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Orxonox Primer

TracNav(TracNav/TOC)? This is a little tutorial for all new to Orxonox, a little refresh for all others:

1. Mail lists

We've got 3 major mailing lists:

  • orxonox-dev subscribe : development stuff just for us (medium traffic)
  • orxonox-announce subscribe : announcements to all who like orxonox (low traffic)
  • orxonox-commit subscribe : auto-mail if the svn repos changes (high traffic during development sessions)

2. Website

You can find our website on http://www.orxonox.net. We have a trac wiki system.

The wiki has got some nice features like the ticket system, where you can set up development requests. The roadmap shows what the current development goals are. Anyone with a account / password (all developers) is able to make changes to the wiki or the ticket system; just by using the account from the subversion system.

3. Forum

There is also a forum. We use it to exchange thoughts, drawings, materials, whatever. You will have to create a new account to be able to post there.

4. Chat, IRC

You will normally find some of us on our IRC-channel
irc://irc.datacore.ch
channel: #orxonox
Here we talk about Orxonox, development issues or coffee…

5. Mail aliases

We are maintaining a mail server. If possible we register the following addresses for someone called Peter Muster:

  • peter at orxonox.ethz.ch
  • peter.muster at orxonox.ethz.ch
  • muster at orxonox.ethz.ch

and forward them to your email account or to a local mailbox on the server that you are able to check out via IMAP.

6. Webpage Stats

We have installed a graph, that monitors the current web traffic on our server. We keep track about visits/hits on our website. you find it at:

You have to log in with your subversion account.

7. Repository

Orxonox is programmed by many programmers at the same time. To synchronize the work and to make it available for all, we've got a central subversion server (subversion is a versioning system; the newer form of cvs). Most Linuxes already have svn (subversion) in their software repository (gentoo: portage tree, debian: apt-system), for Windows you need to install tortoise svn, which you can get here: http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/
If you want to read more about this topic, go to:

You can download the code repositories in Linux by typing:

yourcomputer $ svn co https://svn.orxonox.net/orxonox orxonox

and the data repository (ships, textures, pictures, sounds, etc):

yourcomputer $ svn co https://svn.orxonox.net/data/ data

8. Compiling and Running

To get Orxonox running on your system, first read how to get Orxonox running?.

9. Finding your Way as a Developer

As a developer of Orxonox you will want to communicate over our mailing lists, the wiki, the forum and IRC. You will find the current tasks, for the next orxonox release under:

and all tasks, that we have defined yet:

You will see the current changes on the orxonox source and the Wiki on the timeline of our Wiki:

The commit messages will also be sent to your email address, if you have registered to the orxonox-commit mailing list.

10. Understanding Orxonox

It definitely takes some time to understand the Orxonox source code. The best way to get your questions answered is to post them on the development-mailing list. Even better is to just go to the developers and ask specific questions. Once you know where to find which functions, you will want to read some more about special topics in the source files themselves: we use doxygen to comment the code, so you will find comments for every class/function. There are also module descriptions? which we are currently working on.