CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to FC pregmod

First off, thanks for taking the time to contribute!

If there is anything you don't understand feel free to ask. Many of the more advanced tools are also not required for fixing small typos or simple bugs.

Environment

Requirements

To effectively work on the project the following tools are required:

• Git
• Node.js or another npm client
• an IDE capable of working with JavaScript, TypeScript and CSS. VS Code is one option.
• Java Runtime Environment, minimum JRE8

Setting everything up

0. Clone the project from GitGud.io (Detailed Git setup and work cycle)
1. Open a terminal (Linux) / cmd window (Windows) and navigate to the fc-pregmod root directory.
2. Run npm install
3. Open the directory in your preferred IDE
4. Configure your IDE to use ESLint and the type checking capabilities of the TypeScript compiler.

Compiling

While you can compile it like usual (compile.bat/compile.sh/make), there is also a Gulp script that creates source files for easier debugging. Other than that there are no differences between compiling for development or compiling for playing the game.

Code

Code style

Generally the code style is based on our .eslintrc.json. If your IDE has an auto format feature it can often read the rules from .eslintrc.json.

Important Rules

• use spaces after commas
• do not omit semicolons
• no empty blocks
• don't pad blocks with blank lines
• prefer strict equality/inequality
• etc.

JSDoc

It's a good idea to provide meaningful JSDoc for new functions and classes where possible. We follow Typescript's JSDoc type dialect for the most part (and we provide a Typescript configuration and auxiliary type definition files if you'd like to use it yourself...it's pretty nifty). Don't worry too much about specific type syntax if you can't make TS work or don't understand it, someone else will probably fix it for you as long as you've made the intent clear in some form of JSDoc.

Naming convention

• JS names are camelCase
  • initial lowercase for variables and functions
  • initial uppercase for classes and namespaces
  • all-caps for constants
• CSS classes are kebob-case.

New code should generally get organized into the App namespace. See js/002-config/fc-init-js.js for a rough outline.

JavaScript Features

• Avoid using very new Javascript features
  • Generally, we're currently targeting ECMAScript 2018, though we use a few widely-implemented ECMAScript 2019 features, like globalThis.
• Conversely, do use modern features, it's not 2010 anymore and we don't try to support Internet Explorer or anything stupid like that.
  • use let/const rather than var
  • prefer fat arrow functions to inline long-form functions
  • etc.

Code quality

There are three main tools used to ensure good code quality, ESLint, TypeScript Compiler (tsc) and a custom sanity check.

ESLint and tsc can be setup in most IDEs aimed at web development to show errors while editing the file.

Contributions should generally not add any new sanity check errors, and it's especially important to check this if you're making changes to .tw files. Use ./compile.sh --dry --sanity on *nix, or run compile_debug+sanityCheck.bat on Windows. It searches for common spelling errors and syntax errors in the twine files. Don't worry about preexisting errors, it's not totally clean as is and there are a few false positives.

Further Reading

Wiki Files

• Writing Guide
• Exception handling
• Sanity check
• Slave List
• Pronouns
• External function documentation
  • Eyes
  • Limbs
  • Standalone functions

Useful issues

• Setting up VS Code
• Classes in Game State
• Self executing functions
• Sort a map