Opportunities for coders

We are seeking additional programmers!

Introduction

The Daemon engine that our game runs on is ultimately descended from Quake 3 and features a renderer from ET:XreaL, along with many of our own additions made over the last two years of engine development. We possess a modern OpenGL 3-compliant renderer, numerous special effects (including bloom, rim lighting, and color grading), MD5 and IQM skeletal model formats with procedural animation blending, support for modern texture maps (including normal, specular, glow, and gloss), navmesh-based bots, localization support for foreign languages, texture compression, and more.

Our project makes monthly releases, and while we are still in an alpha state, we are projecting to reach our beta release sometime during 2015. Each monthly alpha release brings updates not only in the form of artwork, but also in the combined effort of our coding team. The project is regularly covered on Phoronix, and we have twice been featured on the front page of SourceForge as a project of the week. For programmers, this would be an excellent chance to get your name onto something that has a serious future, while at the same time getting a chance to hone your skills in a stable, long-term project.

Development

There are many areas of the project that a new coder can focus on and contribute to, and the programmers on our team can mentor you where appropriate. Some of our current efforts and desires are listed below, to give some ideas:

  • Engine refactoring. We are in the process of rewriting our engine code to a cleaner, more modern C++.
  • Renderer features. You can optimize existing code, create new special effects, or tackle some bugs.
  • Scripting support. Some form of in-game scripting is desired, either through Lua or something else.
  • Game programming. There is a whole gameplay design document filled with things to be implemented.

Of course, you wouldn’t be limited to those. If you have something else in mind, you are more than welcome to propose it. You can also take on a lighter task, like tackling some of the issues on the list maintained on GitHub.

Joining

From a new coder, we expect the following:

  • Knowledge of C and/or C++ is required, unless writing an external tool.
  • It is desirable to be familiar with Git, but this is not a requirement.
  • Willingness to work on a large project with a globally distributed team.

While this is not a paid project, you will be fully credited for all of your work. If you’re interested in coding for us, you can simply leave a post on our forums, or you can contact me directly via my kharnov@gmail.com address. A good place to join would also be our IRC channel, which is #unvanquished-dev on Freenode. We’d love to hear from you, and we’re eager to get you started!