Ok, some concrete advice: Start with the ruleset dev book. At the very least it will give you some intro and tell you how to set up the basic ruleset module. At least this bit hasn't changed and is still well documented.
Next, play minisec and read the equivalent sources (modules/games/minisec/). See how your experience matches with how it is coded. Look at the protocol documentation (read protocol3.php first to help you understand protocolxml.php). Realise the limitations, and the flexibility. Lastly, try for yourself and ask questions on this mailing list or IRC. If you find something really cool, add it to the wiki page and/or the ruleset dev book. The wiki page is here: http://www.thousandparsec.net/wiki/Tpserver-cpp That page will be the primary location of tpserver-cpp documentation, when some appear. I might write something up there soon. Later Lee On Mon, 28 Apr 2008, Tim Ansell wrote: > On Sun, 2008-04-27 at 13:22 -0500, Ryan Neufeld wrote: > > I was going to email this exclusively to my mentor, xdotx, but I > > figured there may be others who have a say. > > > > I am about to hop into some heavy documentation reading this week, and > > frankly, I have never done anything like this before. What advice do > > you more experienced programmers have on getting to know a piece of > > software through documentation? Is it, say, like reading a book? > > Studying for an exam? Memorization? Trial and error? Playing with code > > while reading? or a mix of all of the above? > > I don't think reading documentation will be a huge amount of help. > tpserver-cpp isn't very well documented in many places and you will need > to learn a lot via trial and error. Without a goal in mind you will > quickly get frustrated and learn lots of irrelevant information. > > Choose a goal like "create an empty ruleset module" and then work on > getting it done. Once you have that working, move towards another goal > (something like "universe generation" or similar). This will focus what > you read and give you better understand on the things you do read. > > Learn by doing! It is pretty hard to do fatal damage with a computer > (compared to other disciplines where you can actually do real physical > damage - IE cut off a limb with a chainsaw ;). With offline revision > control like git it is even easier to try things and when they don't > work try something different. > > Those are my tips. > > Tim 'Mithro' Ansell > > <snip> > > _______________________________________________ > tp-devel mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.thousandparsec.net/tp/mailman.php/listinfo/tp-devel
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