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
• a code editor
  • VSCode is a popular option
• Java Runtime Environment, minimum JRE8

Setting everything up

1. Clone the project from GitGud.io (Detailed Git setup and work cycle)
2. Navigate to the fc-pregmod root directory.
   • Windows: Open a terminal and execute cd C:\path\to\project\fc-pregmod
   • GNU/Linux: Open a terminal and execute cd /path/to/project/fc-pregmod/
3. Run npm install in your terminal
   • On Windows, you may need to run npm install --omit-optional instead.
4. Open the directory in your preferred editor

• Make sure you have an extension for ESLint installed to catch formatting errors

Recommended extensions for VSCode:

• Code Spell Checker
• GitLens — Git supercharged.

Compiling

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

If you are using an ARM-based device, you may need to use arch -x86_64 bash compile.sh to properly compile.

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. Be sure to run npm run lint in the console before committing and pushing your changes.

Documentation

It's a good idea to provide meaningful documentation 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 conventions

• JavaScript variable and function names should be camelCase.

// good
let fooBar;

// bad
let foobar;
let Foobar;
let FooBar;

• JavaScript classes and namespaces should be PascalCase.

// good
class Foo {}
App.Foo.bar();

// bad
class foo {}
class FOO {}
App.foo.bar();

• Enum members should be ALLCAPS.

// good
enum Foo {
  BAR = 'bar',
  BAZ = 'baz',
}

// bad
enum Foo {
  bar = 'bar',
  Baz = 'baz',
}

This also applies to JavaScript objects that are used as enums.

// good
/** @enum {string} */
const Foo = {
  BAR: 'bar',
  BAZ: 'baz',
}

// bad
/** @enum {string} */
const foo = {
  BAR: 'bar',
  BAZ: 'baz',
}

// worse
/** @enum {string} */
const foo = {
  bar: 'bar',
  Baz: 'baz',
}

• CSS classes are kebob-case.

/* good */
.foo-bar {}

/* bad */
.fooBar {}
.FOO-BAR {}

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

JavaScript Features

Use modern JavaScript features when possible. We are currently targeting ECMAScript 2021, and aren't trying to support Internet Explorer or anything stupid like that (it isn't 2010 anymore). For example, use let/const rather than var, prefer fat arrow functions to inline long-form functions, use nullish coalescing and optional chaining, 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 or the shorthand ./compile.sh -d -s on Linux or macOS. On Windows run compile_debug+sanityCheck.bat. 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.

Project Structure

Source files

• src/ is the main directory for source code. It also contains the embedded art files. Since it is inside an eval() statement debugging and minification is more complicated than for js/.
• js/ is loaded before SugarCube and therefore outside SugarCube's eval which src/ is contained in. This means accessing SugarCube features (like SugarCube.Engine) is more complicated however it other than src/ it can be minified and is easier to debug. Currently, contains mainly static data, however new code not relying on SC2 should be sorted in here too.
• css/ contains all CSS files. The internal structure is explained here.
• themes/ contains custom themes which are built separately.