CCP Games on GitHub
Hello! I wanted to take some time to talk to you people a bit about GitHub and some of the areas we are using it within CCP to work with you.
There are more and more things showing up within the CCP Games GitHub organization, which can be found at https://github.com/ccpgames/. While things such as CCPWGL have been up for a while, there is not necessarily a push but a desire from many CCPers to put more things openly on GitHub. Our graphics engine team has already put their dae-to-red project along with their rescache project up there publicly. I know of a few other things that are likely to end up there as well.
While this is really awesome I would like to ask that if you submit a pull request or an issue to be both patient and helpful. Several of the people involved in these projects are very new to git and GitHub. Those of us with more experience will of course help them but I know from my own experience how helpful it is when the community pitches in even a little bit and has some patience. So if you do submit a pull request and it doesn't get any attention right away don't be afraid to give it a friendly bump or poke me to poke the maintainer.
License
Simple and to the point, we have decided to license our GitHub projects under the MIT license. We have added this license to all existing projects and will continue to add it to future ones.
CCPWGL
In a dramatic change from last years FanFest the CCP WebGL project received a big update on GitHub. It is in a pretty good working state right now with all the new models and other resources. It is our intention to keep updating it as needed and more closely watch pull requests. Since its update several issues have already been fixed and pull requests accepted. You can find the CCP WebGL project at https://github.com/ccpgames/ccpwgl.
Documentation
Documentation is something I have been thinking long and hard about. For the longest time CCP never had any official documentation for any of our third-party developer related resources. There are some OK wikis out there with good information but there has always been a desire to get some more official documentation from CCP out there. In that effort when we released the developers web site, https://developers.eveonline.com/ we tried putting some basic documentation up. From that experiment we have learned a few things. First, I am terrible at writing documentation and second that it takes a fair bit of time. The advantage of having CCP hosted documentation is it's generally a lot easier to find, because we control it we can link to it more officially. The disadvantage is that there's not as many resources that can be put into it.
While the developers site was a good experiment, some effort has been put into thinking of a new way that would combine the best of both worlds. One that that CCP controls and can safely link to, but also one that the community can contribute to. Bonus points for something that looks great, is easy to read, is easy to contribute to, and ideally is close to the development environment for third-party devs.
After doing some research into other possibilities and talking with the community some the current idea is to try out documentation written in markdown, hosted on GitHub, and rendered on Read The Docs. This has what I hope to be many advantages. First the generated docs look really good. You can see the generated output here: http://eveonline-third-party-documentation.readthedocs.org/en/latest/sso/intro/
Second because CCP maintains the GitHub repository for the documentation, we have the final say about what goes into it. Anyone can contribute however by forking the repository, committing some changes, and submitting a pull request. Since we maintain the repository, all those pull requests have to be approved by us. Continuing the reasons why GitHub seems like a great idea it's a place where a lot of third-party developers are already working. This means contributing to the documentation, and reading it, is generally very close to your current work.
If you take a look at the documentation and find a problem or that something is missing, please feel free to open an issue on the GitHub repo. That is one of the benefits for doing it this way.
You can find the GitHub repository for the documentation here: https://github.com/ccpgames/eveonline-third-party-documentation
That's all for now. Take care and fly safe!
CCP FoxFour