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4 Contributing

There's much to work to be done for this simulator to become something more then just a bunch nice ideas. In this section you can find out what and how you can contribute to the development of AirTraffic.

4.1 Tasks to be done

Here's a list of tasks that are needed to be done:

Install testing:

Basicly means getting the package from the CVS and seeing if you can get it installed and working. Ofcourse the developers are trying to do that here as well. But it's always good to have people test it, on ``clean'' systems that havn't been involved with the development it self.

Building packages:

RPMs and/or debs. That would really help expand exposure quite a bit. I know how to do this, but I want to focus on the development of the program, and not loose too much time fiddling with these packages and having to deal with user-feedback related only to that installation procedures.

Website:

The website looks truly horrid. It's auto-generated from some latex files (check out the airtraffic-doc module from CVS for them). It would really help if someone took some time to make it look half-decent. But it would really be appreciated it if it was still relatively easy to maintain, since worse then an ugly website is an out-of-date website. Zapping spelling / grammar errors, is also really needed :).

beta testing / Programfeedback:

Will get more important as the project progresses. At the moment there's not much to brake.

4.2 Contacting

The medium the developers of AirTraffic use to talk to each other is the mailinglists. There are three of them:

• Annouce for announcements :) (subscribe ) (archives )
• Devel for the developers (subscribe ) (archives )
• users for the Users, thou there are not many yet. (subscribe ) (archives )

Recently the channel #airtraffic was registered with openprojects.net for a more interactive conversation with developers.

For all the settings and features that the airtraffic site has, you can always go to the airtraffic project page

4.3 Coders

We need more people to work on this project. Many things have to be done, both big and small. The work to be done is various, from things fit for beginning programmers to making physical models of the planes, threads, GUI design, data visualization and graphics programming and what have you not.

The main programming language is www.python.org . Because it's easy and it codes fast. Python is optimzed for development speed. If execution speed is a real requirement, then those critical parts, can be rewritten in C or C++. Getting the best of both worlds.

If you want to contribute to this project, please contact the project manager , subscribe to the developers mailinglist and join in!

4.4 ATC experts

Since the 0.3 version rewrite, the focus of AirTraffic has shifted from being a game to a simulation. However this balance is a subtle one. The game part should be have a real ``feel'' to it, while keeping it playable by the general public as well.

The AirTraffic project needs ATC (and gamer) experts to give advice and be a source of ideas and keep the reality factor in check. This factor will be quite low in the beginning, as we are working to get it all to work. Then later realism will be much higher priority.

I know that most ATC people are not coders, and most coders don't know ATC, so please be understanding with our ignorance. Any comments or advice is really appreciated.

4.5 Visual artists

Even though this project is only in the beginning of a development cycle it could already use people one that has a good feel interfaces and graphics.

For example: these projects document pages do not meet even my standards when it comes to the look and feel (and then it's bad :) !). If you have a good idea about how to fix it, please contact me: Marijn Vriens. .

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