CSP:About
From CSP
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About CSP
The Combat Simulator Project (CSP) is a community united by the common interest in combat simulator development. We are developing standards, technologies, code libraries, tools and artwork that can be used to build a wide variety of real-time combat simulators. Our ultimate goal is to create free, cross-platform, multiplayer simulations of large scale combat scenarios.
Background
During 1995-2000 quite a few commercial flight/combat simulator developers left the market. As developers turned elsewhere for profit, users were left with unsupported products and unrealized dreams. This depressive climate spawned a renewed interest in open-source simulator development in the simulator user community. While open-source simulator development had been shown to work, e.g. with the FlightGear (http://www.flightgear.org) simulator, no similar development effort existed for combat simulators. CSP was founded to be just that.
CSP was inspired by a basic simulator framework demo originally written by Brandon Bohn. Brandon's ideas and code, acting as a concrete hands-on starting point, combined with Matt "Boddman" Boddicker's heroic efforts to provide a web-site and the necessary distributed development services, formed the foundation for what is now the Combat Simulator Project.
CSP has evolved substantially since those early days. The project moved to SourceForge in late 2002, and development focused on refining and extending the basic flight simulation application. The first port to Linux was completed around that time, and key infrastructure elements were designed and implemented. The screenshots page tracks some of this development, although the focus is of course on visual advances. In early 2004 the source code repository was moved from SourceForge CVS to a private subversion repository hosted at zerobar.net (https://www.zerobar.net/csp), where development continues at present.
Organization
CSP is based on a loose organizational structure. We have no managers or team leaders in an official sense. You will find that there is indeed leadership in the project, but it is based on respect and not titles. The reason for not having defined leadership is that members will come and they will go. To survive this project can not be dependent on only a handful of members.
Interested?
CSP is open for all to join. We invite everyone with interest in simulators and simulator development to contribute to this project. Even if not contributing directly as a developer, we hope you will visit the Wiki, check on our progress and join in our discussions. As we seek to be releasing hands-on demos and code, feel free to download them (go to Combat Simulator Project Development Support Server (https://www.zerobar.net/csp/)), try them out and give us your feedback. You can also browse (https://www.zerobar.net/repos/) the current code repository.
