Hacktoberfest – Week 2

On this, the second week of Hacktoberfest, I took to contributing to an open source recreation of Roller Coaster Tycoon 2, a project not dissimilar to the likes of OpenTTD, an open source recreation of Transport Tycoon Deluxe. These two projects were created by the same developer initially, and the fans of the series have decided to create the games again in open source style.

My mission for this week was to refactor a variable that was initially declared as a global variable was not used in the scope of the project as such. Navigating such a massive project, even if it was for an ultimately small refactoring task was quite the challenge. Ultimately, development tools really came in handy for navigating the project and tracking down every last instance of a variable name and renaming them all.

Another interesting thing to note was the inclusion of third party testing, and more interestingly formatting tools. A few of my pull requests had to be updated with some formatting changes due to being slightly off from the expected output. It was a bit tough to figure out at first. I also had some visual studio SDK versioning issues, but sorted those out eventually and pushed a pull request that hasn’t quite been approved yet, but has been passed around from one head of the project to another. It has passed one layer of verification so to speak. It may not be full verified by the end of this week, but should not be too much longer until I receive some more feedback and my work is integrated.

Here is the issue, and the PR.

Moving onto week 3, I’d like to take a look at another project of similar or smaller scale to get more practice in working in larger projects.