GSoC 2011

Welcome To Google Summer of Code and Atomic Blue!

This is the central page for Google SoC. Join the fun!

Registering and signing in

The program just started, and it's important for you to understand what's needed and how to proceed. These are the main next milestones:

March 18-27 : Would-be student participants discuss application ideas with mentoring organizations. If you didn't complete this step before 27 March, don't worry, you are still in time, but hurry up to complete the following steps! The real deadline is in the next chapter. For this part of the program, we ask you to do the following:

• Review our ideas list below.
• Create an account on this web app (nexus) so we can more easily track your profile.
  • Please use "gsoc_" as prefix of your nick, example "gsoc_talad"
  • Select "Programming" as department
  • In the section "Previous Experiences" paste the questions present in the section "Background" in our gsoc student template, with your answers.
  • In the section "RPG Experience" you can list what's your knowledge of RPG games, but it's not required for GSoC.
  • In the section "Portfolio" paste the questions present in the section "Google Summer Of Code" in our gsoc student template, with your answers.
• Connect to our IRC channel at irc.freenode.net #planeshift-prospects
• Discuss and improve the current ideas together with us.
• You need to create your proposal document and be ready to submit it to google in the next phase. If we collaborate a bit on the proposal, there are higher chances the project will be successful. You can find a FAQ on the proposal document here.
• Participate in game to the event name "GSoC students welcome", you can find the date and time in our event calendar. For this event you need to download the game, create an account and create a character (it's free!!). Your presence there is not required to be part of gsoc, but can be fun and a different way to have a chat, also you will see better our current software.
• Download our sources and start to familiarize with the code. Build our server and client if you want to go one step further!
• Read this article, it's very useful!

The main output of this phase is for you to get a good understanding of our organization, our goals and the ideas. But it's also the time for you to contribute and to make a proposal on how you would like to implement a specific idea.

March 28-April 8: Students can apply on the Google web site for being a student. This is the students final deadline, you must not miss it. The registration on the Google web site if the official one that makes you part of the program. The one you made on nexus is for our internal usage and it's not enough to make you officially part of the GSoC. Considering the GSoC website accepts only text, along with your proposal please link the document you posted on nexus. The URL is the one you get by right clicking on the /upload/yourfile.doc link on nexus.

April 25: Accepted student proposals announced on the Google Summer of Code 2011 site.

April 26 - August 22: Finally you can start working on the project! August 22 is the last day of work on the code.

For more details on the overall timeline please read this page.

Main Ideas

This section collects ideas we think are large enough to be developed over a period of 3 months. Please note that we are improving the ideas right now, so check back often for updates.

If you think you have a good idea to add to the list, please let us know! We are eager to add one project if it's worth it.

Dynamic Economy

• Implementation of an Economy Manager to allow a more Dynamic Economy (medium)

Tribes

• Artificial intelligence for Tribes expansion (composed of various tasks from medium to high)

Statistics

• Analysis package of data mining data (Medium) and better server reporting (Easy)

GUI

• Improved UI Includes improvements to the Help system, fixes to the interface, conversion to plugin. Enhancement to the Container System, and Crafting of books.

Sound System

• Sound System . Improve the sound manager, make it more flexible and allow association of sounds to in game events, scripts, monsters actions.

Hardcoding removal

• Hardcoding removal: Involves moving some of the hardcoded skills/stats/rules/mechanics from the code to the database, making the engine more flexible and more maintainable. (easy to hard)

Combat enhancements

• Combat enhancements: The objective of this idea is to make combat more interactive and smoother, to add special abilities and make it more fun to play.

Other smaller / fragmented tasks

This section contains ideas which have not yet been developed into main ideas. We are not sure if one of these can really cover the 3 months period of GSoC and so those are pending review, discussion and expansion to be moved in the previous section.

Database

• Database reconstruction: Optimise database with innodb triggers, rework of tables, new index, scalability and subdivision of data between different servers...(hard)

Networking

• IPV4 TO IPV6: changing the code so it doesn't rely specifically on IPV4 or IPV6, allow to define various listen interfaces either IPV4 and IPV6. Remove network logic which can be left to system libraries. Conversion to plugin.(easy to medium depending on the parts which are picked up)

Effect Library

• PSEFFECT: conversion to plugin and performance optimizations. Maybe adding support for 2d objects.(medium)

Server reliability

• Unit Testing: Implement a basic unit testing framework for common server commands and actions. (Medium)