The best way to get involved is to join the [AD] Allegro Developers mailing list and join the conversation. Submit your patches there and if they're accepted, they'll be applied by someone with commit privileges.

thanks alot , is there any way to join the official team ?

Welcome and thanks for your interest in Allegro! The easiest way to get started will probably be to clone the github repository so you can make pull requests, as SiegeLord stated. As for what you could do, it depends on your interests and available platforms to work on.

On all platforms we need bugfixes and small enhancements to existing functionality. As for desirable "big" features for the future, I think VULKAN support on all platforms, as well as Wayland and maybe Mir support on Linux would be nice. Another idea I have is that maybe we should render TTF fonts as primitives and not as bitmaps. Futhermore, the audio recording and video plugins can use some improvements. Multilingual input with input methods on all platforms would also be nice.

Our main competitor here is SDL, I personally think it would be nice if we could match most important features of SDL that Allegro is still missing. Or, if we could at least fix certain problems that exist on Allegro and not on SDL.

There's an old roadmap on the wiki, but I think it's obsolete. I think we should update it? https://wiki.allegro.cc/index.php?title=Allegro_roadmap

TTF to primitives would be nice. That would have direct applications to 3D which currently aren't available.

Imagine an extruded 3D font with a glitzy shader.

@Bearan
the best thing to do in competition with SDL is to make the android build on windows as easy as SDL , i don't know why you didn't do that yet !! , that's the only thing preventing me and many many others from porting thier awsome game to android and make allegro more popular , i think we should make it even more easy than SDL , maybe by a smart python script that works on all platforms ( not the boring Cmake that is not well working on windows ) , the python script should then expect some input and environment variables and add pass commands to ant and the ndk (ant is much easier than gradle and it is tiny ), i work that way with my games and it is the best way ever , if we implement it more allegro games will come to android and you won't believe the success , i really want to help doing this thing if i find help from you

Personally, I found building Allegro for Android to be not a very big problem, by using NVidia's AndroidWorks and modern CMake's support of this Visual Studio plugin. It's not completely straightforward, but workable.

Unfortunately, CMake can't generate AndroidStudio/Gradle projects, but nowadays, Gradle can reference CMake projects, so it's an option for those who are willing to use Google's "official" Android IDE.

What I thing would be very daunting for beginners is building dependencies, because most of them are not well-suited for cross-compilation on Windows (on Linux, it's a different story, but newbies on Linux probably are more knowledgeable in general). Most of libraries Allegro use are quite stable, so a package of pre-build dependencies for Android and iOS would be a welcome thing.

What does dependencies maintenance include? Compiling any new stable version of a dependency when it comes out? I mean, most of the time, Allegro only needs a certain version of dependency compiled once (for all possible architectures), and can live with it for quite a few years...

Maintaining a platform-dependent build script is too much of a pain, I think. CMake does its job well for the most part.

Also, Ant is awful, and is not recommended by Google for use anymore. If you have modern Android SDK, you can and should use Gradle, which is also awful, but WAY better than Ant, and also happens to have CMake integration.

Elias, you're a true hero!