goldeneye-pc-port/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing

Thanks for your interest. This is a small hobby project; issues and pull requests are welcome, but please read the ground rules first — they are what keep the port faithful to the original game.

Ground rules

1. The decompilation is not modified for the port. Everything under src/ and include/ is compiled unmodified. Makefile, tools/, rsp/, ld/ belong to the N64 build and are never touched for PC work. If PC code seems to need a behavioural change in the game, the fix belongs in port/.

2. Narrow ABI exception; diagnosis is always allowed. Trace a bug as deep into the decomp's state as the evidence leads — that's never restricted. Only the fix is constrained: the 32→64-bit transition forces a small class of mechanical, semantics-preserving edits — any struct-layout or pointer-width-driven misread caused by 32→64-bit widening, in a ROM-serialized record or a live runtime struct/union alike (see docs/porting-notes.md §A1 for the pattern and its tells). These are allowed, must be guarded with #ifdef PORT, must change no behaviour, and must be documented. A genuine behavioral difference from real N64 behavior is a separate, much rarer case that needs explicit maintainer sign-off first — see docs/dev-process.md's rule-2 sign-off procedure; it is not something a contributor can self-approve or infer from this exception.

3. Region macros mirror the Makefile. CMakeLists.txt REGION_DEFS must match the N64 Makefile's per-region macro set exactly.

4. Verify before you push. A build-affecting change needs, at minimum, a clean configure + build for ntsc-final and a crash-free run of one level (./build-pc/ge007.x86_64 -level_09).

5. No game data, ever. Never commit, upload or attach a ROM or anything extracted from one (textures, audio, models, level data, in-game text, the generated data/pcmodels-* / data/pccg-* folders) in a pull request or an issue. A small cropped screenshot of a glitch is fine.

Bug reports

Open an issue with:

• ge007.crash.log if the game crashed (in the folder you launched from),
• the output of ge007.x86_64 --version (or the release version you downloaded), your OS, and your GPU and driver version,
• your ROM's SHA-1 (Windows: certutil -hashfile <rom> SHA1, Linux: sha1sum <rom>),
• what you did, what happened, and what you expected.

Never attach the ROM itself.

Style

• C/C++ formatting follows .clang-format and .editorconfig in the repo root. Match the surrounding code.
• Port-layer code is plain C11 / C++17, SDL2 + OpenGL, no extra dependencies.
• Keep commits focused and describe why, not just what.

Forks and derivative works

Fork away — the code is MIT and the port/ layer exists to be extended. Rebranding, localizing and extending are all welcome, and none of them need permission. If you carry the work forward under your own name, please keep two things:

• Attribution. A clear statement, in your README and about page, that the project derives from this one — with a link. The engine prints its origin at startup and in its --version output; keeping that intact is part of the ask.
• The record. docs/dev/ (the finding log, porting notes, per-level status) is the engineering record behind every fix. Derivative projects are asked to preserve or link to it rather than fork-and-forget.

Stripping the attribution is the one thing that turns a fork into something we no longer recognize as a descendant of this project.

Where to look

• docs/internals.md — how the port is structured.
• docs/porting-notes.md — the recurring bug classes. Check here before debugging a crash; you are likely looking at a known pattern.
• docs/dev/ — the full finding log and per-level status.