Meadow Home Page

FAQ

What is meadow?

Meadow is (or will be) a generic real-time networked multi-player wargame engine, written in Java. It is currently very early in the development cycle, so there's not much to see yet. What little there is can be found by following the links from the development home page.

Where are the design documents?

There aren't any. The only documentation available is this "quick-tour" document, the javadocs (run the "makedocs" script to produce them), and - the ultimate documentation - (you guessed it) the source.

How far along in development is it?

There is a basic system working - there are units which can be ordered about, they shoot at each other, and so on. Nothing amazing but the basic system (including multiplayer and networking issues) is there. That said, I consider the current code to be basically a prototype... because I'm not convinced I shan't find a fairly fatal design flaw at some point. But if that happens, we shall scrap it and start again... this time with a better undertanding of the design issues.

How long until meadow is finished?

Umm... I don't know. How many features do you want? Who's going to help work on it? How many problems will we run into? As a crude ballpark, I think it will be at least summer 2002 before we have anything approaching Red Alert levels.

Do you want any help?

Yes! Particularly AI and graphics, but also on the basic functionality, including feature requests, bug reports, user and developer documentation... anything and everything really.

What is the target platform?

The current target platform is Java 1.2. It may move to 1.3 before release.

Which software is required to work on the project?

Just a standard 1.2 or higher JDK. I use the Jext editor (jext.sourceforge.net) but no IDE - anyone care to suggest one? The project does contain a few unix shell scripts to compile the code and documents, and remove them, but this functionality is probably easy to replicate on any non-unix system.

I get a load of messages when I run the code. Is that normal?

Yes, it's debugging info. Set meadow.common.Debug.ON to false and recompile to prevent it.

What's the bug tracking policy?

Currently all bugs, feature requests, everything, are going in the bug tracker. Bugs with priority>5 are to be fixed by alpha release.

How can I keep track of meadow development?

Subscribe to the meadow-development email list. You will then be notified of CVS commits and can join in any discussion that occurs on the list.

Last update 5 June 2001, by nphillips.

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