Introduction

[Devo404]

Hello, Colonists!

If memory serves me correctly. I played Colobot when I was younger, and enjoyed it. When I saw Colobot: Gold Edition on the Ubuntu software repository, I just had to have a play.
I love the concept of being able to have a fleet of helpful bots at your command to help you colonize the across the stars!

The reason I came to this forum is that I was looking around for an open-source project I could get involved in to gain experience in working as a team. Colobot was the perfect chance.
I admit I am very much new to the idea of shared code, but this is why I am here: I want to learn! Nevertheless, I hope I can give some worthwhile suggestions and contributions.

I am a young web developer with a small experience in c++ who loves to compose music, and I like to play around with Blender and GIMP. I very much enjoy 2D texturing. I'm not as good at 3D work.

I very much like to be critical of things, because the small details are what makes a game  good or bad. So I try to give truthful opinions, though I do not mind if they are not accepted.

On an aside, your "Game Design Document" link on the "How to contribute" page on github gives me a 404 error. Thus, I have little idea of the technical details of the project.

[tomangelo]

Hello, Colonist. Welcome in ICC.

Readme file in repo lead to old developers wiki, that was removed recently. Now we keep it there https://github.com/colobot/colobot/blob/...IBUTING.md
GDD link broke after server software update, had to be fixed, but somehow it isn't.

About what you can do: there are some engine issues https://github.com/colobot/colobot/issues/, so if you're brave enough you can try to fix them and make a pull request to repository. Just remember to hold on with "Proposal" labeled issues, as they aren't accepted yet.
About textures I won't tell anything, I can't tell what could be done there.
And with 3D models - if you want you can try to help there. There are plants models, that should be upgraded a bit. Now most of them looks like this
https://www.dropbox.com/s/zugty1t5wdb9hi...3.png?dl=0
(I've turned textures off, to show better how "complicated" is object mesh at the moment. textures on

They should be upgraded a bit, like https://www.dropbox.com/s/q5699err2nv391...4.png?dl=0
They don't need to have exactly this shape, just to make them more natural than big flat textured triangle.

[Devo404]

Thanks I will work on the plant textures and explore some issues.

[tomangelo]

You may want to talk with @RaptorParkowsky about which textures you could make, as some of them might be already done. Just so you won't make already finished textures.

[Devo404]

How do you import a .mod file into Blender?

There's probably something quite obvious or said elsewhere, but I couldn't find anything.

I don't see how I could improve the meshes themselves much. It's the textures that create the plant look. The only great change that could be made to the mesh is to make it look less linear, perhaps by making them more narrow at the base.

[tomangelo]

There is a plugin to Blender here https://github.com/colobot/colobot/blob/...scripts.py, it loads .txt to Blender, it also allow to export them to this format. Colobot support both .txt and .mod files. If case of any problems with loading models to game, there was somewhere tool to converting .txt to .mod files, I'll search for it later.
There is also more advanced Colobot Model Converter https://github.com/tomaszkax86/Colobot-Model-Converter, it can convert .mod and .txt files to .obj files readable with any 3D software, but in require Python 3 to work. For me it works better.