On 10/15/2023 at 1:13 AM, Koishi said:I'm a game systems engineer by hobby and browsing through the source have noticed there's several places I can offer some decent runtime opts to and general architectural stability in the process however maintaining this in a mod wouldn't be ideal since it'd break every alpha. So are TFP open to donated code? In particular there's a way I can batch process zeds and improve them a fair bit such that having a few hundred shouldn't be problematic for servers or even clients. It would help maintainability as well since it'd help pull away from excessive flag/type checking and use existence based processing which helps pull code away from the virtual tick call and instead places things inside "game systems" which is easy to maintain since you have one function working with exactly one type of data doing one type of logic without having to do a ton of state checking or jump through polymorphic hoops. All around would make everyone's lives easier. I don't want money or anything in return, it'd be nice to have credit for a CV but even if that can't happen for some NDA reason I'd be happy still to sign whatever just to contribute. It'd be nice to actually see the game's runtime improve they just look like they need a bit of help.
If proof is required for any reason I'm working on an openworld sandbox showcase/demo right now on github called YearsOfShadow, it manages to simulate about 10k zed intelligence level NPCs with deterministic physics/logic at about 8ms though it utilizes every core in a synced threading technique which is a bit cheaty, but even single threaded it manages to do this in about 11ms just fine.
This genre of games can be a lot more than it is with the right skill chipping in and showing the way and would love to contribute for the sake of growing the industry. You can find my discord server through that repo if you wish to contact me directly for any reason. I'd love to get into contact with TFP any way possible especially and love chatting about architecture and runtime solutions and their tradeoffs.
Thank you for reading and I hope your day is awesome.
Hi Koishi,
If you are serious about wanting to contact the developers and offer services then your best course of action is to send an email to [email protected] and include your resume and links to portfolio/ work you have done. That is your direct line to them. I'm going to close this thread simply because the responses you get here will not be from the developers and will vary greatly from support to criticism to ridicule from non-associated parties and I don't think that is your goal.
Good Luck! A few current and past staff members started out as simply fans of the game and regular forum users. Please also note that if a developer does read this and wants to respond they have the power to do so even though it is locked to normal users.