GSoC '09 Endgame

2009.08.18 in code, gnome, and summer of code

Today marked the final day of this year's Google Summer of Code! It's been a good summer, though I certainly didn't get as much done as I'd hoped, a lot of cool stuff got finished this summer.

Future in GSoC

I've decided that this is my last year participating in GSoC as a student; I had a great deal of fun both years, but I guess it's time to give others a chance, and I really don't like working on open-source with a definite deadline... it's more of a hobby to me than a "job", and I'd like to keep it that way for now — at least as long as I'm sitting at home/school; I think things would work a lot better if I had to go into work instead of working from somewhere where I'm comfortable/easily distracted. I guess a lot of people run into that problem...

Anyway; though I'm not going to participate as a student next year, I'd absolutely love to help out or mentor/co-mentor someone working on a GNOME-related (especially games, or Clutter, or Seed) next year. I think that would be great fun! But that's a good ways away now...

Also: be sure not to take any of the above to suggest that I'm leaving; far from it! I'm definitely going to be at Boston Summit this fall, and I plan to continue working on Seed and GNOME Games for the foreseeable future (as long as nobody wants to get rid of me (I realize there are some who want to get rid of all of us who peddle Clutter/GL/JavaScript/etc., but whatever...)).

Summer Results

It seems the general consensus is that my three games (lightsoff, same-gnome-clutter, and gnomines-clutter) will be moved to the "normal" section of GNOME Games (versus the "staging" section in which they currently reside) in master as soon as 2.28 is branched, and will ship with 2.30.

• seed — I was more or less the active Seed maintainer during the majority of the summer, so this involved a lot of releases, patches, and bugs. I wrote a lot of documentation over the course of GSoC.
• lightsoff — I completely rewrote Lights Off during the GSoC period, and created the entirety of the surrounding UI. It's 99% of the way there; it needs documentation and one preference to be removed (or made functional). The new version has theming, and is much more attractive and less buggy than v.1 or v.2.
• same-gnome-clutter — Lots of updates and reorganization, as well as a bunch of preferences. And theming! (though there are no other themes, at the moment)
• gnomines-clutter — Started an initial implementation, using things I've learned over the course of writing and rewriting the other two games. It has a very preliminary Clutter UI, but the game is theoretically playable.

Overall, I'm very happy with the games as they stand... I'm a little iffy about the performance of same-gnome-clutter, but I think I might know how to fix that. There's still a lot of work to do (saving high-scores still doesn't work, but I put that aside to work on gnomines-clutter so I would have something to show by the end of the project).

gnomines-clutter

Since nobody's seen any of gnomines except my family and Thomas, I guess I might as well show it to you here! Keep in mind that this is a total of a day of Clutter work (after working on and off for a few weeks in between other things on the underlying structure of the game and getting a playable CLI version working), so it'll get a lot better shortly. Also, I stole the flags and bombs from the current version of gnomines... that could be a good thing, or a bad thing... we'll see!

Click on the image for a short video!



I'll be creating a gnomines-clutter branch on GNOME Games git tomorrow (if nobody has any complaints) in which to continue working on this (right now I'm just using a local Git repo, so the code isn't published anywhere yet).

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