MapTool source as of 1.4 is stored on GitHub. You don't need a GitHub account to contribute but it makes it easier for everyone if you do -- dont worry its free.
So this post will only contain instructions will assume you will create a GitHub account (https://github.com/) if for some reason any one has strenuous objections to creating a free account I will update the instructions to include other methods. These instructions are also IDE agnostic if someone wants to provide instructions for their favourite IDE we can add them, these instructions are a work in progress so I will be updating this post as people as for more details or clarifications on certain parts.
First create your GitHub account (https://github.com/)
Go to the MapTool repository https://github.com/RPTools/MapTool and click on the Fork button on the top right, this will fork a copy of MapTool in your account (it takes up no space, only changes you make to it take space (which will be tiny) so you never have to worry about them saying you are using too much space.
If you just want to make small changes like updating the internationalisation files and are ok using the GitHub editor then you can skip the installing the client step, otherwise...
Setup the GitHub client on your computer You can then go to your forked copy of MapTool and click on the Clone in Desktop button on the right and this should get the application installed above to grab the source.
Once you have made the changes that you want to make -- and tested them of course
![Smile :)](./images/smilies/icon_smile.gif)
Building MapTool
Gradle is used to build MapTool 1.4, you do not need Gradle installed to perform the build as the repository has a small wrapper that will download it and install it in a subdirectory where the source is for you. This means that the first time you do a build you will need to be connected to the internet and the first build will take a while
as it downloads everything it needs.
To build
./gradlew build (or for Windows: .\gradlew build)
To create a distributable file
./gradlew clean release (or for Windows: \.gradlew clean release)
This will create a .zip file for use on all systems as well as a zipped .app for Mac OS X the build number will be based on the latest tag and latest commit.
GitHub Issue Log
There is an issue log on GitHub attached to the project located at https://github.com/RPTools/maptool/issues
The parser and rplib projects are not yet in GitHub but I plan to move them as soon as I get some free time.