Meeting 2025-01-04

This is a past developer meeting.

Location

The #development channel in the Principia Discord server, also bridged and available in the Principia Matrix space.

Time

The meeting started at 18:00 GMT on the 4th of January 2025, and ended at around 20:00 GMT.

Agenda

Host: ROllerozxa

This is the first time we will be having a formal meeting for the open source project, originally suggested by Luna. For this meeting I don't have any specific points to bring up, other than to discuss the future of the game and to promote its further development. For example how to help on-boarding new contributors and simplifying the process of learning the game's codebase, or doing outreach for people who may be interested in the game (either as players or as contributors).

If other prospective contributors have things to bring up to discussion for the meeting then they are welcome to.

Meeting notes

Participants: Luna, ROllerozxa, VOXEL

• How to get more contributions
  • We all agree the codebase is messy (of course)
  • Refactoring/cleanups
    • Not very flashy, but extremely necessary
    • New contributors can do refactoring to get to know the codebase better while improving it in the process
    • Point to particular sections or files in the codebase that can use refactoring so people know where to look
      • GUI code is messy, really anything rendering related
      • Big source files such as game.cc should be split up in relevant ways
    • Restructure the source files, no flat directory structure in src/src/
  • Documentation
    • Document things as you go when working in the codebase with Doxygen annotations
    • Also some more high-level summaries of how things generally work, to put on the wiki in a nice manner
• Puzzles
  • The lost level type, deprecated in 1.5 due to regressions with handling it
  • It was a goal in the 1.5.2 roadmap to get them fixed, but this didn't happen
    • It still hasn't happened
    • The issues with them are rather complicated
  • Summary of how it's broken: You cannot testplay them from the sandbox, or when trying to play from the community site.
    • The puzzles that are remaining in the main menu had a lot of hardcoded behaviour added to make them still work. Good place to start looking at it, but ideally this should also be removed by a proper fixed implementation
  • It is a very well liked gameplay feature, getting it fixed would create a lot of renewed interest
• We should have a new roadmap
  • Code refactoring, general code cleanups and documentation
  • Some sort of list for new features that are in various stages of consideration/development
    • Current examples:
      • Puzzles
      • Imgui dialogs
      • Undo
      • Actually functional window resizing
    • Show if there is any issue, PR, person assigned to it at the moment
  • ROllerozxa will write one, sometime.
• Get the word out about Principia
  • Chain mails? (No)
  • More activity on Mastodon
    • ROllerozxa should try to post Principia-related stuff from his personal, and then boost from the Principia account, rather than vice versa, to get a better "human factor"
  • Bluesky presence
    • Either bridge from Mastodon or cross-post, figure something out
    • ROllerozxa made one now: principiagame.bsky.social
  • YouTube channel
    • Probably best to make a new channel separate from the old Bithack channel (ROllerozxa doesn't have access to it, anyway)
    • ROllerozxa made one now: @principiagame
  • Any other social media is probably not worth it