Allow Community Contributions to the PA HTML5 / JavaScript User Interface

@jables

Disclaimer: open sourcing and community contributions have been discussed by others in various forums posts.

Just to be clear we are not suggesting full open sourcing of PA. (please discuss that in one of the other threads)

AND we are also not suggesting full source code access to the engine. (although that would be great and again please discuss in one of the other threads)

What we do want to suggest is a public source code repository of the PA HTML5 / JavaScript user interface under what ever license is appropriate for Uber that can accept community contributions.

The community already has access to the HTML5 / JavaScript source code in PA and has a number of user interface fixes and improvements in mods that could easily be packaged as well documented pull requests.

This would be great marketing for Uber and newsworthy.

PA community... if you reply to this post please stay on topic

I think this is a great idea, keen software have been using this to great affect, in space engineers.

Would this include css and html?

trust issue are hard. you can make this game company crash i afraid.

They don't have to "trust" anyone because CLA is pretty much standard procedure. Even Epic Games now accept tons of small contributions into their engine and for HTML-based UI of PA is can't be anywhere that hard to manage.

Though I'll still prefer that if something like that happen Uber choose some open source license as otherwise there will be a lot of issues with licensing of things that not accepted. If all derivative code going to use some license by default it's make usage of other's work a lot easier.

That's a really good idea.
On the other side, there may be a little work attached to it, since someone at Uber will have the duty to wade through all (means: one or three a week) those push requests, but luckily there are tools out there to help to manage that.

We are open to whatever permitted use and contributor license agreement (CLA) approach that Uber thinks is appropriate for the JavaScript user interface source code and their business model.

Uber retains full control and can cherry pick contributions from the community.

Community contributions may accelerate fixes and improvements to the PA user interface freeing Uber to work on the core game engine, game mechanics and bigger features.

Renamed to reflect that it would include all assets used in the HTML5 / JavasScript user interface.

Top of my list is an in-game mod manager to replace PAMM with:

• curated mods (reviewed and tested for new players)
  
• recommendations (stars)
• automatic updating option and prompts
• automatic disabling of problematic mods
• flagging and reporting of mod issues
• dev mode for mod developers and testers

I'd love to see this, there are a lot of awesome small UI improvement mods available and it would save Uber a lot of work to just be able to say 'yes' and it is implemented.

+1 would be nice to see this, as it at allows people to contribute and keep the UI up to date.

*obligatory yes please*

I would be OK to assign intellectual property rights for any of my contributions and would contribute under non disclosure if required.

So to sum up this thread @allofuber this guy is gonna take care of ya, fix ya up, and do it all for free..... THIS is good idea!

If we used something like github, the community could review pull requests, and help ensure peoples code is best practice etc

@jables

An easy starting point might be to allow community contributions to the player guide.

@jables

Are we at a point where you could allow the community to contribute to the PA HTML5 / Javascript user interface?

Ideally we create a public github repository.

Alternatively a private repository.

There a number of us who would be happy to sign appropriate agreements for access.

If it would be possible to change overall UI style, and make something like this...

Spoiler: thing

YES PLEASE!

no pls

Tons of useless animation FTW.