GSoC linii proposal

IRC

linii

Questionnaire

1) Basics
1.1) Write a small introduction to yourself.

Hi! I'm Lining from the USA and I'm excited to be submitting a proposal for Wesnoth. I come from somewhat of an interdisciplinary background--I like creating art as well as coding, and being part of a game dev team is one of my life goals. :)

1.2) State your preferred email address.

lining.wang@yale.edu

1.3) If you have chosen a nick for IRC and Wesnoth forums, what is it?

linii

1.4) Why do you want to participate in summer of code?

I want to improve my coding skills and immerse myself in open source software development.

1.5) What are you studying, subject, level and school?

I'm a rising second-year student at Yale University, studying computer science.

1.6) What country are you from, at what time are you most likely to be able to join IRC?

I'm from the U.S., and I'll be free anytime between 10 AM and 10PM EST.

1.7) Do you have other commitments for the summer period ? Do you plan to take any vacations ? If yes, when.

Short vacation at end of May. May also be working on a side cryptography project.

2) Experience
2.1) What programs/software have you worked on before?

I'm currently working at the Distributed Systems lab at Yale, on the Cryptobook project (an app which stops the flow of information between a social networking site and a cross-authentication site). I hope to develop a cryptographical method to defend against cross-site correlation attacks. I've made or conceptualized several video game projects. The one which involved coding was made in ren.py (a visual novel engine), which was a python variant. Other programs I've made include an astrophysics data analyzer which determined the orbital elements of an near earth asteroid from observational images (ask for source code if you're interested!), and small sorting programs.

2.2) Have you developed software in a team environment before? (As opposed to hacking on something on your own)

Sort of--started working on a social media app called Locus for Y-Hack (Yale's hackathon).

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 have not participated in GSoC before.

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, I am not.

2.5) Gaming experience - Are you a gamer?

Yes.

2.5.1) What type of gamer are you?

ALL THE GAMES! I guess I'm somewhere between casual and hardcore now that I have a lot of college work to deal with. I play video games not only to relax, but to experience another world & expand my perspective. I love games, and as an art form, I think they have a lot of potential.

2.5.2) What type of games?

I like RPG's/ story-focused games, such as Portal, BioShock, and Gone Home. A bit of strategy is good too.

2.5.3) What type of opponents do you prefer?

Ones that don't merely need good reaction-time to defeat. Hopefully there's a puzzle or other skills (verbal persuasion) involved.

2.5.4) Are you more interested in story or gameplay?

Both? I think one complements the other. The story is what ends up making the player feel something, though, and thus has the most impact, though gameplay can also evolve to be very original.

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. No, not yet.

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 repository (during the evaluation period or earlier) please state so.

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.

I have excellent verbal and written skills in English.

3.2) What spoken languages are you fluent in?

English and Mandarin.

3.3) Are you good at interacting with other players? Our developer community is friendly, but the player community can be a bit rough. 3.4) Do you give constructive advice? 3.5) Do you receive advice well? 3.6) Are you good at sorting useful criticisms from useless ones? 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

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? 4.2) If you have invented your own project, please describe the project and the scope. 4.3) Why did you choose this project? 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". 4.5) Include as much technical detail about your implementation as you can 4.6) What do you expect to gain from this project? 4.7) What would make you stay in the Wesnoth community after the conclusion of SOC?

5) Practical considerations

5.1) Are you familiar with any of the following tools or languages?

Git (used for all commits) Yes C++ (language used for all the normal source code) Yes STL, Boost, Sdl (C++ libraries used by Wesnoth) No Python (optional, mainly used for tools) Yes build environments (eg cmake/scons) No WML (the wesnoth specific scenario language) No Lua (used in combination with WML to create scenarios) Not really--I know Scheme, a variant.

5.2) Which tools do you normally use for development? Why do you use them?

5.3) What programming languages are you fluent in?

C/C++, Java, Python

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.

Nope! Would love to.