Hacktoberfest PR #1

First Impressions

Honestly I was excited about hacktoberfest when I first heard about it, I thought it would be full of huge opensource projects and bugs on stuff I use every day, except I found most of the hacktoberfest labeled issues are more of collections of code like a list of nice words or a set of algorithms in different languages. This made searching for actual projects tedious since there was a lot of these kinds of projects making issues but eventually I found a project that struck my interest.

Project

This project was a game engine written in c++ then a python wrapper is put on it so it can be used in python. I found this project captivating since it used combined two languages that I'm interested in. The game engine seemed to be in a primitive but working state. But more I read into the code the more it became confusing, it used a lot of strange calculations and an enormous amount of OpenGL functions which I couldn't understand. I kind of gave up on it since it seemed like a never ending rabbit hole of code. Except I couldn't stop thinking about it, I guess even if I didn't understand the code I still found it interesting.

Issue

At the time I was choosing an issue there was only two open and one of them was already being work on so I was left to do this one. Although I had no understanding of OpenGL or how texture rendering even worked I chipped away at it for a few days, looking at each function call, traversing files just to find some clue on how I could implement the fix. I found the line that used an image from file and the line that loaded it. All I had to do was change that and be done. So I messed around with it and got it working! Even I was surprised when it started showing different a image. This victory was bittersweet because after I changed the loaded image I couldn't find a way to specify that image in the python constructor. Thankfully it was pointed out that the python constructor wasn't in the scope of my pull request so I was in the clear. I put up my pr and that was it.

Pull Request

The project owner brought up some valid criticism in my pull request. I was loading the texture from file every frame which would cause additional lag and I could just have the image stored in a object group since it is being used by every object in that group. I made these changes and then tragedy struck... The pretty colors from the pictures weren't being shown anymore. It seemed like if the image wasn't being loaded right before it was being used, it would get corrupted somewhere along the line. I set sail back into the sea of code and tried to find out why this was but I just couldn't. I replied to the project owners comment telling him my problem seeing if he could find out why this was happening but as of righting this he has not yet replied.

Conclusion

I learned a bit about OpenGL and some game engine logic. I am still interested in this project but as of now it is unclear whether or not I will be worth the time investment and stress trying to contribute to this project. Overall even though it sounds like I had a terrible experience I actually enjoyed sifting through code and finally finding a nugget of gold only to find out it was fools gold.