User:Tschmitz
| This page is related to Summer of Code 2011 |
| See the list of Summer of Code 2011 Ideas |
| This is a Summer of Code 2011 student page |
| Project: SoC_Ideas_Whiteboard_2011 |
Description
Tommy Schmitz - Whiteboard Improvements
The Wesnoth whiteboard system is currently unfinished and requires both debugging and additional features. The proposed project will address these, building on Gabba's foundation and polishing off the whiteboard system once and for all.
Timeline
- Familiarize myself with the project.
IRC
tschmitz
Questionnaire
1) Basics
1.1) Write a small introduction to yourself. My name is Tommy Schmitz. My legal name is, of course, Thomas, but everyone has always called me Tommy and I have never found any reason to change that, so I'm known as Tommy. I have been a code-tinkerer all my life, but this will be my first time working with other programmers.
1.2) State your preferred email address. tschmitz.wesnoth@gmail.com
1.3) If you have chosen a nick for IRC and Wesnoth forums, what is it? tschmitz
1.4) Why do you want to participate in summer of code? I really want to finally get some experience working on a group project. I was drawn to the Battle for Wesnoth project because it was one of the few that I recognized from the list of participating organizations. I played Wesnoth around two years ago and was surprised to see the name again!
1.5) What are you studying, subject, level and school? I am working toward a bachelor's degree in computer science and mathematics.
1.6) What country are you from, at what time are you most likely to be able to join IRC? I'm from the United States and I have already joined IRC.
1.7) Do you have other commitments for the summer period ? Do you plan to take any vacations ? If yes, when. My intent for the summer is to take on this project exclusively; I have planned no vacations.
2) Experience
2.1) What programs/software have you worked on before? Aside from command line programs for school, I have mainly worked on small independent projects of my own with the hopes of refining and expanding my game-development tool kit. My most polished project was a Tetris clone implemented as a Java applet.
2.2) Have you developed software in a team environment before? (As opposed to hacking on something on your own) No, but this is something I very much look forward to doing!
2.3) Have you participated to the Google Summer of Code before? As a mentor or a student? In what project? Were you successful? If not, why? No, I didn't hear about the Summer of Code until recently. This is my first time applying!
2.4) Are you already involved with any open source development projects? If yes, please describe the project and the scope of your involvement. No, this will be my first experience.
2.5) Gaming experience - Are you a gamer? Yes.
2.5.1) What type of gamer are you? These days, I only play games when I have spare time, but when I do, I go all out.
2.5.2) What type of games? Platformers are my favorite. I like turn-based strategy games a lot too, though, because it both requires and allows thinking deeply to succeed.
2.5.3) What type of opponents do you prefer? Computer opponents. I prefer to cooperate with my friends rather than compete with them.
2.5.4) Are you more interested in story or gameplay? I very much enjoy both.
2.5.5) Have you played Wesnoth? If so, tell us roughly for how long and whether you lean towards single player or multiplayer.
We do not plan to favor Wesnoth players as such, but some particular projects require a good feeling for the game which is hard to get without having played intensively. I played for a few months and I liked single player, multiplayer, and also making custom content. I tended to prefer playing multiplayer games with my friends.
2.6) If you have contributed any patches to Wesnoth, please list them below. You can also list patches that have been submitted but not committed yet and patches that have not been specifically written for GSoC. If you have gained commit access to our SVN (during the evaluation period or earlier) please state so. None just yet, and I do not yet have commit access.
3) Communication skills
3.1) Though most of our developers are not native English speakers, English is the project's working language. Describe your fluency level in written English. My fluency will be sufficient to communicate with the other collaborators on this project. As a programmer and mathematician, I have excellent attention to detail, which includes the details of English communication (such as grammar).
3.2) What spoken languages are you fluent in? English.
3.3) Are you good at interacting with other players? Our developer community is friendly, but the player community can be a bit rough. In the past, I have played multiplayer games fairly extensively and should fit right in.
3.4) Do you give constructive advice? I do my best to evaluate others' work with the courtesy that I like to have from others.
3.5) Do you receive advice well? Again, I do my best; when receiving advice, I try to focus on the content of the criticism and keep my ego out of the picture.
3.6) Are you good at sorting useful criticisms from useless ones? Once more, I do the best I can -- if someone offers me critique that lacks specificity, I'll ask for clarification. If it's clearly hostile, I'll simply ignore it.
3.7) How autonomous are you when developing ? Would you rather discuss intensively changes and not start coding until you know what you want to do or would you rather code a proof of concept to "see how it turn out", taking the risk of having it thrown away if it doesn't match what the project want I lean toward having discussions to clarify details as much as possible, but if I can't gain an audience, I'll focus on the parts I'm most comfortable with until I can get my questions answered.
4) Project
4.1) Did you select a project from our list? If that is the case, what project did you select? What do you want to especially concentrate on? I picked the whiteboard project mainly because it has no other takers yet, but I think it is a good fit for me because I enjoy collaborative multiplayer games and careful planning and the whiteboard is designed for exactly those purposes. I'm also interested in getting some experience in network programming, and the whiteboard project will have elements of that.
4.2) If you have invented your own project, please describe the project and the scope. I have not.
4.3) Why did you choose this project? For the reasons above, I think that it is a good fit for me and that I will learn a lot doing it.
4.4) Include an estimated timeline for your work on the project. Don't forget to mention special things like "I booked holidays between A and B" and "I got an exam at ABC and won't be doing much then". See the top of this page.
4.5) Include as much technical detail about your implementation as you can Again, see the top of this page.
4.6) What do you expect to gain from this project? This should be a good opportunity for me not only to learn technical skills, but also to experience the dynamic of creating a software project collaboratively.
4.7) What would make you stay in the Wesnoth community after the conclusion of SOC? It's going to be a lot of fun!
5) Practical considerations
5.1) Are you familiar with any of the following tools or languages?
Subversion (used for all commits)
C++ (language used for all the normal source code)
STL, Boost, Sdl (C++ libraries used by Wesnoth)
Python (optional, mainly used for tools)
build environments (eg cmake/scons)
WML (the wesnoth specific scenario language)
Lua (used in combination with WML to create scenarios)
I haven't used SVN much, but I have been introduced to it before and it seems relatively straightforward.
I am quite familiar with C++ and the STL from my programming classes and a few personal projects.
I used WML for a while two years ago, so I'm sure I'll be able to pick it up again fairly quickly.
Unfortunately, I can't say I have had any experience with Boost, Sdl, Python, cmake/scons, or Lua.
5.2) Which tools do you normally use for development? Why do you use them? For my programming classes, we have mainly used the university Unix system to write command line utilities in various languages (C, C++, Java, and Perl in my case). We used "gcc" to compile C++ code, "make" to write build scripts, and RCS for version control. When writing computational tools, I often use the university system since it is nicely set up for me already. More recently, I began to write Java applets, using Sun's compiler and appletviewer and Windows batch files for build scripts, to make graphical applications, mainly because applets are easy to deploy on the web. I usually use Notepad or Pico as text editors, but I have also used Visual C++ for projects from time to time.
5.3) What programming languages are you fluent in? My best are C++, Java, and Matlab. I have also tinkered with HTML, Javascript, PHP, and Perl.
5.4) Would you mind talking with your mentor on telephone / internet phone? We would like to have a backup way for communications for the case that somehow emails and IRC do fail. If you are willing to do so, please do list a phone number (including international code) so that we are able to contact you. You should probably *only* add this number in the application for you submit to google since the info in the wiki is available in public. We will *not* make any use of your number unless some case of "there is no way to contact you" does arise! I certainly would not mind!