Wings 3D Development

If you are interested in helping to develop Wings, you can look at the build instruction included with in the Wings 3D sources.

If you are REALLY interested in programming for Wings, you should create a Github account so you can fork dgud’s wings ‘master’ branch, and get coding!

Reporting Bugs

Since Wings has been in development for more than 9 years, most of the obvious bugs have been eliminated. The bugs that remain usually only appear in certain circumstances.

Therefore, reporting that “feature X sometimes doesn’t work” does not help. Given a lot of time, we could start reading all of the relevant code for feature X and hope to figure it out.

On the other hand, reporting that “feature X doesn’t work when I try on the following model which you will find at some_site/…/some_model.wings” is much more useful. If we can reproduce a bug in action on one of our own computers, it is usually very easy to locate and correct the bug.

Here are some tips on how to get the bugs fixed quickly.

1. When you have posted a bug report, make sure to return to the bug report thread later to see if one of the developer has asked for additional details.
2. Provide all information needed for us to reproduce the bug on our own computers.
   • If the problem occurs in a specific model, make the Wings file available at a web page (preferred way) or email it to one of the developers. Note that selections are saved in a Wings file, so if a selection is needed, do the selection before you save file.
   • In other cases, describe how to reproduce the problem. Keep in mind that we are not mind readers.
3. If there is a crash dump and it is not too long, post it in the error report. If it is very long, post only the first part in the error report. (We’ll ask you to provide the rest if we’ll think that it will be useful.)
4. Additional useful information to provide:
   • Operating system type and version.
   • Type and driver version of graphic card (if it seems relevant to the problem at hand).
   • Whether the bug exists in previous versions of Wings.

Typos and Wording

If you happen to come across any typos, wording issues or wording inconsistencies, you can report these as bugs (see above).

When reporting wording problems, please include:

• The location of the string (how you come to see it on the screen).
• The problem with the string.
• If possible, suggestions for its correction are nice too.

Help Translate Wings 3D

Wings is always trying to reach new users, and one way to do that is to speak their language. Since Wings development is quite fast, most of the translations are not up to date. Currently Wings has translations started in the following languages:

If you are interested in helping to translate to Wings, you will need the latest release and a decent text editor like Jedit. Just be sure to announce your intentions on the Official Development Forum before you get started, since there may be others who have already started or want to help.

Advice for Translators

Advice from fluegel3d, who did the German Wings translation:

• Start with the English language files. If you start with another language you take the risk of introducing “Chinese whispers” problems.
• Copy all *_en.lang files into a directory and rename them to *_es.lang (for Spanish for example).
• Understand the differences in the grammar of the two languages. For example, in English menu entries are formed , i.e. “Save file”, while it is , i.e. “Datei speichern”, in German. Look for those differences between English and your language.
• Do the translation sentence by sentence, not word by word. Don’t do a global search/replace for individual words. Some English words, e.g. search and size, can be a verb and a noun. In your language the spelling of noun and verb might be different.
• There are several groups of words addressing similar functions in Wings. Example groups are (move, shift, slide, drag), (extrude, extract, lift), (pick, select), (turn, rotate, twist). Develop a concept how to translate the words in those groups and stick closely to this concept.
• Decide how you want to address the user. In English it is “Do you want to save your changes before quitting?”. In Spanish it might be more common to say “Save changes before quitting?” (a neutral form, omitting the “you”).
• In some cases strings are concatenated to form longer strings. Take care of the grammar in the resulting string!