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Ways to contribute

Orchestrator is a community-driven, free, and open-source project. All developers work on this plug-in pro bono, meaning they contribute their free time and skills for the love of making tools for others.

This means that for Orchestrator to thrive, it needs contributors to help improve the plug-in. There are multiple ways to contribute to a project, making it possible for everyone to bring something positive to the project, regardless of your skill set.s

  • Be part of the community.
    The best way to contribute to Orchestrator, and to help it grow is to simply use the plug-in and promote it by word-of-mouth, in the credits or splash screen of your games, blog posts, tutorials, videos, demos, you name it. Participate! Being a user and advocating for the plug-in helps spread the word about Orchestrator, which is not professionally marketed, and therefore relies on its community.

  • Make games.
    It's no secret, no convince new users that visual scripting with Orchestrator can be fun, we need games made with it. We know that visual scripting has tremendous potential, it's one of the most common ways to use other engines like Unreal. So work on your awesome projects, each new game increases the plug-ins ability to illustrate it's potential.

  • Get involved in the plug-in's development.
    Many people think that getting involved in develop means contributing code, but that's far from the truth. While contributing code via pull requests are much appreciated, testing the development snapshots, reporting bugs or suggesting enhancements on GitHub, improving this documentation, or even translations go a long way to increasing the availabiility and success of the project. The following sections will cover some of these direct ways to contribute.

  • Donate.
    Orchestrator is a plug-in that is defined completely free of charge, and in the spare time of willing contributors. Donations help cover certain operating costs for hosting our websites, content, and more. If you want to donate to the project, check our website for details.

Contributing code​

The possibility to study, use, and contribute to the Orchestrator project is made possible because the project is open-source.

If you want to get started contributing to open source, check out the repository by creating a fork, and getting familiar with the code base. One of the most direct ways to contribute to the project is to submit bug fixes or improvements to the project through a GitHub pull request.

Contributing code has two big advantages:

  • Your own code will be reviewed and improved by other developers, and will be further maintained directly in the upstream project, so you won't have to reapply the change to your fork if you're extending Orchestrator. On the other hand, it comes with a responsibility, as your changes to be generic to be beneficial to all, and not only to your project; so in some cases it may still be relevant to keep your changes in your own fork should they be too specific.

  • The whole community benefits from your work, consequentially other contributors will contribute code that benefits you.

To aid in collaboration and overall quality, the core developers will enforce some rules for code contributions, for example regarding the style to use in the C++ code (indentations, brackets, etc) or the Git and PR workflow will.

All pull requests go through a review process before being accepted. Depending on the scope of the changes, it may take sometime for a maintainer to provide their review. We value all contributors, and ask for patience when submitting pull requests.

Testing and reporting issues​

Another excellent way to contribute to the plug-in is to test development releases and report issues. It is also helpful to report issues discovered during stable releases, so that they can be fixed in the development branch and in future maintenance releases.

Testing development versions​

To help with testing, test our official pre-release binaries when they are announced (using on the blog and other community platforms). Pre-release builds are tagged with the dev, beta, or rc designators.

It's also helpful to be on the lookout for bugs in stable releases.

Filing an issue on GitHub​

Orchestrator uses GitHub's issue tracker for bug reports. When you start filing a bug report, you'll be given a form to fill out. Please try and follow it so that all issues are consistent and provide the necessary information.

Contributing to the documentation​

The documentation is maintained in the Orchestrator docs repository. This repository maintains not only the raw markdown files used for documentation, but also all translations used for various languages.

Should you find outdated information in the documentation or parts that could be improved, contributions are welcomed.