the campaign server, and not touch any of the main wesnoth code. Here's the forum post suggesting this, and also the thread has more info: http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=184504#184504
+=== Events Manipulation ===
-=== Restricted Python ===
+* [event] persistent="yes" - creates an event that lasts for the rest of the campaign
-Unlike Blender/GIMP/Inkscape and so on, there seems to be one project "Zope" which has restricted Python execution: http://zopewiki.org/PythonScript http://svn.zope.org/Zope3/trunk/src/RestrictedPython/
+* [disable_event][/disable_event] disables the event within which it appears (useful with conditionals). A more complex take on first_time_only=yes/no.
+''This is largely possible with event IDs, but could be useful when multiple copies of an event should be floating around''
-Maybe this could be adapted to Wesnoth? If you know how Python works, then this is probably easy.. copy over the Zope code (if license permits, that is), adjust so it works outside of Zope, and then modify ai_python.cpp so it uses the restricted execution instead of the full Python interpreter.
+https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/issues/2326
-=== Lua Support ===
-Lua might be a nice alternative to Python, since it should be possible to have "safe" scripts, i.e. they should not be able to gain any access outside of Wesnoth, or even to crash Wesnoth.
-If you have experience with implementing Lua scripting, then this is probably quite easy to do, can just look how Python was added. Just keep the security aspect in mind from the beginning (but I think in Lua you don't get filesystem access by default, so shouldn't be anything to do here).
+== Improvements to AI ==
+=== Existing bugs or undesirable features ===
+Most of these are probably relatively easy to fix, although we can, of course, not guarantee that.
+* Bug: Adding a candidate action mid-turn does not include it where it belongs in terms of its evaluation score. Instead, it gets added at the end of the candidate action list and might not be executed on the current turn, because other CAs with lower scores get evaluated first.
+https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/issues/2345
+* Bug: ai.get_new_enemy_dst_src and related functions have several problems:
+** They use the current moves of the enemy units, which generally are all zero.
+** Hexes occupied by other enemy units count as not reachable.
+** Working around this with a Lua wrapper makes this actually slower than ai_helper.get_enemy_dst_src, which makes the functions pretty much useless, as speed is the only thing speaking for them.
+https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/issues/2346
+== GUI2 features ==
+Although mordante developed a new GUI system, GUI2, some dialogs still use the older GUI1 and could be improved or transferred. mordante has since disappeared, leaving GUI2's core code unmaintained; shadowm and vultraz should be able to answer most GUI2 (and even GUI1) related questions in his absence.
+* Information on the wiki can be found under [[GUIToolkit]] on the wiki.
+* The source code is under [https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/tree/master/src/gui src/gui/]
+* All mainline GUI2 WML resides in [https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/tree/master/data/gui data/gui/]
+* Make games sortable in the lobby (open slots, total number of players, era, XP modifier, gold per village, fog/shroud)
+* The biggest feature yet to be converted to GUI2 is the in-game Help documentation (first available from the main screen).
+** There was an [https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/pull/3653 initial effort to convert Help to GUI2], but appears to be pending on the implementation of a [https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/issues/2687 rich-text label widget].
 == Miscellaneous ==
-=== More powerful village naming ===
-'''adding mountain names and other features to village names, having a second random name in village names'''
-currently the village naming engine has avery good structure that could allow more powerfull names to be generated. Understanding how it works should be quite easy, and a few usefull imprvements could be added
+=== Debug mode ===
+* New debug command functionality (setting additional status.variables, possibly terrain)
+=== woptipng / wesnoth-optipng ===
+For lossless png compression we use woptipng, a script using an external toolchain (ImageMagick, OptiPNG, Advdef, oxipng). Perhaps the performance could be improved by using oxipng or PNGOut instead of advdef. This task includes:
+* a quick profiling of compression ratio and decompression speed for all relevant tools
+* if it provides a higher compression while not significantly slowing down decompression, adapt woptipng to use PNGOut or oxipng (whichever makes more sense)
+* note that there is a separate repository for woptipng: [https://github.com/matthiaskrgr/woptipng https://github.com/matthiaskrgr/woptipng] (with its own issue tracker, etc.)
+== Bugs ==
+== See Also ==
-* currently villages can use lake names and river names, this should be extanded to other features like bridges, swamps, mountains etc...
+[[NotSoEasyCoding]]
-* it would be nice to have a separate list of "first sylabus" and "last sylabus" for naming. That's not really needed in english, but some translations could use it
-* again, it is common to have village with more than one "random" word in them. having a $name2 variable would be nice
-=== Other ===
+[[Category:Development]]
-* show number of owned villages/total villages (FR: #3135)
+[[Category:Future]]
-* show side number, name and team association information in the status table
-* Giving result=defeat or result=victory for specific sides. (FR: #4960)
-* New debug command functionality (setting status.variables, possibly terrain, WML value display)
-* make games sortable in the lobby (open slots, total number of players, era, XP modifier, gold per village, fog/shroud)
-* enabling WML-scripted leveling of units ([http://gna.org/bugs/index.php?7426 FR #7426])
-* new trait "fearless": remove lawful_bonus penalty at day/night
-* new trait "healthy": +4hp rest healing
-* side-specific [message]s ([http://gna.org/bugs/index.php?7427 FR #7427])
-* allow custom themes to display values of WML variables ([http://gna.org/bugs/index.php?6209 FR #6209])
-* WML event trigger for recalling (the current one triggers on both recalls and recruits) ([http://gna.org/bugs/index.php?3622 FR #3622]) (please read the comments of the report for a proper description of how this should work)