[cjakeman]

I wonder how many people here realise how difficult it is for a developer/coder to test his own work.

Of course, when you add some new feature, you test as you go along to check that it works and works as you intended. (Often the complexities of Open Rails will surprise you and make you think again.)

And you code "defensively" to protect the program from situations that should not occur but somehow do.

And then you test interactively to make sure that you've not broken anything.

And then you tweak something to improve it - and perhaps you don't test everything all over again <sigh>

But Open Rails is complex and very flexible and no-one can test all the possible permutations of route and operation (and, yes, user errors too).

THAT'S WHERE YOU COME IN.

When a code change is delivered and appears in the Unstable version, please, please try it out. No coder can give it the work-out that all of you users can do together. We need your content (the good stuff but also the bad stuff), your experience, your imagination (and your clumsiness too ! )

And when you've found an issue, please report it - preferably with an image and, of course, with a OpenRailsLog.txt file. And please be gentle with us coders - some of us bruise easily.


Thank you in anticipation of lots of lovely bug reports . . .

[Howky]

And what to try to accept new programmers. A friend tried and did not succeed. And that brought a lot of news to the OR. So far, it requires it as its CZ SK version: /
I'm probably not the only one who noticed, but many people who play OR in the Czech Republic and SK talk about it. That development, Or somehow got stuck and is being addressed lately by uselessness.
Everyone understands that programmers do this in their spare time.
But it would probably be better to focus on the important things of OR, the behavior of locomotives e.g.

[Genma Saotome]

Chris, I'm sure you understand this already but nobody can test stuff that isn't properly explained. The norm has been almost no explanation... or a pointer to 15 posts and the implied suggestion of go figure it out.

I'm sure people are willing to help but it is going to take a lot more than simply asking each time something is added to the code.

[YoRyan]

Honestly, the best reference for new stuff in the unstable version is probably the GitHub pull requests list.

You can see stuff we've queued up for testing and eventual merging into the testing/stable branches. As of today, that would be Chris's new timetable view and my hidden Track Monitor mode. PR's include short descriptions and links to Launchpad and Elvas Tower threads.