I’m fairly new to this game and community. I am really liking this game, and since the project is open-sourced, I was thinking about contributing to the repo, but the last commit of the repo was two years ago, so I don’t know if I should even try, and even make me think the project is dead :c.
I have seen the game has great modding support, but that is not what I want. I want to help fixing small issues and changing the user interface a bit and stuff like that. Basically small changes that are not enough for a mod.
What do you recommend? Should I contribute to the git repo?
The fm-dev repo has more or less been abandoned. You are better off forking it so that you can control the content you add. However, there has been significant progress made in the fc-preg fork. There’s tons and tons of content there compared to fm-dev one. I think the latest branch is a bit unstable, but you can always fork off your own branch from an earlier point and then request to merge in your changes if you think the community would like to continue developing that.
Ya @ticktock is right, in general if it looks like there is nothing going on with the repo you will be better off forking. If you want your fork to be apart of the main branch you can always still make a pull request as if they do not accept it your fork with the changes will still be active.
I had a quick look and @jimbobvii’s fork is the only one with recent commits. I think it’s probably covered in this post? Maybe have a chat with him and possibly work together or fork from his version?
Thanks for pointing that out. I got my wired crossed. Do look at other fetish master repos with more recent progress if they contained work you like. I think lots of FM development has fragmented without central repos so defer to others regarding the best choice.
Yeah, to my knowledge, public development for any version of Fetish Master is close to nonexistent at the moment; I’ve been pushing to a couple different branches on and off for the last couple years, but I don’t think I’ve put together a release build for my version in over a year, much less released anything that actually takes advantage of the engine changes.
I’ve seen h.coder pop up once in a while in threads here or elsewhere regarding FM development, but either he doesn’t have time to work on it or he’s been keeping his work local. Maternal-Reads on Deviantart/Patreon has an overhaul mod of their own, but that’s mostly just gamedata rather than engine stuff and it’s mostly a private thing.
If you’re interested in doing your own work, my suggestion would be to to fork from hcoder’s repo, make your changes, and (once you’re sure everything’s working how you want it to), commit it and make a pull request from your fork to the main branch; if you want to submit it to be included in my fork, add my fork as an upstream and submit a pull request there too.
If your work only involves stuff in the gamedata folder (and not touching the Java source) I might still recommend releasing it as a mod anyways; both the main git repo and my fork are newer builds than what anyone else is practically using, and function significantly differently under the hood from the last full release of the game. That said, if you’re messing with the interface you’d realistically have to recompile and distribute the game jar, which would mean it’d be easier for everyone to have it merged into the official source.