Community Contribution

Intro

The MSP Challenge Simulation Platform is openly available for users to download and use, as explained on the Download & Install page.

You might however be interested in developing new Client features, or to create your own Simulations to add additional data calculations to the platform. For this purpose, we have provided the source code of the Client, Server, and Simulations for our community to use for expanding on the MSP Challenge Simulation Platform.

Source Location: MSPChallenge Repository

License: GPL-3.0

Thank you for considering to contribute to the MSP Challenge Platform Edition. We have seen many users of the MSP Challenge over the years, and it brings us great joy to see the enthusiasm of these users extend into becoming contributors to the platform.

The following guidelines help understand why we made the project open source, and how we expect to reply to community contributions. As the MSP Challenge team consists of a small team without funding for dedicated open-source support staff, we ask for your understanding in our capabilities to respond to any contact related to community contributions

Free to extend on the MSP Challenge Platform Edition

Our aim is to allow all community members with enough technical knowledge to freely contribute to the MSP Challenge project, both the content as well as the features. To aid in this effort we decided to release the source code under the GPL-3.0-only license. Under this license you may freely copy, distribute and modify the software as long as you track changes and their dates in source files. This license counts for the data and code made available via the public Github repo.

For more information on the Terms & Condition of using the MSP Challenge Simulation platform, please visit the Terms and Conditions page

Terms & Conditions - MSP Challenge Community

Licensed elements

While the source code of MSP Challenge itself is open source, several packages and plugins have been used to develop the software, which have their own licenses. We are NOT able share many of these files, and ask you to retrieve your own copy if you wish to use these files or plugins. This involves several plugins we purchased via the Unity Asset Store amongst others. You can find these plugins and libraries on the following page on the wiki: Source code - MSP Challenge Community

Our GIS data can only be used by us to create derivate works, not to publicly share, therefore we have provided an example GeoServer, including GIS files and configuration, to assist in the setup and development of community based content.  To find out where exactly we retrieved our data, please visit our Data Sources page.

Retrieving the MSP Challenge Source Data

We chose to host the MSP Challenge on GitHub, being one of the major hosting platforms for Open Source projects. You can find the repository here. Contributors are free to fork the repository, and use this fork to extend on the project, as long as all changes are tracked. Community members are only able to edit their own fork, and cannot directly edit and commit to the public MSP Challenge repository itself.

For more information on how to fork a repository, please visit the documentation page by GitHub - Fork a repo / GitHub Docs

Integration into the open version

Due to the limited resources available to the MSP Challenge development team, we do not guarantee the integration of any contributions made to the MSP Challenge Platform Edition.

After you have successfully expanded on your own fork of the MSP Challenge Simulation Platform, you can create a pull requests. This will notify the MSP Challenge team of external contributions, and allow the team to checkout the files for integration into the publicly available platform. These pull requests require a detailed description of the changes so that the team can properly review the provided changes.

May the team be able to implement public contributions, then the following steps will be part of the integration process:

1. Pull Request

A pull request is created by the contributor, including the altered files, and a clear description of the added or altered functionality.

2. Design Review

A member of the MSP Challenge team will review the design of the contribution, based on the added description.

3. Code Review

A member of the MSP Challenge team will review the code of the contribution.

4. Integration

The contribution is integration via the development branch of the MSP Challenge Simulation Platform, to allow for internal testing.

5. Publication

If all above steps have been succesfully ended, the contribution can become part of the public version.

For more information on creating pull requests, please visit the documentation page by GitHub - About pull requests / GitHub Docs

Issue Support

The MSP Challenge is being developed by a core team, part of the Academy of Games and Media at the Breda University of Applied sciences. Because of this, we do not have the resources to develop and offer an infrastructure of support for contributions. While we allow our community to fork, and extend on the MSP Challenge, we can not guarantee that we will be able to answer any issues posted as part of the MSP Challenge repo, or integrate any extensions developed by community members.

Issue Rules

- Please refrain from creating duplicate issues, as this will only slow-down our communication efforts. If you encounter a similar issue to other users, please comment on that issue to let us know that you encountered it as well, including additional information where needed.

-

Communication with the Developers

As our current focus on community contributions is limited, we have decided not to create and maintain a public chat, such as a Slack, Discord, or living Forum. This means that contributors are currently not provided means to engage in discussions or create active conversations with the developers.

If you wish to contact the developers of the MSP Challenge Platform, please use the following methods:

Mail

Please see our contact page for the most common contact methods: Contact us - MSP Challenge Community. We attempt to keep up to date with our inbox, however please provide us some leeway in responding to any mails you send us

Issue Tracker

Please report any issues you encounter via the Github Issues Tracker. We will periodically check the issues, and determine whether we can incorporate these into our internal bug-fixing protocol.

Code Responsibilities

To make sure that community contributions can be considered for integration, please respect the following rules and responsibilities.

- The MSP Challenge Client is Cross-Platform for both Mac and Windows 10. Contributions are not allowed to use code or content unable to run on either of these platforms.

-

Community Responsibilities

To create an open and welcoming community, we ask everyone to comply with the following responsibilities.

- In all communication efforts, both between community members, and with developers, please be open and friendly. The MSP Community consists of a diverse group of users and contributors from different backgrounds, with varying levels of technical knowhow.

For information on the latest public release, please see the release notes on our Wiki

Release notes - MSP Challenge Community