Happy to join the Sweet Home 3D GroupHello, I'm a computer science postgraduate student in Australia and just start to learn free open source project. Because I was working on Java Swing and OpenGL projects in the past years, what I really want to find is a graphical project which is active and well organised, and certainly is written in Java. Fortunately Sweet Home 3D is a perfect project for me to begin the study of open source project.
Before going too deep into the development, I have some general questions:
-- After reviewing questions and problems launched in the forums, I got that the project manager is the only Java developer working on the code. But according to the member list I found from sourceforge.com, there is one or two people who takes the design work. Do they have the right to finalise the code or still only the project manager takes this job? How is it organised?
-- I found there is a CVS statistics on sourceforge.com, I also found there is a tracking system which collects plug-ins contributions and bug reports. In my past projects, the develop team only used one of the file management systems. So how do the two file management system work in the Sweet Home 3D project?
-- It is said the Sweet Home 3D project matches a case study in a French book written by the project manager. I haven't read that book, but I guess there might be some other projects described in that book. Does this project interact with any other projects?
And here are some technical questions:
-- When I run the program, I found it was pretty fast to generate 3D models. Much faster than my thought compared to the experience gained from previous graphical project. So what kind of 3D techniques were used in this project?
-- When I tried to create a plug-in jar file, I didn't find the export destination directory ".eteks/sweethome3d/plugins" in the browser. I was working on Linux and I tried Ctrl+H as well as creating the directory by myself, it didn't work. However, I exported the jar file to other existing directory, and copy it to ".eteks/sweethome3d/plugins", it worked. So why I cannot see the directory in the browser?
-- And I have downloaded some plug-ins, all of these plug-ins files' names were ended with ".sh3p". I don't know how to generate this type of files. If I create a plug-in jar file and want to share with the user community in the future, is it necessary to generate the .sh3p files in advance?
Finally, I really like this program and would like to make some contributions. But as a beginner, I don't know how to do it. Maybe some translation work first? Because I come from China and I saw some of the web pages have Chinese version but most don't, especially the documents. And in the future days, after I get understanding of the code and structure, I will dedicate myself to create new plug-ins. How is it?
Looking forward to hear some voice http://www.sweethome3d.com/support/mvnplugin/mvnforum/images/emotion/smile.gif
