Workflow

This page describes the workflow from a concept until release. Try to follow this when developing a new feature or releasing a new Empires version.

Creating an Issue

To ensure we don't duplicate effort and to allow team members to see what we're working on we add a short description of the thing we're trying to fix / achieve to an issue on the internal issue tracker.

When adding an issue, try to stick to formulating it as a user story. This makes it easier to evaluate whether a proposed change actually fixes the issue. To help discoverability you can add relevant tags.

If you plan on working on the issue yourself, be sure to assign yourself to it. For more information on how you can effectively use issues you can refer to the official issue documentation.

Cloning the Relevant Repository

If you've already performed this step in the past you can ignore this section

1. Make sure you have an account on the internal gitlab and have received the appropriate permissions.
2. Make sure you have added your public key to your acccount.
3. Clone git@git.empiresmod.com:empires_assets/empires_build.git in a location of your choosing. Make sure you have at least 30gb free space.
4. Double click the setup.bat file on Windows or the setup file on Linux and wait for the process to finish.
5. Double click the preview.bat file on Windows or the preview file on Linux and wait for the process to finish.
6. You should now have a development version of Empires you can run in your preview folder.

Creating a New Branch

1. Figure out which repository you should be editing. The repos folder contains a list of all the repositories you have access to.
2. Figure out if the issue you're working on should be categorized as a bugfix or as a feature. Bugfixes are changes which don't change the intended behavior of the game but purely fix a previous mistake. The rest are features.
3. Create a new branch named bugfix/your-description or feature/your-description based on the master or develop branch. (Not all repositories have a develop branch, use master in that case)
4. Start working on this branch and regularly commit your changes. You can create a new preview for testing by clicking the preview script again. This will include the changes you just made.