Became a developer
So, have you decided to lend a hand with V-Gears? Well, first of all, congratulations, and my sincerest thanks. Every help is very welcome.
But first, you have a bit of reading ahead of you. I suggest the build instructions, so you can start compiling the source code.
Then, you may wonder how to install V-Gears, how to extract data from an original Final Fantasy VII game (you'll need the PC version), or how to run V-Gears.
After that, you may take a look at the source code. It's fairly well organized, and heavily commented, but not always very intuitive. When lost, the source code documentation may help you
What to do?
Currently, there are many things that need to be implemented or fixed in V-Gears. This is a list of things that rapidly came to my mind, but you'll find many more to entertain yourself. You can also take a look to the roadmap to see the current state of the project and it's problems. Feel free to use the GitHub issue tracker when tackling any of them.
- Menus: The status, limit, config and PHS menus are not implemented. The item and materia menus still need a few features. This is an easy starting point: menus are implemented as Lua scripts. Just take a look at the ones already implemented, and you'll be golden.
- Installer: The data installer can install all the data that V-Gears needs right now from a PC version of V-Gears, but it would be really great if it could also use the Play Station version, since it's more ubiquitous. The FFRTT Wiki lists the (few) differences between version, if you are up for the challenge.
- Documentation: The repository includes quite a bit of documentation, both in terms of guides and in source code comments. But there is always room for improvements! If you notice something that is not clear or easy to understand, feel free to fix or expand it.
- Field maps: For the field maps, almost all the heavy lifting is done, but there are always errors, and some of them can softlock the game. Some opcodes are unimplemented, some triggers act weird... Why don't you play the game and see if you find an error you can fix?.
- World map: If you prefer to tackle something from scratch, why not start with the world map? Almost no work has been done on that, so feel free to be the first.
- Compiling and installing: Currently, the process to build, install and run V-Gears is not exactly an easy one. While CMake is used for building V-Gears, some dependencies must be manually adjusted, and the installation step is very manual and requires copying certain files to be copied to specific folder. If you feel like it, you can try to automate the process a bit. Also, instructions for Windows or Mac would be great.
- Battle: Looking for a challenge? Then the battle module is for you. Heavy 3D, timing, formulas, AI, audio, and a thousand other little things. It's by far the hardest module to implement, so any set of eyes and hands are always welcome.