I would like to contribute

Hey all, I am hoping some team members view this.
I am currently a CS student, about to dual major in CE or EE as well.
I am looking for an open source project to contribute to in order to further my programming skillset. I currently program mainly in Java, but I've been learning C. I can pick up new languages pretty quickly.
I was hoping that the dev team would allow me to contribute to the project. I feel that once I'm up to speed with the codebase and language, I'd be an asset and not a liability.
I am hoping to hear from you all soon. I like what you're doing.

I'm speaking as a contributor outside of the core team. Xonotic has a core team that does the majority of the coding, and many contributors like me who help out here and there.

First, thank you for your interest. It is people like you who make open source projects possible.

Second, are you new to the game? If so, I suggest you play the game for a while to learn about the game as an application, and also be part of the community by exchange ideas here in the forum or IRC, to learn about what the community actually needs. Then, after that, you will be more informed of what to do next.

Third, depending on what you mean by programming skill, the coding experience here may or may be useful for the job market you are interested in in the future. Code-wise, there are several parts of this projects:

1. The game code is written in QuakeC, a dialect of C that's used only in Quake-like games. If you don't mind its narrow application in the job market, the game code is a good place to contribute. Read this to setup your local repo, and then pick something from the issue list to fix, locally. This process is useful for you to determine whether this project is the one you'd like to make a long-term commitment to. If so, fix something for real, discuss and demonstrate your fix in IRC or here, and then request for write-access to the repo. The IRC channel #xonotic on Freenode is where most development discussion happens.

2. The engine is written in C, but it takes a long time to contribute to the engine in a meaningful way -- one needs to be able to do something that's compatible with the vision, the history, and the rest of the team. Unless you already have experience coding for Darkplaces or other Quake engines, I don't think this is a good place to start.

3. There are other utilities written in various languages to do tasks surrounding the game. For example, some wrote utilities (Python, Bash, etc.) to remotely manage the game server; some wrote utilities (Python, JAVA, etc.) to facilitate game demo recording and video rendition.


Hope this helps.

Being Xonotic free software, pretty much everyone is allowed to contribute.
You can look at gitlab for code/asstets/issues https://gitlab.com/groups/xonotic.
If you do something and it's good enough, it will be merged.