The Battle for Wesnoth Wiki - User contributions [en]

SoC Information for Google

2015-02-20T19:14:30Z

Noy:

{{Template:SoC2015}}

== SoC Information for Google ==
This is the information that we submit to google as Application in Summer of Code (current status: 2015). The submitter automatically becomes primary Admin. Most entries are mandatory and have to be filled out before the application can be submitted.

=== First page of questions ===

==== Organization id* ====
wesnoth

==== Organization Name* ====
Battle for Wesnoth

==== Description* ====
<code type="html">
Battle for Wesnoth, or simply Wesnoth, is a Free, turn-based strategy game with a high-fantasy theme that was designed in June 2003 by David White (Sirp).
Although the core rules are fairly simple and meant to be easily learned[1], they provide interesting gameplay and rich tactical options. A major strength of the project is the Wesnoth Markup Language (WML) for writing scenarios. Programming skills are not required to compose with it, and a large WML-modding community has generated a vast amount of user-maintained content. We polish the best of this content and lift it into our official release tree.
The first stable release (1.0) was on October 2, 2005, and the latest stable release (1.10.7) happened in August 2013. Version 1.10 was released in January 2012, while the current development branch is at version 1.11.9, released at the beginning of February 2014. We are currently working towards another stable release which should be out in Q2 2014.
Wesnoth is one of the most successful open-source game projects in existence, with an exceptionally large developer base and user community:
<ul>
<li>We support two multiplayer game servers (stable and development) with a usual minimum load of more than a hundred players</li>
<li>More than a thousand downloads a day</li>
<li>more than 6 million downloads via SourceForge; many more via various mirrors of Linux distributions</li>
<li>Game of the year 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 at LinuxQuestions.org[2][3]</li>
<li>In general, Wesnoth tends to show up in the first or second position whenever anyone compiles a list of top open-source games</li>
</ul>
Wesnoth's most notable features include:
<ul>
<li>A mature project with continuing active development and frequent improvements after 10 years of development</li>
<li>High quality artwork: both original graphics and music</li>
<li>Well-balanced by a tireless team of playtesters</li>
<li>Fun, unique gameplay</li>
<li>Even after a decade of development and a very solid, fun product already created, there are still plenty of new developers</li>
<li>Strong support of internationalization with many supported languages, thus experience in working with non-native English speakers. In fact, more than half of our developers are not native English speakers.</li>
</ul>
For our Ideas page, please have a look at [4]. There you can find all information required to get you started working on Wesnoth.
[1] http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy 
[2] http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/ 
[3] http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/ 
[4] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas
</code>

==== Tags ====
ai_development, ai, artificial_intelligence, lua, multiplayer, game_development, c++, game_engine, game, games, graphics, server, scripting, extensibility

==== Main license* ====
GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2) [Dropdown box answer!]

==== Logo URL ====
https://raw.github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth-old/master/icons/wesnoth-icon.png

==== Ideas list* ====
http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas

==== Mailing list ====
wesnoth-dev@gna.org

==== Organization website* ====
http://www.wesnoth.org/

==== IRC Channel ====
#wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net

==== Feed URL ====
[left empty]

==== Google+ URL ====
[left empty]

==== Twitter URL ====
[left empty]

==== Blog page ====
[left empty]

==== Facebook URL ====
[left empty]

==== Backup administrator* ====
Ivanovic

==== Checkboxes ====
===== Veteran organization =====
Checked

===== I hereby declare that the applying organization is not located in any of the countries which are not eligible to participate in the program: Iran, Syria, Cuba, Sudan, North Korea and Myanmar (Burma).* =====
Checked

=== Second page of questions ===

==== Why is your organization applying to participate in Google Summer of Code 2014? What do you hope to gain by participating?* ====
Most of our developers have particular areas of interest in which they work. Though they are efficient in their areas, there are other, presently uncovered, areas of the code with a need for improvements but a high barrier to entry for casual contributors. By bringing new people in and allowing them to be actively responsible for an area of code, we hope to kickstart work in these areas and others that are lagging behind. Our previous SoC experience shows that a motivated, full-time, student can be brought up to date in any area fairly quickly. Our previous experiences has shown us that SoC developers tend to stay after the end of the Summer of Code and become valuable members of our community. Finally, we feel that it is part of our mandate is to provide a platform for motivated contributors to develop their skills in a positive learning environment.

Overall GSOC has been a win for all parties and we want it to continue in the future.

==== How many potential mentors do you have for this year's program? What criteria did you use to select them?* ====
This year 5 developers stepped up stating they would be willing to mentor. Not all of them will be able to handle a student singlehandedly, but applying some cooperation concepts we will make sure that our students never feel left alone.

Our first criterion for mentor selection was that all the people had to be volunteers. According to other open source projects and our experience from the last six years, being a SoC mentor takes a lot of time and the person has to be ready to spend quite some time with the student.

AI has been a long term contributor and developer who now wants to take responsibility for a student. He is one of our resident lua experts and also handles several tasks reaching over into automated testing and building.

Iurii Chernyi (Crab) has joined the team in 2009, taking part in Google Summer of Code 2009, and staying with the project as a developer after successful completion of GSoC. He's an expert on all aspects of current Wesnoth AI codebase (having fully reorganized it as part of GSoC 2009), and has fixed numerous bugs all over Wesnoth. He was a GSoC mentor 2010, 2011 and 2012. In 2011 he was a GCI mentor and administrator. He is experienced in teaching other people, in areas like programming languages and math.

Mordante is one of the most active developers on our IRC channel. Not only has he done preliminary studies and coding in multiple areas that are candidates for Summer of Code ideas, he also is one of the coders with the best overview of the Wesnoth code. A large part of his work involves refactoring and polishing existing code. Next to that he's very active with fixing bugs which leads him to all areas in the code base. He is currently completing a rewrite of the Wesnoth GUI library, making all windows configurable through WML. This should make it easier to use Wesnoth on different resolutions, from small handheld devices to large 30 inch screens. Mordante has been a GSoC mentor for Wesnoth since 2008.

Thunderstruck was a student in GSoC 2013 and stayed around to improve the game. During our regular meeting at FOSDEM he stated that he will try to find time during the summer to help students work on the games backend. Based on his GSoC contribution he has become an expert in our engines internal workings reducing the differences between singleplayer and multiplayer content.

Trademark is another of our GSoC 2013 students who intends to stay an active developer. He wants to push the development of our Add-On server to the next level introducing new concepts and ideas. One of these ideas is the move to C++11 and using some highly specialized libs to create a sound basis for one of the highlights Wesnoth features, the easy availability of user created content.

All other developers listed in the ideas page are the leading capacities we do have for the respecting areas. Have a look at our list of "people who to contact" [1] for an easy reference. In general all our developers will mentor all students. That is, questions should just be asked in our IRC channel, where basically every developer who has an idea can and will directly answer.

When choosing the mentors, we have kept in mind that most developers can answer most technical questions, and we have chosen people that are well known for interacting with new-comers/external developers and can provide general guidance and design advice, more than people with specific technical knowledge.

[3] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SoC_People_to_bug_on_IRC

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?* ====
The first thing to do is to avoid this situation altogether. The key is identifying candidates with the right mix of skills and temperament. Wesnoth is a game, and as such has lots of developers that are not coders. In particular, artists are well known in the Wesnoth community for being very sensitive about criticism and our community is used to people being sensitive to critics.

We try to choose students that accept criticism and are able to filter constructive criticism from useless one. The Wesnoth developer community is used to judging people according to these criteria and the special title we are going to give to applicants will allow us to easily spot any such problems and discuss them before they grow out of control.

If a student disappears, their mentor are in charge of reconnecting the student to see what is going wrong (available time, tension with other developers, with members of the community etc...). Depending on the actual problem, the mentor and the student will have to agree on possible ways to resolve the problem.

If a student disappears completely and there is no way to get back to them, there is little the project can do except salvaging whatever can be salvaged from the code (the students will have repository write access, so most of the work will be committed either to trunk or to a specific branch) and find a core developer to take on the job. This will probably be slower and less effective for the project, but it's the best we can do.

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?* ====
Most of our mentors are long time developers that volunteered for the job, so we don't expect that to happen. We observed in during the last years the amount of time required to mentor, and our mentors accepted the job knowing the amount of work it involved. Most of this years mentors mentored last year as well, most have contributed since 2008, or been organizational admins.

However, should it happen, we would continue to mentor as a developer community the student until we find a new "official" mentor to take on the job.

==== What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before and during the program?* ====
Wesnoth has a particularly healthy community, both for developers and for players.

Our general policy regarding new coders has always been "two (non trival) patches... you're in". With other words, anybody that is able to get two non-trivial patches applied is offered commit privileges.
We have a developer responsible for applying patches and guiding new developers into our community. This is a well known and effective process we plan to apply to students, directing them to our EasyCoding pages [1] (these projects are usually a couple of hours long and hve been chosen to provide easy access to the respective area of code). This year, we also have added some simple coding tasks directly related to our GSoC ideas to be able to test students more specifically on their future project

Usually, patches go back and forth a couple of times, to make sure that all secondary things are in place (indenting, coding style, modified buildfiles etc.) The idea is that coder education should take place before the coder gets commit rights, but that getting new coder in is one of the most important things to keep our project alive.

If the student is proactive and ready to join IRC, all the developers are usually very welcoming, and good at directing newcomers to quickly give useful results.

In previous years, all students that were accepted (and a couple more) managed to have commit access before the start of the coding phase. We consider that this policy was successful and we plan to keep it this year.

We also plan to give a special forum title to any students. This will allow all forum members to tell them apart from normal users and give them read/write access to the developer only forums. This will also allow us to quickly spot any problem they might have interacting with the player community. We have a very mature developer community, but our player community is made of all sort of people of all age and education, and it can sometimes be rough.

Last, our experience from previous years is that students that participate in the community during the evaluation period will stay active in the community after that period. In previous years this has been a discriminating criterias for students of similar level, and overall we never had problems of students working "behind a black wall." Our selection process tend to favor students who participate, and participation hasn't been a problem so far.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/EasyCoding

==== What will you do to encourage your accepted students to stick with the project after Google Summer of Code concludes?* ====
The steps meant to involve the students in the community are the same steps we use to make it easy and rewarding to stay with the community even after Summer of Code is over. We really try to make students feel part of the community, particularly as equal developers, rather than just students working a summer job. This, we think, make them feel empowered, and want to remain an important part of the community.

==== Are you a new organization who has a Googler or other organization to vouch for you? If so, please list their name(s) here. ====
[left empty]

==== Are you an established or larger organization who would like to vouch for a new organization applying this year? If so, please list their name(s) here. ====
[left empty]

Since 2008 we have participated in 5 years of GSOC, with good results. With the exception of our first year, we pass approximately 75% of our students, and usually get some really interesting code from them.

2008 results: Wesnoth participated in GSoC 2008 with four students. Out of these, two were great successes (that is they became full-fledge developers before the actual start of GSoC), did huge improvement during GSoC (A new recruitment algorithm for the AI and the basic structure for a new map editor, the student finished this work after the summer), and are still active developers in the Wesnoth community, even after 5 years. Two others eventually failed, but we learned from them that while great students should be left on their own, average students should be monitored much more closely than we did. If things seems to start to go wrong, it's important to react very quick, to meet with other mentors and get things back on track early.
Timezone problems were also a serious barrier for student/mentor communication, and we will take that more into account when pairing mentors and students.
For our other students, multiple problems collectively led to failure:
We should enforce IRC communication, E-mail is a barrier. This applies both for students and mentors. Both should be on IRC several hours a day, with overlapping hours.
We should be more strict about mid-term evaluation. If the student is slightly lacking at mid-term we should give a clear message that he needs to get back on track.
2009 results: In 2009 we mentored 6 students as part of Summer of Code. Out of these 5 projects were a success. From those 5 developers 3 are still part of our core development group and still maintain and improve the work they submitted as part of Summer of Code. One of the students even became the "head" of our AI development department and mentored a student this year. For a summary of the 2009 results have a look at [1].
2010 results: In 2010 we mentored 4 students as part of Summer of Code, all the projects were a success. from those 4 developers, 1 is still part of our code development team and maintains the work he has done as part of Summer of Code.
2011 results: In 2011 we mentored 5 students, with four of those successfully completed their projects. Some continued the work polishing their projects a little further even after GSoC, one continues to actively polish his work and just released a new version of his WML Editor.
2012 results: In 2012 we mentored five students with four of them completing their project successfully. Most were from a set list of ideas provided by the project, which were aimed at fixing or updating parts of the code that never seemed to get fixed.
2013 results: In 2013 we mentored three students, all of them completing their project successfully. The projects centered around unification of singleplayer and multiplayer content, work on recreating the add-on server as well as improvements for our AI to ensure units are recruited smartly.
2014 results: We had three passes, which included a very difficult improvement of AI programming, and moderately difficult SDL2 transition and unifying single and multiplayer code paths. Our failures was a sprite sheet programming and improving the user made content daemon. These two failures showed similar difficulties, where the deliverables were not met according to deadlines, despite very good initial discussions.

[1] http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=26955

2008: 2/4 2009: 5/6 2010: 4/4 2011: 4/5 2012: 4/5 2013: 3/3 2015: 3/5

==== If you are a new organization, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)? ====
[left empty]

==== Is there anything else we should know or you'd like to tell us that doesn't fit anywhere else on the application? ====
[left empty]

=== Old questions and answers ===

== Application template ==
This template is no longer asked for during the initial application. Listing it here so that we can still reference it later on.

==== Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? ====

Students wishing to participate in GSoC should copy the questions below to a new page and fill it with the answers.

Please note that we generally plan to meet potential students through our IRC channel. So beside just answering these questions, potential candidates consider visiting us in IRC: #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net. This is where most of our work takes place and participating in IRC is mandatory for GSoC students participating with Wesnoth. Our experience is that this is the easiest way to communicate and solve problems that come up.

1) Basics

1.1) Write a small introduction to yourself.

1.2) State your preferred email address.

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

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

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

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

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

2) Experience

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

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

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?

2.4) Are you already involved with any open source development projects? If yes, please describe the project and the scope of your involvement.

2.5) Gaming experience - Are you a gamer?

2.5.1) What type of gamer are you?

2.5.2) What type of games?

2.5.3) What type of opponents do you prefer?

2.5.4) Are you more interested in story or gameplay?

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.

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.

3.2) What spoken languages are you fluent in?

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)
* 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)

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

5.3) What programming languages are you fluent in?

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!

In general, students should be as verbose as possible in their answers and feel free to elaborate.

SoC Information for Google

2015-02-20T19:14:07Z

Noy: /* SoC Information for Google */

{{Template:SoC2014}}

== SoC Information for Google ==
This is the information that we submit to google as Application in Summer of Code (current status: 2015). The submitter automatically becomes primary Admin. Most entries are mandatory and have to be filled out before the application can be submitted.

=== First page of questions ===

==== Organization id* ====
wesnoth

==== Organization Name* ====
Battle for Wesnoth

==== Description* ====
<code type="html">
Battle for Wesnoth, or simply Wesnoth, is a Free, turn-based strategy game with a high-fantasy theme that was designed in June 2003 by David White (Sirp).
Although the core rules are fairly simple and meant to be easily learned[1], they provide interesting gameplay and rich tactical options. A major strength of the project is the Wesnoth Markup Language (WML) for writing scenarios. Programming skills are not required to compose with it, and a large WML-modding community has generated a vast amount of user-maintained content. We polish the best of this content and lift it into our official release tree.
The first stable release (1.0) was on October 2, 2005, and the latest stable release (1.10.7) happened in August 2013. Version 1.10 was released in January 2012, while the current development branch is at version 1.11.9, released at the beginning of February 2014. We are currently working towards another stable release which should be out in Q2 2014.
Wesnoth is one of the most successful open-source game projects in existence, with an exceptionally large developer base and user community:
<ul>
<li>We support two multiplayer game servers (stable and development) with a usual minimum load of more than a hundred players</li>
<li>More than a thousand downloads a day</li>
<li>more than 6 million downloads via SourceForge; many more via various mirrors of Linux distributions</li>
<li>Game of the year 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 at LinuxQuestions.org[2][3]</li>
<li>In general, Wesnoth tends to show up in the first or second position whenever anyone compiles a list of top open-source games</li>
</ul>
Wesnoth's most notable features include:
<ul>
<li>A mature project with continuing active development and frequent improvements after 10 years of development</li>
<li>High quality artwork: both original graphics and music</li>
<li>Well-balanced by a tireless team of playtesters</li>
<li>Fun, unique gameplay</li>
<li>Even after a decade of development and a very solid, fun product already created, there are still plenty of new developers</li>
<li>Strong support of internationalization with many supported languages, thus experience in working with non-native English speakers. In fact, more than half of our developers are not native English speakers.</li>
</ul>
For our Ideas page, please have a look at [4]. There you can find all information required to get you started working on Wesnoth.
[1] http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy 
[2] http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/ 
[3] http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/ 
[4] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas
</code>

==== Tags ====
ai_development, ai, artificial_intelligence, lua, multiplayer, game_development, c++, game_engine, game, games, graphics, server, scripting, extensibility

==== Main license* ====
GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2) [Dropdown box answer!]

==== Logo URL ====
https://raw.github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth-old/master/icons/wesnoth-icon.png

==== Ideas list* ====
http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas

==== Mailing list ====
wesnoth-dev@gna.org

==== Organization website* ====
http://www.wesnoth.org/

==== IRC Channel ====
#wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net

==== Feed URL ====
[left empty]

==== Google+ URL ====
[left empty]

==== Twitter URL ====
[left empty]

==== Blog page ====
[left empty]

==== Facebook URL ====
[left empty]

==== Backup administrator* ====
Ivanovic

==== Checkboxes ====
===== Veteran organization =====
Checked

===== I hereby declare that the applying organization is not located in any of the countries which are not eligible to participate in the program: Iran, Syria, Cuba, Sudan, North Korea and Myanmar (Burma).* =====
Checked

=== Second page of questions ===

==== Why is your organization applying to participate in Google Summer of Code 2014? What do you hope to gain by participating?* ====
Most of our developers have particular areas of interest in which they work. Though they are efficient in their areas, there are other, presently uncovered, areas of the code with a need for improvements but a high barrier to entry for casual contributors. By bringing new people in and allowing them to be actively responsible for an area of code, we hope to kickstart work in these areas and others that are lagging behind. Our previous SoC experience shows that a motivated, full-time, student can be brought up to date in any area fairly quickly. Our previous experiences has shown us that SoC developers tend to stay after the end of the Summer of Code and become valuable members of our community. Finally, we feel that it is part of our mandate is to provide a platform for motivated contributors to develop their skills in a positive learning environment.

Overall GSOC has been a win for all parties and we want it to continue in the future.

==== How many potential mentors do you have for this year's program? What criteria did you use to select them?* ====
This year 5 developers stepped up stating they would be willing to mentor. Not all of them will be able to handle a student singlehandedly, but applying some cooperation concepts we will make sure that our students never feel left alone.

Our first criterion for mentor selection was that all the people had to be volunteers. According to other open source projects and our experience from the last six years, being a SoC mentor takes a lot of time and the person has to be ready to spend quite some time with the student.

AI has been a long term contributor and developer who now wants to take responsibility for a student. He is one of our resident lua experts and also handles several tasks reaching over into automated testing and building.

Iurii Chernyi (Crab) has joined the team in 2009, taking part in Google Summer of Code 2009, and staying with the project as a developer after successful completion of GSoC. He's an expert on all aspects of current Wesnoth AI codebase (having fully reorganized it as part of GSoC 2009), and has fixed numerous bugs all over Wesnoth. He was a GSoC mentor 2010, 2011 and 2012. In 2011 he was a GCI mentor and administrator. He is experienced in teaching other people, in areas like programming languages and math.

Mordante is one of the most active developers on our IRC channel. Not only has he done preliminary studies and coding in multiple areas that are candidates for Summer of Code ideas, he also is one of the coders with the best overview of the Wesnoth code. A large part of his work involves refactoring and polishing existing code. Next to that he's very active with fixing bugs which leads him to all areas in the code base. He is currently completing a rewrite of the Wesnoth GUI library, making all windows configurable through WML. This should make it easier to use Wesnoth on different resolutions, from small handheld devices to large 30 inch screens. Mordante has been a GSoC mentor for Wesnoth since 2008.

Thunderstruck was a student in GSoC 2013 and stayed around to improve the game. During our regular meeting at FOSDEM he stated that he will try to find time during the summer to help students work on the games backend. Based on his GSoC contribution he has become an expert in our engines internal workings reducing the differences between singleplayer and multiplayer content.

Trademark is another of our GSoC 2013 students who intends to stay an active developer. He wants to push the development of our Add-On server to the next level introducing new concepts and ideas. One of these ideas is the move to C++11 and using some highly specialized libs to create a sound basis for one of the highlights Wesnoth features, the easy availability of user created content.

All other developers listed in the ideas page are the leading capacities we do have for the respecting areas. Have a look at our list of "people who to contact" [1] for an easy reference. In general all our developers will mentor all students. That is, questions should just be asked in our IRC channel, where basically every developer who has an idea can and will directly answer.

When choosing the mentors, we have kept in mind that most developers can answer most technical questions, and we have chosen people that are well known for interacting with new-comers/external developers and can provide general guidance and design advice, more than people with specific technical knowledge.

[3] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SoC_People_to_bug_on_IRC

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?* ====
The first thing to do is to avoid this situation altogether. The key is identifying candidates with the right mix of skills and temperament. Wesnoth is a game, and as such has lots of developers that are not coders. In particular, artists are well known in the Wesnoth community for being very sensitive about criticism and our community is used to people being sensitive to critics.

We try to choose students that accept criticism and are able to filter constructive criticism from useless one. The Wesnoth developer community is used to judging people according to these criteria and the special title we are going to give to applicants will allow us to easily spot any such problems and discuss them before they grow out of control.

If a student disappears, their mentor are in charge of reconnecting the student to see what is going wrong (available time, tension with other developers, with members of the community etc...). Depending on the actual problem, the mentor and the student will have to agree on possible ways to resolve the problem.

If a student disappears completely and there is no way to get back to them, there is little the project can do except salvaging whatever can be salvaged from the code (the students will have repository write access, so most of the work will be committed either to trunk or to a specific branch) and find a core developer to take on the job. This will probably be slower and less effective for the project, but it's the best we can do.

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?* ====
Most of our mentors are long time developers that volunteered for the job, so we don't expect that to happen. We observed in during the last years the amount of time required to mentor, and our mentors accepted the job knowing the amount of work it involved. Most of this years mentors mentored last year as well, most have contributed since 2008, or been organizational admins.

However, should it happen, we would continue to mentor as a developer community the student until we find a new "official" mentor to take on the job.

==== What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before and during the program?* ====
Wesnoth has a particularly healthy community, both for developers and for players.

Our general policy regarding new coders has always been "two (non trival) patches... you're in". With other words, anybody that is able to get two non-trivial patches applied is offered commit privileges.
We have a developer responsible for applying patches and guiding new developers into our community. This is a well known and effective process we plan to apply to students, directing them to our EasyCoding pages [1] (these projects are usually a couple of hours long and hve been chosen to provide easy access to the respective area of code). This year, we also have added some simple coding tasks directly related to our GSoC ideas to be able to test students more specifically on their future project

Usually, patches go back and forth a couple of times, to make sure that all secondary things are in place (indenting, coding style, modified buildfiles etc.) The idea is that coder education should take place before the coder gets commit rights, but that getting new coder in is one of the most important things to keep our project alive.

If the student is proactive and ready to join IRC, all the developers are usually very welcoming, and good at directing newcomers to quickly give useful results.

In previous years, all students that were accepted (and a couple more) managed to have commit access before the start of the coding phase. We consider that this policy was successful and we plan to keep it this year.

We also plan to give a special forum title to any students. This will allow all forum members to tell them apart from normal users and give them read/write access to the developer only forums. This will also allow us to quickly spot any problem they might have interacting with the player community. We have a very mature developer community, but our player community is made of all sort of people of all age and education, and it can sometimes be rough.

Last, our experience from previous years is that students that participate in the community during the evaluation period will stay active in the community after that period. In previous years this has been a discriminating criterias for students of similar level, and overall we never had problems of students working "behind a black wall." Our selection process tend to favor students who participate, and participation hasn't been a problem so far.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/EasyCoding

==== What will you do to encourage your accepted students to stick with the project after Google Summer of Code concludes?* ====
The steps meant to involve the students in the community are the same steps we use to make it easy and rewarding to stay with the community even after Summer of Code is over. We really try to make students feel part of the community, particularly as equal developers, rather than just students working a summer job. This, we think, make them feel empowered, and want to remain an important part of the community.

==== Are you a new organization who has a Googler or other organization to vouch for you? If so, please list their name(s) here. ====
[left empty]

==== Are you an established or larger organization who would like to vouch for a new organization applying this year? If so, please list their name(s) here. ====
[left empty]

Since 2008 we have participated in 5 years of GSOC, with good results. With the exception of our first year, we pass approximately 75% of our students, and usually get some really interesting code from them.

2008 results: Wesnoth participated in GSoC 2008 with four students. Out of these, two were great successes (that is they became full-fledge developers before the actual start of GSoC), did huge improvement during GSoC (A new recruitment algorithm for the AI and the basic structure for a new map editor, the student finished this work after the summer), and are still active developers in the Wesnoth community, even after 5 years. Two others eventually failed, but we learned from them that while great students should be left on their own, average students should be monitored much more closely than we did. If things seems to start to go wrong, it's important to react very quick, to meet with other mentors and get things back on track early.
Timezone problems were also a serious barrier for student/mentor communication, and we will take that more into account when pairing mentors and students.
For our other students, multiple problems collectively led to failure:
We should enforce IRC communication, E-mail is a barrier. This applies both for students and mentors. Both should be on IRC several hours a day, with overlapping hours.
We should be more strict about mid-term evaluation. If the student is slightly lacking at mid-term we should give a clear message that he needs to get back on track.
2009 results: In 2009 we mentored 6 students as part of Summer of Code. Out of these 5 projects were a success. From those 5 developers 3 are still part of our core development group and still maintain and improve the work they submitted as part of Summer of Code. One of the students even became the "head" of our AI development department and mentored a student this year. For a summary of the 2009 results have a look at [1].
2010 results: In 2010 we mentored 4 students as part of Summer of Code, all the projects were a success. from those 4 developers, 1 is still part of our code development team and maintains the work he has done as part of Summer of Code.
2011 results: In 2011 we mentored 5 students, with four of those successfully completed their projects. Some continued the work polishing their projects a little further even after GSoC, one continues to actively polish his work and just released a new version of his WML Editor.
2012 results: In 2012 we mentored five students with four of them completing their project successfully. Most were from a set list of ideas provided by the project, which were aimed at fixing or updating parts of the code that never seemed to get fixed.
2013 results: In 2013 we mentored three students, all of them completing their project successfully. The projects centered around unification of singleplayer and multiplayer content, work on recreating the add-on server as well as improvements for our AI to ensure units are recruited smartly.
2014 results: We had three passes, which included a very difficult improvement of AI programming, and moderately difficult SDL2 transition and unifying single and multiplayer code paths. Our failures was a sprite sheet programming and improving the user made content daemon. These two failures showed similar difficulties, where the deliverables were not met according to deadlines, despite very good initial discussions.

[1] http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=26955

2008: 2/4 2009: 5/6 2010: 4/4 2011: 4/5 2012: 4/5 2013: 3/3 2015: 3/5

==== If you are a new organization, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)? ====
[left empty]

==== Is there anything else we should know or you'd like to tell us that doesn't fit anywhere else on the application? ====
[left empty]

=== Old questions and answers ===

== Application template ==
This template is no longer asked for during the initial application. Listing it here so that we can still reference it later on.

==== Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? ====

Students wishing to participate in GSoC should copy the questions below to a new page and fill it with the answers.

Please note that we generally plan to meet potential students through our IRC channel. So beside just answering these questions, potential candidates consider visiting us in IRC: #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net. This is where most of our work takes place and participating in IRC is mandatory for GSoC students participating with Wesnoth. Our experience is that this is the easiest way to communicate and solve problems that come up.

1) Basics

1.1) Write a small introduction to yourself.

1.2) State your preferred email address.

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

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

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

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

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

2) Experience

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

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

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?

2.4) Are you already involved with any open source development projects? If yes, please describe the project and the scope of your involvement.

2.5) Gaming experience - Are you a gamer?

2.5.1) What type of gamer are you?

2.5.2) What type of games?

2.5.3) What type of opponents do you prefer?

2.5.4) Are you more interested in story or gameplay?

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.

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.

3.2) What spoken languages are you fluent in?

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)
* 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)

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

5.3) What programming languages are you fluent in?

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!

In general, students should be as verbose as possible in their answers and feel free to elaborate.

SoC Information for Google

2015-02-20T19:09:34Z

Noy: /* If you chose "veteran" in the organization profile dropdown, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation. Please also list your pass/fail rate for each year. */

{{Template:SoC2014}}

== SoC Information for Google ==
This is the information that we submit to google as Application in Summer of Code (current status: 2014). The submitter automatically becomes primary Admin. Most entries are mandatory and have to be filled out before the application can be submitted.

=== First page of questions ===

==== Organization id* ====
wesnoth

==== Organization Name* ====
Battle for Wesnoth

==== Description* ====
<code type="html">
Battle for Wesnoth, or simply Wesnoth, is a Free, turn-based strategy game with a high-fantasy theme that was designed in June 2003 by David White (Sirp).
Although the core rules are fairly simple and meant to be easily learned[1], they provide interesting gameplay and rich tactical options. A major strength of the project is the Wesnoth Markup Language (WML) for writing scenarios. Programming skills are not required to compose with it, and a large WML-modding community has generated a vast amount of user-maintained content. We polish the best of this content and lift it into our official release tree.
The first stable release (1.0) was on October 2, 2005, and the latest stable release (1.10.7) happened in August 2013. Version 1.10 was released in January 2012, while the current development branch is at version 1.11.9, released at the beginning of February 2014. We are currently working towards another stable release which should be out in Q2 2014.
Wesnoth is one of the most successful open-source game projects in existence, with an exceptionally large developer base and user community:
<ul>
<li>We support two multiplayer game servers (stable and development) with a usual minimum load of more than a hundred players</li>
<li>More than a thousand downloads a day</li>
<li>more than 6 million downloads via SourceForge; many more via various mirrors of Linux distributions</li>
<li>Game of the year 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 at LinuxQuestions.org[2][3]</li>
<li>In general, Wesnoth tends to show up in the first or second position whenever anyone compiles a list of top open-source games</li>
</ul>
Wesnoth's most notable features include:
<ul>
<li>A mature project with continuing active development and frequent improvements after 10 years of development</li>
<li>High quality artwork: both original graphics and music</li>
<li>Well-balanced by a tireless team of playtesters</li>
<li>Fun, unique gameplay</li>
<li>Even after a decade of development and a very solid, fun product already created, there are still plenty of new developers</li>
<li>Strong support of internationalization with many supported languages, thus experience in working with non-native English speakers. In fact, more than half of our developers are not native English speakers.</li>
</ul>
For our Ideas page, please have a look at [4]. There you can find all information required to get you started working on Wesnoth.
[1] http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy 
[2] http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/ 
[3] http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/ 
[4] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas
</code>

==== Tags ====
ai_development, ai, artificial_intelligence, lua, multiplayer, game_development, c++, game_engine, game, games, graphics, server, scripting, extensibility

==== Main license* ====
GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2) [Dropdown box answer!]

==== Logo URL ====
https://raw.github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth-old/master/icons/wesnoth-icon.png

==== Ideas list* ====
http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas

==== Mailing list ====
wesnoth-dev@gna.org

==== Organization website* ====
http://www.wesnoth.org/

==== IRC Channel ====
#wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net

==== Feed URL ====
[left empty]

==== Google+ URL ====
[left empty]

==== Twitter URL ====
[left empty]

==== Blog page ====
[left empty]

==== Facebook URL ====
[left empty]

==== Backup administrator* ====
neuhausercova

==== Checkboxes ====
===== Veteran organization =====
Checked

===== I hereby declare that the applying organization is not located in any of the countries which are not eligible to participate in the program: Iran, Syria, Cuba, Sudan, North Korea and Myanmar (Burma).* =====
Checked

=== Second page of questions ===

==== Why is your organization applying to participate in Google Summer of Code 2014? What do you hope to gain by participating?* ====
Most of our developers have particular areas of interest in which they work. Though they are efficient in their areas, there are other, presently uncovered, areas of the code with a need for improvements but a high barrier to entry for casual contributors. By bringing new people in and allowing them to be actively responsible for an area of code, we hope to kickstart work in these areas and others that are lagging behind. Our previous SoC experience shows that a motivated, full-time, student can be brought up to date in any area fairly quickly. Our previous experiences has shown us that SoC developers tend to stay after the end of the Summer of Code and become valuable members of our community. Finally, we feel that it is part of our mandate is to provide a platform for motivated contributors to develop their skills in a positive learning environment.

Overall GSOC has been a win for all parties and we want it to continue in the future.

==== How many potential mentors do you have for this year's program? What criteria did you use to select them?* ====
This year 5 developers stepped up stating they would be willing to mentor. Not all of them will be able to handle a student singlehandedly, but applying some cooperation concepts we will make sure that our students never feel left alone.

Our first criterion for mentor selection was that all the people had to be volunteers. According to other open source projects and our experience from the last six years, being a SoC mentor takes a lot of time and the person has to be ready to spend quite some time with the student.

AI has been a long term contributor and developer who now wants to take responsibility for a student. He is one of our resident lua experts and also handles several tasks reaching over into automated testing and building.

Iurii Chernyi (Crab) has joined the team in 2009, taking part in Google Summer of Code 2009, and staying with the project as a developer after successful completion of GSoC. He's an expert on all aspects of current Wesnoth AI codebase (having fully reorganized it as part of GSoC 2009), and has fixed numerous bugs all over Wesnoth. He was a GSoC mentor 2010, 2011 and 2012. In 2011 he was a GCI mentor and administrator. He is experienced in teaching other people, in areas like programming languages and math.

Mordante is one of the most active developers on our IRC channel. Not only has he done preliminary studies and coding in multiple areas that are candidates for Summer of Code ideas, he also is one of the coders with the best overview of the Wesnoth code. A large part of his work involves refactoring and polishing existing code. Next to that he's very active with fixing bugs which leads him to all areas in the code base. He is currently completing a rewrite of the Wesnoth GUI library, making all windows configurable through WML. This should make it easier to use Wesnoth on different resolutions, from small handheld devices to large 30 inch screens. Mordante has been a GSoC mentor for Wesnoth since 2008.

Thunderstruck was a student in GSoC 2013 and stayed around to improve the game. During our regular meeting at FOSDEM he stated that he will try to find time during the summer to help students work on the games backend. Based on his GSoC contribution he has become an expert in our engines internal workings reducing the differences between singleplayer and multiplayer content.

Trademark is another of our GSoC 2013 students who intends to stay an active developer. He wants to push the development of our Add-On server to the next level introducing new concepts and ideas. One of these ideas is the move to C++11 and using some highly specialized libs to create a sound basis for one of the highlights Wesnoth features, the easy availability of user created content.

All other developers listed in the ideas page are the leading capacities we do have for the respecting areas. Have a look at our list of "people who to contact" [1] for an easy reference. In general all our developers will mentor all students. That is, questions should just be asked in our IRC channel, where basically every developer who has an idea can and will directly answer.

When choosing the mentors, we have kept in mind that most developers can answer most technical questions, and we have chosen people that are well known for interacting with new-comers/external developers and can provide general guidance and design advice, more than people with specific technical knowledge.

[3] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SoC_People_to_bug_on_IRC

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?* ====
The first thing to do is to avoid this situation altogether. The key is identifying candidates with the right mix of skills and temperament. Wesnoth is a game, and as such has lots of developers that are not coders. In particular, artists are well known in the Wesnoth community for being very sensitive about criticism and our community is used to people being sensitive to critics.

We try to choose students that accept criticism and are able to filter constructive criticism from useless one. The Wesnoth developer community is used to judging people according to these criteria and the special title we are going to give to applicants will allow us to easily spot any such problems and discuss them before they grow out of control.

If a student disappears, their mentor are in charge of reconnecting the student to see what is going wrong (available time, tension with other developers, with members of the community etc...). Depending on the actual problem, the mentor and the student will have to agree on possible ways to resolve the problem.

If a student disappears completely and there is no way to get back to them, there is little the project can do except salvaging whatever can be salvaged from the code (the students will have repository write access, so most of the work will be committed either to trunk or to a specific branch) and find a core developer to take on the job. This will probably be slower and less effective for the project, but it's the best we can do.

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?* ====
Most of our mentors are long time developers that volunteered for the job, so we don't expect that to happen. We observed in during the last years the amount of time required to mentor, and our mentors accepted the job knowing the amount of work it involved. Most of this years mentors mentored last year as well, most have contributed since 2008, or been organizational admins.

However, should it happen, we would continue to mentor as a developer community the student until we find a new "official" mentor to take on the job.

==== What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before and during the program?* ====
Wesnoth has a particularly healthy community, both for developers and for players.

Our general policy regarding new coders has always been "two (non trival) patches... you're in". With other words, anybody that is able to get two non-trivial patches applied is offered commit privileges.
We have a developer responsible for applying patches and guiding new developers into our community. This is a well known and effective process we plan to apply to students, directing them to our EasyCoding pages [1] (these projects are usually a couple of hours long and hve been chosen to provide easy access to the respective area of code). This year, we also have added some simple coding tasks directly related to our GSoC ideas to be able to test students more specifically on their future project

Usually, patches go back and forth a couple of times, to make sure that all secondary things are in place (indenting, coding style, modified buildfiles etc.) The idea is that coder education should take place before the coder gets commit rights, but that getting new coder in is one of the most important things to keep our project alive.

If the student is proactive and ready to join IRC, all the developers are usually very welcoming, and good at directing newcomers to quickly give useful results.

In previous years, all students that were accepted (and a couple more) managed to have commit access before the start of the coding phase. We consider that this policy was successful and we plan to keep it this year.

We also plan to give a special forum title to any students. This will allow all forum members to tell them apart from normal users and give them read/write access to the developer only forums. This will also allow us to quickly spot any problem they might have interacting with the player community. We have a very mature developer community, but our player community is made of all sort of people of all age and education, and it can sometimes be rough.

Last, our experience from previous years is that students that participate in the community during the evaluation period will stay active in the community after that period. In previous years this has been a discriminating criterias for students of similar level, and overall we never had problems of students working "behind a black wall." Our selection process tend to favor students who participate, and participation hasn't been a problem so far.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/EasyCoding

==== What will you do to encourage your accepted students to stick with the project after Google Summer of Code concludes?* ====
The steps meant to involve the students in the community are the same steps we use to make it easy and rewarding to stay with the community even after Summer of Code is over. We really try to make students feel part of the community, particularly as equal developers, rather than just students working a summer job. This, we think, make them feel empowered, and want to remain an important part of the community.

==== Are you a new organization who has a Googler or other organization to vouch for you? If so, please list their name(s) here. ====
[left empty]

==== Are you an established or larger organization who would like to vouch for a new organization applying this year? If so, please list their name(s) here. ====
[left empty]

Since 2008 we have participated in 5 years of GSOC, with good results. With the exception of our first year, we pass approximately 75% of our students, and usually get some really interesting code from them.

2008 results: Wesnoth participated in GSoC 2008 with four students. Out of these, two were great successes (that is they became full-fledge developers before the actual start of GSoC), did huge improvement during GSoC (A new recruitment algorithm for the AI and the basic structure for a new map editor, the student finished this work after the summer), and are still active developers in the Wesnoth community, even after 5 years. Two others eventually failed, but we learned from them that while great students should be left on their own, average students should be monitored much more closely than we did. If things seems to start to go wrong, it's important to react very quick, to meet with other mentors and get things back on track early.
Timezone problems were also a serious barrier for student/mentor communication, and we will take that more into account when pairing mentors and students.
For our other students, multiple problems collectively led to failure:
We should enforce IRC communication, E-mail is a barrier. This applies both for students and mentors. Both should be on IRC several hours a day, with overlapping hours.
We should be more strict about mid-term evaluation. If the student is slightly lacking at mid-term we should give a clear message that he needs to get back on track.
2009 results: In 2009 we mentored 6 students as part of Summer of Code. Out of these 5 projects were a success. From those 5 developers 3 are still part of our core development group and still maintain and improve the work they submitted as part of Summer of Code. One of the students even became the "head" of our AI development department and mentored a student this year. For a summary of the 2009 results have a look at [1].
2010 results: In 2010 we mentored 4 students as part of Summer of Code, all the projects were a success. from those 4 developers, 1 is still part of our code development team and maintains the work he has done as part of Summer of Code.
2011 results: In 2011 we mentored 5 students, with four of those successfully completed their projects. Some continued the work polishing their projects a little further even after GSoC, one continues to actively polish his work and just released a new version of his WML Editor.
2012 results: In 2012 we mentored five students with four of them completing their project successfully. Most were from a set list of ideas provided by the project, which were aimed at fixing or updating parts of the code that never seemed to get fixed.
2013 results: In 2013 we mentored three students, all of them completing their project successfully. The projects centered around unification of singleplayer and multiplayer content, work on recreating the add-on server as well as improvements for our AI to ensure units are recruited smartly.
2014 results: We had three passes, which included a very difficult improvement of AI programming, and moderately difficult SDL2 transition and unifying single and multiplayer code paths. Our failures was a sprite sheet programming and improving the user made content daemon. These two failures showed similar difficulties, where the deliverables were not met according to deadlines, despite very good initial discussions.

[1] http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=26955

2008: 2/4 2009: 5/6 2010: 4/4 2011: 4/5 2012: 4/5 2013: 3/3 2015: 3/5

==== If you are a new organization, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)? ====
[left empty]

==== Is there anything else we should know or you'd like to tell us that doesn't fit anywhere else on the application? ====
[left empty]

=== Old questions and answers ===

== Application template ==
This template is no longer asked for during the initial application. Listing it here so that we can still reference it later on.

==== Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? ====

Students wishing to participate in GSoC should copy the questions below to a new page and fill it with the answers.

Please note that we generally plan to meet potential students through our IRC channel. So beside just answering these questions, potential candidates consider visiting us in IRC: #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net. This is where most of our work takes place and participating in IRC is mandatory for GSoC students participating with Wesnoth. Our experience is that this is the easiest way to communicate and solve problems that come up.

1) Basics

1.1) Write a small introduction to yourself.

1.2) State your preferred email address.

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

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

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

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

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

2) Experience

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

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

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?

2.4) Are you already involved with any open source development projects? If yes, please describe the project and the scope of your involvement.

2.5) Gaming experience - Are you a gamer?

2.5.1) What type of gamer are you?

2.5.2) What type of games?

2.5.3) What type of opponents do you prefer?

2.5.4) Are you more interested in story or gameplay?

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.

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.

3.2) What spoken languages are you fluent in?

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)
* 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)

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

5.3) What programming languages are you fluent in?

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!

In general, students should be as verbose as possible in their answers and feel free to elaborate.

SoC Information for Google

2013-03-29T19:00:17Z

Noy: /* Are you a new organization who has a Googler or other organization to vouch for you? If so, please list their name(s) here. */

{{Template:SoC2013}}

== SoC Information for Google ==
This is the information that we submit to google as Application in Summer of Code (current status: 2013). The submitter automatically becomes primary Admin. Most entries are mandatory and have to be filled out before the application can be submitted.

==== Organization id ====
wesnoth

==== Organization Name ====
Battle for Wesnoth

==== Organization description ====
<code type="html">
Battle for Wesnoth, or simply Wesnoth, is a free, turn-based strategy game with role-playing elements that was designed in June 2003 by David White (Sirp).
Although the core rules are fairly simple and meant to be easily learned[1], they provide interesting gameplay and rich tactical options. A major strength of the project is the Wesnoth Markup Language (WML) for writing scenarios. Programming skills are not required to compose with it, and a large WML-modding community has generated a great deal of user-maintained content. We polish the best of this content and lift it into our official release tree.
The first stable release (1.0) was on October 2, 2005, and the latest stable release (1.10.6) happened in March 2013. Version 1.10 was released in January 2012, while the current development branch is 1.11.2 that was released earlier this month. We're later in our development cycle, but there are some good projects out there that students can work on.
Wesnoth is one of the most successful open-source game projects in existence, with an exceptionally large developer base and user community:
<ul>
<li>According to Ohloh, a site that collects activity statistics on open-source projects, the ''Wesnoth'' development effort is in the top 2% of largest and most active projects</li>
<li>We support two multiplayer game servers (stable and development) with a usual minimum load of more than a hundred players</li>
<li>More than two thousand downloads a day</li>
<li>6 million downloads via SourceForge; many more via various mirrors of Linux distributions</li>
<li>Best rated game at the Linux Game Tome[2]</li>
<li>Game of the year 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2013 at LinuxQuestions.org[3][4]</li>
<li>In general, Wesnoth tends to show up in the first or second position whenever anyone compiles a list of top open-source games</li>
</ul>
Wesnoth's most notable features include:
<ul>
<li>A mature project with continuing active development and frequent improvements after 10 years of development</li>
<li>High quality artwork: both original graphics and music</li>
<li>Well-balanced by a tireless team of playtesters</li>
<li>Fun, unique gameplay</li>
<li>Even after nearly a decade of development and a very solid, fun product already created, there are still plenty of new developers; the frequency of commits to the repository is still increasing</li>
<li>Strong support of internationalization with many supported languages, thus experience in working with non-native English speakers. In fact, more than half of our developers are not native English speakers.</li>
</ul>
For our Ideas page, please have a look at [5]. There you can find all information required to get you started working on Wesnoth.
[1] <a href="http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy">http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy</a> 
[2] <a href="http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating">http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating</a> 
[3] <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/">http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/</a> 
[4] <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/">http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/</a> 
[5] <a href="http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas">http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas</a>
</code>

==== Organization home page url ====
http://www.wesnoth.org/

==== Main Organization License: ====
GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2) [Dropdown box answer!]

==== Veteran/New ====
Veteran [Dropdown box answer!]

==== Backup Admin ====
neuhausercova

==== If you chose "veteran" in the dropdown above, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation. Please also list your pass/fail rate for each year. ====

Since 2008 we have participated in 5 years of GSOC, with good results. With the exception of our first year, we pass approximately 75% of our students, and usually get some really interesting code from them.

2008 results:
Wesnoth participated in GSoC 2008 with four students. Out of these, two were great successes (that is they became full-fledge developers before the actual start of GSoC), did huge improvement during GSoC (A new recruitment algorithm for the AI and the basic structure for a new map editor, the student finished this work after the summer), and are still active developers in the Wesnoth community, even after 5 years. Two others eventually failed, but we learned from them that while great students should be left on their own, average students should be monitored much more closely than we did. If things seems to start to go wrong, it's important to react very quick, to meet with other mentors and get things back on track early.

Timezone problems were also a serious barrier for student/mentor communication, and we will take that more into account when pairing mentors and students.

For our other students, multiple problems collectively led to failure:
* We should enforce IRC communication, E-mail is a barrier. This applies both for students and mentors. Both should be on IRC several hours a day, with overlapping hours.
* We should be more strict about mid-term evaluation. If the student is slightly lacking at mid-term we should give a clear message that he needs to get back on track.

2009 results:
In 2009 we mentored 6 students as part of Summer of Code. Out of these 5 projects were a success. From those 5 developers 3 are still part of our core development group and still maintain and improve the work they submitted as part of Summer of Code. One of the students even became the "head" of our AI development department and mentored a student this year. For a summary of the 2009 results have a look at [1].

2010 results:
In 2010 we mentored 4 students as part of Summer of Code, all the projects were a success. from those 4 developers, 1 is still part of our code development team and maintains the work he has done as part of Summer of Code.

2011 results:
In 2011 we mentored 5 students, with four of those successfully completed their projects. Some continued the work polishing their projects a little further even after GSoC, one continues to actively polish his work and just released a new version of his WML Editor.

2012 results
in 2012 we mentored five students with four of them completing their project successfully. Most were from a set list of ideas provided by the project, which were aimed at fixing or updating parts of the code that never seemed to get fixed.

[1] http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=26955

2008: 2/4
2009: 5/6
2010: 4/4
2011: 4/5
2012: 4/5

==== If you chose "new" in the dropdown above, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)? ====
[left empty]

==== Why is your organization applying to participate in Google Summer of Code 2013? What do you hope to gain by participating? ====
Most of our developers have particular areas of interest in which they work. Though they are efficient in their areas, there are other, presently uncovered, areas of the code with a need for improvements but a high barrier to entry for casual contributors. By bringing new people in and allowing them to be actively responsible for an area of code, we hope to kickstart work in these areas and others that are lagging behind. Our previous SoC experience shows that a motivated, full-time, student can be brought up to date in any area fairly quickly. Our previous experiences has shown us that SoC developers tend to stay after the end of the Summer of Code and become valuable members of our community. Finally, we feel that it is part of our mandate is to provide a platform for motivated contributors to develop their skills in a positive learning environment.

Overall GSOC has been a win for all parties and we want it to continue in the future.

==== What is the URL for your Ideas list? ====
http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas

==== What is the main development mailing list for your organization? ====
wesnoth-dev@gna.org

==== What is the main IRC channel for your organization? ====
#wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net

==== What criteria did you use to select your mentors for this year's program? Please be as specific as possible. ====
Our first criterion was that all the people had to be volunteers. According to other open source projects and our experience from the last two years, being a SoC mentor takes a lot of time and the person has to be ready to spend quite some time with the student.

Iurii Chernyi (Crab) has joined the team in 2009, taking part in Google Summer of Code 2009, and staying with the project as a developer after successful completion of GSoC. He's an expert on all aspects of current Wesnoth AI codebase (having fully reorganized it as part of GSoC 2009), and has fixed numerous bugs all over Wesnoth. He was a GSoC mentor 2010 and 2011. In 2011 he was a GCI mentor and administrator. He is experienced in teaching other people, in areas like programming languages and math.

Mordante is one of the most active developers on our IRC channel. Not only has he done preliminary studies and coding in multiple areas that are candidates for Summer of Code ideas, he also is one of the coders with the best overview of the Wesnoth code. A large part of his work involves refactoring and polishing existing code. Next to that he's very active with fixing bugs which leads him to all areas in the code base. He is currently completing a rewrite of the Wesnoth GUI library, making all windows configurable through WML. This should make it easier to use Wesnoth on different resolutions, from small handheld devices to large 30 inch screens. Mordante has been a GSoC mentor for Wesnoth since 2008.

All other developers listed in the ideas page are the leading capacities we do have for the respecting areas. Have a look at our list of "people who to contact" [1] for an easy reference. In general all our developers will mentor all students. That is, questions should just be asked in our IRC channel, where basically every developer who has an idea can and will directly answer.

When choosing the mentors, we have kept in mind that most developers can answer most technical questions, and we have chosen people that are well known for interacting with new-comers/external developers and can provide general guidance and design advice, more than people with specific technical knowledge.

[3] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SoC_People_to_bug_on_IRC

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students? ====
The first thing to do is to avoid this situation altogether. The key is identifying candidates with the right mix of skills and temperament. Wesnoth is a game, and as such has lots of developers that are not coders. In particular, artists are well known in the Wesnoth community for being very sensitive about criticism and our community is used to people being sensitive to critics.

We try to choose students that accept criticism and are able to filter constructive criticism from useless one. The Wesnoth developer community is used to judging people according to these criteria and the special title we are going to give to applicants will allow us to easily spot any such problems and discuss them before they grow out of control.

If a student disappears, their mentor are in charge of reconnecting the student to see what is going wrong (available time, tension with other developers, with members of the community etc...). Depending on the actual problem, the mentor and the student will have to agree on possible ways to resolve the problem.

If a student disappears completely and there is no way to get back to them, there is little the project can do except salvaging whatever can be salvaged from the code (the students will have repository write access, so most of the work will be committed either to trunk or to a specific branch) and find a core developer to take on the job. This will probably be slower and less effective for the project, but it's the best we can do.

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors? ====
All our mentors are long time developers that volunteered for the job, so we don't expect that to happen. We observed in during the last years the amount of time required to mentor, and our mentors accepted the job knowing the amount of work it involved. All of this years mentors mentored last year as well, most have contributed since 2008, or been organizational admins.

However, should it happen, we would continue to mentor as a developer community the student until we find a new "official" mentor to take on the job.

==== What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before and during the program? ====
Wesnoth has a particularly healthy community, both for developers and for players.

Our general policy regarding new coders has always been "two (non trival) patches... you're in". With other words, anybody that is able to get two non-trivial patches applied is offered commit privileges.
We have a developer responsible for applying patches and guiding new developers into our community. This is a well known and effective process we plan to apply to students, directing them to our EasyCoding pages [1] (these projects are usually a couple of hours long and hve been chosen to provide easy access to the respective area of code). This year, we also have added some simple coding tasks directly related to our GSoC ideas to be able to test students more specifically on their future project

Usually, patches go back and forth a couple of times, to make sure that all secondary things are in place (indenting, coding style, modified buildfiles etc.) The idea is that coder education should take place before the coder gets commit rights, but that getting new coder in is one of the most important things to keep our project alive.

If the student is proactive and ready to join IRC, all the developers are usually very welcoming, and good at directing newcomers to quickly give useful results.

In previous years, all students that were accepted (and a couple more) managed to have commit access before the start of the coding phase. We consider that this policy was successful and we plan to keep it this year.

We also plan to give a special forum title to any students. This will allow all forum members to tell them apart from normal users and give them read/write access to the developer only forums. This will also allow us to quickly spot any problem they might have interacting with the player community. We have a very mature developer community, but our player community is made of all sort of people of all age and education, and it can sometimes be rough.

Last, our experience from previous years is that students that participate in the community during the evaluation period will stay active in the community after that period. In previous years this has been a discriminating criterias for students of similar level, and overall we never had problems of students working "behind a black wall." Our selection process tend to favor students who participate, and participation hasn't been a problem so far.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/EasyCoding

==== What will you do to encourage that your accepted students stick with the project after Google Summer of Code concludes? ====
The steps meant to involve the students in the community are the same steps we use to make it easy and rewarding to stay with the community even after Summer of Code is over. We really try to make students feel part of the community, particularly as equal developers, rather than just students working a summer job. This, we think, make them feel empowered, and want to remain an important part of the community.

==== Are you a new organization who has a Googler or other organization to vouch for you? If so, please list their name(s) here. ====
N/A

==== Are you an established or larger organization who would like to vouch for a new organization applying this year? If so, please list their name(s) here. ====
[left empty]

== Application template ==
This template is no longer asked for during the initial application. Listing it here so that we can still reference it later on.

==== Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? ====

Students wishing to participate in GSoC should copy the questions below to a new page and fill it with the answers.

Please note that we generally plan to meet potential students through our IRC channel. So beside just answering these questions, potential candidates consider visiting us in IRC: #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net. This is where most of our work takes place and participating in IRC is mandatory for GSoC students participating with Wesnoth. Our experience is that this is the easiest way to communicate and solve problems that come up.

1) Basics

1.1) Write a small introduction to yourself.

1.2) State your preferred email address.

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

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

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

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

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

2) Experience

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

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

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?

2.4) Are you already involved with any open source development projects? If yes, please describe the project and the scope of your involvement.

2.5) Gaming experience - Are you a gamer?

2.5.1) What type of gamer are you?

2.5.2) What type of games?

2.5.3) What type of opponents do you prefer?

2.5.4) Are you more interested in story or gameplay?

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.

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.

3.2) What spoken languages are you fluent in?

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?
* 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)

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

5.3) What programming languages are you fluent in?

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!

In general, students should be as verbose as possible in their answers and feel free to elaborate.

SoC Information for Google

2013-03-29T18:59:50Z

Noy: /* What will you do to encourage that your accepted students stick with the project after Google Summer of Code concludes? */

{{Template:SoC2013}}

== SoC Information for Google ==
This is the information that we submit to google as Application in Summer of Code (current status: 2013). The submitter automatically becomes primary Admin. Most entries are mandatory and have to be filled out before the application can be submitted.

==== Organization id ====
wesnoth

==== Organization Name ====
Battle for Wesnoth

==== Organization description ====
<code type="html">
Battle for Wesnoth, or simply Wesnoth, is a free, turn-based strategy game with role-playing elements that was designed in June 2003 by David White (Sirp).
Although the core rules are fairly simple and meant to be easily learned[1], they provide interesting gameplay and rich tactical options. A major strength of the project is the Wesnoth Markup Language (WML) for writing scenarios. Programming skills are not required to compose with it, and a large WML-modding community has generated a great deal of user-maintained content. We polish the best of this content and lift it into our official release tree.
The first stable release (1.0) was on October 2, 2005, and the latest stable release (1.10.6) happened in March 2013. Version 1.10 was released in January 2012, while the current development branch is 1.11.2 that was released earlier this month. We're later in our development cycle, but there are some good projects out there that students can work on.
Wesnoth is one of the most successful open-source game projects in existence, with an exceptionally large developer base and user community:
<ul>
<li>According to Ohloh, a site that collects activity statistics on open-source projects, the ''Wesnoth'' development effort is in the top 2% of largest and most active projects</li>
<li>We support two multiplayer game servers (stable and development) with a usual minimum load of more than a hundred players</li>
<li>More than two thousand downloads a day</li>
<li>6 million downloads via SourceForge; many more via various mirrors of Linux distributions</li>
<li>Best rated game at the Linux Game Tome[2]</li>
<li>Game of the year 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2013 at LinuxQuestions.org[3][4]</li>
<li>In general, Wesnoth tends to show up in the first or second position whenever anyone compiles a list of top open-source games</li>
</ul>
Wesnoth's most notable features include:
<ul>
<li>A mature project with continuing active development and frequent improvements after 10 years of development</li>
<li>High quality artwork: both original graphics and music</li>
<li>Well-balanced by a tireless team of playtesters</li>
<li>Fun, unique gameplay</li>
<li>Even after nearly a decade of development and a very solid, fun product already created, there are still plenty of new developers; the frequency of commits to the repository is still increasing</li>
<li>Strong support of internationalization with many supported languages, thus experience in working with non-native English speakers. In fact, more than half of our developers are not native English speakers.</li>
</ul>
For our Ideas page, please have a look at [5]. There you can find all information required to get you started working on Wesnoth.
[1] <a href="http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy">http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy</a> 
[2] <a href="http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating">http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating</a> 
[3] <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/">http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/</a> 
[4] <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/">http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/</a> 
[5] <a href="http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas">http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas</a>
</code>

==== Organization home page url ====
http://www.wesnoth.org/

==== Main Organization License: ====
GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2) [Dropdown box answer!]

==== Veteran/New ====
Veteran [Dropdown box answer!]

==== Backup Admin ====
neuhausercova

==== If you chose "veteran" in the dropdown above, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation. Please also list your pass/fail rate for each year. ====

Since 2008 we have participated in 5 years of GSOC, with good results. With the exception of our first year, we pass approximately 75% of our students, and usually get some really interesting code from them.

2008 results:
Wesnoth participated in GSoC 2008 with four students. Out of these, two were great successes (that is they became full-fledge developers before the actual start of GSoC), did huge improvement during GSoC (A new recruitment algorithm for the AI and the basic structure for a new map editor, the student finished this work after the summer), and are still active developers in the Wesnoth community, even after 5 years. Two others eventually failed, but we learned from them that while great students should be left on their own, average students should be monitored much more closely than we did. If things seems to start to go wrong, it's important to react very quick, to meet with other mentors and get things back on track early.

Timezone problems were also a serious barrier for student/mentor communication, and we will take that more into account when pairing mentors and students.

For our other students, multiple problems collectively led to failure:
* We should enforce IRC communication, E-mail is a barrier. This applies both for students and mentors. Both should be on IRC several hours a day, with overlapping hours.
* We should be more strict about mid-term evaluation. If the student is slightly lacking at mid-term we should give a clear message that he needs to get back on track.

2009 results:
In 2009 we mentored 6 students as part of Summer of Code. Out of these 5 projects were a success. From those 5 developers 3 are still part of our core development group and still maintain and improve the work they submitted as part of Summer of Code. One of the students even became the "head" of our AI development department and mentored a student this year. For a summary of the 2009 results have a look at [1].

2010 results:
In 2010 we mentored 4 students as part of Summer of Code, all the projects were a success. from those 4 developers, 1 is still part of our code development team and maintains the work he has done as part of Summer of Code.

2011 results:
In 2011 we mentored 5 students, with four of those successfully completed their projects. Some continued the work polishing their projects a little further even after GSoC, one continues to actively polish his work and just released a new version of his WML Editor.

2012 results
in 2012 we mentored five students with four of them completing their project successfully. Most were from a set list of ideas provided by the project, which were aimed at fixing or updating parts of the code that never seemed to get fixed.

[1] http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=26955

2008: 2/4
2009: 5/6
2010: 4/4
2011: 4/5
2012: 4/5

==== If you chose "new" in the dropdown above, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)? ====
[left empty]

==== Why is your organization applying to participate in Google Summer of Code 2013? What do you hope to gain by participating? ====
Most of our developers have particular areas of interest in which they work. Though they are efficient in their areas, there are other, presently uncovered, areas of the code with a need for improvements but a high barrier to entry for casual contributors. By bringing new people in and allowing them to be actively responsible for an area of code, we hope to kickstart work in these areas and others that are lagging behind. Our previous SoC experience shows that a motivated, full-time, student can be brought up to date in any area fairly quickly. Our previous experiences has shown us that SoC developers tend to stay after the end of the Summer of Code and become valuable members of our community. Finally, we feel that it is part of our mandate is to provide a platform for motivated contributors to develop their skills in a positive learning environment.

Overall GSOC has been a win for all parties and we want it to continue in the future.

==== What is the URL for your Ideas list? ====
http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas

==== What is the main development mailing list for your organization? ====
wesnoth-dev@gna.org

==== What is the main IRC channel for your organization? ====
#wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net

==== What criteria did you use to select your mentors for this year's program? Please be as specific as possible. ====
Our first criterion was that all the people had to be volunteers. According to other open source projects and our experience from the last two years, being a SoC mentor takes a lot of time and the person has to be ready to spend quite some time with the student.

Iurii Chernyi (Crab) has joined the team in 2009, taking part in Google Summer of Code 2009, and staying with the project as a developer after successful completion of GSoC. He's an expert on all aspects of current Wesnoth AI codebase (having fully reorganized it as part of GSoC 2009), and has fixed numerous bugs all over Wesnoth. He was a GSoC mentor 2010 and 2011. In 2011 he was a GCI mentor and administrator. He is experienced in teaching other people, in areas like programming languages and math.

Mordante is one of the most active developers on our IRC channel. Not only has he done preliminary studies and coding in multiple areas that are candidates for Summer of Code ideas, he also is one of the coders with the best overview of the Wesnoth code. A large part of his work involves refactoring and polishing existing code. Next to that he's very active with fixing bugs which leads him to all areas in the code base. He is currently completing a rewrite of the Wesnoth GUI library, making all windows configurable through WML. This should make it easier to use Wesnoth on different resolutions, from small handheld devices to large 30 inch screens. Mordante has been a GSoC mentor for Wesnoth since 2008.

All other developers listed in the ideas page are the leading capacities we do have for the respecting areas. Have a look at our list of "people who to contact" [1] for an easy reference. In general all our developers will mentor all students. That is, questions should just be asked in our IRC channel, where basically every developer who has an idea can and will directly answer.

When choosing the mentors, we have kept in mind that most developers can answer most technical questions, and we have chosen people that are well known for interacting with new-comers/external developers and can provide general guidance and design advice, more than people with specific technical knowledge.

[3] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SoC_People_to_bug_on_IRC

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students? ====
The first thing to do is to avoid this situation altogether. The key is identifying candidates with the right mix of skills and temperament. Wesnoth is a game, and as such has lots of developers that are not coders. In particular, artists are well known in the Wesnoth community for being very sensitive about criticism and our community is used to people being sensitive to critics.

We try to choose students that accept criticism and are able to filter constructive criticism from useless one. The Wesnoth developer community is used to judging people according to these criteria and the special title we are going to give to applicants will allow us to easily spot any such problems and discuss them before they grow out of control.

If a student disappears, their mentor are in charge of reconnecting the student to see what is going wrong (available time, tension with other developers, with members of the community etc...). Depending on the actual problem, the mentor and the student will have to agree on possible ways to resolve the problem.

If a student disappears completely and there is no way to get back to them, there is little the project can do except salvaging whatever can be salvaged from the code (the students will have repository write access, so most of the work will be committed either to trunk or to a specific branch) and find a core developer to take on the job. This will probably be slower and less effective for the project, but it's the best we can do.

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors? ====
All our mentors are long time developers that volunteered for the job, so we don't expect that to happen. We observed in during the last years the amount of time required to mentor, and our mentors accepted the job knowing the amount of work it involved. All of this years mentors mentored last year as well, most have contributed since 2008, or been organizational admins.

However, should it happen, we would continue to mentor as a developer community the student until we find a new "official" mentor to take on the job.

==== What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before and during the program? ====
Wesnoth has a particularly healthy community, both for developers and for players.

Our general policy regarding new coders has always been "two (non trival) patches... you're in". With other words, anybody that is able to get two non-trivial patches applied is offered commit privileges.
We have a developer responsible for applying patches and guiding new developers into our community. This is a well known and effective process we plan to apply to students, directing them to our EasyCoding pages [1] (these projects are usually a couple of hours long and hve been chosen to provide easy access to the respective area of code). This year, we also have added some simple coding tasks directly related to our GSoC ideas to be able to test students more specifically on their future project

Usually, patches go back and forth a couple of times, to make sure that all secondary things are in place (indenting, coding style, modified buildfiles etc.) The idea is that coder education should take place before the coder gets commit rights, but that getting new coder in is one of the most important things to keep our project alive.

If the student is proactive and ready to join IRC, all the developers are usually very welcoming, and good at directing newcomers to quickly give useful results.

In previous years, all students that were accepted (and a couple more) managed to have commit access before the start of the coding phase. We consider that this policy was successful and we plan to keep it this year.

We also plan to give a special forum title to any students. This will allow all forum members to tell them apart from normal users and give them read/write access to the developer only forums. This will also allow us to quickly spot any problem they might have interacting with the player community. We have a very mature developer community, but our player community is made of all sort of people of all age and education, and it can sometimes be rough.

Last, our experience from previous years is that students that participate in the community during the evaluation period will stay active in the community after that period. In previous years this has been a discriminating criterias for students of similar level, and overall we never had problems of students working "behind a black wall." Our selection process tend to favor students who participate, and participation hasn't been a problem so far.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/EasyCoding

==== What will you do to encourage that your accepted students stick with the project after Google Summer of Code concludes? ====
The steps meant to involve the students in the community are the same steps we use to make it easy and rewarding to stay with the community even after Summer of Code is over. We really try to make students feel part of the community, particularly as equal developers, rather than just students working a summer job. This, we think, make them feel empowered, and want to remain an important part of the community.

==== Are you a new organization who has a Googler or other organization to vouch for you? If so, please list their name(s) here. ====
[left empty]

==== Are you an established or larger organization who would like to vouch for a new organization applying this year? If so, please list their name(s) here. ====
[left empty]

== Application template ==
This template is no longer asked for during the initial application. Listing it here so that we can still reference it later on.

==== Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? ====

Students wishing to participate in GSoC should copy the questions below to a new page and fill it with the answers.

Please note that we generally plan to meet potential students through our IRC channel. So beside just answering these questions, potential candidates consider visiting us in IRC: #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net. This is where most of our work takes place and participating in IRC is mandatory for GSoC students participating with Wesnoth. Our experience is that this is the easiest way to communicate and solve problems that come up.

1) Basics

1.1) Write a small introduction to yourself.

1.2) State your preferred email address.

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

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

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

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

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

2) Experience

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

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

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?

2.4) Are you already involved with any open source development projects? If yes, please describe the project and the scope of your involvement.

2.5) Gaming experience - Are you a gamer?

2.5.1) What type of gamer are you?

2.5.2) What type of games?

2.5.3) What type of opponents do you prefer?

2.5.4) Are you more interested in story or gameplay?

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.

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.

3.2) What spoken languages are you fluent in?

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?
* 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)

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

5.3) What programming languages are you fluent in?

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!

In general, students should be as verbose as possible in their answers and feel free to elaborate.

SoC People to bug on IRC

2013-03-29T15:01:24Z

Noy:

{{SoC2013}}

== People to bug on IRC ==
We have prepared a list of people with their "area of competence". This is to give you an idea on which areas those people can be of help for you. Of course you should always just ask in the IRC chan, but those are the most likely ones to answer questions in the respective area. And here is the list:

=== boucman ===
As our "patch monkey" he accustomed to critiquing patches of every kind. Beside this, he knows many areas of the game due to working on applying patches. He is particularly used to answering question from new coders, and doesn't mind explaining trivial stuff. He was the one who started the "two patches, you're in" policy and the ReferenceWML part of the project.

=== Crab_ ===
iurii chernyi (Crab) has joined the team in 2009. He restructured Wesnoth AI as part of GSoC-2009, and is an expert on all aspects of current Wesnoth AI codebase. So, he's the person to ask about anything in '''src/ai'''. He also knows much about campaign units/leaders persistence.

=== Dave alias Sirp ===
Sirp started Wesnoth and is our lead developer. He is currently our C++ expert and is also the one that is working on the new Formula AI. Any questions regarding the formula AI should be directed to him.

=== Dragonking ===

He is one of our best Wesnoth players, and understands the various strategies well. He has also programmed much of the Wesnoth Formula AI system and understands it well.

=== Eric S. Raymond (ESR) ===
ESR is our project toolsmith; he has written several tools that semi-automate various aspects of WML maintenance. While most of our developers/designers concentrate on either the C++ core or WML but not both, he has a balanced understanding of both levels and may be helpful in helping students develop a grasp of the overall architecture. Finally, he did the last overhaul of the Wesnoth UI and understands UI design principles; he is well-equipped to guide students working in that area.

=== Gabriel Morin (gabba) ===

gabba joined the team in 2010 where he participated in GSoC, and is the conceptor and maintainer of Wesnoth's planning system, codenamed "Whiteboard".

=== Happygrue/Wintermute ===

A recent addition to the development team, Winter has recently been helping to test the AI and is a useful person to ask about behavioral problems in this area.

=== ilor ===
2008 GSoC student, worked on and maintains the new map editor in Wesnoth 1.5/1.6/1.7. Has some fairly recent experience with getting "in" the Wesnoth codebase.

=== Karol Nowak (grzywacz) ===
Two years he participated at GSoC as a student, so he will understand the situation of GSoC students. Beside this he is our top expert on Wesnoth for embedded devices as he worked on the gp2x support.

=== loonycyborg ===
Maintainer of Wesnoth's SCons build system and windows packager. Might also help out with other buildsystems.

=== Mordante ===
Many of the possible projects involve the code for which he is an area expert. Also, many of the possible projects currently listed on the ideas page require GUI parts to work. Mordante is currently busy rewriting the old gui engine, he will be our expert there as well as already being our area expert for the terrain engine. He also has limited experience with boost asio.

=== Nils Kneuper (Ivanovic) ===
He is doing nothing special, he just does some "administrative work" like packaging fresh tarballs when it is time for them and works on setting up any kind of deadlines and timetables related to releasing. He has administrative powers in most areas, no matter if website, forum or IRC. Beside this he uploads translation updates, tries to communicate with the translation teams when it is required and translates a little bit himself every now and then. But in general he is not a real expert in anything, just has a look at things that come up and redirects people to the correct contacts.

=== Noy ===
Noy is an oddity among developers; he's got no coding skills whatsoever and possesses a limited understanding of computers, which is illustrated by his difficulty operating a Mac. Instead, Noy makes his contribution in gameplay and multiplayer design, drawing upon his background in social sciences research, military strategy and playing games online, to understand the effects of development on the playing community behavior. Along with Soliton, Noy is a useful conduit to discuss any issues in this area.

=== Sapient ===
This developer started working on the GUI and widgets, but recently he focused more on improving the internal mechanics of the WML engine such as variable look-ups and filtering. Sapient is not as active anymore but he does come one IRC in the evenings (U.S.A.). He has touched-up many areas of the code in small ways over time, thus he has a good general knowledge of the C++ code and also has worked a little on some python maintenance scripts.

=== shadowm ===
He has been around since late 2007, and has worked in many areas of the game, including WML event commands handling, image path functions, and the add-ons client code. As an add-on content developer, he also knows a lot about the WML language itself (preprocessor, syntax) and the functionality available in single-player campaigns.

=== Soliton ===
He knows our MP server setup best. Beside this he has already done a lot of work on the MP server himself. So he probably has most knowledge about it and, being one of our MP-developers, might provide important help from the perspective of the MP player community and what is needed there.

=== YogiHH ===
Since he is the developer who know most about building under Windows, he will probably be really helpful. Either if the student comes from the Windows side, or to help test resulting work to make sure that it does work on Windows and, for the case that it does not, to show them where problems are.
YogiHH also knows quite a bit about the game engine and everything that has to do with replays and savegames.

=== zookeeper or Mythological or Rhuvaen ===
As our leading WML experts those are to be contacted when it comes to anything related WML problems since they know this stuff best. They do maintain most of the campaigns and improve them whenever they have a good idea for changes.

SoC Information for Google

2013-03-29T14:57:26Z

Noy:

{{Template:SoC2013}}

== SoC Information for Google ==
This is the information that we submit to google as Application in Summer of Code (current status: 2013). The submitter automatically becomes primary Admin. Most entries are mandatory and have to be filled out before the application can be submitted.

==== Organization Name: ====
Battle for Wesnoth

==== Description: ====
<code type="html">
Battle for Wesnoth, or simply Wesnoth, is a free, turn-based strategy game with role-playing elements that was designed in June 2003 by David White (Sirp).
Although the core rules are fairly simple and meant to be easily learned[1], they provide interesting gameplay and rich tactical options. A major strength of the project is the Wesnoth Markup Language (WML) for writing scenarios. Programming skills are not required to compose with it, and a large WML-modding community has generated a great deal of user-maintained content. We polish the best of this content and lift it into our official release tree.
The first stable release (1.0) was on October 2, 2005, and the latest stable release (1.10.6) happened in March 2013. Version 1.10 was released in January 2012, while the current development branch is 1.11.2 that was released earlier this month. We're later in our development cycle, but there are some good projects out there that students can work on.
Wesnoth is one of the most successful open-source game projects in existence, with an exceptionally large developer base and user community:
<ul>
<li>According to Ohloh, a site that collects activity statistics on open-source projects, the ''Wesnoth'' development effort is in the top 2% of largest and most active projects</li>
<li>We support two multiplayer game servers (stable and development) with a usual minimum load of more than a hundred players</li>
<li>More than two thousand downloads a day</li>
<li>6 million downloads via SourceForge; many more via various mirrors of Linux distributions</li>
<li>Best rated game at the Linux Game Tome[2]</li>
<li>Game of the year 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2013 at LinuxQuestions.org[3][4]</li>
<li>In general, Wesnoth tends to show up in the first or second position whenever anyone compiles a list of top open-source games</li>
</ul>
Wesnoth's most notable features include:
<ul>
<li>A mature project with continuing active development and frequent improvements after 10 years of development</li>
<li>High quality artwork: both original graphics and music</li>
<li>Well-balanced by a tireless team of playtesters</li>
<li>Fun, unique gameplay</li>
<li>Even after nearly a decade of development and a very solid, fun product already created, there are still plenty of new developers; the frequency of commits to the repository is still increasing</li>
<li>Strong support of internationalization with many supported languages, thus experience in working with non-native English speakers. In fact, more than half of our developers are not native English speakers.</li>
</ul>
For our Ideas page, please have a look at [5]. There you can find all information required to get you started working on Wesnoth.
[1] <a href="http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy">http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy</a> 
[2] <a href="http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating">http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating</a> 
[3] <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/">http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/</a> 
[4] <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/">http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/</a> 
[5] <a href="http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas">http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas</a>
</code>

==== Home page: ====
http://www.wesnoth.org/

==== Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2012? What do you hope to gain by participating? ====
Most of our developers have particular areas of interest in which they work. Though they are efficient in their areas, there are other, presently uncovered, areas of the code with a need for improvements but a high barrier to entry for casual contributors. By bringing new people in and allowing them to be actively responsible for an area of code, we hope to kickstart work in these areas and others that are lagging behind. Our previous SoC experience shows that a motivated, full-time, student can be brought up to date in any area fairly quickly. Our previous experiences has shown us that SoC developers tend to stay after the end of the Summer of Code and become valuable members of our community. Finally, we feel that it is part of our mandate is to provide a platform for motivated contributors to develop their skills in a positive learning environment.

Overall GSOC has been a win for all parties and we want it to continue in the future.

==== If accepted, would this be your first year participating in GSoC? ====
No

==== Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation. ====

Since 2008 we have participated in 5 years of GSOC, with good results. With the exception of our first year, we pass approximately 75% of our students, and usually get some really interesting code from them.

2008 results:
Wesnoth participated in GSoC 2008 with four students. Out of these, two were great successes (that is they became full-fledge developers before the actual start of GSoC), did huge improvement during GSoC (A new recruitment algorithm for the AI and the basic structure for a new map editor, the student finished this work after the summer), and are still active developers in the Wesnoth community, even after 5 years. Two others eventually failed, but we learned from them that while great students should be left on their own, average students should be monitored much more closely than we did. If things seems to start to go wrong, it's important to react very quick, to meet with other mentors and get things back on track early.

Timezone problems were also a serious barrier for student/mentor communication, and we will take that more into account when pairing mentors and students.

For our other students, multiple problems collectively led to failure:
* We should enforce IRC communication, E-mail is a barrier. This applies both for students and mentors. Both should be on IRC several hours a day, with overlapping hours.
* We should be more strict about mid-term evaluation. If the student is slightly lacking at mid-term we should give a clear message that he needs to get back on track.

2009 results:
In 2009 we mentored 6 students as part of Summer of Code. Out of these 5 projects were a success. From those 5 developers 3 are still part of our core development group and still maintain and improve the work they submitted as part of Summer of Code. One of the students even became the "head" of our AI development department and mentored a student this year. For a summary of the 2009 results have a look at [1].

2010 results:
In 2010 we mentored 4 students as part of Summer of Code, all the projects were a success. from those 4 developers, 1 is still part of our code development team and maintains the work he has done as part of Summer of Code.

2011 results:
In 2011 we mentored 5 students, with four of those successfully completed their projects. Some continued the work polishing their projects a little further even after GSoC, one continues to actively polish his work and just released a new version of his WML Editor.

2012 results
in 2012 we mentored five students with four of them completing their project successfully. Most were from a set list of ideas provided by the project, which were aimed at fixing or updating parts of the code that never seemed to get fixed.

[1] http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=26955

==== If your organization participated in past GSoCs, please let us know the ratio of students passing to students allocated, e.g. 2006: 3/6 for 3 out of 6 students passed in 2006. ====
2008: 2/4
2009: 5/6
2010: 4/4
2011: 4/5
2012: 4/5

==== Main Organization License: ====
GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2) [Dropdown box answer!]

==== What is the URL for your ideas page? ====
http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas

==== What is the main development mailing list for your organization? This question will be shown to students who would like to get more information about applying to your organization for GSoC 2012. If your organization uses more than one list, please make sure to include a description of the list so students know which to use. ====
The main development mailing list is "wesnoth-dev@gna.org"

==== What is the main IRC channel for your organization? ====
#wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net

This is our main means of communications. If students have questions you should ask them in #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net and wait for a reply (might take some hours!). The Wesnoth related channels are logged in public and the logs tend to be read by developers.

==== Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? ====

Students wishing to participate in GSoC should copy the questions below to a new page and fill it with the answers.

Please note that we generally plan to meet potential students through our IRC channel. So beside just answering these questions, potential candidates consider visiting us in IRC: #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net. This is where most of our work takes place and participating in IRC is mandatory for GSoC students participating with Wesnoth. Our experience is that this is the easiest way to communicate and solve problems that come up.

1) Basics

1.1) Write a small introduction to yourself.

1.2) State your preferred email address.

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

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

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

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

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

2) Experience

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

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

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?

2.4) Are you already involved with any open source development projects? If yes, please describe the project and the scope of your involvement.

2.5) Gaming experience - Are you a gamer?

2.5.1) What type of gamer are you?

2.5.2) What type of games?

2.5.3) What type of opponents do you prefer?

2.5.4) Are you more interested in story or gameplay?

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.

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.

3.2) What spoken languages are you fluent in?

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?
* 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)

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

5.3) What programming languages are you fluent in?

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!

In general, students should be as verbose as possible in their answers and feel free to elaborate.

==== Who will be your backup organization administrator? ====
Link ID: Ivanovic

==== What criteria did you use to select the individuals who will act as mentors for your organization? Please be as specific as possible. ====
Our first criterion was that all the people had to be volunteers. According to other open source projects and our experience from the last two years, being a SoC mentor takes a lot of time and the person has to be ready to spend quite some time with the student.

Boucman is one of the oldest active developers around. He has rewritten the whole animation engine and made it an easily pluggable system allowing artists to easily specify exactly how they want the units to appear. He also started many community oriented projects like the Art Contribution[1] section of the wiki (now deprecated) and the WML Reference Manual[2]. He is responsible for dispatching and sorting the patches at http://patches.wesnoth.org that has created the new developer process we currently use. Boucman was a mentor for Wesnoth in every GSoC since 2008.

Iurii Chernyi (Crab) has joined the team in 2009, taking part in Google Summer of Code 2009, and staying with the project as a developer after successful completion of GSoC. He's an expert on all aspects of current Wesnoth AI codebase (having fully reorganized it as part of GSoC 2009), and has fixed numerous bugs all over Wesnoth. He was a GSoC mentor 2010 and 2011. In 2011 he was a GCI mentor and administrator. He is experienced in teaching other people, in areas like programming languages and math.

Mordante is one of the most active developers on our IRC channel. Not only has he done preliminary studies and coding in multiple areas that are candidates for Summer of Code ideas, he also is one of the coders with the best overview of the Wesnoth code. A large part of his work involves refactoring and polishing existing code. Next to that he's very active with fixing bugs which leads him to all areas in the code base. He is currently completing a rewrite of the Wesnoth GUI library, making all windows configurable through WML. This should make it easier to use Wesnoth on different resolutions, from small handheld devices to large 30 inch screens. Mordante has been a GSoC mentor for Wesnoth since 2008.

All other developers listed in the ideas page are the leading capacities we do have for the respecting areas. Have a look at our list of "people who to contact" [3] for an easy reference. In general all our developers will mentor all students. That is, questions should just be asked in our IRC channel, where basically every developer who has an idea can and will directly answer.

When choosing the mentors, we have kept in mind that most developers can answer most technical questions, and we have chosen people that are well known for interacting with new-comers/external developers and can provide general guidance and design advice, more than people with specific technical knowledge.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/UnsortedContrib

[2] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/ReferenceWML

[3] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SoC_People_to_bug_on_IRC

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students? ====
The first thing to do is to avoid this situation altogether. The key is identifying candidates with the right mix of skills and temperament. Wesnoth is a game, and as such has lots of developers that are not coders. In particular, artists are well known in the Wesnoth community for being very sensitive about criticism and our community is used to people being sensitive to critics.

We try to choose students that accept criticism and are able to filter constructive criticism from useless one. The Wesnoth developer community is used to judging people according to these criteria and the special title we are going to give to applicants will allow us to easily spot any such problems and discuss them before they grow out of control.

If a student disappears, their mentor are in charge of reconnecting the student to see what is going wrong (available time, tension with other developers, with members of the community etc...). Depending on the actual problem, the mentor and the student will have to agree on possible ways to resolve the problem.

If a student disappears completely and there is no way to get back to them, there is little the project can do except salvaging whatever can be salvaged from the code (the students will have repository write access, so most of the work will be committed either to trunk or to a specific branch) and find a core developer to take on the job. This will probably be slower and less effective for the project, but it's the best we can do.

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors? ====
All our mentors are long time developers that volunteered for the job, so we don't expect that to happen. We observed in during the last years the amount of time required to mentor, and our mentors accepted the job knowing the amount of work it involved. All of this years mentors mentored last year as well, most have contributed since 2008, or been organizational admins.

However, should it happen, we would continue to mentor as a developer community the student until we find a new "official" mentor to take on the job.

==== What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program? ====
Wesnoth has a particularly healthy community, both for developers and for players.

Our general policy regarding new coders has always been "two (non trival) patches... you're in". With other words, anybody that is able to get two non-trivial patches applied is offered commit privileges.
We have a developer responsible for applying patches and guiding new developers into our community. This is a well known and effective process we plan to apply to students, directing them to our EasyCoding pages [1] (these projects are usually a couple of hours long and hve been chosen to provide easy access to the respective area of code). This year, we also have added some simple coding tasks directly related to our GSoC ideas to be able to test students more specifically on their future project

Usually, patches go back and forth a couple of times, to make sure that all secondary things are in place (indenting, coding style, modified buildfiles etc.) The idea is that coder education should take place before the coder gets commit rights, but that getting new coder in is one of the most important things to keep our project alive.

If the student is proactive and ready to join IRC, all the developers are usually very welcoming, and good at directing newcomers to quickly give useful results.

In previous years, all students that were accepted (and a couple more) managed to have commit access before the start of the coding phase. We consider that this policy was successful and we plan to keep it this year.

We also plan to give a special forum title to any students. This will allow all forum members to tell them apart from normal users and give them read/write access to the developer only forums. This will also allow us to quickly spot any problem they might have interacting with the player community. We have a very mature developer community, but our player community is made of all sort of people of all age and education, and it can sometimes be rough.

Last, our experience from previous years is that students that participate in the community during the evaluation period will stay active in the community after that period. In previous years this has been a discriminating criterias for students of similar level, and overall we never had problems of students working "behind a black wall." Our selection process tend to favor students who participate, and participation hasn't been a problem so far.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/EasyCoding

==== If you are a small or new organization applying to GSoC, please list a larger, established GSoC organization or a Googler that can vouch for you here. ====

==== If you are a large organization who is vouching for a small organization applying to GSoC for their first time this year, please list their name and why you think they'd be good candidates for GSoC here: ====

==== Anything else you'd like to tell us? ====
There is nothing more to say.

==== Admin Agreement: ====
(some terms of service by Google that have to be agreed upon)

SoC Information for Google

2013-03-29T14:50:39Z

Noy: /* Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation. */

{{Template:SoC2012}}

== SoC Information for Google ==
This is the information that we submit to google as Application in Summer of Code (current status: 2012). The submitter automatically becomes primary Admin. Most entries are mandatory and have to be filled out before the application can be submitted.

==== Organization Name: ====
Battle for Wesnoth

==== Description: ====
<code type="html">
Battle for Wesnoth, or simply Wesnoth, is a free, turn-based strategy game with role-playing elements that was designed in June 2003 by David White (Sirp).
Although the core rules are fairly simple and meant to be easily learned[1], they provide interesting gameplay and rich tactical options. A major strength of the project is the Wesnoth Markup Language (WML) for writing scenarios. Programming skills are not required to compose with it, and a large WML-modding community has generated a great deal of user-maintained content. We polish the best of this content and lift it into our official release tree.
The first stable release (1.0) was on October 2, 2005, and the latest stable release (1.8) happened in April 2010. Version 1.10 was released earlier this year, while the current development branch is 1.11. We're early in our cycle, so there are several interesting project available for students to join
Wesnoth is one of the most successful open-source game projects in existence, with an exceptionally large developer base and user community:
<ul>
<li>According to Ohloh, a site that collects activity statistics on open-source projects, the ''Wesnoth'' development effort is in the top 2% of largest and most active projects</li>
<li>We support two multiplayer game servers (stable and development) with a usual minimum load of more than a hundred players</li>
<li>More than two thousand downloads a day</li>
<li>6 million downloads via SourceForge; many more via various mirrors of Linux distributions</li>
<li>Best rated game at the Linux Game Tome[2]</li>
<li>Game of the year 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2013 at LinuxQuestions.org[3][4]</li>
<li>In general, Wesnoth tends to show up in the first or second position whenever anyone compiles a list of top open-source games</li>
</ul>
Wesnoth's most notable features include:
<ul>
<li>A mature project with continuing active development and frequent improvements after 10 years of development</li>
<li>High quality artwork: both original graphics and music</li>
<li>Well-balanced by a tireless team of playtesters</li>
<li>Fun, unique gameplay</li>
<li>Even after nearly a decade of development and a very solid, fun product already created, there are still plenty of new developers; the frequency of commits to the repository is still increasing</li>
<li>Strong support of internationalization with many supported languages, thus experience in working with non-native English speakers. In fact, more than half of our developers are not native English speakers.</li>
</ul>
For our Ideas page, please have a look at [5]. There you can find all information required to get you started working on Wesnoth.
[1] <a href="http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy">http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy</a> 
[2] <a href="http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating">http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating</a> 
[3] <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/">http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/</a> 
[4] <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/">http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/</a> 
[5] <a href="http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas">http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas</a>
</code>

==== Home page: ====
http://www.wesnoth.org/

==== Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2012? What do you hope to gain by participating? ====
Most of our developers have particular areas of interest in which they work. Though they are efficient in their areas, there are other, presently uncovered, areas of the code with a need for improvements but a high barrier to entry for casual contributors. By bringing new people in and allowing them to be actively responsible for an area of code, we hope to kickstart work in these areas and others that are lagging behind. Our previous SoC experience shows that a motivated, full-time, student can be brought up to date in any area fairly quickly. Our previous experiences has shown us that SoC developers tend to stay after the end of the Summer of Code and become valuable members of our community. Finally, we feel that it is part of our mandate is to provide a platform for motivated contributors to develop their skills in a positive learning environment.

Overall GSOC has been a win for all parties and we want it to continue in the future.

==== If accepted, would this be your first year participating in GSoC? ====
No

==== Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation. ====

Since 2008 we have participated in 5 years of GSOC, with good results. With the exception of our first year, we pass approximately 75% of our students, and usually get some really interesting code from them.

2008 results:
Wesnoth participated in GSoC 2008 with four students. Out of these, two were great successes (that is they became full-fledge developers before the actual start of GSoC), did huge improvement during GSoC (A new recruitment algorithm for the AI and the basic structure for a new map editor, the student finished this work after the summer), and are still active developers in the Wesnoth community, even after 5 years. Two others eventually failed, but we learned from them that while great students should be left on their own, average students should be monitored much more closely than we did. If things seems to start to go wrong, it's important to react very quick, to meet with other mentors and get things back on track early.

Timezone problems were also a serious barrier for student/mentor communication, and we will take that more into account when pairing mentors and students.

For our other students, multiple problems collectively led to failure:
* We should enforce IRC communication, E-mail is a barrier. This applies both for students and mentors. Both should be on IRC several hours a day, with overlapping hours.
* We should be more strict about mid-term evaluation. If the student is slightly lacking at mid-term we should give a clear message that he needs to get back on track.

2009 results:
In 2009 we mentored 6 students as part of Summer of Code. Out of these 5 projects were a success. From those 5 developers 3 are still part of our core development group and still maintain and improve the work they submitted as part of Summer of Code. One of the students even became the "head" of our AI development department and mentored a student this year. For a summary of the 2009 results have a look at [1].

2010 results:
In 2010 we mentored 4 students as part of Summer of Code, all the projects were a success. from those 4 developers, 1 is still part of our code development team and maintains the work he has done as part of Summer of Code.

2011 results:
In 2011 we mentored 5 students, with four of those successfully completed their projects. Some continued the work polishing their projects a little further even after GSoC, one continues to actively polish his work and just released a new version of his WML Editor.

2012 results
in 2012 we mentored five students with four of them completing their project successfully. Most were from a set list of ideas provided by the project, which were aimed at fixing or updating parts of the code that never seemed to get fixed.

[1] http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=26955

==== If your organization participated in past GSoCs, please let us know the ratio of students passing to students allocated, e.g. 2006: 3/6 for 3 out of 6 students passed in 2006. ====
2008: 2/4
2009: 5/6
2010: 4/4
2011: 4/5
2012: 4/5

==== Main Organization License: ====
GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2) [Dropdown box answer!]

==== What is the URL for your ideas page? ====
http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas

==== What is the main development mailing list for your organization? This question will be shown to students who would like to get more information about applying to your organization for GSoC 2012. If your organization uses more than one list, please make sure to include a description of the list so students know which to use. ====
The main development mailing list is "wesnoth-dev@gna.org"

==== What is the main IRC channel for your organization? ====
#wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net

This is our main means of communications. If students have questions you should ask them in #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net and wait for a reply (might take some hours!). The Wesnoth related channels are logged in public and the logs tend to be read by developers.

==== Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? ====

Students wishing to participate in GSoC should copy the questions below to a new page and fill it with the answers.

Please note that we generally plan to meet potential students through our IRC channel. So beside just answering these questions, potential candidates consider visiting us in IRC: #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net. This is where most of our work takes place and participating in IRC is mandatory for GSoC students participating with Wesnoth. Our experience is that this is the easiest way to communicate and solve problems that come up.

1) Basics

1.1) Write a small introduction to yourself.

1.2) State your preferred email address.

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

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

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

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

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

2) Experience

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

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

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?

2.4) Are you already involved with any open source development projects? If yes, please describe the project and the scope of your involvement.

2.5) Gaming experience - Are you a gamer?

2.5.1) What type of gamer are you?

2.5.2) What type of games?

2.5.3) What type of opponents do you prefer?

2.5.4) Are you more interested in story or gameplay?

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.

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.

3.2) What spoken languages are you fluent in?

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?
* 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)

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

5.3) What programming languages are you fluent in?

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!

In general, students should be as verbose as possible in their answers and feel free to elaborate.

==== Who will be your backup organization administrator? ====
Link ID: Ivanovic

==== What criteria did you use to select the individuals who will act as mentors for your organization? Please be as specific as possible. ====
Our first criterion was that all the people had to be volunteers. According to other open source projects and our experience from the last two years, being a SoC mentor takes a lot of time and the person has to be ready to spend quite some time with the student.

Boucman is one of the oldest active developers around. He has rewritten the whole animation engine and made it an easily pluggable system allowing artists to easily specify exactly how they want the units to appear. He also started many community oriented projects like the Art Contribution[1] section of the wiki (now deprecated) and the WML Reference Manual[2]. He is responsible for dispatching and sorting the patches at http://patches.wesnoth.org that has created the new developer process we currently use. Boucman was a mentor for Wesnoth in every GSoC since 2008.

Iurii Chernyi (Crab) has joined the team in 2009, taking part in Google Summer of Code 2009, and staying with the project as a developer after successful completion of GSoC. He's an expert on all aspects of current Wesnoth AI codebase (having fully reorganized it as part of GSoC 2009), and has fixed numerous bugs all over Wesnoth. He was a GSoC mentor 2010 and 2011. In 2011 he was a GCI mentor and administrator. He is experienced in teaching other people, in areas like programming languages and math.

Mordante is one of the most active developers on our IRC channel. Not only has he done preliminary studies and coding in multiple areas that are candidates for Summer of Code ideas, he also is one of the coders with the best overview of the Wesnoth code. A large part of his work involves refactoring and polishing existing code. Next to that he's very active with fixing bugs which leads him to all areas in the code base. He is currently completing a rewrite of the Wesnoth GUI library, making all windows configurable through WML. This should make it easier to use Wesnoth on different resolutions, from small handheld devices to large 30 inch screens. Mordante has been a GSoC mentor for Wesnoth since 2008.

All other developers listed in the ideas page are the leading capacities we do have for the respecting areas. Have a look at our list of "people who to contact" [3] for an easy reference. In general all our developers will mentor all students. That is, questions should just be asked in our IRC channel, where basically every developer who has an idea can and will directly answer.

When choosing the mentors, we have kept in mind that most developers can answer most technical questions, and we have chosen people that are well known for interacting with new-comers/external developers and can provide general guidance and design advice, more than people with specific technical knowledge.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/UnsortedContrib

[2] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/ReferenceWML

[3] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SoC_People_to_bug_on_IRC

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students? ====
The first thing to do is to avoid this situation altogether. The key is identifying candidates with the right mix of skills and temperament. Wesnoth is a game, and as such has lots of developers that are not coders. In particular, artists are well known in the Wesnoth community for being very sensitive about criticism and our community is used to people being sensitive to critics.

We try to choose students that accept criticism and are able to filter constructive criticism from useless one. The Wesnoth developer community is used to judging people according to these criteria and the special title we are going to give to applicants will allow us to easily spot any such problems and discuss them before they grow out of control.

If a student disappears, their mentor are in charge of reconnecting the student to see what is going wrong (available time, tension with other developers, with members of the community etc...). Depending on the actual problem, the mentor and the student will have to agree on possible ways to resolve the problem.

If a student disappears completely and there is no way to get back to them, there is little the project can do except salvaging whatever can be salvaged from the code (the students will have repository write access, so most of the work will be committed either to trunk or to a specific branch) and find a core developer to take on the job. This will probably be slower and less effective for the project, but it's the best we can do.

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors? ====
All our mentors are long time developers that volunteered for the job, so we don't expect that to happen. We observed in during the last years the amount of time required to mentor, and our mentors accepted the job knowing the amount of work it involved. All of this years mentors mentored last year as well, most have contributed since 2008, or been organizational admins.

However, should it happen, we would continue to mentor as a developer community the student until we find a new "official" mentor to take on the job.

==== What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program? ====
Wesnoth has a particularly healthy community, both for developers and for players.

Our general policy regarding new coders has always been "two (non trival) patches... you're in". With other words, anybody that is able to get two non-trivial patches applied is offered commit privileges.
We have a developer responsible for applying patches and guiding new developers into our community. This is a well known and effective process we plan to apply to students, directing them to our EasyCoding pages [1] (these projects are usually a couple of hours long and hve been chosen to provide easy access to the respective area of code). This year, we also have added some simple coding tasks directly related to our GSoC ideas to be able to test students more specifically on their future project

Usually, patches go back and forth a couple of times, to make sure that all secondary things are in place (indenting, coding style, modified buildfiles etc.) The idea is that coder education should take place before the coder gets commit rights, but that getting new coder in is one of the most important things to keep our project alive.

If the student is proactive and ready to join IRC, all the developers are usually very welcoming, and good at directing newcomers to quickly give useful results.

In previous years, all students that were accepted (and a couple more) managed to have commit access before the start of the coding phase. We consider that this policy was successful and we plan to keep it this year.

We also plan to give a special forum title to any students. This will allow all forum members to tell them apart from normal users and give them read/write access to the developer only forums. This will also allow us to quickly spot any problem they might have interacting with the player community. We have a very mature developer community, but our player community is made of all sort of people of all age and education, and it can sometimes be rough.

Last, our experience from previous years is that students that participate in the community during the evaluation period will stay active in the community after that period. In previous years this has been a discriminating criterias for students of similar level, and overall we never had problems of students working "behind a black wall." Our selection process tend to favor students who participate, and participation hasn't been a problem so far.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/EasyCoding

==== If you are a small or new organization applying to GSoC, please list a larger, established GSoC organization or a Googler that can vouch for you here. ====

==== If you are a large organization who is vouching for a small organization applying to GSoC for their first time this year, please list their name and why you think they'd be good candidates for GSoC here: ====

==== Anything else you'd like to tell us? ====
There is nothing more to say.

==== Admin Agreement: ====
(some terms of service by Google that have to be agreed upon)

SoC Information for Google

2013-03-29T14:44:45Z

Noy: /* SoC Information for Google */

{{Template:SoC2012}}

== SoC Information for Google ==
This is the information that we submit to google as Application in Summer of Code (current status: 2012). The submitter automatically becomes primary Admin. Most entries are mandatory and have to be filled out before the application can be submitted.

==== Organization Name: ====
Battle for Wesnoth

==== Description: ====
<code type="html">
Battle for Wesnoth, or simply Wesnoth, is a free, turn-based strategy game with role-playing elements that was designed in June 2003 by David White (Sirp).
Although the core rules are fairly simple and meant to be easily learned[1], they provide interesting gameplay and rich tactical options. A major strength of the project is the Wesnoth Markup Language (WML) for writing scenarios. Programming skills are not required to compose with it, and a large WML-modding community has generated a great deal of user-maintained content. We polish the best of this content and lift it into our official release tree.
The first stable release (1.0) was on October 2, 2005, and the latest stable release (1.8) happened in April 2010. Version 1.10 was released earlier this year, while the current development branch is 1.11. We're early in our cycle, so there are several interesting project available for students to join
Wesnoth is one of the most successful open-source game projects in existence, with an exceptionally large developer base and user community:
<ul>
<li>According to Ohloh, a site that collects activity statistics on open-source projects, the ''Wesnoth'' development effort is in the top 2% of largest and most active projects</li>
<li>We support two multiplayer game servers (stable and development) with a usual minimum load of more than a hundred players</li>
<li>More than two thousand downloads a day</li>
<li>6 million downloads via SourceForge; many more via various mirrors of Linux distributions</li>
<li>Best rated game at the Linux Game Tome[2]</li>
<li>Game of the year 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2013 at LinuxQuestions.org[3][4]</li>
<li>In general, Wesnoth tends to show up in the first or second position whenever anyone compiles a list of top open-source games</li>
</ul>
Wesnoth's most notable features include:
<ul>
<li>A mature project with continuing active development and frequent improvements after 10 years of development</li>
<li>High quality artwork: both original graphics and music</li>
<li>Well-balanced by a tireless team of playtesters</li>
<li>Fun, unique gameplay</li>
<li>Even after nearly a decade of development and a very solid, fun product already created, there are still plenty of new developers; the frequency of commits to the repository is still increasing</li>
<li>Strong support of internationalization with many supported languages, thus experience in working with non-native English speakers. In fact, more than half of our developers are not native English speakers.</li>
</ul>
For our Ideas page, please have a look at [5]. There you can find all information required to get you started working on Wesnoth.
[1] <a href="http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy">http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy</a> 
[2] <a href="http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating">http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating</a> 
[3] <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/">http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/</a> 
[4] <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/">http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/</a> 
[5] <a href="http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas">http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas</a>
</code>

==== Home page: ====
http://www.wesnoth.org/

==== Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2012? What do you hope to gain by participating? ====
Most of our developers have particular areas of interest in which they work. Though they are efficient in their areas, there are other, presently uncovered, areas of the code with a need for improvements but a high barrier to entry for casual contributors. By bringing new people in and allowing them to be actively responsible for an area of code, we hope to kickstart work in these areas and others that are lagging behind. Our previous SoC experience shows that a motivated, full-time, student can be brought up to date in any area fairly quickly. Our previous experiences has shown us that SoC developers tend to stay after the end of the Summer of Code and become valuable members of our community. Finally, we feel that it is part of our mandate is to provide a platform for motivated contributors to develop their skills in a positive learning environment.

Overall GSOC has been a win for all parties and we want it to continue in the future.

==== If accepted, would this be your first year participating in GSoC? ====
No

==== Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation. ====

2008 results:
Wesnoth participated in GSoC 2008 with four students. Out of these, two were great successes (that is they became full-fledge developers before the actual start of GSoC), did huge improvement during GSoC (A new recruitment algorithm for the AI and the basic structure for a new map editor, the student finished this work after the summer), and are still active developers in the Wesnoth community.

Of the two other, one of them was very active for the first half of GSoC and provided some useful infrastructure for AI development that we used as base in GSoC 2009, but was much less active and didn't reach expectations for the second half of GSoC. The lesson we learned is that great students should be left on their own, that's the best way to have them work, but average students should be monitored much more closely than we did. If things seems to start to go wrong, it's important to react very quick, to meet with other mentors and get things back on track early.

Timezone problems were also a serious barrier for student/mentor communication, and we will take that more into account when pairing mentors and students.

For our other students, multiple problems collectively led to failure:
* We should enforce IRC communication, E-mail is a barrier. This applies both for students and mentors. Both should be on IRC several hours a day, with overlapping hours.
* We should be more strict about mid-term evaluation. If the student is slightly lacking at mid-term we should give a clear message that he needs to get back on track.

2009 results:
In 2009 we mentored 6 students as part of Summer of Code. Out of these 5 projects were a success. From those 5 developers 3 are still part of our core development group and still maintain and improve the work they submitted as part of Summer of Code. One of the students even became the "head" of our AI development department and mentored a student this year. For a summary of the 2009 results have a look at [1].

Sadly one student was not able to continue his work past midterm due to his computer failing completely as well as personal problems that we won't delve into further here. It was not a salvageable situation.

2010 results:
In 2010 we mentored 4 students as part of Summer of Code, all the projects were a success. from those 4 developers, 1 is still part of our code development team and maintains the work he has done as part of Summer of Code.

2011 results:
In 2011 we mentored 5 students, with four of those successfully completed their projects. Some continued the work polishing their projects a little further even after GSoC, one continues to actively polish his work and just released a new version of his WML Editor.

2012 results
in 2012 we mentored five students with four of them completing their project successfully. Most were from a set list of ideas provided by the project, which were aimed at fixing or updating parts of the code that never seemed to get fixed.

[1] http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=26955

==== If your organization participated in past GSoCs, please let us know the ratio of students passing to students allocated, e.g. 2006: 3/6 for 3 out of 6 students passed in 2006. ====
2008: 2/4
2009: 5/6
2010: 4/4
2011: 4/5
2012: 4/5

==== Main Organization License: ====
GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2) [Dropdown box answer!]

==== What is the URL for your ideas page? ====
http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas

==== What is the main development mailing list for your organization? This question will be shown to students who would like to get more information about applying to your organization for GSoC 2012. If your organization uses more than one list, please make sure to include a description of the list so students know which to use. ====
The main development mailing list is "wesnoth-dev@gna.org"

==== What is the main IRC channel for your organization? ====
#wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net

This is our main means of communications. If students have questions you should ask them in #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net and wait for a reply (might take some hours!). The Wesnoth related channels are logged in public and the logs tend to be read by developers.

==== Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? ====

Students wishing to participate in GSoC should copy the questions below to a new page and fill it with the answers.

Please note that we generally plan to meet potential students through our IRC channel. So beside just answering these questions, potential candidates consider visiting us in IRC: #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net. This is where most of our work takes place and participating in IRC is mandatory for GSoC students participating with Wesnoth. Our experience is that this is the easiest way to communicate and solve problems that come up.

1) Basics

1.1) Write a small introduction to yourself.

1.2) State your preferred email address.

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

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

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

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

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

2) Experience

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

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

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?

2.4) Are you already involved with any open source development projects? If yes, please describe the project and the scope of your involvement.

2.5) Gaming experience - Are you a gamer?

2.5.1) What type of gamer are you?

2.5.2) What type of games?

2.5.3) What type of opponents do you prefer?

2.5.4) Are you more interested in story or gameplay?

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.

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.

3.2) What spoken languages are you fluent in?

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?
* 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)

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

5.3) What programming languages are you fluent in?

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!

In general, students should be as verbose as possible in their answers and feel free to elaborate.

==== Who will be your backup organization administrator? ====
Link ID: Ivanovic

==== What criteria did you use to select the individuals who will act as mentors for your organization? Please be as specific as possible. ====
Our first criterion was that all the people had to be volunteers. According to other open source projects and our experience from the last two years, being a SoC mentor takes a lot of time and the person has to be ready to spend quite some time with the student.

Boucman is one of the oldest active developers around. He has rewritten the whole animation engine and made it an easily pluggable system allowing artists to easily specify exactly how they want the units to appear. He also started many community oriented projects like the Art Contribution[1] section of the wiki (now deprecated) and the WML Reference Manual[2]. He is responsible for dispatching and sorting the patches at http://patches.wesnoth.org that has created the new developer process we currently use. Boucman was a mentor for Wesnoth in every GSoC since 2008.

Iurii Chernyi (Crab) has joined the team in 2009, taking part in Google Summer of Code 2009, and staying with the project as a developer after successful completion of GSoC. He's an expert on all aspects of current Wesnoth AI codebase (having fully reorganized it as part of GSoC 2009), and has fixed numerous bugs all over Wesnoth. He was a GSoC mentor 2010 and 2011. In 2011 he was a GCI mentor and administrator. He is experienced in teaching other people, in areas like programming languages and math.

Mordante is one of the most active developers on our IRC channel. Not only has he done preliminary studies and coding in multiple areas that are candidates for Summer of Code ideas, he also is one of the coders with the best overview of the Wesnoth code. A large part of his work involves refactoring and polishing existing code. Next to that he's very active with fixing bugs which leads him to all areas in the code base. He is currently completing a rewrite of the Wesnoth GUI library, making all windows configurable through WML. This should make it easier to use Wesnoth on different resolutions, from small handheld devices to large 30 inch screens. Mordante has been a GSoC mentor for Wesnoth since 2008.

All other developers listed in the ideas page are the leading capacities we do have for the respecting areas. Have a look at our list of "people who to contact" [3] for an easy reference. In general all our developers will mentor all students. That is, questions should just be asked in our IRC channel, where basically every developer who has an idea can and will directly answer.

When choosing the mentors, we have kept in mind that most developers can answer most technical questions, and we have chosen people that are well known for interacting with new-comers/external developers and can provide general guidance and design advice, more than people with specific technical knowledge.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/UnsortedContrib

[2] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/ReferenceWML

[3] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SoC_People_to_bug_on_IRC

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students? ====
The first thing to do is to avoid this situation altogether. The key is identifying candidates with the right mix of skills and temperament. Wesnoth is a game, and as such has lots of developers that are not coders. In particular, artists are well known in the Wesnoth community for being very sensitive about criticism and our community is used to people being sensitive to critics.

We try to choose students that accept criticism and are able to filter constructive criticism from useless one. The Wesnoth developer community is used to judging people according to these criteria and the special title we are going to give to applicants will allow us to easily spot any such problems and discuss them before they grow out of control.

If a student disappears, their mentor are in charge of reconnecting the student to see what is going wrong (available time, tension with other developers, with members of the community etc...). Depending on the actual problem, the mentor and the student will have to agree on possible ways to resolve the problem.

If a student disappears completely and there is no way to get back to them, there is little the project can do except salvaging whatever can be salvaged from the code (the students will have repository write access, so most of the work will be committed either to trunk or to a specific branch) and find a core developer to take on the job. This will probably be slower and less effective for the project, but it's the best we can do.

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors? ====
All our mentors are long time developers that volunteered for the job, so we don't expect that to happen. We observed in during the last years the amount of time required to mentor, and our mentors accepted the job knowing the amount of work it involved. All of this years mentors mentored last year as well, most have contributed since 2008, or been organizational admins.

However, should it happen, we would continue to mentor as a developer community the student until we find a new "official" mentor to take on the job.

==== What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program? ====
Wesnoth has a particularly healthy community, both for developers and for players.

Our general policy regarding new coders has always been "two (non trival) patches... you're in". With other words, anybody that is able to get two non-trivial patches applied is offered commit privileges.
We have a developer responsible for applying patches and guiding new developers into our community. This is a well known and effective process we plan to apply to students, directing them to our EasyCoding pages [1] (these projects are usually a couple of hours long and hve been chosen to provide easy access to the respective area of code). This year, we also have added some simple coding tasks directly related to our GSoC ideas to be able to test students more specifically on their future project

Usually, patches go back and forth a couple of times, to make sure that all secondary things are in place (indenting, coding style, modified buildfiles etc.) The idea is that coder education should take place before the coder gets commit rights, but that getting new coder in is one of the most important things to keep our project alive.

If the student is proactive and ready to join IRC, all the developers are usually very welcoming, and good at directing newcomers to quickly give useful results.

In previous years, all students that were accepted (and a couple more) managed to have commit access before the start of the coding phase. We consider that this policy was successful and we plan to keep it this year.

We also plan to give a special forum title to any students. This will allow all forum members to tell them apart from normal users and give them read/write access to the developer only forums. This will also allow us to quickly spot any problem they might have interacting with the player community. We have a very mature developer community, but our player community is made of all sort of people of all age and education, and it can sometimes be rough.

Last, our experience from previous years is that students that participate in the community during the evaluation period will stay active in the community after that period. In previous years this has been a discriminating criterias for students of similar level, and overall we never had problems of students working "behind a black wall." Our selection process tend to favor students who participate, and participation hasn't been a problem so far.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/EasyCoding

==== If you are a small or new organization applying to GSoC, please list a larger, established GSoC organization or a Googler that can vouch for you here. ====

==== If you are a large organization who is vouching for a small organization applying to GSoC for their first time this year, please list their name and why you think they'd be good candidates for GSoC here: ====

==== Anything else you'd like to tell us? ====
There is nothing more to say.

==== Admin Agreement: ====
(some terms of service by Google that have to be agreed upon)

SoC Information for Google

2013-03-29T14:33:32Z

Noy: /* Description: */

{{Template:SoC2012}}

== SoC Information for Google ==
This is the information that we submit to google as Application in Summer of Code (current status: 2012). The submitter automatically becomes primary Admin. Most entries are mandatory and have to be filled out before the application can be submitted.

==== Organization Name: ====
Battle for Wesnoth

==== Description: ====
<code type="html">
Battle for Wesnoth, or simply Wesnoth, is a free, turn-based strategy game with role-playing elements that was designed in June 2003 by David White (Sirp).
Although the core rules are fairly simple and meant to be easily learned[1], they provide interesting gameplay and rich tactical options. A major strength of the project is the Wesnoth Markup Language (WML) for writing scenarios. Programming skills are not required to compose with it, and a large WML-modding community has generated a great deal of user-maintained content. We polish the best of this content and lift it into our official release tree.
The first stable release (1.0) was on October 2, 2005, and the latest stable release (1.8) happened in April 2010. Version 1.10 was released earlier this year, while the current development branch is 1.11. We're early in our cycle, so there are several interesting project available for students to join
Wesnoth is one of the most successful open-source game projects in existence, with an exceptionally large developer base and user community:
<ul>
<li>According to Ohloh, a site that collects activity statistics on open-source projects, the ''Wesnoth'' development effort is in the top 2% of largest and most active projects</li>
<li>We support two multiplayer game servers (stable and development) with a usual minimum load of more than a hundred players</li>
<li>More than two thousand downloads a day</li>
<li>6 million downloads via SourceForge; many more via various mirrors of Linux distributions</li>
<li>Best rated game at the Linux Game Tome[2]</li>
<li>Game of the year 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 at LinuxQuestions.org[3][4]</li>
<li>In general, Wesnoth tends to show up in the first or second position whenever anyone compiles a list of top open-source games</li>
</ul>
Wesnoth's most notable features include:
<ul>
<li>A mature project with continuing active development and frequent improvements after 10 years of development</li>
<li>High quality artwork: both original graphics and music</li>
<li>Well-balanced by a tireless team of playtesters</li>
<li>Fun, unique gameplay</li>
<li>Even after nearly a decade of development and a very solid, fun product already created, there are still plenty of new developers; the frequency of commits to the repository is still increasing</li>
<li>Strong support of internationalization with many supported languages, thus experience in working with non-native English speakers. In fact, more than half of our developers are not native English speakers.</li>
</ul>
For our Ideas page, please have a look at [5]. There you can find all information required to get you started working on Wesnoth.
[1] <a href="http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy">http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy</a> 
[2] <a href="http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating">http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating</a> 
[3] <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/">http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/</a> 
[4] <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/">http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/</a> 
[5] <a href="http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas">http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas</a>
</code>

==== Home page: ====
http://www.wesnoth.org/

==== Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2012? What do you hope to gain by participating? ====
Most of our developers have particular areas of interest in which they work. Though they are efficient in their areas, there are other, presently uncovered, areas of the code with a need for improvements but a high barrier to entry for casual contributors. By bringing new people in and allowing them to be actively responsible for an area of code, we hope to kickstart work in these areas and others that are lagging behind. Our previous SoC experience shows that a motivated, full-time, student can be brought up to date in any area fairly quickly. Our previous experiences has shown us that SoC developers tend to stay after the end of the Summer of Code and become valuable members of our community. Finally, we feel that it is part of our mandate is to provide a platform for motivated contributors to develop their skills in a positive learning environment.

Overall GSOC has been a win for all parties and we want it to continue in the future.

==== If accepted, would this be your first year participating in GSoC? ====
No

==== Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation. ====

2008 results:
Wesnoth participated in GSoC 2008 with four students. Out of these, two were great successes (that is they became full-fledge developers before the actual start of GSoC), did huge improvement during GSoC (A new recruitment algorithm for the AI and the basic structure for a new map editor, the student finished this work after the summer), and are still active developers in the Wesnoth community.

Of the two other, one of them was very active for the first half of GSoC and provided some useful infrastructure for AI development that we used as base in GSoC 2009, but was much less active and didn't reach expectations for the second half of GSoC. The lesson we learned is that great students should be left on their own, that's the best way to have them work, but average students should be monitored much more closely than we did. If things seems to start to go wrong, it's important to react very quick, to meet with other mentors and get things back on track early.

Timezone problems were also a serious barrier for student/mentor communication, and we will take that more into account when pairing mentors and students.

For our other students, multiple problems collectively led to failure:
* We should enforce IRC communication, E-mail is a barrier. This applies both for students and mentors. Both should be on IRC several hours a day, with overlapping hours.
* We should be more strict about mid-term evaluation. If the student is slightly lacking at mid-term we should give a clear message that he needs to get back on track.

2009 results:
In 2009 we mentored 6 students as part of Summer of Code. Out of these 5 projects were a success. From those 5 developers 3 are still part of our core development group and still maintain and improve the work they submitted as part of Summer of Code. One of the students even became the "head" of our AI development department and mentored a student this year. For a summary of the 2009 results have a look at [1].

Sadly one student was not able to continue his work past midterm due to his computer failing completely as well as personal problems that we won't delve into further here. It was not a salvageable situation.

2010 results:
In 2010 we mentored 4 students as part of Summer of Code, all the projects were a success. from those 4 developers, 1 is still part of our code development team and maintains the work he has done as part of Summer of Code.

2011 results:
In 2011 we mentored 5 students, with 4 four of those successfully completed their projects. Some continued the work polishing their projects a little further even after GSoC, one continues to actively polish his work and just released a new version of his WML Editor.

[1] http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=26955

==== If your organization participated in past GSoCs, please let us know the ratio of students passing to students allocated, e.g. 2006: 3/6 for 3 out of 6 students passed in 2006. ====
2008: 2/4
2009: 5/6
2010: 4/4
2011: 4/5

==== Main Organization License: ====
GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2) [Dropdown box answer!]

==== What is the URL for your ideas page? ====
http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas

==== What is the main development mailing list for your organization? This question will be shown to students who would like to get more information about applying to your organization for GSoC 2012. If your organization uses more than one list, please make sure to include a description of the list so students know which to use. ====
The main development mailing list is "wesnoth-dev@gna.org"

==== What is the main IRC channel for your organization? ====
#wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net

This is our main means of communications. If students have questions you should ask them in #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net and wait for a reply (might take some hours!). The Wesnoth related channels are logged in public and the logs tend to be read by developers.

==== Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? ====

Students wishing to participate in GSoC should copy the questions below to a new page and fill it with the answers.

Please note that we generally plan to meet potential students through our IRC channel. So beside just answering these questions, potential candidates consider visiting us in IRC: #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net. This is where most of our work takes place and participating in IRC is mandatory for GSoC students participating with Wesnoth. Our experience is that this is the easiest way to communicate and solve problems that come up.

1) Basics

1.1) Write a small introduction to yourself.

1.2) State your preferred email address.

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

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

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

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

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

2) Experience

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

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

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?

2.4) Are you already involved with any open source development projects? If yes, please describe the project and the scope of your involvement.

2.5) Gaming experience - Are you a gamer?

2.5.1) What type of gamer are you?

2.5.2) What type of games?

2.5.3) What type of opponents do you prefer?

2.5.4) Are you more interested in story or gameplay?

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.

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.

3.2) What spoken languages are you fluent in?

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?
* 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)

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

5.3) What programming languages are you fluent in?

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!

In general, students should be as verbose as possible in their answers and feel free to elaborate.

==== Who will be your backup organization administrator? ====
Link ID: Ivanovic

==== What criteria did you use to select the individuals who will act as mentors for your organization? Please be as specific as possible. ====
Our first criterion was that all the people had to be volunteers. According to other open source projects and our experience from the last two years, being a SoC mentor takes a lot of time and the person has to be ready to spend quite some time with the student.

Boucman is one of the oldest active developers around. He has rewritten the whole animation engine and made it an easily pluggable system allowing artists to easily specify exactly how they want the units to appear. He also started many community oriented projects like the Art Contribution[1] section of the wiki (now deprecated) and the WML Reference Manual[2]. He is responsible for dispatching and sorting the patches at http://patches.wesnoth.org that has created the new developer process we currently use. Boucman was a mentor for Wesnoth in every GSoC since 2008.

Iurii Chernyi (Crab) has joined the team in 2009, taking part in Google Summer of Code 2009, and staying with the project as a developer after successful completion of GSoC. He's an expert on all aspects of current Wesnoth AI codebase (having fully reorganized it as part of GSoC 2009), and has fixed numerous bugs all over Wesnoth. He was a GSoC mentor 2010 and 2011. In 2011 he was a GCI mentor and administrator. He is experienced in teaching other people, in areas like programming languages and math.

Fendrin has some skills on both ends of the Wesnoth world, knowing parts of the c++ engine and how to use the Wesnoth markup language. He is the coder and maintainer of Wesnoth's first multiplayer campaign that is hosted in the mainline repository. His experience as a content developer ensures that there is an eye kept on the usability of those new features which are accessible to content designers. Fendrin was a mentor in 2010 and 2011.

Mordante is one of the most active developers on our IRC channel. Not only has he done preliminary studies and coding in multiple areas that are candidates for Summer of Code ideas, he also is one of the coders with the best overview of the Wesnoth code. A large part of his work involves refactoring and polishing existing code. Next to that he's very active with fixing bugs which leads him to all areas in the code base. He is currently completing a rewrite of the Wesnoth GUI library, making all windows configurable through WML. This should make it easier to use Wesnoth on different resolutions, from small handheld devices to large 30 inch screens. Mordante has been a GSoC mentor for Wesnoth since 2008.

All other developers listed in the ideas page are the leading capacities we do have for the respecting areas. Have a look at our list of "people who to contact" [3] for an easy reference. In general all our developers will mentor all students. That is, questions should just be asked in our IRC channel, where basically every developer who has an idea can and will directly answer.

When choosing the mentors, we have kept in mind that most developers can answer most technical questions, and we have chosen people that are well known for interacting with new-comers/external developers and can provide general guidance and design advice, more than people with specific technical knowledge.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/UnsortedContrib

[2] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/ReferenceWML

[3] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SoC_People_to_bug_on_IRC

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students? ====
The first thing to do is to avoid this situation altogether. The key is identifying candidates with the right mix of skills and temperament. Wesnoth is a game, and as such has lots of developers that are not coders. In particular, artists are well known in the Wesnoth community for being very sensitive about criticism and our community is used to people being sensitive to critics.

We try to choose students that accept criticism and are able to filter constructive criticism from useless one. The Wesnoth developer community is used to judging people according to these criteria and the special title we are going to give to applicants will allow us to easily spot any such problems and discuss them before they grow out of control.

If a student disappears, their mentor are in charge of reconnecting the student to see what is going wrong (available time, tension with other developers, with members of the community etc...). Depending on the actual problem, the mentor and the student will have to agree on possible ways to resolve the problem.

If a student disappears completely and there is no way to get back to them, there is little the project can do except salvaging whatever can be salvaged from the code (the students will have repository write access, so most of the work will be committed either to trunk or to a specific branch) and find a core developer to take on the job. This will probably be slower and less effective for the project, but it's the best we can do.

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors? ====
All our mentors are long time developers that volunteered for the job, so we don't expect that to happen. We observed in during the last years the amount of time required to mentor, and our mentors accepted the job knowing the amount of work it involved. All of this years mentors mentored last year as well.

However, should it happen, we would continue to mentor as a developer community the student until we find a new "official" mentor to take on the job.

==== What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program? ====
Wesnoth has a particularly healthy community, both for developers and for players.

Our general policy regarding new coders has always been "two (non trival) patches... you're in". With other words, anybody that is able to get two non-trivial patches applied is offered commit privileges.
We have a developer responsible for applying patches and guiding new developers into our community. This is a well known and effective process we plan to apply to students, directing them to our EasyCoding pages [1] (these projects are usually a couple of hours long and hve been chosen to provide easy access to the respective area of code). This year, we also have added some simple coding tasks directly related to our GSoC ideas to be able to test students more specifically on their future project

Usually, patches go back and forth a couple of times, to make sure that all secondary things are in place (indenting, coding style, modified buildfiles etc.) The idea is that coder education should take place before the coder gets commit rights, but that getting new coder in is one of the most important things to keep our project alive.

If the student is proactive and ready to join IRC, all the developers are usually very welcoming, and good at directing newcomers to quickly give useful results.

In previous years, all students that were accepted (and a couple more) managed to have commit access before the start of the coding phase. We consider that this policy was successful and we plan to keep it this year.

We also plan to give a special forum title to any students. This will allow all forum members to tell them apart from normal users and give them read/write access to the developer only forums. This will also allow us to quickly spot any problem they might have interacting with the player community. We have a very mature developer community, but our player community is made of all sort of people of all age and education, and it can sometimes be rough.

Last, our experience from previous years is that students that participate in the community during the evaluation period will stay active in the community after that period. In previous years this has been a discriminating criterias for students of similar level, and overall we never had problems of students working "behind a black wall." Our selection process tend to favor students who participate, and participation hasn't been a problem so far.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/EasyCoding

==== If you are a small or new organization applying to GSoC, please list a larger, established GSoC organization or a Googler that can vouch for you here. ====

==== If you are a large organization who is vouching for a small organization applying to GSoC for their first time this year, please list their name and why you think they'd be good candidates for GSoC here: ====

==== Anything else you'd like to tell us? ====
There is nothing more to say.

==== Admin Agreement: ====
(some terms of service by Google that have to be agreed upon)

SoC Information for Google

2013-03-29T14:31:00Z

Noy: /* Description: */

{{Template:SoC2012}}

== SoC Information for Google ==
This is the information that we submit to google as Application in Summer of Code (current status: 2012). The submitter automatically becomes primary Admin. Most entries are mandatory and have to be filled out before the application can be submitted.

==== Organization Name: ====
Battle for Wesnoth

==== Description: ====
<code type="html">
Battle for Wesnoth, or simply Wesnoth, is a free, turn-based strategy game with role-playing elements that was designed in June 2003 by David White (Sirp).
Although the core rules are fairly simple and meant to be easily learned[1], they provide interesting gameplay and rich tactical options. A major strength of the project is the Wesnoth Markup Language (WML) for writing scenarios. Programming skills are not required to compose with it, and a large WML-modding community has generated a great deal of user-maintained content. We polish the best of this content and lift it into our official release tree.
The first stable release (1.0) was on October 2, 2005, and the latest stable release (1.8) happened in April 2010. Version 1.10 was released earlier this year, while the current development branch is 1.11. We're early in our cycle, so there are several interesting project available for students to join
Wesnoth is one of the most successful open-source game projects in existence, with an exceptionally large developer base and user community:
<ul>
<li>According to Ohloh, a site that collects activity statistics on open-source projects, the ''Wesnoth'' development effort is in the top 2% of largest and most active projects</li>
<li>We support two multiplayer game servers (stable and development) with a usual minimum load of more than a hundred players</li>
<li>More than two thousand downloads a day</li>
<li>6 million downloads via SourceForge; many more via various mirrors of Linux distributions</li>
<li>Best rated game at the Linux Game Tome[2]</li>
<li>Game of the year 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 at LinuxQuestions.org[3][4]</li>
<li>In general, Wesnoth tends to show up in the first or second position whenever anyone compiles a list of top open-source games</li>
</ul>
Wesnoth's most notable features include:
<ul>
<li>A mature project with continuing active development and frequent improvements</li>
<li>High quality artwork: both original graphics and music</li>
<li>Well-balanced by a tireless team of playtesters</li>
<li>Fun, unique gameplay</li>
<li>Even after nearly a decade of development and a very solid, fun product already created, there are still plenty of new developers; the frequency of commits to the repository is still increasing</li>
<li>Strong support of internationalization with many supported languages, thus experience in working with non-native English speakers. In fact, more than half of our developers are not native English speakers.</li>
</ul>
For our Ideas page, please have a look at [5]. There you can find all information required to get you started working on Wesnoth.
[1] <a href="http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy">http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy</a> 
[2] <a href="http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating">http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating</a> 
[3] <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/">http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/</a> 
[4] <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/">http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/</a> 
[5] <a href="http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas">http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas</a>
</code>

==== Home page: ====
http://www.wesnoth.org/

==== Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2012? What do you hope to gain by participating? ====
Most of our developers have particular areas of interest in which they work. Though they are efficient in their areas, there are other, presently uncovered, areas of the code with a need for improvements but a high barrier to entry for casual contributors. By bringing new people in and allowing them to be actively responsible for an area of code, we hope to kickstart work in these areas and others that are lagging behind. Our previous SoC experience shows that a motivated, full-time, student can be brought up to date in any area fairly quickly. Our previous experiences has shown us that SoC developers tend to stay after the end of the Summer of Code and become valuable members of our community. Finally, we feel that it is part of our mandate is to provide a platform for motivated contributors to develop their skills in a positive learning environment.

Overall GSOC has been a win for all parties and we want it to continue in the future.

==== If accepted, would this be your first year participating in GSoC? ====
No

==== Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation. ====

2008 results:
Wesnoth participated in GSoC 2008 with four students. Out of these, two were great successes (that is they became full-fledge developers before the actual start of GSoC), did huge improvement during GSoC (A new recruitment algorithm for the AI and the basic structure for a new map editor, the student finished this work after the summer), and are still active developers in the Wesnoth community.

Of the two other, one of them was very active for the first half of GSoC and provided some useful infrastructure for AI development that we used as base in GSoC 2009, but was much less active and didn't reach expectations for the second half of GSoC. The lesson we learned is that great students should be left on their own, that's the best way to have them work, but average students should be monitored much more closely than we did. If things seems to start to go wrong, it's important to react very quick, to meet with other mentors and get things back on track early.

Timezone problems were also a serious barrier for student/mentor communication, and we will take that more into account when pairing mentors and students.

For our other students, multiple problems collectively led to failure:
* We should enforce IRC communication, E-mail is a barrier. This applies both for students and mentors. Both should be on IRC several hours a day, with overlapping hours.
* We should be more strict about mid-term evaluation. If the student is slightly lacking at mid-term we should give a clear message that he needs to get back on track.

2009 results:
In 2009 we mentored 6 students as part of Summer of Code. Out of these 5 projects were a success. From those 5 developers 3 are still part of our core development group and still maintain and improve the work they submitted as part of Summer of Code. One of the students even became the "head" of our AI development department and mentored a student this year. For a summary of the 2009 results have a look at [1].

Sadly one student was not able to continue his work past midterm due to his computer failing completely as well as personal problems that we won't delve into further here. It was not a salvageable situation.

2010 results:
In 2010 we mentored 4 students as part of Summer of Code, all the projects were a success. from those 4 developers, 1 is still part of our code development team and maintains the work he has done as part of Summer of Code.

2011 results:
In 2011 we mentored 5 students, with 4 four of those successfully completed their projects. Some continued the work polishing their projects a little further even after GSoC, one continues to actively polish his work and just released a new version of his WML Editor.

[1] http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=26955

==== If your organization participated in past GSoCs, please let us know the ratio of students passing to students allocated, e.g. 2006: 3/6 for 3 out of 6 students passed in 2006. ====
2008: 2/4
2009: 5/6
2010: 4/4
2011: 4/5

==== Main Organization License: ====
GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2) [Dropdown box answer!]

==== What is the URL for your ideas page? ====
http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas

==== What is the main development mailing list for your organization? This question will be shown to students who would like to get more information about applying to your organization for GSoC 2012. If your organization uses more than one list, please make sure to include a description of the list so students know which to use. ====
The main development mailing list is "wesnoth-dev@gna.org"

==== What is the main IRC channel for your organization? ====
#wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net

This is our main means of communications. If students have questions you should ask them in #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net and wait for a reply (might take some hours!). The Wesnoth related channels are logged in public and the logs tend to be read by developers.

==== Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? ====

Students wishing to participate in GSoC should copy the questions below to a new page and fill it with the answers.

Please note that we generally plan to meet potential students through our IRC channel. So beside just answering these questions, potential candidates consider visiting us in IRC: #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net. This is where most of our work takes place and participating in IRC is mandatory for GSoC students participating with Wesnoth. Our experience is that this is the easiest way to communicate and solve problems that come up.

1) Basics

1.1) Write a small introduction to yourself.

1.2) State your preferred email address.

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

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

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

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

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

2) Experience

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

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

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?

2.4) Are you already involved with any open source development projects? If yes, please describe the project and the scope of your involvement.

2.5) Gaming experience - Are you a gamer?

2.5.1) What type of gamer are you?

2.5.2) What type of games?

2.5.3) What type of opponents do you prefer?

2.5.4) Are you more interested in story or gameplay?

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.

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.

3.2) What spoken languages are you fluent in?

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?
* 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)

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

5.3) What programming languages are you fluent in?

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!

In general, students should be as verbose as possible in their answers and feel free to elaborate.

==== Who will be your backup organization administrator? ====
Link ID: Ivanovic

==== What criteria did you use to select the individuals who will act as mentors for your organization? Please be as specific as possible. ====
Our first criterion was that all the people had to be volunteers. According to other open source projects and our experience from the last two years, being a SoC mentor takes a lot of time and the person has to be ready to spend quite some time with the student.

Boucman is one of the oldest active developers around. He has rewritten the whole animation engine and made it an easily pluggable system allowing artists to easily specify exactly how they want the units to appear. He also started many community oriented projects like the Art Contribution[1] section of the wiki (now deprecated) and the WML Reference Manual[2]. He is responsible for dispatching and sorting the patches at http://patches.wesnoth.org that has created the new developer process we currently use. Boucman was a mentor for Wesnoth in every GSoC since 2008.

Iurii Chernyi (Crab) has joined the team in 2009, taking part in Google Summer of Code 2009, and staying with the project as a developer after successful completion of GSoC. He's an expert on all aspects of current Wesnoth AI codebase (having fully reorganized it as part of GSoC 2009), and has fixed numerous bugs all over Wesnoth. He was a GSoC mentor 2010 and 2011. In 2011 he was a GCI mentor and administrator. He is experienced in teaching other people, in areas like programming languages and math.

Fendrin has some skills on both ends of the Wesnoth world, knowing parts of the c++ engine and how to use the Wesnoth markup language. He is the coder and maintainer of Wesnoth's first multiplayer campaign that is hosted in the mainline repository. His experience as a content developer ensures that there is an eye kept on the usability of those new features which are accessible to content designers. Fendrin was a mentor in 2010 and 2011.

Mordante is one of the most active developers on our IRC channel. Not only has he done preliminary studies and coding in multiple areas that are candidates for Summer of Code ideas, he also is one of the coders with the best overview of the Wesnoth code. A large part of his work involves refactoring and polishing existing code. Next to that he's very active with fixing bugs which leads him to all areas in the code base. He is currently completing a rewrite of the Wesnoth GUI library, making all windows configurable through WML. This should make it easier to use Wesnoth on different resolutions, from small handheld devices to large 30 inch screens. Mordante has been a GSoC mentor for Wesnoth since 2008.

All other developers listed in the ideas page are the leading capacities we do have for the respecting areas. Have a look at our list of "people who to contact" [3] for an easy reference. In general all our developers will mentor all students. That is, questions should just be asked in our IRC channel, where basically every developer who has an idea can and will directly answer.

When choosing the mentors, we have kept in mind that most developers can answer most technical questions, and we have chosen people that are well known for interacting with new-comers/external developers and can provide general guidance and design advice, more than people with specific technical knowledge.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/UnsortedContrib

[2] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/ReferenceWML

[3] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SoC_People_to_bug_on_IRC

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students? ====
The first thing to do is to avoid this situation altogether. The key is identifying candidates with the right mix of skills and temperament. Wesnoth is a game, and as such has lots of developers that are not coders. In particular, artists are well known in the Wesnoth community for being very sensitive about criticism and our community is used to people being sensitive to critics.

We try to choose students that accept criticism and are able to filter constructive criticism from useless one. The Wesnoth developer community is used to judging people according to these criteria and the special title we are going to give to applicants will allow us to easily spot any such problems and discuss them before they grow out of control.

If a student disappears, their mentor are in charge of reconnecting the student to see what is going wrong (available time, tension with other developers, with members of the community etc...). Depending on the actual problem, the mentor and the student will have to agree on possible ways to resolve the problem.

If a student disappears completely and there is no way to get back to them, there is little the project can do except salvaging whatever can be salvaged from the code (the students will have repository write access, so most of the work will be committed either to trunk or to a specific branch) and find a core developer to take on the job. This will probably be slower and less effective for the project, but it's the best we can do.

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors? ====
All our mentors are long time developers that volunteered for the job, so we don't expect that to happen. We observed in during the last years the amount of time required to mentor, and our mentors accepted the job knowing the amount of work it involved. All of this years mentors mentored last year as well.

However, should it happen, we would continue to mentor as a developer community the student until we find a new "official" mentor to take on the job.

==== What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program? ====
Wesnoth has a particularly healthy community, both for developers and for players.

Our general policy regarding new coders has always been "two (non trival) patches... you're in". With other words, anybody that is able to get two non-trivial patches applied is offered commit privileges.
We have a developer responsible for applying patches and guiding new developers into our community. This is a well known and effective process we plan to apply to students, directing them to our EasyCoding pages [1] (these projects are usually a couple of hours long and hve been chosen to provide easy access to the respective area of code). This year, we also have added some simple coding tasks directly related to our GSoC ideas to be able to test students more specifically on their future project

Usually, patches go back and forth a couple of times, to make sure that all secondary things are in place (indenting, coding style, modified buildfiles etc.) The idea is that coder education should take place before the coder gets commit rights, but that getting new coder in is one of the most important things to keep our project alive.

If the student is proactive and ready to join IRC, all the developers are usually very welcoming, and good at directing newcomers to quickly give useful results.

In previous years, all students that were accepted (and a couple more) managed to have commit access before the start of the coding phase. We consider that this policy was successful and we plan to keep it this year.

We also plan to give a special forum title to any students. This will allow all forum members to tell them apart from normal users and give them read/write access to the developer only forums. This will also allow us to quickly spot any problem they might have interacting with the player community. We have a very mature developer community, but our player community is made of all sort of people of all age and education, and it can sometimes be rough.

Last, our experience from previous years is that students that participate in the community during the evaluation period will stay active in the community after that period. In previous years this has been a discriminating criterias for students of similar level, and overall we never had problems of students working "behind a black wall." Our selection process tend to favor students who participate, and participation hasn't been a problem so far.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/EasyCoding

==== If you are a small or new organization applying to GSoC, please list a larger, established GSoC organization or a Googler that can vouch for you here. ====

==== If you are a large organization who is vouching for a small organization applying to GSoC for their first time this year, please list their name and why you think they'd be good candidates for GSoC here: ====

==== Anything else you'd like to tell us? ====
There is nothing more to say.

==== Admin Agreement: ====
(some terms of service by Google that have to be agreed upon)

SoC Ideas Your Own Ideas2012

2012-03-07T19:47:36Z

Noy: /* Description */

{{Template:SoC2012Idea}}
= Description =
<h2>Make your own ideas</h2>
Page for the idea: [[SoC_Ideas_Your_Own_Ideas2012]]

Unlike previous years,will not accept unsolicited proposals in principle. Exceptional proposals might be considered however. If you have your own idea the best thing is to join IRC wesnoth-dev at irc.freenode.net and discuss the idea with the developers there. If the developers think your idea is interesting and like the feature you can start to turn it into a full proposal.

{{#dpl:
|resultsheader=''There are %PAGES% submitted student proposals for this idea''
|oneresultheader=''There is 1 student proposal for this idea''
|suppresserrors=true
|noresultsheader=''There are no student proposals for this idea''
|category=Summer of Code 2012 Student Page&SoC_Ideas_Your_Own_Ideas2012
|notcategory=SoC 2012 Not Submitted To Google
|include=#Description
|nottitlematch=SoC2012_Template_of_Student_page
|mode=userformat
|format=,, See [[%PAGE%|%TITLE%]] for more information. ,
}}

=Additional Information=
There are some frequently proposed ideas on wesnoth's forum that the developers decided should not be implemented, take a look at that list before proposing.

=Whom to ask about this=
See [[SoC_People_to_bug_on_IRC]]

SoC Information for Google

2012-03-05T22:01:47Z

Noy: /* If you are a large organization who is vouching for a small organization applying to GSoC for their first time this year, please list their name and why you think they'd be good candidates for GSoC here: */

{{Template:SoC2011}}

== SoC Information for Google ==
This is the information that we submit to google as Application in Summer of Code (current status: 2012). The submitter automatically becomes primary Admin. Most entries are mandatory and have to be filled out before the application can be submitted.

==== Organization Name: ====
Battle for Wesnoth

==== Description: ====
<code type="html">
Battle for Wesnoth, or simply Wesnoth, is a free, turn-based strategy game with role-playing elements that was designed in June 2003 by David White (Sirp).
Although the core rules are fairly simple and meant to be easily learned[1], they provide interesting gameplay and rich tactical options. A major strength of the project is the Wesnoth Markup Language (WML) for writing scenarios. Programming skills are not required to compose with it, and a large WML-modding community has generated a great deal of user-maintained content. We polish the best of this content and lift it into our official release tree.
The first stable release (1.0) was on October 2, 2005, and the latest stable release (1.8) happened in April 2010. Version 1.10 was released earlier this year, while the current development branch is 1.11. We're early in our cycle, so there are several interesting project available for students to join
Wesnoth is one of the most successful open-source game projects in existence, with an exceptionally large developer base and user community:
<ul>
<li>According to Ohloh, a site that collects activity statistics on open-source projects, the ''Wesnoth'' development effort is in the top 2% of largest and most active projects</li>
<li>We support two multiplayer game servers (stable and development) with a usual minimum load of more than a hundred players</li>
<li>More than two thousand downloads a day</li>
<li>4.5 million downloads via SourceForge; many more via various mirrors of Linux distributions</li>
<li>Best rated game at the Linux Game Tome[2]</li>
<li>Game of the year 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 at LinuxQuestions.org[3][4]</li>
<li>In general, Wesnoth tends to show up in the first or second position whenever anyone compiles a list of top open-source games</li>
</ul>
Wesnoth's most notable features include:
<ul>
<li>A mature project with continuing active development and frequent improvements</li>
<li>High quality artwork: both original graphics and music</li>
<li>Well-balanced by a tireless team of playtesters</li>
<li>Fun, unique gameplay</li>
<li>Even after nearly a decade of development and a very solid, fun product already created, there are still plenty of new developers; the number of commits to Subversion is still increasing</li>
<li>Strong support of internationalization with many supported languages, thus experience in working with non-native English speakers. In fact, more than half of our developers are not native English speakers.</li>
</ul>
For our Ideas page, please have a look at [5]. There you can find all information required to get you started working on Wesnoth.
[1] <a href="http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy">http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy</a> 
[2] <a href="http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating">http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating</a> 
[3] <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/">http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/</a> 
[4] <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/">http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/</a> 
[5] <a href="http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas">http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas</a>
</code>

==== Home page: ====
http://www.wesnoth.org/

==== Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2012? What do you hope to gain by participating? ====
Most of our developers have particular areas of interest in which they work. Though they are efficient in their areas, there are other, presently uncovered, areas of the code with a need for improvements but a high barrier to entry for casual contributors. By bringing new people in and allowing them to be actively responsible for an area of code, we hope to kickstart work in these areas and others that are lagging behind. Our previous SoC experience shows that a motivated, full-time, student can be brought up to date in any area fairly quickly. Our previous experiences has shown us that SoC developers tend to stay after the end of the Summer of Code and become valuable members of our community. Finally, we feel that it is part of our mandate is to provide a platform for motivated contributors to develop their skills in a positive learning environment.

Overall GSOC has been a win for all parties and we want it to continue in the future.

==== If accepted, would this be your first year participating in GSoC? ====
No

==== Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation. ====

2008 results:
Wesnoth participated in GSoC 2008 with four students. Out of these, two were great successes (that is they became full-fledge developers before the actual start of GSoC), did huge improvement during GSoC (A new recruitment algorithm for the AI and the basic structure for a new map editor, the student finished this work after the summer), and are still active developers in the Wesnoth community.

Of the two other, one of them was very active for the first half of GSoC and provided some useful infrastructure for AI development that we used as base in GSoC 2009, but was much less active and didn't reach expectations for the second half of GSoC. The lesson we learned is that great students should be left on their own, that's the best way to have them work, but average students should be monitored much more closely than we did. If things seems to start to go wrong, it's important to react very quick, to meet with other mentors and get things back on track early.

Timezone problems were also a serious barrier for student/mentor communication, and we will take that more into account when pairing mentors and students

For our other students, multiple problems collectively led to failure
* We should enforce IRC communication, E-mail is a barrier. This applies both for students and mentors. Both should be on IRC several hours a day, with overlapping hours.
* We should be more strict about mid-term evaluation. If the student is slightly lacking at mid-term we should give a clear message that he needs to get back on track.

2009 results:
In 2009 we mentored 6 students as part of Summer of Code. Out of these 5 projects were a success. From those 5 developers 3 are still part of our core development group and still maintain and improve the work they submitted as part of Summer of Code. One of the students even became the "head" of our AI development department and mentored a student this year. For a summary of the 2009 results have a look at [1].

Sadly one student was not able to continue his work past midterm due to his computer failing completely as well as personal problems that we won't delve into further here. It was not a salvageable situation.

2010 results:
In 2010 we mentored 4 students as part of Summer of Code, all the projects were a success. from those 4 developers, 1 is still part of our code development team and maintains the work he has done as part of Summer of Code.

2011 results:
In 2011 we mentored 5 students, with 4 four successfully completed

[1] http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=26955

==== If your organization participated in past GSoCs, please let us know the ratio of students passing to students allocated, e.g. 2006: 3/6 for 3 out of 6 students passed in 2006. ====
2008: 2/4
2009: 5/6
2010: 4/4
2011: 4/5

==== Main Organization License: ====
GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2) [Dropdown box answer!]

==== What is the URL for your ideas page? ====
http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas

==== What is the main development mailing list for your organization? This question will be shown to students who would like to get more information about applying to your organization for GSoC 2012. If your organization uses more than one list, please make sure to include a description of the list so students know which to use. ====
The main development mailing list is "wesnoth-dev@gna.org"

==== What is the main IRC channel for your organization? ====
#wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net

This is our main means of communications. If students have questions you should ask them in #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net and wait for a reply (might take some hours!). The Wesnoth related channels are logged in public and the logs tend to be read by developers.

==== Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? ====

Students wishing to participate in GSoC should copy the questions below to a new page and fill it with the answers.

Please note that we generally plan to meet potential students through our IRC channel. So beside just answering these questions, potential candidates consider visiting us in IRC: #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net. This is where most of our work takes place and participating in IRC is mandatory for GSoC students participating with Wesnoth. Our experience is that this is the easiest way to communicate and solve problems that come up.

1) Basics

1.1) Write a small introduction to yourself.

1.2) State your preferred email address.

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

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

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

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

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

2) Experience

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

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

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?

2.4) Are you already involved with any open source development projects? If yes, please describe the project and the scope of your involvement.

2.5) Gaming experience - Are you a gamer?

2.5.1) What type of gamer are you?

2.5.2) What type of games?

2.5.3) What type of opponents do you prefer?

2.5.4) Are you more interested in story or gameplay?

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.

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.

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.

3.2) What spoken languages are you fluent in?

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?
* 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)

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

5.3) What programming languages are you fluent in?

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!

In general, students should be as verbose as possible in their answers and feel free to elaborate.

==== Who will be your backup organization administrator? ====
Link ID: Ivanovic

==== What criteria did you use to select the individuals who will act as mentors for your organization? Please be as specific as possible. ====
Our first criterion was that all the people had to be volunteers. According to other open source projects and our experience from the last two years, being a SoC mentor takes a lot of time and the person has to be ready to spend quite some time with the student.

Boucman is one of the oldest active developers around. He has rewritten the whole animation engine and made it an easily pluggable system allowing artists to easily specify exactly how they want the units to appear. He also started many community oriented projects like the Art Contribution[1] section of the wiki (now deprecated) and the WML Reference Manual[2]. He is responsible for dispatching and sorting the patches at http://patches.wesnoth.org that has created the new developer process we currently use. Boucman was a mentor in 2008, 2009 and 2010.

Iurii Chernyi (Crab) has joined the team in 2009, taking part in Google Summer of Code 2009, and staying with the project as a developer after successful completion of GSoC. He's an expert on all aspects of current Wesnoth AI codebase (having fully reorganized it as part of GSoC 2009), and has fixed numerous bugs all over Wesnoth. He was a GSoC mentor and a GCI mentor and administrator in 2010. He is experienced in teaching other people, in areas like programming languages and math.

Fendrin has some skills on both ends of the Wesnoth world, knowing parts of the c++ engine and how to use the Wesnoth markup language. He is the coder and maintainer of Wesnoth's first multiplayer campaign that is hosted in the mainline repository. His experience as a content developer ensures that there is an eye kept on the usability of those new features which are accessible to content designers. Fendrin was a mentor in 2010.

Mordante is one of the most active developers on our IRC channel. Not only has he done preliminary studies and coding in multiple areas that are candidates for Summer of Code ideas, he also is one of the coders with the best overview of the Wesnoth code. A large part of his work involves refactoring and polishing existing code. Next to that he's very active with fixing bugs which leads him to all areas in the code base. He is currently completing a rewrite of the Wesnoth GUI library, making all windows configurable through WML. This should make it easier to use Wesnoth on different resolutions, from small handheld devices to large 30 inch screens. Mordante was a mentor in 2008, 2009 and 2010.

All other developers listed in the ideas page are the leading capacities we do have for the respecting areas. Have a look at our list of "people who to contact" [3] for an easy reference. In general all our developers will mentor all students. That is, questions should just be asked in our IRC channel, where basically every developer who has an idea can and will directly answer.

When choosing the mentors, we have kept in mind that most developers can answer most technical questions, and we have chosen people that are well known for interacting with new-comers/external developers and can provide general guidance and design advice, more than people with specific technical knowledge.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/UnsortedContrib

[2] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/ReferenceWML

[3] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SoC_People_to_bug_on_IRC

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students? ====
The first thing to do is to avoid this situation altogether. The key is identifying candidates with the right mix of skills and temperament. Wesnoth is a game, and as such has lots of developers that are not coders. In particular, artists are well known in the Wesnoth community for being very sensitive about criticism and our community is used to people being sensitive to critics.

We try to choose students that accept criticism and are able to filter constructive criticism from useless one. The Wesnoth developer community is used to judging people according to these criteria and the special title we are going to give to applicants will allow us to easily spot any such problems and discuss them before they grow out of control.

If a student disappears, their mentor are in charge of reconnecting the student to see what is going wrong (available time, tension with other developers, with members of the community etc...). Depending on the actual problem, the mentor and the student will have to agree on possible ways to resolve the problem.

If a student disappears completely and there is no way to get back to them, there is little the project can do except salvaging whatever can be salvaged from the code (the students will have SVN write access, so most of the work will be committed either to trunk or to a specific branch) and find a core developer to take on the job. This will probably be slower and less effective for the project, but it's the best we can do.

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors? ====
All our mentors are long time developers that volunteered for the job, so we don't expect that to happen. We observed in during the last years the amount of time required to mentor, and our mentors accepted the job knowing the amount of work it involved. All of this years mentors mentored last year as well.

However, should it happen, we would continue to mentor as a developer community the student until we find a new "official" mentor to take on the job.

==== What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program? ====
Wesnoth has a particularly healthy community, both for developers and for players.

Our general policy regarding new coders has always been "two (non trival) patches... you're in". With other words, anybody that is able to get two non-trivial patches applied is offered commit privileges.
We have a developer responsible for applying patches and guiding new developers into our community. This is a well known and effective process we plan to apply to students, directing them to our EasyCoding pages [1] (these projects are usually a couple of hours long and hve been chosen to provide easy access to the respective area of code). This year, we also have added some simple coding tasks directly related to our GSoC ideas to be able to test students more specifically on their future project

Usually, patches go back and forth a couple of times, to make sure that all secondary things are in place (indenting, coding style, modified buildfiles etc.) The idea is that coder education should take place before the coder gets commit rights, but that getting new coder in is one of the most important things to keep our project alive.

If the student is proactive and ready to join IRC, all the developers are usually very welcoming, and good at directing newcomers to quickly give useful results.

In previous years, all students that were accepted (and a couple more) managed to have commit access before the start of the coding phase. We consider that this policy was successful and we plan to keep it this year.

We also plan to give a special forum title to any students. This will allow all forum members to tell them apart from normal users and give them read/write access to the developer only forums. This will also allow us to quickly spot any problem they might have interacting with the player community. We have a very mature developer community, but our player community is made of all sort of people of all age and education, and it can sometimes be rough.

Last, our experience from previous years is that students that participate in the community during the evaluation period will stay active in the community after that period. In previous years this has been a discriminating criterias for students of similar level, and overall we never had problems of students working "behind a black wall." Our selection process tend to favor students who participate, and participation hasn't been a problem so far.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/EasyCoding

==== If you are a small or new organization applying to GSoC, please list a larger, established GSoC organization or a Googler that can vouch for you here. ====

==== If you are a large organization who is vouching for a small organization applying to GSoC for their first time this year, please list their name and why you think they'd be good candidates for GSoC here: ====

==== Anything else you'd like to tell us? ====
There is nothing more to say.

==== Admin Agreement: ====
(some terms of service by Google that have to be agreed upon)

SoC Information for Google

2012-03-05T21:16:17Z

Noy: /* SoC Information for Google */

{{Template:SoC2011}}

== SoC Information for Google ==
This is the information that we submit to google as Application in Summer of Code (current status: 2012). The submitter automatically becomes primary Admin. Most entries are mandatory and have to be filled out before the application can be submitted.

==== Organization Name: ====
Battle for Wesnoth

==== Description: ====
<code type="html">
Battle for Wesnoth, or simply Wesnoth, is a free, turn-based strategy game with role-playing elements that was designed in June 2003 by David White (Sirp).
Although the core rules are fairly simple and meant to be easily learned[1], they provide interesting gameplay and rich tactical options. A major strength of the project is the Wesnoth Markup Language (WML) for writing scenarios. Programming skills are not required to compose with it, and a large WML-modding community has generated a great deal of user-maintained content. We polish the best of this content and lift it into our official release tree.
The first stable release (1.0) was on October 2, 2005, and the latest stable release (1.8) happened in April 2010. Version 1.10 was released earlier this year, while the current development branch is 1.11. We're early in our cycle, so there are several interesting project available for students to join
Wesnoth is one of the most successful open-source game projects in existence, with an exceptionally large developer base and user community:
<ul>
<li>According to Ohloh, a site that collects activity statistics on open-source projects, the ''Wesnoth'' development effort is in the top 2% of largest and most active projects</li>
<li>We support two multiplayer game servers (stable and development) with a usual minimum load of more than a hundred players</li>
<li>More than two thousand downloads a day</li>
<li>4.5 million downloads via SourceForge; many more via various mirrors of Linux distributions</li>
<li>Best rated game at the Linux Game Tome[2]</li>
<li>Game of the year 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 at LinuxQuestions.org[3][4]</li>
<li>In general, Wesnoth tends to show up in the first or second position whenever anyone compiles a list of top open-source games</li>
</ul>
Wesnoth's most notable features include:
<ul>
<li>A mature project with continuing active development and frequent improvements</li>
<li>High quality artwork: both original graphics and music</li>
<li>Well-balanced by a tireless team of playtesters</li>
<li>Fun, unique gameplay</li>
<li>Even after nearly a decade of development and a very solid, fun product already created, there are still plenty of new developers; the number of commits to Subversion is still increasing</li>
<li>Strong support of internationalization with many supported languages, thus experience in working with non-native English speakers. In fact, more than half of our developers are not native English speakers.</li>
</ul>
For our Ideas page, please have a look at [5]. There you can find all information required to get you started working on Wesnoth.
[1] <a href="http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy">http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy</a> 
[2] <a href="http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating">http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating</a> 
[3] <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/">http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/</a> 
[4] <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/">http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/</a> 
[5] <a href="http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas">http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas</a>
</code>

==== Home page: ====
http://www.wesnoth.org/

==== Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2012? What do you hope to gain by participating? ====
Most of our developers have particular areas of interest in which they work. Though they are efficient in their areas, there are other, presently uncovered, areas of the code with a need for improvements but a high barrier to entry for casual contributors. By bringing new people in and allowing them to be actively responsible for an area of code, we hope to kickstart work in these areas and others that are lagging behind. Our previous SoC experience shows that a motivated, full-time, student can be brought up to date in any area fairly quickly. Our previous experiences has shown us that SoC developers tend to stay after the end of the Summer of Code and become valuable members of our community. Finally, we feel that it is part of our mandate is to provide a platform for motivated contributors to develop their skills in a positive learning environment.

Overall GSOC has been a win for all parties and we want it to continue in the future.

==== If accepted, would this be your first year participating in GSoC? ====
No

==== Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation. ====

2008 results:
Wesnoth participated in GSoC 2008 with four students. Out of these, two were great successes (that is they became full-fledge developers before the actual start of GSoC), did huge improvement during GSoC (A new recruitment algorithm for the AI and the basic structure for a new map editor, the student finished this work after the summer), and are still active developers in the Wesnoth community.

Of the two other, one of them was very active for the first half of GSoC and provided some useful infrastructure for AI development that we used as base in GSoC 2009, but was much less active and didn't reach expectations for the second half of GSoC. The lesson we learned is that great students should be left on their own, that's the best way to have them work, but average students should be monitored much more closely than we did. If things seems to start to go wrong, it's important to react very quick, to meet with other mentors and get things back on track early.

Timezone problems were also a serious barrier for student/mentor communication, and we will take that more into account when pairing mentors and students

For our other students, multiple problems collectively led to failure
* We should enforce IRC communication, E-mail is a barrier. This applies both for students and mentors. Both should be on IRC several hours a day, with overlapping hours.
* We should be more strict about mid-term evaluation. If the student is slightly lacking at mid-term we should give a clear message that he needs to get back on track.

2009 results:
In 2009 we mentored 6 students as part of Summer of Code. Out of these 5 projects were a success. From those 5 developers 3 are still part of our core development group and still maintain and improve the work they submitted as part of Summer of Code. One of the students even became the "head" of our AI development department and mentored a student this year. For a summary of the 2009 results have a look at [1].

Sadly one student was not able to continue his work past midterm due to his computer failing completely as well as personal problems that we won't delve into further here. It was not a salvageable situation.

2010 results:
In 2010 we mentored 4 students as part of Summer of Code, all the projects were a success. from those 4 developers, 1 is still part of our code development team and maintains the work he has done as part of Summer of Code.

2011 results:
In 2011 we mentored 5 students, with 4 four successfully completed

[1] http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=26955

==== If your organization participated in past GSoCs, please let us know the ratio of students passing to students allocated, e.g. 2006: 3/6 for 3 out of 6 students passed in 2006. ====
2008: 2/4
2009: 5/6
2010: 4/4
2011: 4/5

==== Main Organization License: ====
GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2) [Dropdown box answer!]

==== What is the URL for your ideas page? ====
http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas

==== What is the main development mailing list for your organization? This question will be shown to students who would like to get more information about applying to your organization for GSoC 2012. If your organization uses more than one list, please make sure to include a description of the list so students know which to use. ====
The main development mailing list is "wesnoth-dev@gna.org"

==== What is the main IRC channel for your organization? ====
#wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net

This is our main means of communications. If students have questions you should ask them in #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net and wait for a reply (might take some hours!). The Wesnoth related channels are logged in public and the logs tend to be read by developers.

==== Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? ====

Students wishing to participate in GSoC should copy the questions below to a new page and fill it with the answers.

Please note that we generally plan to meet potential students through our IRC channel. So beside just answering these questions, potential candidates consider visiting us in IRC: #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net. This is where most of our work takes place and participating in IRC is mandatory for GSoC students participating with Wesnoth. Our experience is that this is the easiest way to communicate and solve problems that come up.

1) Basics

1.1) Write a small introduction to yourself.

1.2) State your preferred email address.

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

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

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

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

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

2) Experience

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

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

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?

2.4) Are you already involved with any open source development projects? If yes, please describe the project and the scope of your involvement.

2.5) Gaming experience - Are you a gamer?

2.5.1) What type of gamer are you?

2.5.2) What type of games?

2.5.3) What type of opponents do you prefer?

2.5.4) Are you more interested in story or gameplay?

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.

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.

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.

3.2) What spoken languages are you fluent in?

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?
* 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)

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

5.3) What programming languages are you fluent in?

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!

In general, students should be as verbose as possible in their answers and feel free to elaborate.

==== Who will be your backup organization administrator? ====
Link ID: Ivanovic

==== What criteria did you use to select the individuals who will act as mentors for your organization? Please be as specific as possible. ====
Our first criterion was that all the people had to be volunteers. According to other open source projects and our experience from the last two years, being a SoC mentor takes a lot of time and the person has to be ready to spend quite some time with the student.

Boucman is one of the oldest active developers around. He has rewritten the whole animation engine and made it an easily pluggable system allowing artists to easily specify exactly how they want the units to appear. He also started many community oriented projects like the Art Contribution[1] section of the wiki (now deprecated) and the WML Reference Manual[2]. He is responsible for dispatching and sorting the patches at http://patches.wesnoth.org that has created the new developer process we currently use. Boucman was a mentor in 2008, 2009 and 2010.

Iurii Chernyi (Crab) has joined the team in 2009, taking part in Google Summer of Code 2009, and staying with the project as a developer after successful completion of GSoC. He's an expert on all aspects of current Wesnoth AI codebase (having fully reorganized it as part of GSoC 2009), and has fixed numerous bugs all over Wesnoth. He was a GSoC mentor and a GCI mentor and administrator in 2010. He is experienced in teaching other people, in areas like programming languages and math.

Fendrin has some skills on both ends of the Wesnoth world, knowing parts of the c++ engine and how to use the Wesnoth markup language. He is the coder and maintainer of Wesnoth's first multiplayer campaign that is hosted in the mainline repository. His experience as a content developer ensures that there is an eye kept on the usability of those new features which are accessible to content designers. Fendrin was a mentor in 2010.

Mordante is one of the most active developers on our IRC channel. Not only has he done preliminary studies and coding in multiple areas that are candidates for Summer of Code ideas, he also is one of the coders with the best overview of the Wesnoth code. A large part of his work involves refactoring and polishing existing code. Next to that he's very active with fixing bugs which leads him to all areas in the code base. He is currently completing a rewrite of the Wesnoth GUI library, making all windows configurable through WML. This should make it easier to use Wesnoth on different resolutions, from small handheld devices to large 30 inch screens. Mordante was a mentor in 2008, 2009 and 2010.

All other developers listed in the ideas page are the leading capacities we do have for the respecting areas. Have a look at our list of "people who to contact" [3] for an easy reference. In general all our developers will mentor all students. That is, questions should just be asked in our IRC channel, where basically every developer who has an idea can and will directly answer.

When choosing the mentors, we have kept in mind that most developers can answer most technical questions, and we have chosen people that are well known for interacting with new-comers/external developers and can provide general guidance and design advice, more than people with specific technical knowledge.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/UnsortedContrib

[2] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/ReferenceWML

[3] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SoC_People_to_bug_on_IRC

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students? ====
The first thing to do is to avoid this situation altogether. The key is identifying candidates with the right mix of skills and temperament. Wesnoth is a game, and as such has lots of developers that are not coders. In particular, artists are well known in the Wesnoth community for being very sensitive about criticism and our community is used to people being sensitive to critics.

We try to choose students that accept criticism and are able to filter constructive criticism from useless one. The Wesnoth developer community is used to judging people according to these criteria and the special title we are going to give to applicants will allow us to easily spot any such problems and discuss them before they grow out of control.

If a student disappears, their mentor are in charge of reconnecting the student to see what is going wrong (available time, tension with other developers, with members of the community etc...). Depending on the actual problem, the mentor and the student will have to agree on possible ways to resolve the problem.

If a student disappears completely and there is no way to get back to them, there is little the project can do except salvaging whatever can be salvaged from the code (the students will have SVN write access, so most of the work will be committed either to trunk or to a specific branch) and find a core developer to take on the job. This will probably be slower and less effective for the project, but it's the best we can do.

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors? ====
All our mentors are long time developers that volunteered for the job, so we don't expect that to happen. We observed in during the last years the amount of time required to mentor, and our mentors accepted the job knowing the amount of work it involved. All of this years mentors mentored last year as well.

However, should it happen, we would continue to mentor as a developer community the student until we find a new "official" mentor to take on the job.

==== What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program? ====
Wesnoth has a particularly healthy community, both for developers and for players.

Our general policy regarding new coders has always been "two (non trival) patches... you're in". With other words, anybody that is able to get two non-trivial patches applied is offered commit privileges.
We have a developer responsible for applying patches and guiding new developers into our community. This is a well known and effective process we plan to apply to students, directing them to our EasyCoding pages [1] (these projects are usually a couple of hours long and hve been chosen to provide easy access to the respective area of code). This year, we also have added some simple coding tasks directly related to our GSoC ideas to be able to test students more specifically on their future project

Usually, patches go back and forth a couple of times, to make sure that all secondary things are in place (indenting, coding style, modified buildfiles etc.) The idea is that coder education should take place before the coder gets commit rights, but that getting new coder in is one of the most important things to keep our project alive.

If the student is proactive and ready to join IRC, all the developers are usually very welcoming, and good at directing newcomers to quickly give useful results.

In previous years, all students that were accepted (and a couple more) managed to have commit access before the start of the coding phase. We consider that this policy was successful and we plan to keep it this year.

We also plan to give a special forum title to any students. This will allow all forum members to tell them apart from normal users and give them read/write access to the developer only forums. This will also allow us to quickly spot any problem they might have interacting with the player community. We have a very mature developer community, but our player community is made of all sort of people of all age and education, and it can sometimes be rough.

Last, our experience from previous years is that students that participate in the community during the evaluation period will stay active in the community after that period. In previous years this has been a discriminating criterias for students of similar level, and overall we never had problems of students working "behind a black wall." Our selection process tend to favor students who participate, and participation hasn't been a problem so far.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/EasyCoding

==== If you are a small or new organization applying to GSoC, please list a larger, established GSoC organization or a Googler that can vouch for you here. ====

==== If you are a large organization who is vouching for a small organization applying to GSoC for their first time this year, please list their name and why you think they'd be good candidates for GSoC here: ====
* Darktable:
Darktable (see http://darktable.sourceforge.net/ and https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/darktable/wiki/GSOC) is an open source raw development tool.

There are currently no major open source raw development tools. Multiple tools cover the need (ufraw, rawtherapee etc...) but most of them are targeting technical users with interest in photography or signal processing experts rather than "normal" photographer.

Darktable has a very good UI designed around what most photographers expects. It is also a project which is at this interesting stage where there is a solid infrastructure and it needs developer to do the fun part of adding new feature. This is the stage of a project which is the most interesting for developers to join.

The Darktable development community is rather small (3 active developers plus occasional contributors). It could use the extra manpower but is large enough to mentor a student into a core developer pretty fast.

Chances of a student finding it interesting are high, chances of the student bringing major contributions to the project are very high

One of the experienced wesnoth mentor (boucman) is an active member of the Darktable community and has been spearheading the GSoC effort for that community and will offer advice and participation for the new mentors in that community. Wesnoth has had a dedicated IRC channel for mentor discussion which could be used by smaller projects for advice if the need arise

* Unknown Horizons:
Unknown Horizons (http://www.unknown-horizons.org/) is a 2D realtime strategy simulation with an emphasis on economy and city building.

This is a smaller open source game project with a really dedicated core team of developers. During our talks with the dev who wants to work as admin it was easy to see that they do think about what they do and got some well working infrastructure. Even though the team is rather small at the moment, they are well suited to handle some students and the project has a proven record of being able to actually release something and continue working on the code. Beside their abilities it is always good to support open source gaming, especially when it comes to rather underrepresented areas like real time strategy games.

==== Anything else you'd like to tell us? ====
There is nothing more to say.

==== Admin Agreement: ====
(some terms of service by Google that have to be agreed upon)

SoC Information for Google

2012-03-05T21:09:21Z

Noy: /* Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? */

{{Template:SoC2011}}

== SoC Information for Google ==
This is the information that we submit to google as Application in Summer of Code (current status: 2012). The submitter automatically becomes primary Admin. Most entries are mandatory and have to be filled out before the application can be submitted.

==== Organization Name: ====
Battle for Wesnoth

==== Description: ====
<code type="html">
Battle for Wesnoth, or simply Wesnoth, is a free, turn-based strategy game with role-playing elements that was designed in June 2003 by David White (Sirp).
Although the core rules are fairly simple and meant to be easily learned[1], they provide interesting gameplay and rich tactical options. A major strength of the project is the Wesnoth Markup Language (WML) for writing scenarios. Programming skills are not required to compose with it, and a large WML-modding community has generated a great deal of user-maintained content. We polish the best of this content and lift it into our official release tree.
The first stable release (1.0) was on October 2, 2005, and the latest stable release (1.8) happened in April 2010. Version 1.10 was released earlier this year, while the current development branch is 1.11. We're early in our cycle, so there are several interesting project available for students to join
Wesnoth is one of the most successful open-source game projects in existence, with an exceptionally large developer base and user community:
<ul>
<li>According to Ohloh, a site that collects activity statistics on open-source projects, the ''Wesnoth'' development effort is in the top 2% of largest and most active projects</li>
<li>We support two multiplayer game servers (stable and development) with a usual minimum load of more than a hundred players</li>
<li>More than two thousand downloads a day</li>
<li>4.5 million downloads via SourceForge; many more via various mirrors of Linux distributions</li>
<li>Best rated game at the Linux Game Tome[2]</li>
<li>Game of the year 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 at LinuxQuestions.org[3][4]</li>
<li>In general, Wesnoth tends to show up in the first or second position whenever anyone compiles a list of top open-source games</li>
</ul>
Wesnoth's most notable features include:
<ul>
<li>A mature project with continuing active development and frequent improvements</li>
<li>High quality artwork: both original graphics and music</li>
<li>Well-balanced by a tireless team of playtesters</li>
<li>Fun, unique gameplay</li>
<li>Even after nearly a decade of development and a very solid, fun product already created, there are still plenty of new developers; the number of commits to Subversion is still increasing</li>
<li>Strong support of internationalization with many supported languages, thus experience in working with non-native English speakers. In fact, more than half of our developers are not native English speakers.</li>
</ul>
For our Ideas page, please have a look at [5]. There you can find all information required to get you started working on Wesnoth.
[1] <a href="http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy">http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy</a> 
[2] <a href="http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating">http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating</a> 
[3] <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/">http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/</a> 
[4] <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/">http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/</a> 
[5] <a href="http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas">http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas</a>
</code>

==== Home page: ====
http://www.wesnoth.org/

==== Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2012? What do you hope to gain by participating? ====
Most of our developers have particular areas of interest in which they work. Though they are efficient in their areas, there are other, presently uncovered, areas of the code with a need for improvements but a high barrier to entry for casual contributors. By bringing new people in and allowing them to be actively responsible for an area of code, we hope to kickstart work in these areas and others that are lagging behind. Our previous SoC experience shows that a motivated, full-time, student can be brought up to date in any area fairly quickly. Our previous experiences has shown us that SoC developers tend to stay after the end of the Summer of Code and become valuable members of our community. Finally, we feel that it is part of our mandate is to provide a platform for motivated contributors to develop their skills in a positive learning environment.

Overall GSOC has been a win for all parties and we want it to continue in the future.

==== If accepted, would this be your first year participating in GSoC? ====
No

==== Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation. ====

2008 results:
Wesnoth participated in GSoC 2008 with four students. Out of these, two were great successes (that is they became full-fledge developers before the actual start of GSoC), did huge improvement during GSoC (A new recruitment algorithm for the AI and the basic structure for a new map editor, the student finished this work after the summer), and are still active developers in the Wesnoth community.

Of the two other, one of them was very active for the first half of GSoC and provided some useful infrastructure for AI development that we used as base in GSoC 2009, but was much less active and didn't reach expectations for the second half of GSoC. The lesson we learned is that great students should be left on their own, that's the best way to have them work, but average students should be monitored much more closely than we did. If things seems to start to go wrong, it's important to react very quick, to meet with other mentors and get things back on track early.

Timezone problems were also a serious barrier for student/mentor communication, and we will take that more into account when pairing mentors and students

For our other students, multiple problems collectively led to failure
* We should enforce IRC communication, E-mail is a barrier. This applies both for students and mentors. Both should be on IRC several hours a day, with overlapping hours.
* We should be more strict about mid-term evaluation. If the student is slightly lacking at mid-term we should give a clear message that he needs to get back on track.

2009 results:
In 2009 we mentored 6 students as part of Summer of Code. Out of these 5 projects were a success. From those 5 developers 3 are still part of our core development group and still maintain and improve the work they submitted as part of Summer of Code. One of the students even became the "head" of our AI development department and mentored a student this year. For a summary of the 2009 results have a look at [1].

Sadly one student was not able to continue his work past midterm due to his computer failing completely as well as personal problems that we won't delve into further here. It was not a salvageable situation.

2010 results:
In 2010 we mentored 4 students as part of Summer of Code, all the projects were a success. from those 4 developers, 1 is still part of our code development team and maintains the work he has done as part of Summer of Code.

2011 results:
In 2011 we mentored 5 students, with 4 four successfully completed

[1] http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=26955

==== If your organization participated in past GSoCs, please let us know the ratio of students passing to students allocated, e.g. 2006: 3/6 for 3 out of 6 students passed in 2006. ====
2008: 2/4
2009: 5/6
2010: 4/4
2011: 4/5

==== Main Organization License: ====
GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2) [Dropdown box answer!]

==== What is the URL for your ideas page? ====
http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas

==== What is the main development mailing list for your organization? This question will be shown to students who would like to get more information about applying to your organization for GSoC 2012. If your organization uses more than one list, please make sure to include a description of the list so students know which to use. ====
The main development mailing list is "wesnoth-dev@gna.org"

==== What is the main IRC channel for your organization? ====
#wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net

This is our main means of communications. If students have questions you should ask them in #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net and wait for a reply (might take some hours!). The Wesnoth related channels are logged in public and the logs tend to be read by developers.

==== Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? ====

Students wishing to participate in GSoC should copy the questions below to a new page and fill it with the answers.

Please note that we generally plan to meet potential students through our IRC channel. So beside just answering these questions, potential candidates consider visiting us in IRC: #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net. This is where most of our work takes place and participating in IRC is mandatory for GSoC students participating with Wesnoth. Our experience is that this is the easiest way to communicate and solve problems that come up.

1) Basics

1.1) Write a small introduction to yourself.

1.2) State your preferred email address.

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

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

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

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

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

2) Experience

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

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

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?

2.4) Are you already involved with any open source development projects? If yes, please describe the project and the scope of your involvement.

2.5) Gaming experience - Are you a gamer?

2.5.1) What type of gamer are you?

2.5.2) What type of games?

2.5.3) What type of opponents do you prefer?

2.5.4) Are you more interested in story or gameplay?

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.

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.

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.

3.2) What spoken languages are you fluent in?

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?
* 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)

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

5.3) What programming languages are you fluent in?

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!

In general, students should be as verbose as possible in their answers and feel free to elaborate.

==== What criteria did you use to select the individuals who will act as mentors for your organization? Please be as specific as possible. ====
Our first criterion was that all the people had to be volunteers. According to other open source projects and our experience from the last two years, being a SoC mentor takes a lot of time and the person has to be ready to spend quite some time with the student.

Boucman is one of the oldest active developers around. He has rewritten the whole animation engine and made it an easily pluggable system allowing artists to easily specify exactly how they want the units to appear. He also started many community oriented projects like the Art Contribution[1] section of the wiki (now deprecated) and the WML Reference Manual[2]. He is responsible for dispatching and sorting the patches at http://patches.wesnoth.org that has created the new developer process we currently use. Boucman was a mentor in 2008, 2009 and 2010.

Iurii Chernyi (Crab) has joined the team in 2009, taking part in Google Summer of Code 2009, and staying with the project as a developer after successful completion of GSoC. He's an expert on all aspects of current Wesnoth AI codebase (having fully reorganized it as part of GSoC 2009), and has fixed numerous bugs all over Wesnoth. He was a GSoC mentor and a GCI mentor and administrator in 2010. He is experienced in teaching other people, in areas like programming languages and math.

Fendrin has some skills on both ends of the Wesnoth world, knowing parts of the c++ engine and how to use the Wesnoth markup language. He is the coder and maintainer of Wesnoth's first multiplayer campaign that is hosted in the mainline repository. His experience as a content developer ensures that there is an eye kept on the usability of those new features which are accessible to content designers. Fendrin was a mentor in 2010.

Mordante is one of the most active developers on our IRC channel. Not only has he done preliminary studies and coding in multiple areas that are candidates for Summer of Code ideas, he also is one of the coders with the best overview of the Wesnoth code. A large part of his work involves refactoring and polishing existing code. Next to that he's very active with fixing bugs which leads him to all areas in the code base. He is currently completing a rewrite of the Wesnoth GUI library, making all windows configurable through WML. This should make it easier to use Wesnoth on different resolutions, from small handheld devices to large 30 inch screens. Mordante was a mentor in 2008, 2009 and 2010.

All other developers listed in the ideas page are the leading capacities we do have for the respecting areas. Have a look at our list of "people who to contact" [3] for an easy reference. In general all our developers will mentor all students. That is, questions should just be asked in our IRC channel, where basically every developer who has an idea can and will directly answer.

When choosing the mentors, we have kept in mind that most developers can answer most technical questions, and we have chosen people that are well known for interacting with new-comers/external developers and can provide general guidance and design advice, more than people with specific technical knowledge.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/UnsortedContrib

[2] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/ReferenceWML

[3] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SoC_People_to_bug_on_IRC

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students? ====
The first thing to do is to avoid this situation altogether. The key is identifying candidates with the right mix of skills and temperament. Wesnoth is a game, and as such has lots of developers that are not coders. In particular, artists are well known in the Wesnoth community for being very sensitive about criticism and our community is used to people being sensitive to critics.

We try to choose students that accept criticism and are able to filter constructive criticism from useless one. The Wesnoth developer community is used to judging people according to these criteria and the special title we are going to give to applicants will allow us to easily spot any such problems and discuss them before they grow out of control.

If a student disappears, their mentor are in charge of reconnecting the student to see what is going wrong (available time, tension with other developers, with members of the community etc...). Depending on the actual problem, the mentor and the student will have to agree on possible ways to resolve the problem.

If a student disappears completely and there is no way to get back to them, there is little the project can do except salvaging whatever can be salvaged from the code (the students will have SVN write access, so most of the work will be committed either to trunk or to a specific branch) and find a core developer to take on the job. This will probably be slower and less effective for the project, but it's the best we can do.

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors? ====
All our mentors are long time developers that volunteered for the job, so we don't expect that to happen. We observed in during the last years the amount of time required to mentor, and our mentors accepted the job knowing the amount of work it involved. All of this years mentors mentored last year as well.

However, should it happen, we would continue to mentor as a developer community the student until we find a new "official" mentor to take on the job.

==== What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program? ====
Wesnoth has a particularly healthy community, both for developers and for players.

Our general policy regarding new coders has always been "two (non trival) patches... you're in". With other words, anybody that is able to get two non-trivial patches applied is offered commit privileges.
We have a developer responsible for applying patches and guiding new developers into our community. This is a well known and effective process we plan to apply to students, directing them to our EasyCoding pages [1] (these projects are usually a couple of hours long and hve been chosen to provide easy access to the respective area of code). This year, we also have added some simple coding tasks directly related to our GSoC ideas to be able to test students more specifically on their future project

Usually, patches go back and forth a couple of times, to make sure that all secondary things are in place (indenting, coding style, modified buildfiles etc.) The idea is that coder education should take place before the coder gets commit rights, but that getting new coder in is one of the most important things to keep our project alive.

If the student is proactive and ready to join IRC, all the developers are usually very welcoming, and good at directing newcomers to quickly give useful results.

In previous years, all students that were accepted (and a couple more) managed to have commit access before the start of the coding phase. We consider that this policy was successful and we plan to keep it this year.

We also plan to give a special forum title to any students. This will allow all forum members to tell them apart from normal users and give them read/write access to the developer only forums. This will also allow us to quickly spot any problem they might have interacting with the player community. We have a very mature developer community, but our player community is made of all sort of people of all age and education, and it can sometimes be rough.

Last, our experience from previous years is that students that participate in the community during the evaluation period will stay active in the community after that period. In previous years this has been a discriminating criterias for students of similar level, and overall we never had problems of students working "behind a black wall." Our selection process tend to favor students who participate, and participation hasn't been a problem so far.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/EasyCoding

==== If you are a small or new organization applying to GSoC, please list a larger, established GSoC organization or a Googler that can vouch for you here. ====

==== If you are a large organization who is vouching for a small organization applying to GSoC for their first time this year, please list their name and why you think they'd be good candidates for GSoC here: ====
* Darktable:
Darktable (see http://darktable.sourceforge.net/ and https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/darktable/wiki/GSOC) is an open source raw development tool.

There are currently no major open source raw development tools. Multiple tools cover the need (ufraw, rawtherapee etc...) but most of them are targeting technical users with interest in photography or signal processing experts rather than "normal" photographer.

Darktable has a very good UI designed around what most photographers expects. It is also a project which is at this interesting stage where there is a solid infrastructure and it needs developer to do the fun part of adding new feature. This is the stage of a project which is the most interesting for developers to join.

The Darktable development community is rather small (3 active developers plus occasional contributors). It could use the extra manpower but is large enough to mentor a student into a core developer pretty fast.

Chances of a student finding it interesting are high, chances of the student bringing major contributions to the project are very high

One of the experienced wesnoth mentor (boucman) is an active member of the Darktable community and has been spearheading the GSoC effort for that community and will offer advice and participation for the new mentors in that community. Wesnoth has had a dedicated IRC channel for mentor discussion which could be used by smaller projects for advice if the need arise

* Unknown Horizons:
Unknown Horizons (http://www.unknown-horizons.org/) is a 2D realtime strategy simulation with an emphasis on economy and city building.

This is a smaller open source game project with a really dedicated core team of developers. During our talks with the dev who wants to work as admin it was easy to see that they do think about what they do and got some well working infrastructure. Even though the team is rather small at the moment, they are well suited to handle some students and the project has a proven record of being able to actually release something and continue working on the code. Beside their abilities it is always good to support open source gaming, especially when it comes to rather underrepresented areas like real time strategy games.

==== Anything else you'd like to tell us? ====
There is nothing more to say.

==== Backup Admin (Link ID): ====
noy

==== Admin Agreement: ====
(some terms of service by Google that have to be agreed upon)

SoC Information for Google

2012-03-05T21:08:57Z

Noy: /* Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now. Please note that it is a very good idea to ask students to provide you with their contact information as part of your template. T

{{Template:SoC2011}}

== SoC Information for Google ==
This is the information that we submit to google as Application in Summer of Code (current status: 2012). The submitter automatically becomes primary Admin. Most entries are mandatory and have to be filled out before the application can be submitted.

==== Organization Name: ====
Battle for Wesnoth

==== Description: ====
<code type="html">
Battle for Wesnoth, or simply Wesnoth, is a free, turn-based strategy game with role-playing elements that was designed in June 2003 by David White (Sirp).
Although the core rules are fairly simple and meant to be easily learned[1], they provide interesting gameplay and rich tactical options. A major strength of the project is the Wesnoth Markup Language (WML) for writing scenarios. Programming skills are not required to compose with it, and a large WML-modding community has generated a great deal of user-maintained content. We polish the best of this content and lift it into our official release tree.
The first stable release (1.0) was on October 2, 2005, and the latest stable release (1.8) happened in April 2010. Version 1.10 was released earlier this year, while the current development branch is 1.11. We're early in our cycle, so there are several interesting project available for students to join
Wesnoth is one of the most successful open-source game projects in existence, with an exceptionally large developer base and user community:
<ul>
<li>According to Ohloh, a site that collects activity statistics on open-source projects, the ''Wesnoth'' development effort is in the top 2% of largest and most active projects</li>
<li>We support two multiplayer game servers (stable and development) with a usual minimum load of more than a hundred players</li>
<li>More than two thousand downloads a day</li>
<li>4.5 million downloads via SourceForge; many more via various mirrors of Linux distributions</li>
<li>Best rated game at the Linux Game Tome[2]</li>
<li>Game of the year 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 at LinuxQuestions.org[3][4]</li>
<li>In general, Wesnoth tends to show up in the first or second position whenever anyone compiles a list of top open-source games</li>
</ul>
Wesnoth's most notable features include:
<ul>
<li>A mature project with continuing active development and frequent improvements</li>
<li>High quality artwork: both original graphics and music</li>
<li>Well-balanced by a tireless team of playtesters</li>
<li>Fun, unique gameplay</li>
<li>Even after nearly a decade of development and a very solid, fun product already created, there are still plenty of new developers; the number of commits to Subversion is still increasing</li>
<li>Strong support of internationalization with many supported languages, thus experience in working with non-native English speakers. In fact, more than half of our developers are not native English speakers.</li>
</ul>
For our Ideas page, please have a look at [5]. There you can find all information required to get you started working on Wesnoth.
[1] <a href="http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy">http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy</a> 
[2] <a href="http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating">http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating</a> 
[3] <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/">http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/</a> 
[4] <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/">http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/</a> 
[5] <a href="http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas">http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas</a>
</code>

==== Home page: ====
http://www.wesnoth.org/

==== Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2012? What do you hope to gain by participating? ====
Most of our developers have particular areas of interest in which they work. Though they are efficient in their areas, there are other, presently uncovered, areas of the code with a need for improvements but a high barrier to entry for casual contributors. By bringing new people in and allowing them to be actively responsible for an area of code, we hope to kickstart work in these areas and others that are lagging behind. Our previous SoC experience shows that a motivated, full-time, student can be brought up to date in any area fairly quickly. Our previous experiences has shown us that SoC developers tend to stay after the end of the Summer of Code and become valuable members of our community. Finally, we feel that it is part of our mandate is to provide a platform for motivated contributors to develop their skills in a positive learning environment.

Overall GSOC has been a win for all parties and we want it to continue in the future.

==== If accepted, would this be your first year participating in GSoC? ====
No

==== Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation. ====

2008 results:
Wesnoth participated in GSoC 2008 with four students. Out of these, two were great successes (that is they became full-fledge developers before the actual start of GSoC), did huge improvement during GSoC (A new recruitment algorithm for the AI and the basic structure for a new map editor, the student finished this work after the summer), and are still active developers in the Wesnoth community.

Of the two other, one of them was very active for the first half of GSoC and provided some useful infrastructure for AI development that we used as base in GSoC 2009, but was much less active and didn't reach expectations for the second half of GSoC. The lesson we learned is that great students should be left on their own, that's the best way to have them work, but average students should be monitored much more closely than we did. If things seems to start to go wrong, it's important to react very quick, to meet with other mentors and get things back on track early.

Timezone problems were also a serious barrier for student/mentor communication, and we will take that more into account when pairing mentors and students

For our other students, multiple problems collectively led to failure
* We should enforce IRC communication, E-mail is a barrier. This applies both for students and mentors. Both should be on IRC several hours a day, with overlapping hours.
* We should be more strict about mid-term evaluation. If the student is slightly lacking at mid-term we should give a clear message that he needs to get back on track.

2009 results:
In 2009 we mentored 6 students as part of Summer of Code. Out of these 5 projects were a success. From those 5 developers 3 are still part of our core development group and still maintain and improve the work they submitted as part of Summer of Code. One of the students even became the "head" of our AI development department and mentored a student this year. For a summary of the 2009 results have a look at [1].

Sadly one student was not able to continue his work past midterm due to his computer failing completely as well as personal problems that we won't delve into further here. It was not a salvageable situation.

2010 results:
In 2010 we mentored 4 students as part of Summer of Code, all the projects were a success. from those 4 developers, 1 is still part of our code development team and maintains the work he has done as part of Summer of Code.

2011 results:
In 2011 we mentored 5 students, with 4 four successfully completed

[1] http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=26955

==== If your organization participated in past GSoCs, please let us know the ratio of students passing to students allocated, e.g. 2006: 3/6 for 3 out of 6 students passed in 2006. ====
2008: 2/4
2009: 5/6
2010: 4/4
2011: 4/5

==== Main Organization License: ====
GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2) [Dropdown box answer!]

==== What is the URL for your ideas page? ====
http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas

==== What is the main development mailing list for your organization? This question will be shown to students who would like to get more information about applying to your organization for GSoC 2012. If your organization uses more than one list, please make sure to include a description of the list so students know which to use. ====
The main development mailing list is "wesnoth-dev@gna.org"

==== What is the main IRC channel for your organization? ====
#wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net

This is our main means of communications. If students have questions you should ask them in #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net and wait for a reply (might take some hours!). The Wesnoth related channels are logged in public and the logs tend to be read by developers.

==== Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? ====

For students wishing to participate in GSoC, they should copy the questions below to a new page and fill it with the answers.

Please note that we generally plan to meet potential students through our IRC channel. So beside just answering these questions, potential candidates consider visiting us in IRC: #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net. This is where most of our work takes place and participating in IRC is mandatory for GSoC students participating with Wesnoth. Our experience is that this is the easiest way to communicate and solve problems that come up.

1) Basics

1.1) Write a small introduction to yourself.

1.2) State your preferred email address.

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

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

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

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

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

2) Experience

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

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

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?

2.4) Are you already involved with any open source development projects? If yes, please describe the project and the scope of your involvement.

2.5) Gaming experience - Are you a gamer?

2.5.1) What type of gamer are you?

2.5.2) What type of games?

2.5.3) What type of opponents do you prefer?

2.5.4) Are you more interested in story or gameplay?

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.

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.

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.

3.2) What spoken languages are you fluent in?

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?
* 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)

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

5.3) What programming languages are you fluent in?

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!

In general, students should be as verbose as possible in their answers and feel free to elaborate.

==== What criteria did you use to select the individuals who will act as mentors for your organization? Please be as specific as possible. ====
Our first criterion was that all the people had to be volunteers. According to other open source projects and our experience from the last two years, being a SoC mentor takes a lot of time and the person has to be ready to spend quite some time with the student.

Boucman is one of the oldest active developers around. He has rewritten the whole animation engine and made it an easily pluggable system allowing artists to easily specify exactly how they want the units to appear. He also started many community oriented projects like the Art Contribution[1] section of the wiki (now deprecated) and the WML Reference Manual[2]. He is responsible for dispatching and sorting the patches at http://patches.wesnoth.org that has created the new developer process we currently use. Boucman was a mentor in 2008, 2009 and 2010.

Iurii Chernyi (Crab) has joined the team in 2009, taking part in Google Summer of Code 2009, and staying with the project as a developer after successful completion of GSoC. He's an expert on all aspects of current Wesnoth AI codebase (having fully reorganized it as part of GSoC 2009), and has fixed numerous bugs all over Wesnoth. He was a GSoC mentor and a GCI mentor and administrator in 2010. He is experienced in teaching other people, in areas like programming languages and math.

Fendrin has some skills on both ends of the Wesnoth world, knowing parts of the c++ engine and how to use the Wesnoth markup language. He is the coder and maintainer of Wesnoth's first multiplayer campaign that is hosted in the mainline repository. His experience as a content developer ensures that there is an eye kept on the usability of those new features which are accessible to content designers. Fendrin was a mentor in 2010.

Mordante is one of the most active developers on our IRC channel. Not only has he done preliminary studies and coding in multiple areas that are candidates for Summer of Code ideas, he also is one of the coders with the best overview of the Wesnoth code. A large part of his work involves refactoring and polishing existing code. Next to that he's very active with fixing bugs which leads him to all areas in the code base. He is currently completing a rewrite of the Wesnoth GUI library, making all windows configurable through WML. This should make it easier to use Wesnoth on different resolutions, from small handheld devices to large 30 inch screens. Mordante was a mentor in 2008, 2009 and 2010.

All other developers listed in the ideas page are the leading capacities we do have for the respecting areas. Have a look at our list of "people who to contact" [3] for an easy reference. In general all our developers will mentor all students. That is, questions should just be asked in our IRC channel, where basically every developer who has an idea can and will directly answer.

When choosing the mentors, we have kept in mind that most developers can answer most technical questions, and we have chosen people that are well known for interacting with new-comers/external developers and can provide general guidance and design advice, more than people with specific technical knowledge.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/UnsortedContrib

[2] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/ReferenceWML

[3] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SoC_People_to_bug_on_IRC

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students? ====
The first thing to do is to avoid this situation altogether. The key is identifying candidates with the right mix of skills and temperament. Wesnoth is a game, and as such has lots of developers that are not coders. In particular, artists are well known in the Wesnoth community for being very sensitive about criticism and our community is used to people being sensitive to critics.

We try to choose students that accept criticism and are able to filter constructive criticism from useless one. The Wesnoth developer community is used to judging people according to these criteria and the special title we are going to give to applicants will allow us to easily spot any such problems and discuss them before they grow out of control.

If a student disappears, their mentor are in charge of reconnecting the student to see what is going wrong (available time, tension with other developers, with members of the community etc...). Depending on the actual problem, the mentor and the student will have to agree on possible ways to resolve the problem.

If a student disappears completely and there is no way to get back to them, there is little the project can do except salvaging whatever can be salvaged from the code (the students will have SVN write access, so most of the work will be committed either to trunk or to a specific branch) and find a core developer to take on the job. This will probably be slower and less effective for the project, but it's the best we can do.

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors? ====
All our mentors are long time developers that volunteered for the job, so we don't expect that to happen. We observed in during the last years the amount of time required to mentor, and our mentors accepted the job knowing the amount of work it involved. All of this years mentors mentored last year as well.

However, should it happen, we would continue to mentor as a developer community the student until we find a new "official" mentor to take on the job.

==== What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program? ====
Wesnoth has a particularly healthy community, both for developers and for players.

Our general policy regarding new coders has always been "two (non trival) patches... you're in". With other words, anybody that is able to get two non-trivial patches applied is offered commit privileges.
We have a developer responsible for applying patches and guiding new developers into our community. This is a well known and effective process we plan to apply to students, directing them to our EasyCoding pages [1] (these projects are usually a couple of hours long and hve been chosen to provide easy access to the respective area of code). This year, we also have added some simple coding tasks directly related to our GSoC ideas to be able to test students more specifically on their future project

Usually, patches go back and forth a couple of times, to make sure that all secondary things are in place (indenting, coding style, modified buildfiles etc.) The idea is that coder education should take place before the coder gets commit rights, but that getting new coder in is one of the most important things to keep our project alive.

If the student is proactive and ready to join IRC, all the developers are usually very welcoming, and good at directing newcomers to quickly give useful results.

In previous years, all students that were accepted (and a couple more) managed to have commit access before the start of the coding phase. We consider that this policy was successful and we plan to keep it this year.

We also plan to give a special forum title to any students. This will allow all forum members to tell them apart from normal users and give them read/write access to the developer only forums. This will also allow us to quickly spot any problem they might have interacting with the player community. We have a very mature developer community, but our player community is made of all sort of people of all age and education, and it can sometimes be rough.

Last, our experience from previous years is that students that participate in the community during the evaluation period will stay active in the community after that period. In previous years this has been a discriminating criterias for students of similar level, and overall we never had problems of students working "behind a black wall." Our selection process tend to favor students who participate, and participation hasn't been a problem so far.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/EasyCoding

==== If you are a small or new organization applying to GSoC, please list a larger, established GSoC organization or a Googler that can vouch for you here. ====

==== If you are a large organization who is vouching for a small organization applying to GSoC for their first time this year, please list their name and why you think they'd be good candidates for GSoC here: ====
* Darktable:
Darktable (see http://darktable.sourceforge.net/ and https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/darktable/wiki/GSOC) is an open source raw development tool.

There are currently no major open source raw development tools. Multiple tools cover the need (ufraw, rawtherapee etc...) but most of them are targeting technical users with interest in photography or signal processing experts rather than "normal" photographer.

Darktable has a very good UI designed around what most photographers expects. It is also a project which is at this interesting stage where there is a solid infrastructure and it needs developer to do the fun part of adding new feature. This is the stage of a project which is the most interesting for developers to join.

The Darktable development community is rather small (3 active developers plus occasional contributors). It could use the extra manpower but is large enough to mentor a student into a core developer pretty fast.

Chances of a student finding it interesting are high, chances of the student bringing major contributions to the project are very high

One of the experienced wesnoth mentor (boucman) is an active member of the Darktable community and has been spearheading the GSoC effort for that community and will offer advice and participation for the new mentors in that community. Wesnoth has had a dedicated IRC channel for mentor discussion which could be used by smaller projects for advice if the need arise

* Unknown Horizons:
Unknown Horizons (http://www.unknown-horizons.org/) is a 2D realtime strategy simulation with an emphasis on economy and city building.

This is a smaller open source game project with a really dedicated core team of developers. During our talks with the dev who wants to work as admin it was easy to see that they do think about what they do and got some well working infrastructure. Even though the team is rather small at the moment, they are well suited to handle some students and the project has a proven record of being able to actually release something and continue working on the code. Beside their abilities it is always good to support open source gaming, especially when it comes to rather underrepresented areas like real time strategy games.

==== Anything else you'd like to tell us? ====
There is nothing more to say.

==== Backup Admin (Link ID): ====
noy

==== Admin Agreement: ====
(some terms of service by Google that have to be agreed upon)

SoC Information for Google

2012-03-05T20:38:18Z

Noy: /* What is the main IRC channel for your organization? */

{{Template:SoC2011}}

== SoC Information for Google ==
This is the information that we submit to google as Application in Summer of Code (current status: 2012). The submitter automatically becomes primary Admin. Most entries are mandatory and have to be filled out before the application can be submitted.

==== Organization Name: ====
Battle for Wesnoth

==== Description: ====
<code type="html">
Battle for Wesnoth, or simply Wesnoth, is a free, turn-based strategy game with role-playing elements that was designed in June 2003 by David White (Sirp).
Although the core rules are fairly simple and meant to be easily learned[1], they provide interesting gameplay and rich tactical options. A major strength of the project is the Wesnoth Markup Language (WML) for writing scenarios. Programming skills are not required to compose with it, and a large WML-modding community has generated a great deal of user-maintained content. We polish the best of this content and lift it into our official release tree.
The first stable release (1.0) was on October 2, 2005, and the latest stable release (1.8) happened in April 2010. Version 1.10 was released earlier this year, while the current development branch is 1.11. We're early in our cycle, so there are several interesting project available for students to join
Wesnoth is one of the most successful open-source game projects in existence, with an exceptionally large developer base and user community:
<ul>
<li>According to Ohloh, a site that collects activity statistics on open-source projects, the ''Wesnoth'' development effort is in the top 2% of largest and most active projects</li>
<li>We support two multiplayer game servers (stable and development) with a usual minimum load of more than a hundred players</li>
<li>More than two thousand downloads a day</li>
<li>4.5 million downloads via SourceForge; many more via various mirrors of Linux distributions</li>
<li>Best rated game at the Linux Game Tome[2]</li>
<li>Game of the year 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 at LinuxQuestions.org[3][4]</li>
<li>In general, Wesnoth tends to show up in the first or second position whenever anyone compiles a list of top open-source games</li>
</ul>
Wesnoth's most notable features include:
<ul>
<li>A mature project with continuing active development and frequent improvements</li>
<li>High quality artwork: both original graphics and music</li>
<li>Well-balanced by a tireless team of playtesters</li>
<li>Fun, unique gameplay</li>
<li>Even after nearly a decade of development and a very solid, fun product already created, there are still plenty of new developers; the number of commits to Subversion is still increasing</li>
<li>Strong support of internationalization with many supported languages, thus experience in working with non-native English speakers. In fact, more than half of our developers are not native English speakers.</li>
</ul>
For our Ideas page, please have a look at [5]. There you can find all information required to get you started working on Wesnoth.
[1] <a href="http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy">http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy</a> 
[2] <a href="http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating">http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating</a> 
[3] <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/">http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/</a> 
[4] <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/">http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/</a> 
[5] <a href="http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas">http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas</a>
</code>

==== Home page: ====
http://www.wesnoth.org/

==== Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2012? What do you hope to gain by participating? ====
Most of our developers have particular areas of interest in which they work. Though they are efficient in their areas, there are other, presently uncovered, areas of the code with a need for improvements but a high barrier to entry for casual contributors. By bringing new people in and allowing them to be actively responsible for an area of code, we hope to kickstart work in these areas and others that are lagging behind. Our previous SoC experience shows that a motivated, full-time, student can be brought up to date in any area fairly quickly. Our previous experiences has shown us that SoC developers tend to stay after the end of the Summer of Code and become valuable members of our community. Finally, we feel that it is part of our mandate is to provide a platform for motivated contributors to develop their skills in a positive learning environment.

Overall GSOC has been a win for all parties and we want it to continue in the future.

==== If accepted, would this be your first year participating in GSoC? ====
No

==== Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation. ====

2008 results:
Wesnoth participated in GSoC 2008 with four students. Out of these, two were great successes (that is they became full-fledge developers before the actual start of GSoC), did huge improvement during GSoC (A new recruitment algorithm for the AI and the basic structure for a new map editor, the student finished this work after the summer), and are still active developers in the Wesnoth community.

Of the two other, one of them was very active for the first half of GSoC and provided some useful infrastructure for AI development that we used as base in GSoC 2009, but was much less active and didn't reach expectations for the second half of GSoC. The lesson we learned is that great students should be left on their own, that's the best way to have them work, but average students should be monitored much more closely than we did. If things seems to start to go wrong, it's important to react very quick, to meet with other mentors and get things back on track early.

Timezone problems were also a serious barrier for student/mentor communication, and we will take that more into account when pairing mentors and students

For our other students, multiple problems collectively led to failure
* We should enforce IRC communication, E-mail is a barrier. This applies both for students and mentors. Both should be on IRC several hours a day, with overlapping hours.
* We should be more strict about mid-term evaluation. If the student is slightly lacking at mid-term we should give a clear message that he needs to get back on track.

2009 results:
In 2009 we mentored 6 students as part of Summer of Code. Out of these 5 projects were a success. From those 5 developers 3 are still part of our core development group and still maintain and improve the work they submitted as part of Summer of Code. One of the students even became the "head" of our AI development department and mentored a student this year. For a summary of the 2009 results have a look at [1].

Sadly one student was not able to continue his work past midterm due to his computer failing completely as well as personal problems that we won't delve into further here. It was not a salvageable situation.

2010 results:
In 2010 we mentored 4 students as part of Summer of Code, all the projects were a success. from those 4 developers, 1 is still part of our code development team and maintains the work he has done as part of Summer of Code.

2011 results:
In 2011 we mentored 5 students, with 4 four successfully completed

[1] http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=26955

==== If your organization participated in past GSoCs, please let us know the ratio of students passing to students allocated, e.g. 2006: 3/6 for 3 out of 6 students passed in 2006. ====
2008: 2/4
2009: 5/6
2010: 4/4
2011: 4/5

==== Main Organization License: ====
GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2) [Dropdown box answer!]

==== What is the URL for your ideas page? ====
http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas

==== What is the main development mailing list for your organization? This question will be shown to students who would like to get more information about applying to your organization for GSoC 2012. If your organization uses more than one list, please make sure to include a description of the list so students know which to use. ====
The main development mailing list is "wesnoth-dev@gna.org"

==== What is the main IRC channel for your organization? ====
#wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net

This is our main means of communications. If students have questions you should ask them in #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net and wait for a reply (might take some hours!). The Wesnoth related channels are logged in public and the logs tend to be read by developers.

==== Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now. Please note that it is a very good idea to ask students to provide you with their contact information as part of your template. Their contact details will not be shared with you automatically via the GSoC 2012 site. ====
We plan mainly to meet potential students through our IRC channel, but the following questions are Wesnoth specific and are worth pondering for any student, even if we don't need a formal answer. So please beside just answering these questions consider visiting us in IRC: #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net. This is where most of our work takes place and participating in IRC is mandatory for GSoC students participating with Wesnoth. Our experience is that this is the easiest way to communicate and solve problems that come up.

If you want to participate in GSoC as a student please copy http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SoC2011_Template_of_Student_page to a new page and fill it with the answers to the following questions

Again, participating on IRC will be highly considered, you should not hesitate to ask any questions there, including how to fill a good proposal. We highly value your capacity to communicate and work in a team, so help other students, actively ask for proposal criticism, this can only help your proposal

1) Basics

1.1) Write a small introduction to yourself.

1.2) State your preferred email address.

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

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

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

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

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

2) Experience

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

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

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?

2.4) Are you already involved with any open source development projects? If yes, please describe the project and the scope of your involvement.

2.5) Gaming experience - Are you a gamer?

2.5.1) What type of gamer are you?

2.5.2) What type of games?

2.5.3) What type of opponents do you prefer?

2.5.4) Are you more interested in story or gameplay?

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.

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.

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.

3.2) What spoken languages are you fluent in?

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?
* 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)

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

5.3) What programming languages are you fluent in?

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!

In general please try to be as verbose as possible in your answers and feel free to elaborate.

==== What criteria did you use to select the individuals who will act as mentors for your organization? Please be as specific as possible. ====
Our first criterion was that all the people had to be volunteers. According to other open source projects and our experience from the last two years, being a SoC mentor takes a lot of time and the person has to be ready to spend quite some time with the student.

Boucman is one of the oldest active developers around. He has rewritten the whole animation engine and made it an easily pluggable system allowing artists to easily specify exactly how they want the units to appear. He also started many community oriented projects like the Art Contribution[1] section of the wiki (now deprecated) and the WML Reference Manual[2]. He is responsible for dispatching and sorting the patches at http://patches.wesnoth.org that has created the new developer process we currently use. Boucman was a mentor in 2008, 2009 and 2010.

Iurii Chernyi (Crab) has joined the team in 2009, taking part in Google Summer of Code 2009, and staying with the project as a developer after successful completion of GSoC. He's an expert on all aspects of current Wesnoth AI codebase (having fully reorganized it as part of GSoC 2009), and has fixed numerous bugs all over Wesnoth. He was a GSoC mentor and a GCI mentor and administrator in 2010. He is experienced in teaching other people, in areas like programming languages and math.

Fendrin has some skills on both ends of the Wesnoth world, knowing parts of the c++ engine and how to use the Wesnoth markup language. He is the coder and maintainer of Wesnoth's first multiplayer campaign that is hosted in the mainline repository. His experience as a content developer ensures that there is an eye kept on the usability of those new features which are accessible to content designers. Fendrin was a mentor in 2010.

Mordante is one of the most active developers on our IRC channel. Not only has he done preliminary studies and coding in multiple areas that are candidates for Summer of Code ideas, he also is one of the coders with the best overview of the Wesnoth code. A large part of his work involves refactoring and polishing existing code. Next to that he's very active with fixing bugs which leads him to all areas in the code base. He is currently completing a rewrite of the Wesnoth GUI library, making all windows configurable through WML. This should make it easier to use Wesnoth on different resolutions, from small handheld devices to large 30 inch screens. Mordante was a mentor in 2008, 2009 and 2010.

All other developers listed in the ideas page are the leading capacities we do have for the respecting areas. Have a look at our list of "people who to contact" [3] for an easy reference. In general all our developers will mentor all students. That is, questions should just be asked in our IRC channel, where basically every developer who has an idea can and will directly answer.

When choosing the mentors, we have kept in mind that most developers can answer most technical questions, and we have chosen people that are well known for interacting with new-comers/external developers and can provide general guidance and design advice, more than people with specific technical knowledge.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/UnsortedContrib

[2] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/ReferenceWML

[3] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SoC_People_to_bug_on_IRC

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students? ====
The first thing to do is to avoid this situation altogether. The key is identifying candidates with the right mix of skills and temperament. Wesnoth is a game, and as such has lots of developers that are not coders. In particular, artists are well known in the Wesnoth community for being very sensitive about criticism and our community is used to people being sensitive to critics.

We try to choose students that accept criticism and are able to filter constructive criticism from useless one. The Wesnoth developer community is used to judging people according to these criteria and the special title we are going to give to applicants will allow us to easily spot any such problems and discuss them before they grow out of control.

If a student disappears, their mentor are in charge of reconnecting the student to see what is going wrong (available time, tension with other developers, with members of the community etc...). Depending on the actual problem, the mentor and the student will have to agree on possible ways to resolve the problem.

If a student disappears completely and there is no way to get back to them, there is little the project can do except salvaging whatever can be salvaged from the code (the students will have SVN write access, so most of the work will be committed either to trunk or to a specific branch) and find a core developer to take on the job. This will probably be slower and less effective for the project, but it's the best we can do.

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors? ====
All our mentors are long time developers that volunteered for the job, so we don't expect that to happen. We observed in during the last years the amount of time required to mentor, and our mentors accepted the job knowing the amount of work it involved. All of this years mentors mentored last year as well.

However, should it happen, we would continue to mentor as a developer community the student until we find a new "official" mentor to take on the job.

==== What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program? ====
Wesnoth has a particularly healthy community, both for developers and for players.

Our general policy regarding new coders has always been "two (non trival) patches... you're in". With other words, anybody that is able to get two non-trivial patches applied is offered commit privileges.
We have a developer responsible for applying patches and guiding new developers into our community. This is a well known and effective process we plan to apply to students, directing them to our EasyCoding pages [1] (these projects are usually a couple of hours long and hve been chosen to provide easy access to the respective area of code). This year, we also have added some simple coding tasks directly related to our GSoC ideas to be able to test students more specifically on their future project

Usually, patches go back and forth a couple of times, to make sure that all secondary things are in place (indenting, coding style, modified buildfiles etc.) The idea is that coder education should take place before the coder gets commit rights, but that getting new coder in is one of the most important things to keep our project alive.

If the student is proactive and ready to join IRC, all the developers are usually very welcoming, and good at directing newcomers to quickly give useful results.

In previous years, all students that were accepted (and a couple more) managed to have commit access before the start of the coding phase. We consider that this policy was successful and we plan to keep it this year.

We also plan to give a special forum title to any students. This will allow all forum members to tell them apart from normal users and give them read/write access to the developer only forums. This will also allow us to quickly spot any problem they might have interacting with the player community. We have a very mature developer community, but our player community is made of all sort of people of all age and education, and it can sometimes be rough.

Last, our experience from previous years is that students that participate in the community during the evaluation period will stay active in the community after that period. In previous years this has been a discriminating criterias for students of similar level, and overall we never had problems of students working "behind a black wall." Our selection process tend to favor students who participate, and participation hasn't been a problem so far.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/EasyCoding

==== If you are a small or new organization applying to GSoC, please list a larger, established GSoC organization or a Googler that can vouch for you here. ====

==== If you are a large organization who is vouching for a small organization applying to GSoC for their first time this year, please list their name and why you think they'd be good candidates for GSoC here: ====
* Darktable:
Darktable (see http://darktable.sourceforge.net/ and https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/darktable/wiki/GSOC) is an open source raw development tool.

There are currently no major open source raw development tools. Multiple tools cover the need (ufraw, rawtherapee etc...) but most of them are targeting technical users with interest in photography or signal processing experts rather than "normal" photographer.

Darktable has a very good UI designed around what most photographers expects. It is also a project which is at this interesting stage where there is a solid infrastructure and it needs developer to do the fun part of adding new feature. This is the stage of a project which is the most interesting for developers to join.

The Darktable development community is rather small (3 active developers plus occasional contributors). It could use the extra manpower but is large enough to mentor a student into a core developer pretty fast.

Chances of a student finding it interesting are high, chances of the student bringing major contributions to the project are very high

One of the experienced wesnoth mentor (boucman) is an active member of the Darktable community and has been spearheading the GSoC effort for that community and will offer advice and participation for the new mentors in that community. Wesnoth has had a dedicated IRC channel for mentor discussion which could be used by smaller projects for advice if the need arise

* Unknown Horizons:
Unknown Horizons (http://www.unknown-horizons.org/) is a 2D realtime strategy simulation with an emphasis on economy and city building.

This is a smaller open source game project with a really dedicated core team of developers. During our talks with the dev who wants to work as admin it was easy to see that they do think about what they do and got some well working infrastructure. Even though the team is rather small at the moment, they are well suited to handle some students and the project has a proven record of being able to actually release something and continue working on the code. Beside their abilities it is always good to support open source gaming, especially when it comes to rather underrepresented areas like real time strategy games.

==== Anything else you'd like to tell us? ====
There is nothing more to say.

==== Backup Admin (Link ID): ====
noy

==== Admin Agreement: ====
(some terms of service by Google that have to be agreed upon)

SoC Information for Google

2012-03-05T20:37:36Z

Noy: /* What is the main development mailing list for your organization? This question will be shown to students who would like to get more information about applying to your organization for GSoC 2012. If your organization uses more than one list, please

{{Template:SoC2011}}

== SoC Information for Google ==
This is the information that we submit to google as Application in Summer of Code (current status: 2012). The submitter automatically becomes primary Admin. Most entries are mandatory and have to be filled out before the application can be submitted.

==== Organization Name: ====
Battle for Wesnoth

==== Description: ====
<code type="html">
Battle for Wesnoth, or simply Wesnoth, is a free, turn-based strategy game with role-playing elements that was designed in June 2003 by David White (Sirp).
Although the core rules are fairly simple and meant to be easily learned[1], they provide interesting gameplay and rich tactical options. A major strength of the project is the Wesnoth Markup Language (WML) for writing scenarios. Programming skills are not required to compose with it, and a large WML-modding community has generated a great deal of user-maintained content. We polish the best of this content and lift it into our official release tree.
The first stable release (1.0) was on October 2, 2005, and the latest stable release (1.8) happened in April 2010. Version 1.10 was released earlier this year, while the current development branch is 1.11. We're early in our cycle, so there are several interesting project available for students to join
Wesnoth is one of the most successful open-source game projects in existence, with an exceptionally large developer base and user community:
<ul>
<li>According to Ohloh, a site that collects activity statistics on open-source projects, the ''Wesnoth'' development effort is in the top 2% of largest and most active projects</li>
<li>We support two multiplayer game servers (stable and development) with a usual minimum load of more than a hundred players</li>
<li>More than two thousand downloads a day</li>
<li>4.5 million downloads via SourceForge; many more via various mirrors of Linux distributions</li>
<li>Best rated game at the Linux Game Tome[2]</li>
<li>Game of the year 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 at LinuxQuestions.org[3][4]</li>
<li>In general, Wesnoth tends to show up in the first or second position whenever anyone compiles a list of top open-source games</li>
</ul>
Wesnoth's most notable features include:
<ul>
<li>A mature project with continuing active development and frequent improvements</li>
<li>High quality artwork: both original graphics and music</li>
<li>Well-balanced by a tireless team of playtesters</li>
<li>Fun, unique gameplay</li>
<li>Even after nearly a decade of development and a very solid, fun product already created, there are still plenty of new developers; the number of commits to Subversion is still increasing</li>
<li>Strong support of internationalization with many supported languages, thus experience in working with non-native English speakers. In fact, more than half of our developers are not native English speakers.</li>
</ul>
For our Ideas page, please have a look at [5]. There you can find all information required to get you started working on Wesnoth.
[1] <a href="http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy">http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy</a> 
[2] <a href="http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating">http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating</a> 
[3] <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/">http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/</a> 
[4] <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/">http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/</a> 
[5] <a href="http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas">http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas</a>
</code>

==== Home page: ====
http://www.wesnoth.org/

==== Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2012? What do you hope to gain by participating? ====
Most of our developers have particular areas of interest in which they work. Though they are efficient in their areas, there are other, presently uncovered, areas of the code with a need for improvements but a high barrier to entry for casual contributors. By bringing new people in and allowing them to be actively responsible for an area of code, we hope to kickstart work in these areas and others that are lagging behind. Our previous SoC experience shows that a motivated, full-time, student can be brought up to date in any area fairly quickly. Our previous experiences has shown us that SoC developers tend to stay after the end of the Summer of Code and become valuable members of our community. Finally, we feel that it is part of our mandate is to provide a platform for motivated contributors to develop their skills in a positive learning environment.

Overall GSOC has been a win for all parties and we want it to continue in the future.

==== If accepted, would this be your first year participating in GSoC? ====
No

==== Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation. ====

2008 results:
Wesnoth participated in GSoC 2008 with four students. Out of these, two were great successes (that is they became full-fledge developers before the actual start of GSoC), did huge improvement during GSoC (A new recruitment algorithm for the AI and the basic structure for a new map editor, the student finished this work after the summer), and are still active developers in the Wesnoth community.

Of the two other, one of them was very active for the first half of GSoC and provided some useful infrastructure for AI development that we used as base in GSoC 2009, but was much less active and didn't reach expectations for the second half of GSoC. The lesson we learned is that great students should be left on their own, that's the best way to have them work, but average students should be monitored much more closely than we did. If things seems to start to go wrong, it's important to react very quick, to meet with other mentors and get things back on track early.

Timezone problems were also a serious barrier for student/mentor communication, and we will take that more into account when pairing mentors and students

For our other students, multiple problems collectively led to failure
* We should enforce IRC communication, E-mail is a barrier. This applies both for students and mentors. Both should be on IRC several hours a day, with overlapping hours.
* We should be more strict about mid-term evaluation. If the student is slightly lacking at mid-term we should give a clear message that he needs to get back on track.

2009 results:
In 2009 we mentored 6 students as part of Summer of Code. Out of these 5 projects were a success. From those 5 developers 3 are still part of our core development group and still maintain and improve the work they submitted as part of Summer of Code. One of the students even became the "head" of our AI development department and mentored a student this year. For a summary of the 2009 results have a look at [1].

Sadly one student was not able to continue his work past midterm due to his computer failing completely as well as personal problems that we won't delve into further here. It was not a salvageable situation.

2010 results:
In 2010 we mentored 4 students as part of Summer of Code, all the projects were a success. from those 4 developers, 1 is still part of our code development team and maintains the work he has done as part of Summer of Code.

2011 results:
In 2011 we mentored 5 students, with 4 four successfully completed

[1] http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=26955

==== If your organization participated in past GSoCs, please let us know the ratio of students passing to students allocated, e.g. 2006: 3/6 for 3 out of 6 students passed in 2006. ====
2008: 2/4
2009: 5/6
2010: 4/4
2011: 4/5

==== Main Organization License: ====
GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2) [Dropdown box answer!]

==== What is the URL for your ideas page? ====
http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas

==== What is the main development mailing list for your organization? This question will be shown to students who would like to get more information about applying to your organization for GSoC 2012. If your organization uses more than one list, please make sure to include a description of the list so students know which to use. ====
The main development mailing list is "wesnoth-dev@gna.org"

==== What is the main IRC channel for your organization? ====
#wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net

==== Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now. Please note that it is a very good idea to ask students to provide you with their contact information as part of your template. Their contact details will not be shared with you automatically via the GSoC 2012 site. ====
We plan mainly to meet potential students through our IRC channel, but the following questions are Wesnoth specific and are worth pondering for any student, even if we don't need a formal answer. So please beside just answering these questions consider visiting us in IRC: #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net. This is where most of our work takes place and participating in IRC is mandatory for GSoC students participating with Wesnoth. Our experience is that this is the easiest way to communicate and solve problems that come up.

If you want to participate in GSoC as a student please copy http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SoC2011_Template_of_Student_page to a new page and fill it with the answers to the following questions

Again, participating on IRC will be highly considered, you should not hesitate to ask any questions there, including how to fill a good proposal. We highly value your capacity to communicate and work in a team, so help other students, actively ask for proposal criticism, this can only help your proposal

1) Basics

1.1) Write a small introduction to yourself.

1.2) State your preferred email address.

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

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

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

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

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

2) Experience

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

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

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?

2.4) Are you already involved with any open source development projects? If yes, please describe the project and the scope of your involvement.

2.5) Gaming experience - Are you a gamer?

2.5.1) What type of gamer are you?

2.5.2) What type of games?

2.5.3) What type of opponents do you prefer?

2.5.4) Are you more interested in story or gameplay?

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.

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.

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.

3.2) What spoken languages are you fluent in?

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?
* 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)

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

5.3) What programming languages are you fluent in?

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!

In general please try to be as verbose as possible in your answers and feel free to elaborate.

==== What criteria did you use to select the individuals who will act as mentors for your organization? Please be as specific as possible. ====
Our first criterion was that all the people had to be volunteers. According to other open source projects and our experience from the last two years, being a SoC mentor takes a lot of time and the person has to be ready to spend quite some time with the student.

Boucman is one of the oldest active developers around. He has rewritten the whole animation engine and made it an easily pluggable system allowing artists to easily specify exactly how they want the units to appear. He also started many community oriented projects like the Art Contribution[1] section of the wiki (now deprecated) and the WML Reference Manual[2]. He is responsible for dispatching and sorting the patches at http://patches.wesnoth.org that has created the new developer process we currently use. Boucman was a mentor in 2008, 2009 and 2010.

Iurii Chernyi (Crab) has joined the team in 2009, taking part in Google Summer of Code 2009, and staying with the project as a developer after successful completion of GSoC. He's an expert on all aspects of current Wesnoth AI codebase (having fully reorganized it as part of GSoC 2009), and has fixed numerous bugs all over Wesnoth. He was a GSoC mentor and a GCI mentor and administrator in 2010. He is experienced in teaching other people, in areas like programming languages and math.

Fendrin has some skills on both ends of the Wesnoth world, knowing parts of the c++ engine and how to use the Wesnoth markup language. He is the coder and maintainer of Wesnoth's first multiplayer campaign that is hosted in the mainline repository. His experience as a content developer ensures that there is an eye kept on the usability of those new features which are accessible to content designers. Fendrin was a mentor in 2010.

Mordante is one of the most active developers on our IRC channel. Not only has he done preliminary studies and coding in multiple areas that are candidates for Summer of Code ideas, he also is one of the coders with the best overview of the Wesnoth code. A large part of his work involves refactoring and polishing existing code. Next to that he's very active with fixing bugs which leads him to all areas in the code base. He is currently completing a rewrite of the Wesnoth GUI library, making all windows configurable through WML. This should make it easier to use Wesnoth on different resolutions, from small handheld devices to large 30 inch screens. Mordante was a mentor in 2008, 2009 and 2010.

All other developers listed in the ideas page are the leading capacities we do have for the respecting areas. Have a look at our list of "people who to contact" [3] for an easy reference. In general all our developers will mentor all students. That is, questions should just be asked in our IRC channel, where basically every developer who has an idea can and will directly answer.

When choosing the mentors, we have kept in mind that most developers can answer most technical questions, and we have chosen people that are well known for interacting with new-comers/external developers and can provide general guidance and design advice, more than people with specific technical knowledge.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/UnsortedContrib

[2] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/ReferenceWML

[3] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SoC_People_to_bug_on_IRC

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students? ====
The first thing to do is to avoid this situation altogether. The key is identifying candidates with the right mix of skills and temperament. Wesnoth is a game, and as such has lots of developers that are not coders. In particular, artists are well known in the Wesnoth community for being very sensitive about criticism and our community is used to people being sensitive to critics.

We try to choose students that accept criticism and are able to filter constructive criticism from useless one. The Wesnoth developer community is used to judging people according to these criteria and the special title we are going to give to applicants will allow us to easily spot any such problems and discuss them before they grow out of control.

If a student disappears, their mentor are in charge of reconnecting the student to see what is going wrong (available time, tension with other developers, with members of the community etc...). Depending on the actual problem, the mentor and the student will have to agree on possible ways to resolve the problem.

If a student disappears completely and there is no way to get back to them, there is little the project can do except salvaging whatever can be salvaged from the code (the students will have SVN write access, so most of the work will be committed either to trunk or to a specific branch) and find a core developer to take on the job. This will probably be slower and less effective for the project, but it's the best we can do.

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors? ====
All our mentors are long time developers that volunteered for the job, so we don't expect that to happen. We observed in during the last years the amount of time required to mentor, and our mentors accepted the job knowing the amount of work it involved. All of this years mentors mentored last year as well.

However, should it happen, we would continue to mentor as a developer community the student until we find a new "official" mentor to take on the job.

==== What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program? ====
Wesnoth has a particularly healthy community, both for developers and for players.

Our general policy regarding new coders has always been "two (non trival) patches... you're in". With other words, anybody that is able to get two non-trivial patches applied is offered commit privileges.
We have a developer responsible for applying patches and guiding new developers into our community. This is a well known and effective process we plan to apply to students, directing them to our EasyCoding pages [1] (these projects are usually a couple of hours long and hve been chosen to provide easy access to the respective area of code). This year, we also have added some simple coding tasks directly related to our GSoC ideas to be able to test students more specifically on their future project

Usually, patches go back and forth a couple of times, to make sure that all secondary things are in place (indenting, coding style, modified buildfiles etc.) The idea is that coder education should take place before the coder gets commit rights, but that getting new coder in is one of the most important things to keep our project alive.

If the student is proactive and ready to join IRC, all the developers are usually very welcoming, and good at directing newcomers to quickly give useful results.

In previous years, all students that were accepted (and a couple more) managed to have commit access before the start of the coding phase. We consider that this policy was successful and we plan to keep it this year.

We also plan to give a special forum title to any students. This will allow all forum members to tell them apart from normal users and give them read/write access to the developer only forums. This will also allow us to quickly spot any problem they might have interacting with the player community. We have a very mature developer community, but our player community is made of all sort of people of all age and education, and it can sometimes be rough.

Last, our experience from previous years is that students that participate in the community during the evaluation period will stay active in the community after that period. In previous years this has been a discriminating criterias for students of similar level, and overall we never had problems of students working "behind a black wall." Our selection process tend to favor students who participate, and participation hasn't been a problem so far.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/EasyCoding

==== If you are a small or new organization applying to GSoC, please list a larger, established GSoC organization or a Googler that can vouch for you here. ====

==== If you are a large organization who is vouching for a small organization applying to GSoC for their first time this year, please list their name and why you think they'd be good candidates for GSoC here: ====
* Darktable:
Darktable (see http://darktable.sourceforge.net/ and https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/darktable/wiki/GSOC) is an open source raw development tool.

There are currently no major open source raw development tools. Multiple tools cover the need (ufraw, rawtherapee etc...) but most of them are targeting technical users with interest in photography or signal processing experts rather than "normal" photographer.

Darktable has a very good UI designed around what most photographers expects. It is also a project which is at this interesting stage where there is a solid infrastructure and it needs developer to do the fun part of adding new feature. This is the stage of a project which is the most interesting for developers to join.

The Darktable development community is rather small (3 active developers plus occasional contributors). It could use the extra manpower but is large enough to mentor a student into a core developer pretty fast.

Chances of a student finding it interesting are high, chances of the student bringing major contributions to the project are very high

One of the experienced wesnoth mentor (boucman) is an active member of the Darktable community and has been spearheading the GSoC effort for that community and will offer advice and participation for the new mentors in that community. Wesnoth has had a dedicated IRC channel for mentor discussion which could be used by smaller projects for advice if the need arise

* Unknown Horizons:
Unknown Horizons (http://www.unknown-horizons.org/) is a 2D realtime strategy simulation with an emphasis on economy and city building.

This is a smaller open source game project with a really dedicated core team of developers. During our talks with the dev who wants to work as admin it was easy to see that they do think about what they do and got some well working infrastructure. Even though the team is rather small at the moment, they are well suited to handle some students and the project has a proven record of being able to actually release something and continue working on the code. Beside their abilities it is always good to support open source gaming, especially when it comes to rather underrepresented areas like real time strategy games.

==== Anything else you'd like to tell us? ====
There is nothing more to say.

==== Backup Admin (Link ID): ====
noy

==== Admin Agreement: ====
(some terms of service by Google that have to be agreed upon)

SoC Information for Google

2012-03-05T20:34:56Z

Noy:

{{Template:SoC2011}}

== SoC Information for Google ==
This is the information that we submit to google as Application in Summer of Code (current status: 2012). The submitter automatically becomes primary Admin. Most entries are mandatory and have to be filled out before the application can be submitted.

==== Organization Name: ====
Battle for Wesnoth

==== Description: ====
<code type="html">
Battle for Wesnoth, or simply Wesnoth, is a free, turn-based strategy game with role-playing elements that was designed in June 2003 by David White (Sirp).
Although the core rules are fairly simple and meant to be easily learned[1], they provide interesting gameplay and rich tactical options. A major strength of the project is the Wesnoth Markup Language (WML) for writing scenarios. Programming skills are not required to compose with it, and a large WML-modding community has generated a great deal of user-maintained content. We polish the best of this content and lift it into our official release tree.
The first stable release (1.0) was on October 2, 2005, and the latest stable release (1.8) happened in April 2010. Version 1.10 was released earlier this year, while the current development branch is 1.11. We're early in our cycle, so there are several interesting project available for students to join
Wesnoth is one of the most successful open-source game projects in existence, with an exceptionally large developer base and user community:
<ul>
<li>According to Ohloh, a site that collects activity statistics on open-source projects, the ''Wesnoth'' development effort is in the top 2% of largest and most active projects</li>
<li>We support two multiplayer game servers (stable and development) with a usual minimum load of more than a hundred players</li>
<li>More than two thousand downloads a day</li>
<li>4.5 million downloads via SourceForge; many more via various mirrors of Linux distributions</li>
<li>Best rated game at the Linux Game Tome[2]</li>
<li>Game of the year 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 at LinuxQuestions.org[3][4]</li>
<li>In general, Wesnoth tends to show up in the first or second position whenever anyone compiles a list of top open-source games</li>
</ul>
Wesnoth's most notable features include:
<ul>
<li>A mature project with continuing active development and frequent improvements</li>
<li>High quality artwork: both original graphics and music</li>
<li>Well-balanced by a tireless team of playtesters</li>
<li>Fun, unique gameplay</li>
<li>Even after nearly a decade of development and a very solid, fun product already created, there are still plenty of new developers; the number of commits to Subversion is still increasing</li>
<li>Strong support of internationalization with many supported languages, thus experience in working with non-native English speakers. In fact, more than half of our developers are not native English speakers.</li>
</ul>
For our Ideas page, please have a look at [5]. There you can find all information required to get you started working on Wesnoth.
[1] <a href="http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy">http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy</a> 
[2] <a href="http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating">http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating</a> 
[3] <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/">http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/</a> 
[4] <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/">http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/</a> 
[5] <a href="http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas">http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas</a>
</code>

==== Home page: ====
http://www.wesnoth.org/

==== Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2012? What do you hope to gain by participating? ====
Most of our developers have particular areas of interest in which they work. Though they are efficient in their areas, there are other, presently uncovered, areas of the code with a need for improvements but a high barrier to entry for casual contributors. By bringing new people in and allowing them to be actively responsible for an area of code, we hope to kickstart work in these areas and others that are lagging behind. Our previous SoC experience shows that a motivated, full-time, student can be brought up to date in any area fairly quickly. Our previous experiences has shown us that SoC developers tend to stay after the end of the Summer of Code and become valuable members of our community. Finally, we feel that it is part of our mandate is to provide a platform for motivated contributors to develop their skills in a positive learning environment.

Overall GSOC has been a win for all parties and we want it to continue in the future.

==== If accepted, would this be your first year participating in GSoC? ====
No

==== Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation. ====

2008 results:
Wesnoth participated in GSoC 2008 with four students. Out of these, two were great successes (that is they became full-fledge developers before the actual start of GSoC), did huge improvement during GSoC (A new recruitment algorithm for the AI and the basic structure for a new map editor, the student finished this work after the summer), and are still active developers in the Wesnoth community.

Of the two other, one of them was very active for the first half of GSoC and provided some useful infrastructure for AI development that we used as base in GSoC 2009, but was much less active and didn't reach expectations for the second half of GSoC. The lesson we learned is that great students should be left on their own, that's the best way to have them work, but average students should be monitored much more closely than we did. If things seems to start to go wrong, it's important to react very quick, to meet with other mentors and get things back on track early.

Timezone problems were also a serious barrier for student/mentor communication, and we will take that more into account when pairing mentors and students

For our other students, multiple problems collectively led to failure
* We should enforce IRC communication, E-mail is a barrier. This applies both for students and mentors. Both should be on IRC several hours a day, with overlapping hours.
* We should be more strict about mid-term evaluation. If the student is slightly lacking at mid-term we should give a clear message that he needs to get back on track.

2009 results:
In 2009 we mentored 6 students as part of Summer of Code. Out of these 5 projects were a success. From those 5 developers 3 are still part of our core development group and still maintain and improve the work they submitted as part of Summer of Code. One of the students even became the "head" of our AI development department and mentored a student this year. For a summary of the 2009 results have a look at [1].

Sadly one student was not able to continue his work past midterm due to his computer failing completely as well as personal problems that we won't delve into further here. It was not a salvageable situation.

2010 results:
In 2010 we mentored 4 students as part of Summer of Code, all the projects were a success. from those 4 developers, 1 is still part of our code development team and maintains the work he has done as part of Summer of Code.

2011 results:
In 2011 we mentored 5 students, with 4 four successfully completed

[1] http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=26955

==== If your organization participated in past GSoCs, please let us know the ratio of students passing to students allocated, e.g. 2006: 3/6 for 3 out of 6 students passed in 2006. ====
2008: 2/4
2009: 5/6
2010: 4/4
2011: 4/5

==== Main Organization License: ====
GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2) [Dropdown box answer!]

==== What is the URL for your ideas page? ====
http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas

==== What is the main development mailing list for your organization? This question will be shown to students who would like to get more information about applying to your organization for GSoC 2012. If your organization uses more than one list, please make sure to include a description of the list so students know which to use. ====
The main development mailing list is "wesnoth-dev@gna.org". Our main means of communications is our IRC channel on freenode. If you have questions you should ask them in #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net and wait for a reply (might take some hours!). The Wesnoth related channels are logged in public and the logs tend to be read by developers.

==== What is the main IRC channel for your organization? ====
#wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net

==== Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now. Please note that it is a very good idea to ask students to provide you with their contact information as part of your template. Their contact details will not be shared with you automatically via the GSoC 2012 site. ====
We plan mainly to meet potential students through our IRC channel, but the following questions are Wesnoth specific and are worth pondering for any student, even if we don't need a formal answer. So please beside just answering these questions consider visiting us in IRC: #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net. This is where most of our work takes place and participating in IRC is mandatory for GSoC students participating with Wesnoth. Our experience is that this is the easiest way to communicate and solve problems that come up.

If you want to participate in GSoC as a student please copy http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SoC2011_Template_of_Student_page to a new page and fill it with the answers to the following questions

Again, participating on IRC will be highly considered, you should not hesitate to ask any questions there, including how to fill a good proposal. We highly value your capacity to communicate and work in a team, so help other students, actively ask for proposal criticism, this can only help your proposal

1) Basics

1.1) Write a small introduction to yourself.

1.2) State your preferred email address.

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

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

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

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

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

2) Experience

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

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

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?

2.4) Are you already involved with any open source development projects? If yes, please describe the project and the scope of your involvement.

2.5) Gaming experience - Are you a gamer?

2.5.1) What type of gamer are you?

2.5.2) What type of games?

2.5.3) What type of opponents do you prefer?

2.5.4) Are you more interested in story or gameplay?

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.

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.

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.

3.2) What spoken languages are you fluent in?

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?
* 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)

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

5.3) What programming languages are you fluent in?

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!

In general please try to be as verbose as possible in your answers and feel free to elaborate.

==== What criteria did you use to select the individuals who will act as mentors for your organization? Please be as specific as possible. ====
Our first criterion was that all the people had to be volunteers. According to other open source projects and our experience from the last two years, being a SoC mentor takes a lot of time and the person has to be ready to spend quite some time with the student.

Boucman is one of the oldest active developers around. He has rewritten the whole animation engine and made it an easily pluggable system allowing artists to easily specify exactly how they want the units to appear. He also started many community oriented projects like the Art Contribution[1] section of the wiki (now deprecated) and the WML Reference Manual[2]. He is responsible for dispatching and sorting the patches at http://patches.wesnoth.org that has created the new developer process we currently use. Boucman was a mentor in 2008, 2009 and 2010.

Iurii Chernyi (Crab) has joined the team in 2009, taking part in Google Summer of Code 2009, and staying with the project as a developer after successful completion of GSoC. He's an expert on all aspects of current Wesnoth AI codebase (having fully reorganized it as part of GSoC 2009), and has fixed numerous bugs all over Wesnoth. He was a GSoC mentor and a GCI mentor and administrator in 2010. He is experienced in teaching other people, in areas like programming languages and math.

Fendrin has some skills on both ends of the Wesnoth world, knowing parts of the c++ engine and how to use the Wesnoth markup language. He is the coder and maintainer of Wesnoth's first multiplayer campaign that is hosted in the mainline repository. His experience as a content developer ensures that there is an eye kept on the usability of those new features which are accessible to content designers. Fendrin was a mentor in 2010.

Mordante is one of the most active developers on our IRC channel. Not only has he done preliminary studies and coding in multiple areas that are candidates for Summer of Code ideas, he also is one of the coders with the best overview of the Wesnoth code. A large part of his work involves refactoring and polishing existing code. Next to that he's very active with fixing bugs which leads him to all areas in the code base. He is currently completing a rewrite of the Wesnoth GUI library, making all windows configurable through WML. This should make it easier to use Wesnoth on different resolutions, from small handheld devices to large 30 inch screens. Mordante was a mentor in 2008, 2009 and 2010.

All other developers listed in the ideas page are the leading capacities we do have for the respecting areas. Have a look at our list of "people who to contact" [3] for an easy reference. In general all our developers will mentor all students. That is, questions should just be asked in our IRC channel, where basically every developer who has an idea can and will directly answer.

When choosing the mentors, we have kept in mind that most developers can answer most technical questions, and we have chosen people that are well known for interacting with new-comers/external developers and can provide general guidance and design advice, more than people with specific technical knowledge.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/UnsortedContrib

[2] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/ReferenceWML

[3] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SoC_People_to_bug_on_IRC

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students? ====
The first thing to do is to avoid this situation altogether. The key is identifying candidates with the right mix of skills and temperament. Wesnoth is a game, and as such has lots of developers that are not coders. In particular, artists are well known in the Wesnoth community for being very sensitive about criticism and our community is used to people being sensitive to critics.

We try to choose students that accept criticism and are able to filter constructive criticism from useless one. The Wesnoth developer community is used to judging people according to these criteria and the special title we are going to give to applicants will allow us to easily spot any such problems and discuss them before they grow out of control.

If a student disappears, their mentor are in charge of reconnecting the student to see what is going wrong (available time, tension with other developers, with members of the community etc...). Depending on the actual problem, the mentor and the student will have to agree on possible ways to resolve the problem.

If a student disappears completely and there is no way to get back to them, there is little the project can do except salvaging whatever can be salvaged from the code (the students will have SVN write access, so most of the work will be committed either to trunk or to a specific branch) and find a core developer to take on the job. This will probably be slower and less effective for the project, but it's the best we can do.

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors? ====
All our mentors are long time developers that volunteered for the job, so we don't expect that to happen. We observed in during the last years the amount of time required to mentor, and our mentors accepted the job knowing the amount of work it involved. All of this years mentors mentored last year as well.

However, should it happen, we would continue to mentor as a developer community the student until we find a new "official" mentor to take on the job.

==== What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program? ====
Wesnoth has a particularly healthy community, both for developers and for players.

Our general policy regarding new coders has always been "two (non trival) patches... you're in". With other words, anybody that is able to get two non-trivial patches applied is offered commit privileges.
We have a developer responsible for applying patches and guiding new developers into our community. This is a well known and effective process we plan to apply to students, directing them to our EasyCoding pages [1] (these projects are usually a couple of hours long and hve been chosen to provide easy access to the respective area of code). This year, we also have added some simple coding tasks directly related to our GSoC ideas to be able to test students more specifically on their future project

Usually, patches go back and forth a couple of times, to make sure that all secondary things are in place (indenting, coding style, modified buildfiles etc.) The idea is that coder education should take place before the coder gets commit rights, but that getting new coder in is one of the most important things to keep our project alive.

If the student is proactive and ready to join IRC, all the developers are usually very welcoming, and good at directing newcomers to quickly give useful results.

In previous years, all students that were accepted (and a couple more) managed to have commit access before the start of the coding phase. We consider that this policy was successful and we plan to keep it this year.

We also plan to give a special forum title to any students. This will allow all forum members to tell them apart from normal users and give them read/write access to the developer only forums. This will also allow us to quickly spot any problem they might have interacting with the player community. We have a very mature developer community, but our player community is made of all sort of people of all age and education, and it can sometimes be rough.

Last, our experience from previous years is that students that participate in the community during the evaluation period will stay active in the community after that period. In previous years this has been a discriminating criterias for students of similar level, and overall we never had problems of students working "behind a black wall." Our selection process tend to favor students who participate, and participation hasn't been a problem so far.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/EasyCoding

==== If you are a small or new organization applying to GSoC, please list a larger, established GSoC organization or a Googler that can vouch for you here. ====

==== If you are a large organization who is vouching for a small organization applying to GSoC for their first time this year, please list their name and why you think they'd be good candidates for GSoC here: ====
* Darktable:
Darktable (see http://darktable.sourceforge.net/ and https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/darktable/wiki/GSOC) is an open source raw development tool.

There are currently no major open source raw development tools. Multiple tools cover the need (ufraw, rawtherapee etc...) but most of them are targeting technical users with interest in photography or signal processing experts rather than "normal" photographer.

Darktable has a very good UI designed around what most photographers expects. It is also a project which is at this interesting stage where there is a solid infrastructure and it needs developer to do the fun part of adding new feature. This is the stage of a project which is the most interesting for developers to join.

The Darktable development community is rather small (3 active developers plus occasional contributors). It could use the extra manpower but is large enough to mentor a student into a core developer pretty fast.

Chances of a student finding it interesting are high, chances of the student bringing major contributions to the project are very high

One of the experienced wesnoth mentor (boucman) is an active member of the Darktable community and has been spearheading the GSoC effort for that community and will offer advice and participation for the new mentors in that community. Wesnoth has had a dedicated IRC channel for mentor discussion which could be used by smaller projects for advice if the need arise

* Unknown Horizons:
Unknown Horizons (http://www.unknown-horizons.org/) is a 2D realtime strategy simulation with an emphasis on economy and city building.

This is a smaller open source game project with a really dedicated core team of developers. During our talks with the dev who wants to work as admin it was easy to see that they do think about what they do and got some well working infrastructure. Even though the team is rather small at the moment, they are well suited to handle some students and the project has a proven record of being able to actually release something and continue working on the code. Beside their abilities it is always good to support open source gaming, especially when it comes to rather underrepresented areas like real time strategy games.

==== Anything else you'd like to tell us? ====
There is nothing more to say.

==== Backup Admin (Link ID): ====
noy

==== Admin Agreement: ====
(some terms of service by Google that have to be agreed upon)

SoC Information for Google

2012-03-05T20:26:55Z

Noy: /* Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2012? What do you hope to gain by participating? */

{{Template:SoC2011}}

== SoC Information for Google ==
This is the information that we submit to google as Application in Summer of Code (current status: 2012). The submitter automatically becomes primary Admin. Most entries are mandatory and have to be filled out before the application can be submitted.

==== Organization Name: ====
Battle for Wesnoth

==== Description: ====
<code type="html">
Battle for Wesnoth, or simply Wesnoth, is a free, turn-based strategy game with role-playing elements that was designed in June 2003 by David White (Sirp).
Although the core rules are fairly simple and meant to be easily learned[1], they provide interesting gameplay and rich tactical options. A major strength of the project is the Wesnoth Markup Language (WML) for writing scenarios. Programming skills are not required to compose with it, and a large WML-modding community has generated a great deal of user-maintained content. We polish the best of this content and lift it into our official release tree.
The first stable release (1.0) was on October 2, 2005, and the latest stable release (1.8) happened in April 2010. Version 1.10 was released earlier this year, while the current development branch is 1.11. We're early in our cycle, so there are several interesting project available for students to join
Wesnoth is one of the most successful open-source game projects in existence, with an exceptionally large developer base and user community:
<ul>
<li>According to Ohloh, a site that collects activity statistics on open-source projects, the ''Wesnoth'' development effort is in the top 2% of largest and most active projects</li>
<li>We support two multiplayer game servers (stable and development) with a usual minimum load of more than a hundred players</li>
<li>More than two thousand downloads a day</li>
<li>4.5 million downloads via SourceForge; many more via various mirrors of Linux distributions</li>
<li>Best rated game at the Linux Game Tome[2]</li>
<li>Game of the year 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 at LinuxQuestions.org[3][4]</li>
<li>In general, Wesnoth tends to show up in the first or second position whenever anyone compiles a list of top open-source games</li>
</ul>
Wesnoth's most notable features include:
<ul>
<li>A mature project with continuing active development and frequent improvements</li>
<li>High quality artwork: both original graphics and music</li>
<li>Well-balanced by a tireless team of playtesters</li>
<li>Fun, unique gameplay</li>
<li>Even after nearly a decade of development and a very solid, fun product already created, there are still plenty of new developers; the number of commits to Subversion is still increasing</li>
<li>Strong support of internationalization with many supported languages, thus experience in working with non-native English speakers. In fact, more than half of our developers are not native English speakers.</li>
</ul>
For our Ideas page, please have a look at [5]. There you can find all information required to get you started working on Wesnoth.
[1] <a href="http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy">http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy</a> 
[2] <a href="http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating">http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating</a> 
[3] <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/">http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/</a> 
[4] <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/">http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/</a> 
[5] <a href="http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas">http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas</a>
</code>

==== Home page: ====
http://www.wesnoth.org/

==== Main Organization License: ====
GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2) [Dropdown box answer!]

==== Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2012? What do you hope to gain by participating? ====
Most of our developers have particular areas of interest in which they work. Though they are efficient in their areas, there are other, presently uncovered, areas of the code with a need for improvements but a high barrier to entry for casual contributors. By bringing new people in and allowing them to be actively responsible for an area of code, we hope to kickstart work in these areas and others that are lagging behind. Our previous SoC experience shows that a motivated, full-time, student can be brought up to date in any area fairly quickly. Our previous experiences has shown us that SoC developers tend to stay after the end of the Summer of Code and become valuable members of our community. Finally, we feel that it is part of our mandate is to provide a platform for motivated contributors to develop their skills in a positive learning environment.

Overall GSOC has been a win for all parties and we want it to continue in the future.

==== If accepted, would this be your first year participating in GSoC? ====
No

==== Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation. ====

2008 results:
Wesnoth participated in GSoC 2008 with four students. Out of these, two were great successes (that is they became full-fledge developers before the actual start of GSoC), did huge improvement during GSoC (A new recruitment algorithm for the AI and the basic structure for a new map editor, the student finished this work after the summer), and are still active developers in the Wesnoth community.

Of the two other, one of them was very active for the first half of GSoC and provided some useful infrastructure for AI development that we used as base in GSoC 2009, but was much less active and didn't reach expectations for the second half of GSoC. The lesson we learned is that great students should be left on their own, that's the best way to have them work, but average students should be monitored much more closely than we did. If things seems to start to go wrong, it's important to react very quick, to meet with other mentors and get things back on track early.

Timezone problems were also a serious barrier for student/mentor communication, and we will take that more into account when pairing mentors and students

For our other students, multiple problems collectively led to failure
* We should enforce IRC communication, E-mail is a barrier. This applies both for students and mentors. Both should be on IRC several hours a day, with overlapping hours.
* We should be more strict about mid-term evaluation. If the student is slightly lacking at mid-term we should give a clear message that he needs to get back on track.

2009 results:
In 2009 we mentored 6 students as part of Summer of Code. Out of these 5 projects were a success. From those 5 developers 3 are still part of our core development group and still maintain and improve the work they submitted as part of Summer of Code. One of the students even became the "head" of our AI development department and mentored a student this year. For a summary of the 2009 results have a look at [1].

Sadly one student was not able to continue his work past midterm due to his computer failing completely as well as personal problems that we won't delve into further here. It was not a salvageable situation.

2010 results:
In 2010 we mentored 4 students as part of Summer of Code, all the projects were a success. from those 4 developers, 1 is still part of our code development team and maintains the work he has done as part of Summer of Code.

2011 results:
In 2011 we mentored 5 students, with 4 four successfully completed

[1] http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=26955

==== If your organization participated in past GSoCs, please let us know the ratio of students passing to students allocated, e.g. 2006: 3/6 for 3 out of 6 students passed in 2006. ====
2008: 2/4
2009: 5/6
2010: 4/4
2011: 4/5

==== What is the URL for your ideas page? ====
http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas

==== What is the main development mailing list for your organization? This question will be shown to students who would like to get more information about applying to your organization for GSoC 2012. If your organization uses more than one list, please make sure to include a description of the list so students know which to use. ====
The main development mailing list is "wesnoth-dev@gna.org". Our main means of communications is our IRC channel on freenode. If you have questions you should ask them in #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net and wait for a reply (might take some hours!). The Wesnoth related channels are logged in public and the logs tend to be read by developers.

==== What is the main IRC channel for your organization? ====
#wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net

==== Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now. Please note that it is a very good idea to ask students to provide you with their contact information as part of your template. Their contact details will not be shared with you automatically via the GSoC 2012 site. ====
We plan mainly to meet potential students through our IRC channel, but the following questions are Wesnoth specific and are worth pondering for any student, even if we don't need a formal answer. So please beside just answering these questions consider visiting us in IRC: #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net. This is where most of our work takes place and participating in IRC is mandatory for GSoC students participating with Wesnoth. Our experience is that this is the easiest way to communicate and solve problems that come up.

If you want to participate in GSoC as a student please copy http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SoC2011_Template_of_Student_page to a new page and fill it with the answers to the following questions

Again, participating on IRC will be highly considered, you should not hesitate to ask any questions there, including how to fill a good proposal. We highly value your capacity to communicate and work in a team, so help other students, actively ask for proposal criticism, this can only help your proposal

1) Basics

1.1) Write a small introduction to yourself.

1.2) State your preferred email address.

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

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

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

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

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

2) Experience

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

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

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?

2.4) Are you already involved with any open source development projects? If yes, please describe the project and the scope of your involvement.

2.5) Gaming experience - Are you a gamer?

2.5.1) What type of gamer are you?

2.5.2) What type of games?

2.5.3) What type of opponents do you prefer?

2.5.4) Are you more interested in story or gameplay?

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.

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.

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.

3.2) What spoken languages are you fluent in?

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?
* 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)

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

5.3) What programming languages are you fluent in?

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!

In general please try to be as verbose as possible in your answers and feel free to elaborate.

==== What criteria did you use to select the individuals who will act as mentors for your organization? Please be as specific as possible. ====
Our first criterion was that all the people had to be volunteers. According to other open source projects and our experience from the last two years, being a SoC mentor takes a lot of time and the person has to be ready to spend quite some time with the student.

Boucman is one of the oldest active developers around. He has rewritten the whole animation engine and made it an easily pluggable system allowing artists to easily specify exactly how they want the units to appear. He also started many community oriented projects like the Art Contribution[1] section of the wiki (now deprecated) and the WML Reference Manual[2]. He is responsible for dispatching and sorting the patches at http://patches.wesnoth.org that has created the new developer process we currently use. Boucman was a mentor in 2008, 2009 and 2010.

Iurii Chernyi (Crab) has joined the team in 2009, taking part in Google Summer of Code 2009, and staying with the project as a developer after successful completion of GSoC. He's an expert on all aspects of current Wesnoth AI codebase (having fully reorganized it as part of GSoC 2009), and has fixed numerous bugs all over Wesnoth. He was a GSoC mentor and a GCI mentor and administrator in 2010. He is experienced in teaching other people, in areas like programming languages and math.

Fendrin has some skills on both ends of the Wesnoth world, knowing parts of the c++ engine and how to use the Wesnoth markup language. He is the coder and maintainer of Wesnoth's first multiplayer campaign that is hosted in the mainline repository. His experience as a content developer ensures that there is an eye kept on the usability of those new features which are accessible to content designers. Fendrin was a mentor in 2010.

Mordante is one of the most active developers on our IRC channel. Not only has he done preliminary studies and coding in multiple areas that are candidates for Summer of Code ideas, he also is one of the coders with the best overview of the Wesnoth code. A large part of his work involves refactoring and polishing existing code. Next to that he's very active with fixing bugs which leads him to all areas in the code base. He is currently completing a rewrite of the Wesnoth GUI library, making all windows configurable through WML. This should make it easier to use Wesnoth on different resolutions, from small handheld devices to large 30 inch screens. Mordante was a mentor in 2008, 2009 and 2010.

All other developers listed in the ideas page are the leading capacities we do have for the respecting areas. Have a look at our list of "people who to contact" [3] for an easy reference. In general all our developers will mentor all students. That is, questions should just be asked in our IRC channel, where basically every developer who has an idea can and will directly answer.

When choosing the mentors, we have kept in mind that most developers can answer most technical questions, and we have chosen people that are well known for interacting with new-comers/external developers and can provide general guidance and design advice, more than people with specific technical knowledge.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/UnsortedContrib

[2] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/ReferenceWML

[3] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SoC_People_to_bug_on_IRC

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students? ====
The first thing to do is to avoid this situation altogether. The key is identifying candidates with the right mix of skills and temperament. Wesnoth is a game, and as such has lots of developers that are not coders. In particular, artists are well known in the Wesnoth community for being very sensitive about criticism and our community is used to people being sensitive to critics.

We try to choose students that accept criticism and are able to filter constructive criticism from useless one. The Wesnoth developer community is used to judging people according to these criteria and the special title we are going to give to applicants will allow us to easily spot any such problems and discuss them before they grow out of control.

If a student disappears, their mentor are in charge of reconnecting the student to see what is going wrong (available time, tension with other developers, with members of the community etc...). Depending on the actual problem, the mentor and the student will have to agree on possible ways to resolve the problem.

If a student disappears completely and there is no way to get back to them, there is little the project can do except salvaging whatever can be salvaged from the code (the students will have SVN write access, so most of the work will be committed either to trunk or to a specific branch) and find a core developer to take on the job. This will probably be slower and less effective for the project, but it's the best we can do.

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors? ====
All our mentors are long time developers that volunteered for the job, so we don't expect that to happen. We observed in during the last years the amount of time required to mentor, and our mentors accepted the job knowing the amount of work it involved. All of this years mentors mentored last year as well.

However, should it happen, we would continue to mentor as a developer community the student until we find a new "official" mentor to take on the job.

==== What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program? ====
Wesnoth has a particularly healthy community, both for developers and for players.

Our general policy regarding new coders has always been "two (non trival) patches... you're in". With other words, anybody that is able to get two non-trivial patches applied is offered commit privileges.
We have a developer responsible for applying patches and guiding new developers into our community. This is a well known and effective process we plan to apply to students, directing them to our EasyCoding pages [1] (these projects are usually a couple of hours long and hve been chosen to provide easy access to the respective area of code). This year, we also have added some simple coding tasks directly related to our GSoC ideas to be able to test students more specifically on their future project

Usually, patches go back and forth a couple of times, to make sure that all secondary things are in place (indenting, coding style, modified buildfiles etc.) The idea is that coder education should take place before the coder gets commit rights, but that getting new coder in is one of the most important things to keep our project alive.

If the student is proactive and ready to join IRC, all the developers are usually very welcoming, and good at directing newcomers to quickly give useful results.

In previous years, all students that were accepted (and a couple more) managed to have commit access before the start of the coding phase. We consider that this policy was successful and we plan to keep it this year.

We also plan to give a special forum title to any students. This will allow all forum members to tell them apart from normal users and give them read/write access to the developer only forums. This will also allow us to quickly spot any problem they might have interacting with the player community. We have a very mature developer community, but our player community is made of all sort of people of all age and education, and it can sometimes be rough.

Last, our experience from previous years is that students that participate in the community during the evaluation period will stay active in the community after that period. In previous years this has been a discriminating criterias for students of similar level, and overall we never had problems of students working "behind a black wall." Our selection process tend to favor students who participate, and participation hasn't been a problem so far.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/EasyCoding

==== If you are a small or new organization applying to GSoC, please list a larger, established GSoC organization or a Googler that can vouch for you here. ====

==== If you are a large organization who is vouching for a small organization applying to GSoC for their first time this year, please list their name and why you think they'd be good candidates for GSoC here: ====
* Darktable:
Darktable (see http://darktable.sourceforge.net/ and https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/darktable/wiki/GSOC) is an open source raw development tool.

There are currently no major open source raw development tools. Multiple tools cover the need (ufraw, rawtherapee etc...) but most of them are targeting technical users with interest in photography or signal processing experts rather than "normal" photographer.

Darktable has a very good UI designed around what most photographers expects. It is also a project which is at this interesting stage where there is a solid infrastructure and it needs developer to do the fun part of adding new feature. This is the stage of a project which is the most interesting for developers to join.

The Darktable development community is rather small (3 active developers plus occasional contributors). It could use the extra manpower but is large enough to mentor a student into a core developer pretty fast.

Chances of a student finding it interesting are high, chances of the student bringing major contributions to the project are very high

One of the experienced wesnoth mentor (boucman) is an active member of the Darktable community and has been spearheading the GSoC effort for that community and will offer advice and participation for the new mentors in that community. Wesnoth has had a dedicated IRC channel for mentor discussion which could be used by smaller projects for advice if the need arise

* Unknown Horizons:
Unknown Horizons (http://www.unknown-horizons.org/) is a 2D realtime strategy simulation with an emphasis on economy and city building.

This is a smaller open source game project with a really dedicated core team of developers. During our talks with the dev who wants to work as admin it was easy to see that they do think about what they do and got some well working infrastructure. Even though the team is rather small at the moment, they are well suited to handle some students and the project has a proven record of being able to actually release something and continue working on the code. Beside their abilities it is always good to support open source gaming, especially when it comes to rather underrepresented areas like real time strategy games.

==== Anything else you'd like to tell us? ====
There is nothing more to say.

==== Backup Admin (Link ID): ====
noy

==== Admin Agreement: ====
(some terms of service by Google that have to be agreed upon)

SoC Information for Google

2012-03-05T06:50:48Z

Noy: /* What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program? */

{{Template:SoC2011}}

== SoC Information for Google ==
This is the information that we submit to google as Application in Summer of Code (current status: 2012). The submitter automatically becomes primary Admin. Most entries are mandatory and have to be filled out before the application can be submitted.

==== Organization Name: ====
Battle for Wesnoth

==== Description: ====
<code type="html">
Battle for Wesnoth, or simply Wesnoth, is a free, turn-based strategy game with role-playing elements that was designed in June 2003 by David White (Sirp).
Although the core rules are fairly simple and meant to be easily learned[1], they provide interesting gameplay and rich tactical options. A major strength of the project is the Wesnoth Markup Language (WML) for writing scenarios. Programming skills are not required to compose with it, and a large WML-modding community has generated a great deal of user-maintained content. We polish the best of this content and lift it into our official release tree.
The first stable release (1.0) was on October 2, 2005, and the latest stable release (1.8) happened in April 2010. Version 1.10 was released earlier this year, while the current development branch is 1.11. We;re early in our cycle, so there are several interesting project available for students to join
Wesnoth is one of the most successful open-source game projects in existence, with an exceptionally large developer base and user community:
<ul>
<li>According to Ohloh, a site that collects activity statistics on open-source projects, the ''Wesnoth'' development effort is in the top 2% of largest and most active projects</li>
<li>We support two multiplayer game servers (stable and development) with a usual minimum load of more than a hundred players</li>
<li>More than two thousands downloads a day</li>
<li>4.5 million downloads via SourceForge; many more via various mirrors of Linux distributions</li>
<li>Best rated game at the Linux Game Tome[2]</li>
<li>Game of the year 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 at LinuxQuestions.org[3][4]</li>
<li>In general, Wesnoth tends to show up in the first or second position whenever anyone compiles a list of top open-source games</li>
</ul>
Wesnoth's most notable features include:
<ul>
<li>A mature project with continuing active development and frequent improvements</li>
<li>High quality artwork: both original graphics and music</li>
<li>Well-balanced by a tireless team of playtesters</li>
<li>Fun, unique gameplay</li>
<li>Even after nearly a decade of development and a very solid, fun product already created, there are still plenty of new developers; the number of commits to Subversion is still increasing</li>
<li>Strong support of internationalization with many supported languages, thus experience in working with non-native English speakers. In fact, more than half of our developers are not native English speakers.</li>
</ul>
For our Ideas page, please have a look at [5]. There you can find all information required to get you started working on Wesnoth.
[1] <a href="http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy">http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy</a> 
[2] <a href="http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating">http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating</a> 
[3] <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/">http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/</a> 
[4] <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/">http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/</a> 
[5] <a href="http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas">http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas</a>
</code>

==== Home page: ====
http://www.wesnoth.org/

==== Main Organization License: ====
GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2) [Dropdown box answer!]

==== Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2012? What do you hope to gain by participating? ====
Most of our developers have particular areas of interest in which they work. Though they are efficient in their areas, there are other, presently uncovered, areas of the code with a need for improvements but a high barrier to entry for casual contributors.

Our previous SoC experience shows that a motivated, full-time, student can be brought up to date in any area fairly quickly.

By bringing new people in and allowing them to be actively responsible for an area of code, we hope to kickstart some areas of the project that are currently lagging behind.

Moreover, our previous experiences has shown us that SoC developers tend to stay after the end of the Summer of Code and become valuable members of our community. This has been a win in all directions and we want it to happen again.

==== If accepted, would this be your first year participating in GSoC? ====
No

==== Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation. ====

2008 results:
Wesnoth participated in GSoC 2008 with four students. Out of these, two were great successes (that is they became full-fledge developers before the actual start of GSoC), did huge improvement during GSoC (A new recruitment algorithm for the AI and the basic structure for a new map editor, the student finished this work after the summer), and are still active developers in the Wesnoth community.

Of the two other, one of them was very active for the first half of GSoC and provided some useful infrastructure for AI development that we used as base in GSoC 2009, but was much less active and didn't reach expectations for the second half of GSoC. The lesson we learned is that great students should be left on their own, that's the best way to have them work, but average students should be monitored much more closely than we did. If things seems to start to go wrong, it's important to react very quick, to meet with other mentors and get things back on track early.

Timezone problems were also a serious barrier for student/mentor communication, and we will take that more into account when pairing mentors and students

For our other students, multiple problems collectively led to failure
* We should enforce IRC communication, E-mail is a barrier. This applies both for students and mentors. Both should be on IRC several hours a day, with overlapping hours.
* We should be more strict about mid-term evaluation. If the student is slightly lacking at mid-term we should give a clear message that he needs to get back on track.

2009 results:
In 2009 we mentored 6 students as part of Summer of Code. Out of these 5 projects were a success. From those 5 developers 3 are still part of our core development group and still maintain and improve the work they submitted as part of Summer of Code. One of the students even became the "head" of our AI development department and mentored a student this year. For a summary of the 2009 results have a look at [1].

Sadly one student was not able to continue his work past midterm due to his computer failing completely as well as personal problems that we won't delve into further here. It was not a salvageable situation.

2010 results:
In 2010 we mentored 4 students as part of Summer of Code, all the projects were a success. from those 4 developers, 1 is still part of our code development team and maintains the work he has done as part of Summer of Code.

2011 results:
In 2011 we mentored 5 students, with 4 four successfully completed

[1] http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=26955

==== If your organization participated in past GSoCs, please let us know the ratio of students passing to students allocated, e.g. 2006: 3/6 for 3 out of 6 students passed in 2006. ====
2008: 2/4
2009: 5/6
2010: 4/4
2011: 4/5

==== What is the URL for your ideas page? ====
http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas

==== What is the main development mailing list for your organization? This question will be shown to students who would like to get more information about applying to your organization for GSoC 2012. If your organization uses more than one list, please make sure to include a description of the list so students know which to use. ====
The main development mailing list is "wesnoth-dev@gna.org". Our main means of communications is our IRC channel on freenode. If you have questions you should ask them in #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net and wait for a reply (might take some hours!). The Wesnoth related channels are logged in public and the logs tend to be read by developers.

==== What is the main IRC channel for your organization? ====
#wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net

==== Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now. Please note that it is a very good idea to ask students to provide you with their contact information as part of your template. Their contact details will not be shared with you automatically via the GSoC 2012 site. ====
We plan mainly to meet potential students through our IRC channel, but the following questions are Wesnoth specific and are worth pondering for any student, even if we don't need a formal answer. So please beside just answering these questions consider visiting us in IRC: #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net. This is where most of our work takes place and participating in IRC is mandatory for GSoC students participating with Wesnoth. Our experience is that this is the easiest way to communicate and solve problems that come up.

If you want to participate in GSoC as a student please copy http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SoC2011_Template_of_Student_page to a new page and fill it with the answers to the following questions

Again, participating on IRC will be highly considered, you should not hesitate to ask any questions there, including how to fill a good proposal. We highly value your capacity to communicate and work in a team, so help other students, actively ask for proposal criticism, this can only help your proposal

1) Basics

1.1) Write a small introduction to yourself.

1.2) State your preferred email address.

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

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

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

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

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

2) Experience

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

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

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?

2.4) Are you already involved with any open source development projects? If yes, please describe the project and the scope of your involvement.

2.5) Gaming experience - Are you a gamer?

2.5.1) What type of gamer are you?

2.5.2) What type of games?

2.5.3) What type of opponents do you prefer?

2.5.4) Are you more interested in story or gameplay?

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.

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.

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.

3.2) What spoken languages are you fluent in?

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?
* 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)

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

5.3) What programming languages are you fluent in?

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!

In general please try to be as verbose as possible in your answers and feel free to elaborate.

==== What criteria did you use to select the individuals who will act as mentors for your organization? Please be as specific as possible. ====
Our first criterion was that all the people had to be volunteers. According to other open source projects and our experience from the last two years, being a SoC mentor takes a lot of time and the person has to be ready to spend quite some time with the student.

Boucman is one of the oldest active developers around. He has rewritten the whole animation engine and made it an easily pluggable system allowing artists to easily specify exactly how they want the units to appear. He also started many community oriented projects like the Art Contribution[1] section of the wiki (now deprecated) and the WML Reference Manual[2]. He is responsible for dispatching and sorting the patches at http://patches.wesnoth.org that has created the new developer process we currently use. Boucman was a mentor in 2008, 2009 and 2010.

Iurii Chernyi (Crab) has joined the team in 2009, taking part in Google Summer of Code 2009, and staying with the project as a developer after successful completion of GSoC. He's an expert on all aspects of current Wesnoth AI codebase (having fully reorganized it as part of GSoC 2009), and has fixed numerous bugs all over Wesnoth. He was a GSoC mentor and a GCI mentor and administrator in 2010. He is experienced in teaching other people, in areas like programming languages and math.

Fendrin has some skills on both ends of the Wesnoth world, knowing parts of the c++ engine and how to use the Wesnoth markup language. He is the coder and maintainer of Wesnoth's first multiplayer campaign that is hosted in the mainline repository. His experience as a content developer ensures that there is an eye kept on the usability of those new features which are accessible to content designers. Fendrin was a mentor in 2010.

Mordante is one of the most active developers on our IRC channel. Not only has he done preliminary studies and coding in multiple areas that are candidates for Summer of Code ideas, he also is one of the coders with the best overview of the Wesnoth code. A large part of his work involves refactoring and polishing existing code. Next to that he's very active with fixing bugs which leads him to all areas in the code base. He is currently completing a rewrite of the Wesnoth GUI library, making all windows configurable through WML. This should make it easier to use Wesnoth on different resolutions, from small handheld devices to large 30 inch screens. Mordante was a mentor in 2008, 2009 and 2010.

All other developers listed in the ideas page are the leading capacities we do have for the respecting areas. Have a look at our list of "people who to contact" [3] for an easy reference. In general all our developers will mentor all students. That is, questions should just be asked in our IRC channel, where basically every developer who has an idea can and will directly answer.

When choosing the mentors, we have kept in mind that most developers can answer most technical questions, and we have chosen people that are well known for interacting with new-comers/external developers and can provide general guidance and design advice, more than people with specific technical knowledge.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/UnsortedContrib

[2] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/ReferenceWML

[3] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SoC_People_to_bug_on_IRC

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students? ====
The first thing to do is to avoid this situation altogether. The key is identifying candidates with the right mix of skills and temperament. Wesnoth is a game, and as such has lots of developers that are not coders. In particular, artists are well known in the Wesnoth community for being very sensitive about criticism and our community is used to people being sensitive to critics.

We try to choose students that accept criticism and are able to filter constructive criticism from useless one. The Wesnoth developer community is used to judging people according to these criteria and the special title we are going to give to applicants will allow us to easily spot any such problems and discuss them before they grow out of control.

If a student disappears, their mentor are in charge of reconnecting the student to see what is going wrong (available time, tension with other developers, with members of the community etc...). Depending on the actual problem, the mentor and the student will have to agree on possible ways to resolve the problem.

If a student disappears completely and there is no way to get back to them, there is little the project can do except salvaging whatever can be salvaged from the code (the students will have SVN write access, so most of the work will be committed either to trunk or to a specific branch) and find a core developer to take on the job. This will probably be slower and less effective for the project, but it's the best we can do.

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors? ====
All our mentors are long time developers that volunteered for the job, so we don't expect that to happen. We observed in during the last years the amount of time required to mentor, and our mentors accepted the job knowing the amount of work it involved. All of this years mentors mentored last year as well.

However, should it happen, we would continue to mentor as a developer community the student until we find a new "official" mentor to take on the job.

==== What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program? ====
Wesnoth has a particularly healthy community, both for developers and for players.

Our general policy regarding new coders has always been "two (non trival) patches... you're in". With other words, anybody that is able to get two non-trivial patches applied is offered commit privileges.
We have a developer responsible for applying patches and guiding new developers into our community. This is a well known and effective process we plan to apply to students, directing them to our EasyCoding pages [1] (these projects are usually a couple of hours long and hve been chosen to provide easy access to the respective area of code). This year, we also have added some simple coding tasks directly related to our GSoC ideas to be able to test students more specifically on their future project

Usually, patches go back and forth a couple of times, to make sure that all secondary things are in place (indenting, coding style, modified buildfiles etc.) The idea is that coder education should take place before the coder gets commit rights, but that getting new coder in is one of the most important things to keep our project alive.

If the student is proactive and ready to join IRC, all the developers are usually very welcoming, and good at directing newcomers to quickly give useful results.

In previous years, all students that were accepted (and a couple more) managed to have commit access before the start of the coding phase. We consider that this policy was successful and we plan to keep it this year.

We also plan to give a special forum title to any students. This will allow all forum members to tell them apart from normal users and give them read/write access to the developer only forums. This will also allow us to quickly spot any problem they might have interacting with the player community. We have a very mature developer community, but our player community is made of all sort of people of all age and education, and it can sometimes be rough.

Last, our experience from previous years is that students that participate in the community during the evaluation period will stay active in the community after that period. In previous years this has been a discriminating criterias for students of similar level, and overall we never had problems of students working "behind a black wall." Our selection process tend to favor students who participate, and participation hasn't been a problem so far.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/EasyCoding

==== If you are a small or new organization applying to GSoC, please list a larger, established GSoC organization or a Googler that can vouch for you here. ====

==== If you are a large organization who is vouching for a small organization applying to GSoC for their first time this year, please list their name and why you think they'd be good candidates for GSoC here: ====
* Darktable:
Darktable (see http://darktable.sourceforge.net/ and https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/darktable/wiki/GSOC) is an open source raw development tool.

There are currently no major open source raw development tools. Multiple tools cover the need (ufraw, rawtherapee etc...) but most of them are targeting technical users with interest in photography or signal processing experts rather than "normal" photographer.

Darktable has a very good UI designed around what most photographers expects. It is also a project which is at this interesting stage where there is a solid infrastructure and it needs developer to do the fun part of adding new feature. This is the stage of a project which is the most interesting for developers to join.

The Darktable development community is rather small (3 active developers plus occasional contributors). It could use the extra manpower but is large enough to mentor a student into a core developer pretty fast.

Chances of a student finding it interesting are high, chances of the student bringing major contributions to the project are very high

One of the experienced wesnoth mentor (boucman) is an active member of the Darktable community and has been spearheading the GSoC effort for that community and will offer advice and participation for the new mentors in that community. Wesnoth has had a dedicated IRC channel for mentor discussion which could be used by smaller projects for advice if the need arise

* Unknown Horizons:
Unknown Horizons (http://www.unknown-horizons.org/) is a 2D realtime strategy simulation with an emphasis on economy and city building.

This is a smaller open source game project with a really dedicated core team of developers. During our talks with the dev who wants to work as admin it was easy to see that they do think about what they do and got some well working infrastructure. Even though the team is rather small at the moment, they are well suited to handle some students and the project has a proven record of being able to actually release something and continue working on the code. Beside their abilities it is always good to support open source gaming, especially when it comes to rather underrepresented areas like real time strategy games.

==== Anything else you'd like to tell us? ====
There is nothing more to say.

==== Backup Admin (Link ID): ====
noy

==== Admin Agreement: ====
(some terms of service by Google that have to be agreed upon)

SoC Information for Google

2012-03-05T06:49:54Z

Noy: /* What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students? */

{{Template:SoC2011}}

== SoC Information for Google ==
This is the information that we submit to google as Application in Summer of Code (current status: 2012). The submitter automatically becomes primary Admin. Most entries are mandatory and have to be filled out before the application can be submitted.

==== Organization Name: ====
Battle for Wesnoth

==== Description: ====
<code type="html">
Battle for Wesnoth, or simply Wesnoth, is a free, turn-based strategy game with role-playing elements that was designed in June 2003 by David White (Sirp).
Although the core rules are fairly simple and meant to be easily learned[1], they provide interesting gameplay and rich tactical options. A major strength of the project is the Wesnoth Markup Language (WML) for writing scenarios. Programming skills are not required to compose with it, and a large WML-modding community has generated a great deal of user-maintained content. We polish the best of this content and lift it into our official release tree.
The first stable release (1.0) was on October 2, 2005, and the latest stable release (1.8) happened in April 2010. Version 1.10 was released earlier this year, while the current development branch is 1.11. We;re early in our cycle, so there are several interesting project available for students to join
Wesnoth is one of the most successful open-source game projects in existence, with an exceptionally large developer base and user community:
<ul>
<li>According to Ohloh, a site that collects activity statistics on open-source projects, the ''Wesnoth'' development effort is in the top 2% of largest and most active projects</li>
<li>We support two multiplayer game servers (stable and development) with a usual minimum load of more than a hundred players</li>
<li>More than two thousands downloads a day</li>
<li>4.5 million downloads via SourceForge; many more via various mirrors of Linux distributions</li>
<li>Best rated game at the Linux Game Tome[2]</li>
<li>Game of the year 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 at LinuxQuestions.org[3][4]</li>
<li>In general, Wesnoth tends to show up in the first or second position whenever anyone compiles a list of top open-source games</li>
</ul>
Wesnoth's most notable features include:
<ul>
<li>A mature project with continuing active development and frequent improvements</li>
<li>High quality artwork: both original graphics and music</li>
<li>Well-balanced by a tireless team of playtesters</li>
<li>Fun, unique gameplay</li>
<li>Even after nearly a decade of development and a very solid, fun product already created, there are still plenty of new developers; the number of commits to Subversion is still increasing</li>
<li>Strong support of internationalization with many supported languages, thus experience in working with non-native English speakers. In fact, more than half of our developers are not native English speakers.</li>
</ul>
For our Ideas page, please have a look at [5]. There you can find all information required to get you started working on Wesnoth.
[1] <a href="http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy">http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy</a> 
[2] <a href="http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating">http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating</a> 
[3] <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/">http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/</a> 
[4] <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/">http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/</a> 
[5] <a href="http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas">http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas</a>
</code>

==== Home page: ====
http://www.wesnoth.org/

==== Main Organization License: ====
GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2) [Dropdown box answer!]

==== Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2012? What do you hope to gain by participating? ====
Most of our developers have particular areas of interest in which they work. Though they are efficient in their areas, there are other, presently uncovered, areas of the code with a need for improvements but a high barrier to entry for casual contributors.

Our previous SoC experience shows that a motivated, full-time, student can be brought up to date in any area fairly quickly.

By bringing new people in and allowing them to be actively responsible for an area of code, we hope to kickstart some areas of the project that are currently lagging behind.

Moreover, our previous experiences has shown us that SoC developers tend to stay after the end of the Summer of Code and become valuable members of our community. This has been a win in all directions and we want it to happen again.

==== If accepted, would this be your first year participating in GSoC? ====
No

==== Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation. ====

2008 results:
Wesnoth participated in GSoC 2008 with four students. Out of these, two were great successes (that is they became full-fledge developers before the actual start of GSoC), did huge improvement during GSoC (A new recruitment algorithm for the AI and the basic structure for a new map editor, the student finished this work after the summer), and are still active developers in the Wesnoth community.

Of the two other, one of them was very active for the first half of GSoC and provided some useful infrastructure for AI development that we used as base in GSoC 2009, but was much less active and didn't reach expectations for the second half of GSoC. The lesson we learned is that great students should be left on their own, that's the best way to have them work, but average students should be monitored much more closely than we did. If things seems to start to go wrong, it's important to react very quick, to meet with other mentors and get things back on track early.

Timezone problems were also a serious barrier for student/mentor communication, and we will take that more into account when pairing mentors and students

For our other students, multiple problems collectively led to failure
* We should enforce IRC communication, E-mail is a barrier. This applies both for students and mentors. Both should be on IRC several hours a day, with overlapping hours.
* We should be more strict about mid-term evaluation. If the student is slightly lacking at mid-term we should give a clear message that he needs to get back on track.

2009 results:
In 2009 we mentored 6 students as part of Summer of Code. Out of these 5 projects were a success. From those 5 developers 3 are still part of our core development group and still maintain and improve the work they submitted as part of Summer of Code. One of the students even became the "head" of our AI development department and mentored a student this year. For a summary of the 2009 results have a look at [1].

Sadly one student was not able to continue his work past midterm due to his computer failing completely as well as personal problems that we won't delve into further here. It was not a salvageable situation.

2010 results:
In 2010 we mentored 4 students as part of Summer of Code, all the projects were a success. from those 4 developers, 1 is still part of our code development team and maintains the work he has done as part of Summer of Code.

2011 results:
In 2011 we mentored 5 students, with 4 four successfully completed

[1] http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=26955

==== If your organization participated in past GSoCs, please let us know the ratio of students passing to students allocated, e.g. 2006: 3/6 for 3 out of 6 students passed in 2006. ====
2008: 2/4
2009: 5/6
2010: 4/4
2011: 4/5

==== What is the URL for your ideas page? ====
http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas

==== What is the main development mailing list for your organization? This question will be shown to students who would like to get more information about applying to your organization for GSoC 2012. If your organization uses more than one list, please make sure to include a description of the list so students know which to use. ====
The main development mailing list is "wesnoth-dev@gna.org". Our main means of communications is our IRC channel on freenode. If you have questions you should ask them in #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net and wait for a reply (might take some hours!). The Wesnoth related channels are logged in public and the logs tend to be read by developers.

==== What is the main IRC channel for your organization? ====
#wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net

==== Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now. Please note that it is a very good idea to ask students to provide you with their contact information as part of your template. Their contact details will not be shared with you automatically via the GSoC 2012 site. ====
We plan mainly to meet potential students through our IRC channel, but the following questions are Wesnoth specific and are worth pondering for any student, even if we don't need a formal answer. So please beside just answering these questions consider visiting us in IRC: #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net. This is where most of our work takes place and participating in IRC is mandatory for GSoC students participating with Wesnoth. Our experience is that this is the easiest way to communicate and solve problems that come up.

If you want to participate in GSoC as a student please copy http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SoC2011_Template_of_Student_page to a new page and fill it with the answers to the following questions

Again, participating on IRC will be highly considered, you should not hesitate to ask any questions there, including how to fill a good proposal. We highly value your capacity to communicate and work in a team, so help other students, actively ask for proposal criticism, this can only help your proposal

1) Basics

1.1) Write a small introduction to yourself.

1.2) State your preferred email address.

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

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

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

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

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

2) Experience

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

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

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?

2.4) Are you already involved with any open source development projects? If yes, please describe the project and the scope of your involvement.

2.5) Gaming experience - Are you a gamer?

2.5.1) What type of gamer are you?

2.5.2) What type of games?

2.5.3) What type of opponents do you prefer?

2.5.4) Are you more interested in story or gameplay?

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.

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.

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.

3.2) What spoken languages are you fluent in?

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?
* 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)

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

5.3) What programming languages are you fluent in?

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!

In general please try to be as verbose as possible in your answers and feel free to elaborate.

==== What criteria did you use to select the individuals who will act as mentors for your organization? Please be as specific as possible. ====
Our first criterion was that all the people had to be volunteers. According to other open source projects and our experience from the last two years, being a SoC mentor takes a lot of time and the person has to be ready to spend quite some time with the student.

Boucman is one of the oldest active developers around. He has rewritten the whole animation engine and made it an easily pluggable system allowing artists to easily specify exactly how they want the units to appear. He also started many community oriented projects like the Art Contribution[1] section of the wiki (now deprecated) and the WML Reference Manual[2]. He is responsible for dispatching and sorting the patches at http://patches.wesnoth.org that has created the new developer process we currently use. Boucman was a mentor in 2008, 2009 and 2010.

Iurii Chernyi (Crab) has joined the team in 2009, taking part in Google Summer of Code 2009, and staying with the project as a developer after successful completion of GSoC. He's an expert on all aspects of current Wesnoth AI codebase (having fully reorganized it as part of GSoC 2009), and has fixed numerous bugs all over Wesnoth. He was a GSoC mentor and a GCI mentor and administrator in 2010. He is experienced in teaching other people, in areas like programming languages and math.

Fendrin has some skills on both ends of the Wesnoth world, knowing parts of the c++ engine and how to use the Wesnoth markup language. He is the coder and maintainer of Wesnoth's first multiplayer campaign that is hosted in the mainline repository. His experience as a content developer ensures that there is an eye kept on the usability of those new features which are accessible to content designers. Fendrin was a mentor in 2010.

Mordante is one of the most active developers on our IRC channel. Not only has he done preliminary studies and coding in multiple areas that are candidates for Summer of Code ideas, he also is one of the coders with the best overview of the Wesnoth code. A large part of his work involves refactoring and polishing existing code. Next to that he's very active with fixing bugs which leads him to all areas in the code base. He is currently completing a rewrite of the Wesnoth GUI library, making all windows configurable through WML. This should make it easier to use Wesnoth on different resolutions, from small handheld devices to large 30 inch screens. Mordante was a mentor in 2008, 2009 and 2010.

All other developers listed in the ideas page are the leading capacities we do have for the respecting areas. Have a look at our list of "people who to contact" [3] for an easy reference. In general all our developers will mentor all students. That is, questions should just be asked in our IRC channel, where basically every developer who has an idea can and will directly answer.

When choosing the mentors, we have kept in mind that most developers can answer most technical questions, and we have chosen people that are well known for interacting with new-comers/external developers and can provide general guidance and design advice, more than people with specific technical knowledge.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/UnsortedContrib

[2] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/ReferenceWML

[3] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SoC_People_to_bug_on_IRC

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students? ====
The first thing to do is to avoid this situation altogether. The key is identifying candidates with the right mix of skills and temperament. Wesnoth is a game, and as such has lots of developers that are not coders. In particular, artists are well known in the Wesnoth community for being very sensitive about criticism and our community is used to people being sensitive to critics.

We try to choose students that accept criticism and are able to filter constructive criticism from useless one. The Wesnoth developer community is used to judging people according to these criteria and the special title we are going to give to applicants will allow us to easily spot any such problems and discuss them before they grow out of control.

If a student disappears, their mentor are in charge of reconnecting the student to see what is going wrong (available time, tension with other developers, with members of the community etc...). Depending on the actual problem, the mentor and the student will have to agree on possible ways to resolve the problem.

If a student disappears completely and there is no way to get back to them, there is little the project can do except salvaging whatever can be salvaged from the code (the students will have SVN write access, so most of the work will be committed either to trunk or to a specific branch) and find a core developer to take on the job. This will probably be slower and less effective for the project, but it's the best we can do.

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors? ====
All our mentors are long time developers that volunteered for the job, so we don't expect that to happen. We observed in during the last years the amount of time required to mentor, and our mentors accepted the job knowing the amount of work it involved. All of this years mentors mentored last year as well.

However, should it happen, we would continue to mentor as a developer community the student until we find a new "official" mentor to take on the job.

==== What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program? ====
Wesnoth has a particularly healthy community, both for developers and for players.

Our general policy regarding new coders has always been "two (non trival) patches... you're in". With other words, anybody that is able to get two non-trivial patches applied is offered commit privileges.
We have a developer responsible for applying patches and guiding new developers into our community. This is a well known and effective process we plan to apply to students, directing them to our EasyCoding pages [1] (these projects are usually a couple of hours long and hve been chosen to provide easy access to the respective area of code). This year, we also have added some simple coding tasks directly related to our GSoC ideas to be able to test students more specifically on their future project

Usually, patches go back and forth a couple of times, to make sure that all secondary things are in place (indenting, coding style, modified buildfiles etc.) The idea is that coder education should take place before the coder gets commit rights, but that getting new coder in is one of the most important things to keep our project alive.

If the student is proactive and ready to join IRC, all the developers are usually very welcoming, and good at directing newcomers to quickly give useful results.

In 2008, 2009 and 2010 all students that were accepted (and a couple more) managed to have commit access before the start of the coding phase. We consider that this policy was successful and we plan to keep it this year.

We also plan to give a special forum title to any students. This will allow all forum members to tell them apart from normal users and give them read/write access to the developer only forums. This will also allow us to quickly spot any problem they might have interacting with the player community. We have a very mature developer community, but our player community is made of all sort of people of all age and education, and it can sometimes be rough.

Last, our experience from previous years is that students that participate in the community during the evaluation period will stay active in the community after that period. In previous years this has been a discriminating criterias for students of similar level, and overall we never had problems of students working "behind a black wall." Our selection process tend to favor students who participate, and participation hasn't been a problem so far.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/EasyCoding

==== If you are a small or new organization applying to GSoC, please list a larger, established GSoC organization or a Googler that can vouch for you here. ====

==== If you are a large organization who is vouching for a small organization applying to GSoC for their first time this year, please list their name and why you think they'd be good candidates for GSoC here: ====
* Darktable:
Darktable (see http://darktable.sourceforge.net/ and https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/darktable/wiki/GSOC) is an open source raw development tool.

There are currently no major open source raw development tools. Multiple tools cover the need (ufraw, rawtherapee etc...) but most of them are targeting technical users with interest in photography or signal processing experts rather than "normal" photographer.

Darktable has a very good UI designed around what most photographers expects. It is also a project which is at this interesting stage where there is a solid infrastructure and it needs developer to do the fun part of adding new feature. This is the stage of a project which is the most interesting for developers to join.

The Darktable development community is rather small (3 active developers plus occasional contributors). It could use the extra manpower but is large enough to mentor a student into a core developer pretty fast.

Chances of a student finding it interesting are high, chances of the student bringing major contributions to the project are very high

One of the experienced wesnoth mentor (boucman) is an active member of the Darktable community and has been spearheading the GSoC effort for that community and will offer advice and participation for the new mentors in that community. Wesnoth has had a dedicated IRC channel for mentor discussion which could be used by smaller projects for advice if the need arise

* Unknown Horizons:
Unknown Horizons (http://www.unknown-horizons.org/) is a 2D realtime strategy simulation with an emphasis on economy and city building.

This is a smaller open source game project with a really dedicated core team of developers. During our talks with the dev who wants to work as admin it was easy to see that they do think about what they do and got some well working infrastructure. Even though the team is rather small at the moment, they are well suited to handle some students and the project has a proven record of being able to actually release something and continue working on the code. Beside their abilities it is always good to support open source gaming, especially when it comes to rather underrepresented areas like real time strategy games.

==== Anything else you'd like to tell us? ====
There is nothing more to say.

==== Backup Admin (Link ID): ====
noy

==== Admin Agreement: ====
(some terms of service by Google that have to be agreed upon)

SoC Information for Google

2012-03-05T06:25:50Z

Noy: /* Description: */

{{Template:SoC2011}}

== SoC Information for Google ==
This is the information that we submit to google as Application in Summer of Code (current status: 2012). The submitter automatically becomes primary Admin. Most entries are mandatory and have to be filled out before the application can be submitted.

==== Organization Name: ====
Battle for Wesnoth

==== Description: ====
<code type="html">
Battle for Wesnoth, or simply Wesnoth, is a free, turn-based strategy game with role-playing elements that was designed in June 2003 by David White (Sirp).
Although the core rules are fairly simple and meant to be easily learned[1], they provide interesting gameplay and rich tactical options. A major strength of the project is the Wesnoth Markup Language (WML) for writing scenarios. Programming skills are not required to compose with it, and a large WML-modding community has generated a great deal of user-maintained content. We polish the best of this content and lift it into our official release tree.
The first stable release (1.0) was on October 2, 2005, and the latest stable release (1.8) happened in April 2010. Version 1.10 was released earlier this year, while the current development branch is 1.11. We;re early in our cycle, so there are several interesting project available for students to join
Wesnoth is one of the most successful open-source game projects in existence, with an exceptionally large developer base and user community:
<ul>
<li>According to Ohloh, a site that collects activity statistics on open-source projects, the ''Wesnoth'' development effort is in the top 2% of largest and most active projects</li>
<li>We support two multiplayer game servers (stable and development) with a usual minimum load of more than a hundred players</li>
<li>More than two thousands downloads a day</li>
<li>4.5 million downloads via SourceForge; many more via various mirrors of Linux distributions</li>
<li>Best rated game at the Linux Game Tome[2]</li>
<li>Game of the year 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 at LinuxQuestions.org[3][4]</li>
<li>In general, Wesnoth tends to show up in the first or second position whenever anyone compiles a list of top open-source games</li>
</ul>
Wesnoth's most notable features include:
<ul>
<li>A mature project with continuing active development and frequent improvements</li>
<li>High quality artwork: both original graphics and music</li>
<li>Well-balanced by a tireless team of playtesters</li>
<li>Fun, unique gameplay</li>
<li>Even after nearly a decade of development and a very solid, fun product already created, there are still plenty of new developers; the number of commits to Subversion is still increasing</li>
<li>Strong support of internationalization with many supported languages, thus experience in working with non-native English speakers. In fact, more than half of our developers are not native English speakers.</li>
</ul>
For our Ideas page, please have a look at [5]. There you can find all information required to get you started working on Wesnoth.
[1] <a href="http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy">http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy</a> 
[2] <a href="http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating">http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating</a> 
[3] <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/">http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/</a> 
[4] <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/">http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/</a> 
[5] <a href="http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas">http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas</a>
</code>

==== Home page: ====
http://www.wesnoth.org/

==== Main Organization License: ====
GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2) [Dropdown box answer!]

==== Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2012? What do you hope to gain by participating? ====
Most of our developers have particular areas of interest in which they work. Though they are efficient in their areas, there are other, presently uncovered, areas of the code with a need for improvements but a high barrier to entry for casual contributors.

Our previous SoC experience shows that a motivated, full-time, student can be brought up to date in any area fairly quickly.

By bringing new people in and allowing them to be actively responsible for an area of code, we hope to kickstart some areas of the project that are currently lagging behind.

Moreover, our previous experiences has shown us that SoC developers tend to stay after the end of the Summer of Code and become valuable members of our community. This has been a win in all directions and we want it to happen again.

==== If accepted, would this be your first year participating in GSoC? ====
No

==== Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation. ====

2008 results:
Wesnoth participated in GSoC 2008 with four students. Out of these, two were great successes (that is they became full-fledge developers before the actual start of GSoC), did huge improvement during GSoC (A new recruitment algorithm for the AI and the basic structure for a new map editor, the student finished this work after the summer), and are still active developers in the Wesnoth community.

Of the two other, one of them was very active for the first half of GSoC and provided some useful infrastructure for AI development that we used as base in GSoC 2009, but was much less active and didn't reach expectations for the second half of GSoC. The lesson we learned is that great students should be left on their own, that's the best way to have them work, but average students should be monitored much more closely than we did. If things seems to start to go wrong, it's important to react very quick, to meet with other mentors and get things back on track early.

Timezone problems were also a serious barrier for student/mentor communication, and we will take that more into account when pairing mentors and students

For our other students, multiple problems collectively led to failure
* We should enforce IRC communication, E-mail is a barrier. This applies both for students and mentors. Both should be on IRC several hours a day, with overlapping hours.
* We should be more strict about mid-term evaluation. If the student is slightly lacking at mid-term we should give a clear message that he needs to get back on track.

2009 results:
In 2009 we mentored 6 students as part of Summer of Code. Out of these 5 projects were a success. From those 5 developers 3 are still part of our core development group and still maintain and improve the work they submitted as part of Summer of Code. One of the students even became the "head" of our AI development department and mentored a student this year. For a summary of the 2009 results have a look at [1].

Sadly one student was not able to continue his work past midterm due to his computer failing completely as well as personal problems that we won't delve into further here. It was not a salvageable situation.

2010 results:
In 2010 we mentored 4 students as part of Summer of Code, all the projects were a success. from those 4 developers, 1 is still part of our code development team and maintains the work he has done as part of Summer of Code.

2011 results:
In 2011 we mentored 5 students, with 4 four successfully completed

[1] http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=26955

==== If your organization participated in past GSoCs, please let us know the ratio of students passing to students allocated, e.g. 2006: 3/6 for 3 out of 6 students passed in 2006. ====
2008: 2/4
2009: 5/6
2010: 4/4
2011: 4/5

==== What is the URL for your ideas page? ====
http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas

==== What is the main development mailing list for your organization? This question will be shown to students who would like to get more information about applying to your organization for GSoC 2012. If your organization uses more than one list, please make sure to include a description of the list so students know which to use. ====
The main development mailing list is "wesnoth-dev@gna.org". Our main means of communications is our IRC channel on freenode. If you have questions you should ask them in #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net and wait for a reply (might take some hours!). The Wesnoth related channels are logged in public and the logs tend to be read by developers.

==== What is the main IRC channel for your organization? ====
#wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net

==== Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now. Please note that it is a very good idea to ask students to provide you with their contact information as part of your template. Their contact details will not be shared with you automatically via the GSoC 2012 site. ====
We plan mainly to meet potential students through our IRC channel, but the following questions are Wesnoth specific and are worth pondering for any student, even if we don't need a formal answer. So please beside just answering these questions consider visiting us in IRC: #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net. This is where most of our work takes place and participating in IRC is mandatory for GSoC students participating with Wesnoth. Our experience is that this is the easiest way to communicate and solve problems that come up.

If you want to participate in GSoC as a student please copy http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SoC2011_Template_of_Student_page to a new page and fill it with the answers to the following questions

Again, participating on IRC will be highly considered, you should not hesitate to ask any questions there, including how to fill a good proposal. We highly value your capacity to communicate and work in a team, so help other students, actively ask for proposal criticism, this can only help your proposal

1) Basics

1.1) Write a small introduction to yourself.

1.2) State your preferred email address.

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

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

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

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

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

2) Experience

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

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

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?

2.4) Are you already involved with any open source development projects? If yes, please describe the project and the scope of your involvement.

2.5) Gaming experience - Are you a gamer?

2.5.1) What type of gamer are you?

2.5.2) What type of games?

2.5.3) What type of opponents do you prefer?

2.5.4) Are you more interested in story or gameplay?

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.

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.

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.

3.2) What spoken languages are you fluent in?

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?
* 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)

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

5.3) What programming languages are you fluent in?

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!

In general please try to be as verbose as possible in your answers and feel free to elaborate.

==== What criteria did you use to select the individuals who will act as mentors for your organization? Please be as specific as possible. ====
Our first criterion was that all the people had to be volunteers. According to other open source projects and our experience from the last two years, being a SoC mentor takes a lot of time and the person has to be ready to spend quite some time with the student.

Boucman is one of the oldest active developers around. He has rewritten the whole animation engine and made it an easily pluggable system allowing artists to easily specify exactly how they want the units to appear. He also started many community oriented projects like the Art Contribution[1] section of the wiki (now deprecated) and the WML Reference Manual[2]. He is responsible for dispatching and sorting the patches at http://patches.wesnoth.org that has created the new developer process we currently use. Boucman was a mentor in 2008, 2009 and 2010.

Iurii Chernyi (Crab) has joined the team in 2009, taking part in Google Summer of Code 2009, and staying with the project as a developer after successful completion of GSoC. He's an expert on all aspects of current Wesnoth AI codebase (having fully reorganized it as part of GSoC 2009), and has fixed numerous bugs all over Wesnoth. He was a GSoC mentor and a GCI mentor and administrator in 2010. He is experienced in teaching other people, in areas like programming languages and math.

Fendrin has some skills on both ends of the Wesnoth world, knowing parts of the c++ engine and how to use the Wesnoth markup language. He is the coder and maintainer of Wesnoth's first multiplayer campaign that is hosted in the mainline repository. His experience as a content developer ensures that there is an eye kept on the usability of those new features which are accessible to content designers. Fendrin was a mentor in 2010.

Mordante is one of the most active developers on our IRC channel. Not only has he done preliminary studies and coding in multiple areas that are candidates for Summer of Code ideas, he also is one of the coders with the best overview of the Wesnoth code. A large part of his work involves refactoring and polishing existing code. Next to that he's very active with fixing bugs which leads him to all areas in the code base. He is currently completing a rewrite of the Wesnoth GUI library, making all windows configurable through WML. This should make it easier to use Wesnoth on different resolutions, from small handheld devices to large 30 inch screens. Mordante was a mentor in 2008, 2009 and 2010.

All other developers listed in the ideas page are the leading capacities we do have for the respecting areas. Have a look at our list of "people who to contact" [3] for an easy reference. In general all our developers will mentor all students. That is, questions should just be asked in our IRC channel, where basically every developer who has an idea can and will directly answer.

When choosing the mentors, we have kept in mind that most developers can answer most technical questions, and we have chosen people that are well known for interacting with new-comers/external developers and can provide general guidance and design advice, more than people with specific technical knowledge.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/UnsortedContrib

[2] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/ReferenceWML

[3] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SoC_People_to_bug_on_IRC

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students? ====
The first thing to do is to avoid this situation altogether.

Wesnoth is a game, and as such has lots of developers that are not coders. In particular, artists are well known in the Wesnoth community for being very sensitive about criticism and our community is used to people being sensitive to critics.

We will try to choose students that accept criticism and are able to filter constructive criticism from useless one. The Wesnoth developer community is used to judging people according to these criteria and the special title we are going to give to applicants will allow us to easily spot any such problems and discuss them before they grow out of control.

If a student disappears, their mentor will be in charge of recontacting the student to see what is going wrong (available time, tension with other developers, with members of the community etc...). Depending on the actual problem, the mentor and the student will have to agree on possible ways to defuse the problem.

If a student disappears completely and there is no way to get back to them, there is little the project can do except salvaging whatever can be salvaged from the code (the students will have SVN write access, so most of the work will be committed either to trunk or to a specific branch) and find a core developer to take on the job. This will probably be slower and less effective for the project, but it's the best we can do.

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors? ====
All our mentors are long time developers that volunteered for the job, so we don't expect that to happen. We observed in during the last years the amount of time required to mentor, and our mentors accepted the job knowing the amount of work it involved. All of this years mentors mentored last year as well.

However, should it happen, we would continue to mentor as a developer community the student until we find a new "official" mentor to take on the job.

==== What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program? ====
Wesnoth has a particularly healthy community, both for developers and for players.

Our general policy regarding new coders has always been "two (non trival) patches... you're in". With other words, anybody that is able to get two non-trivial patches applied is offered commit privileges.
We have a developer responsible for applying patches and guiding new developers into our community. This is a well known and effective process we plan to apply to students, directing them to our EasyCoding pages [1] (these projects are usually a couple of hours long and hve been chosen to provide easy access to the respective area of code). This year, we also have added some simple coding tasks directly related to our GSoC ideas to be able to test students more specifically on their future project

Usually, patches go back and forth a couple of times, to make sure that all secondary things are in place (indenting, coding style, modified buildfiles etc.) The idea is that coder education should take place before the coder gets commit rights, but that getting new coder in is one of the most important things to keep our project alive.

If the student is proactive and ready to join IRC, all the developers are usually very welcoming, and good at directing newcomers to quickly give useful results.

In 2008, 2009 and 2010 all students that were accepted (and a couple more) managed to have commit access before the start of the coding phase. We consider that this policy was successful and we plan to keep it this year.

We also plan to give a special forum title to any students. This will allow all forum members to tell them apart from normal users and give them read/write access to the developer only forums. This will also allow us to quickly spot any problem they might have interacting with the player community. We have a very mature developer community, but our player community is made of all sort of people of all age and education, and it can sometimes be rough.

Last, our experience from previous years is that students that participate in the community during the evaluation period will stay active in the community after that period. In previous years this has been a discriminating criterias for students of similar level, and overall we never had problems of students working "behind a black wall." Our selection process tend to favor students who participate, and participation hasn't been a problem so far.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/EasyCoding

==== If you are a small or new organization applying to GSoC, please list a larger, established GSoC organization or a Googler that can vouch for you here. ====

==== If you are a large organization who is vouching for a small organization applying to GSoC for their first time this year, please list their name and why you think they'd be good candidates for GSoC here: ====
* Darktable:
Darktable (see http://darktable.sourceforge.net/ and https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/darktable/wiki/GSOC) is an open source raw development tool.

There are currently no major open source raw development tools. Multiple tools cover the need (ufraw, rawtherapee etc...) but most of them are targeting technical users with interest in photography or signal processing experts rather than "normal" photographer.

Darktable has a very good UI designed around what most photographers expects. It is also a project which is at this interesting stage where there is a solid infrastructure and it needs developer to do the fun part of adding new feature. This is the stage of a project which is the most interesting for developers to join.

The Darktable development community is rather small (3 active developers plus occasional contributors). It could use the extra manpower but is large enough to mentor a student into a core developer pretty fast.

Chances of a student finding it interesting are high, chances of the student bringing major contributions to the project are very high

One of the experienced wesnoth mentor (boucman) is an active member of the Darktable community and has been spearheading the GSoC effort for that community and will offer advice and participation for the new mentors in that community. Wesnoth has had a dedicated IRC channel for mentor discussion which could be used by smaller projects for advice if the need arise

* Unknown Horizons:
Unknown Horizons (http://www.unknown-horizons.org/) is a 2D realtime strategy simulation with an emphasis on economy and city building.

This is a smaller open source game project with a really dedicated core team of developers. During our talks with the dev who wants to work as admin it was easy to see that they do think about what they do and got some well working infrastructure. Even though the team is rather small at the moment, they are well suited to handle some students and the project has a proven record of being able to actually release something and continue working on the code. Beside their abilities it is always good to support open source gaming, especially when it comes to rather underrepresented areas like real time strategy games.

==== Anything else you'd like to tell us? ====
There is nothing more to say.

==== Backup Admin (Link ID): ====
noy

==== Admin Agreement: ====
(some terms of service by Google that have to be agreed upon)

SoC Information for Google

2012-03-05T06:25:14Z

Noy: /* Description: */

{{Template:SoC2011}}

== SoC Information for Google ==
This is the information that we submit to google as Application in Summer of Code (current status: 2012). The submitter automatically becomes primary Admin. Most entries are mandatory and have to be filled out before the application can be submitted.

==== Organization Name: ====
Battle for Wesnoth

==== Description: ====
<code type="html">
Battle for Wesnoth, or simply Wesnoth, is a free, turn-based strategy game with role-playing elements that was designed in June 2003 by David White (Sirp).
Although the core rules are fairly simple and meant to be easily learned[1], they provide interesting gameplay and rich tactical options. A major strength of the project is the Wesnoth Markup Language (WML) for writing scenarios. Programming skills are not required to compose with it, and a large WML-modding community has generated a great deal of user-maintained content. We polish the best of this content and lift it into our official release tree.
The first stable release (1.0) was on October 2, 2005, and the latest stable release (1.8) happened in April 2010. Version 1.10 was released earlier this year, while the current development branch is 1.11. We;re early in our cycle, so there are several interesting project available for students to join
Wesnoth is one of the most successful open-source game projects in existence, with an exceptionally large developer base and user community:
<ul>
<li>According to Ohloh, a site that collects activity statistics on open-source projects, the ''Wesnoth'' development effort is in the top 2% of largest and most active projects</li>
<li>We support two multiplayer game servers (stable and development) with a usual minimum load of more than a hundred players</li>
<li>More than two thousands downloads a day</li>
<li>4.5 million downloads via SourceForge; many more via various mirrors of Linux distributions</li>
<li>Best rated game at the Linux Game Tome[2]</li>
<li>Game of the year 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010 at LinuxQuestions.org[3][4]</li>
<li>In general, Wesnoth tends to show up in the first or second position whenever anyone compiles a list of top open-source games</li>
</ul>
Wesnoth's most notable features include:
<ul>
<li>A mature project with continuing active development and frequent improvements</li>
<li>High quality artwork: both original graphics and music</li>
<li>Well-balanced by a tireless team of playtesters</li>
<li>Fun, unique gameplay</li>
<li>Even after nearly a decade of development and a very solid, fun product already created, there are still plenty of new developers; the number of commits to Subversion is still increasing</li>
<li>Strong support of internationalization with many supported languages, thus experience in working with non-native English speakers. In fact, more than half of our developers are not native English speakers.</li>
</ul>
For our Ideas page, please have a look at [5]. There you can find all information required to get you started working on Wesnoth.
[1] <a href="http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy">http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy</a> 
[2] <a href="http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating">http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating</a> 
[3] <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/">http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/</a> 
[4] <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/">http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/</a> 
[5] <a href="http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas">http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas</a>
</code>

==== Home page: ====
http://www.wesnoth.org/

==== Main Organization License: ====
GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2) [Dropdown box answer!]

==== Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2012? What do you hope to gain by participating? ====
Most of our developers have particular areas of interest in which they work. Though they are efficient in their areas, there are other, presently uncovered, areas of the code with a need for improvements but a high barrier to entry for casual contributors.

Our previous SoC experience shows that a motivated, full-time, student can be brought up to date in any area fairly quickly.

By bringing new people in and allowing them to be actively responsible for an area of code, we hope to kickstart some areas of the project that are currently lagging behind.

Moreover, our previous experiences has shown us that SoC developers tend to stay after the end of the Summer of Code and become valuable members of our community. This has been a win in all directions and we want it to happen again.

==== If accepted, would this be your first year participating in GSoC? ====
No

==== Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation. ====

2008 results:
Wesnoth participated in GSoC 2008 with four students. Out of these, two were great successes (that is they became full-fledge developers before the actual start of GSoC), did huge improvement during GSoC (A new recruitment algorithm for the AI and the basic structure for a new map editor, the student finished this work after the summer), and are still active developers in the Wesnoth community.

Of the two other, one of them was very active for the first half of GSoC and provided some useful infrastructure for AI development that we used as base in GSoC 2009, but was much less active and didn't reach expectations for the second half of GSoC. The lesson we learned is that great students should be left on their own, that's the best way to have them work, but average students should be monitored much more closely than we did. If things seems to start to go wrong, it's important to react very quick, to meet with other mentors and get things back on track early.

Timezone problems were also a serious barrier for student/mentor communication, and we will take that more into account when pairing mentors and students

For our other students, multiple problems collectively led to failure
* We should enforce IRC communication, E-mail is a barrier. This applies both for students and mentors. Both should be on IRC several hours a day, with overlapping hours.
* We should be more strict about mid-term evaluation. If the student is slightly lacking at mid-term we should give a clear message that he needs to get back on track.

2009 results:
In 2009 we mentored 6 students as part of Summer of Code. Out of these 5 projects were a success. From those 5 developers 3 are still part of our core development group and still maintain and improve the work they submitted as part of Summer of Code. One of the students even became the "head" of our AI development department and mentored a student this year. For a summary of the 2009 results have a look at [1].

Sadly one student was not able to continue his work past midterm due to his computer failing completely as well as personal problems that we won't delve into further here. It was not a salvageable situation.

2010 results:
In 2010 we mentored 4 students as part of Summer of Code, all the projects were a success. from those 4 developers, 1 is still part of our code development team and maintains the work he has done as part of Summer of Code.

2011 results:
In 2011 we mentored 5 students, with 4 four successfully completed

[1] http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=26955

==== If your organization participated in past GSoCs, please let us know the ratio of students passing to students allocated, e.g. 2006: 3/6 for 3 out of 6 students passed in 2006. ====
2008: 2/4
2009: 5/6
2010: 4/4
2011: 4/5

==== What is the URL for your ideas page? ====
http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas

==== What is the main development mailing list for your organization? This question will be shown to students who would like to get more information about applying to your organization for GSoC 2012. If your organization uses more than one list, please make sure to include a description of the list so students know which to use. ====
The main development mailing list is "wesnoth-dev@gna.org". Our main means of communications is our IRC channel on freenode. If you have questions you should ask them in #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net and wait for a reply (might take some hours!). The Wesnoth related channels are logged in public and the logs tend to be read by developers.

==== What is the main IRC channel for your organization? ====
#wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net

==== Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now. Please note that it is a very good idea to ask students to provide you with their contact information as part of your template. Their contact details will not be shared with you automatically via the GSoC 2012 site. ====
We plan mainly to meet potential students through our IRC channel, but the following questions are Wesnoth specific and are worth pondering for any student, even if we don't need a formal answer. So please beside just answering these questions consider visiting us in IRC: #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net. This is where most of our work takes place and participating in IRC is mandatory for GSoC students participating with Wesnoth. Our experience is that this is the easiest way to communicate and solve problems that come up.

If you want to participate in GSoC as a student please copy http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SoC2011_Template_of_Student_page to a new page and fill it with the answers to the following questions

Again, participating on IRC will be highly considered, you should not hesitate to ask any questions there, including how to fill a good proposal. We highly value your capacity to communicate and work in a team, so help other students, actively ask for proposal criticism, this can only help your proposal

1) Basics

1.1) Write a small introduction to yourself.

1.2) State your preferred email address.

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

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

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

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

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

2) Experience

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

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

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?

2.4) Are you already involved with any open source development projects? If yes, please describe the project and the scope of your involvement.

2.5) Gaming experience - Are you a gamer?

2.5.1) What type of gamer are you?

2.5.2) What type of games?

2.5.3) What type of opponents do you prefer?

2.5.4) Are you more interested in story or gameplay?

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.

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.

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.

3.2) What spoken languages are you fluent in?

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?
* 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)

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

5.3) What programming languages are you fluent in?

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!

In general please try to be as verbose as possible in your answers and feel free to elaborate.

==== What criteria did you use to select the individuals who will act as mentors for your organization? Please be as specific as possible. ====
Our first criterion was that all the people had to be volunteers. According to other open source projects and our experience from the last two years, being a SoC mentor takes a lot of time and the person has to be ready to spend quite some time with the student.

Boucman is one of the oldest active developers around. He has rewritten the whole animation engine and made it an easily pluggable system allowing artists to easily specify exactly how they want the units to appear. He also started many community oriented projects like the Art Contribution[1] section of the wiki (now deprecated) and the WML Reference Manual[2]. He is responsible for dispatching and sorting the patches at http://patches.wesnoth.org that has created the new developer process we currently use. Boucman was a mentor in 2008, 2009 and 2010.

Iurii Chernyi (Crab) has joined the team in 2009, taking part in Google Summer of Code 2009, and staying with the project as a developer after successful completion of GSoC. He's an expert on all aspects of current Wesnoth AI codebase (having fully reorganized it as part of GSoC 2009), and has fixed numerous bugs all over Wesnoth. He was a GSoC mentor and a GCI mentor and administrator in 2010. He is experienced in teaching other people, in areas like programming languages and math.

Fendrin has some skills on both ends of the Wesnoth world, knowing parts of the c++ engine and how to use the Wesnoth markup language. He is the coder and maintainer of Wesnoth's first multiplayer campaign that is hosted in the mainline repository. His experience as a content developer ensures that there is an eye kept on the usability of those new features which are accessible to content designers. Fendrin was a mentor in 2010.

Mordante is one of the most active developers on our IRC channel. Not only has he done preliminary studies and coding in multiple areas that are candidates for Summer of Code ideas, he also is one of the coders with the best overview of the Wesnoth code. A large part of his work involves refactoring and polishing existing code. Next to that he's very active with fixing bugs which leads him to all areas in the code base. He is currently completing a rewrite of the Wesnoth GUI library, making all windows configurable through WML. This should make it easier to use Wesnoth on different resolutions, from small handheld devices to large 30 inch screens. Mordante was a mentor in 2008, 2009 and 2010.

All other developers listed in the ideas page are the leading capacities we do have for the respecting areas. Have a look at our list of "people who to contact" [3] for an easy reference. In general all our developers will mentor all students. That is, questions should just be asked in our IRC channel, where basically every developer who has an idea can and will directly answer.

When choosing the mentors, we have kept in mind that most developers can answer most technical questions, and we have chosen people that are well known for interacting with new-comers/external developers and can provide general guidance and design advice, more than people with specific technical knowledge.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/UnsortedContrib

[2] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/ReferenceWML

[3] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SoC_People_to_bug_on_IRC

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students? ====
The first thing to do is to avoid this situation altogether.

Wesnoth is a game, and as such has lots of developers that are not coders. In particular, artists are well known in the Wesnoth community for being very sensitive about criticism and our community is used to people being sensitive to critics.

We will try to choose students that accept criticism and are able to filter constructive criticism from useless one. The Wesnoth developer community is used to judging people according to these criteria and the special title we are going to give to applicants will allow us to easily spot any such problems and discuss them before they grow out of control.

If a student disappears, their mentor will be in charge of recontacting the student to see what is going wrong (available time, tension with other developers, with members of the community etc...). Depending on the actual problem, the mentor and the student will have to agree on possible ways to defuse the problem.

If a student disappears completely and there is no way to get back to them, there is little the project can do except salvaging whatever can be salvaged from the code (the students will have SVN write access, so most of the work will be committed either to trunk or to a specific branch) and find a core developer to take on the job. This will probably be slower and less effective for the project, but it's the best we can do.

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors? ====
All our mentors are long time developers that volunteered for the job, so we don't expect that to happen. We observed in during the last years the amount of time required to mentor, and our mentors accepted the job knowing the amount of work it involved. All of this years mentors mentored last year as well.

However, should it happen, we would continue to mentor as a developer community the student until we find a new "official" mentor to take on the job.

==== What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program? ====
Wesnoth has a particularly healthy community, both for developers and for players.

Our general policy regarding new coders has always been "two (non trival) patches... you're in". With other words, anybody that is able to get two non-trivial patches applied is offered commit privileges.
We have a developer responsible for applying patches and guiding new developers into our community. This is a well known and effective process we plan to apply to students, directing them to our EasyCoding pages [1] (these projects are usually a couple of hours long and hve been chosen to provide easy access to the respective area of code). This year, we also have added some simple coding tasks directly related to our GSoC ideas to be able to test students more specifically on their future project

Usually, patches go back and forth a couple of times, to make sure that all secondary things are in place (indenting, coding style, modified buildfiles etc.) The idea is that coder education should take place before the coder gets commit rights, but that getting new coder in is one of the most important things to keep our project alive.

If the student is proactive and ready to join IRC, all the developers are usually very welcoming, and good at directing newcomers to quickly give useful results.

In 2008, 2009 and 2010 all students that were accepted (and a couple more) managed to have commit access before the start of the coding phase. We consider that this policy was successful and we plan to keep it this year.

We also plan to give a special forum title to any students. This will allow all forum members to tell them apart from normal users and give them read/write access to the developer only forums. This will also allow us to quickly spot any problem they might have interacting with the player community. We have a very mature developer community, but our player community is made of all sort of people of all age and education, and it can sometimes be rough.

Last, our experience from previous years is that students that participate in the community during the evaluation period will stay active in the community after that period. In previous years this has been a discriminating criterias for students of similar level, and overall we never had problems of students working "behind a black wall." Our selection process tend to favor students who participate, and participation hasn't been a problem so far.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/EasyCoding

==== If you are a small or new organization applying to GSoC, please list a larger, established GSoC organization or a Googler that can vouch for you here. ====

==== If you are a large organization who is vouching for a small organization applying to GSoC for their first time this year, please list their name and why you think they'd be good candidates for GSoC here: ====
* Darktable:
Darktable (see http://darktable.sourceforge.net/ and https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/darktable/wiki/GSOC) is an open source raw development tool.

There are currently no major open source raw development tools. Multiple tools cover the need (ufraw, rawtherapee etc...) but most of them are targeting technical users with interest in photography or signal processing experts rather than "normal" photographer.

Darktable has a very good UI designed around what most photographers expects. It is also a project which is at this interesting stage where there is a solid infrastructure and it needs developer to do the fun part of adding new feature. This is the stage of a project which is the most interesting for developers to join.

The Darktable development community is rather small (3 active developers plus occasional contributors). It could use the extra manpower but is large enough to mentor a student into a core developer pretty fast.

Chances of a student finding it interesting are high, chances of the student bringing major contributions to the project are very high

One of the experienced wesnoth mentor (boucman) is an active member of the Darktable community and has been spearheading the GSoC effort for that community and will offer advice and participation for the new mentors in that community. Wesnoth has had a dedicated IRC channel for mentor discussion which could be used by smaller projects for advice if the need arise

* Unknown Horizons:
Unknown Horizons (http://www.unknown-horizons.org/) is a 2D realtime strategy simulation with an emphasis on economy and city building.

This is a smaller open source game project with a really dedicated core team of developers. During our talks with the dev who wants to work as admin it was easy to see that they do think about what they do and got some well working infrastructure. Even though the team is rather small at the moment, they are well suited to handle some students and the project has a proven record of being able to actually release something and continue working on the code. Beside their abilities it is always good to support open source gaming, especially when it comes to rather underrepresented areas like real time strategy games.

==== Anything else you'd like to tell us? ====
There is nothing more to say.

==== Backup Admin (Link ID): ====
noy

==== Admin Agreement: ====
(some terms of service by Google that have to be agreed upon)

SoC Information for Google

2012-03-04T07:53:45Z

Noy: /* SoC Information for Google */

{{Template:SoC2011}}

== SoC Information for Google ==
This is the information that we submit to google as Application in Summer of Code (current status: 2012). The submitter automatically becomes primary Admin. Most entries are mandatory and have to be filled out before the application can be submitted.

==== Organization Name: ====
Battle for Wesnoth

==== Description: ====
<code type="html">
Battle for Wesnoth, or simply Wesnoth, is a free, turn-based strategy game with role-playing elements that was designed in June 2003 by David White (Sirp).
Although the core rules are fairly simple and meant to be easily learned[1], they provide interesting gameplay and rich tactical options. A major strength of the project is the Wesnoth Markup Language (WML) for writing scenarios. Programming skills are not required to compose with it, and a large WML-modding community has generated a great deal of user-maintained content. We polish the best of this content and lift it into our official release tree.
The first stable release (1.0) was on October 2, 2005, and the latest stable release (1.8) happened in April 2010. Version 1.10 was released earlier this year, while the current development branch is 1.11. We;re early in our cycle, so there are several interesting project available for students to join
Wesnoth is one of the most successful open-source game projects in existence, with an exceptionally large developer base and user community:
<ul>
<li>According to Ohloh, a site that collects activity statistics on open-source projects, the ''Wesnoth'' development effort is in the top 2% of largest and most active projects</li>
<li>We support two multiplayer game servers (stable and development) with a usual minimum load of more than a hundred players</li>
<li>More than two thousands downloads a day</li>
<li>4.5 million downloads via SourceForge; many more via various mirrors of Linux distributions</li>
<li>Best rated game at the Linux Game Tome[2]</li>
<li>Game of the year 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010 at LinuxQuestions.org[3][4]</li>
<li>In general, Wesnoth tends to show up in the first or second position whenever anyone compiles a list of top open-source games</li>
</ul>
Wesnoth's most notable features include:
<ul>
<li>A mature project with continuing active development and frequent improvements</li>
<li>High quality artwork: both original graphics and music</li>
<li>Well-balanced by a tireless team of playtesters</li>
<li>Fun, unique gameplay</li>
<li>Even after six years of development and with a very solid, fun product already created, there are still plenty of new developers; the number of commits to Subversion is still increasing</li>
<li>Strong support of internationalization with many supported languages, thus experience in working with non-native English speakers. In fact, more than half of our developers are not native English speakers.</li>
</ul>
For our Ideas page, please have a look at [5]. There you can find all information required to get you started working on Wesnoth.
[1] <a href="http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy">http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy</a> 
[2] <a href="http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating">http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating</a> 
[3] <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/">http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/2009-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-award-winners-788028/</a> 
[4] <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/">http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2010-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-93/open-source-game-of-the-year-855937/</a> 
[5] <a href="http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas">http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas</a>
</code>

==== Home page: ====
http://www.wesnoth.org/

==== Main Organization License: ====
GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2) [Dropdown box answer!]

==== Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2012? What do you hope to gain by participating? ====
Most of our developers have particular areas of interest in which they work. Though they are efficient in their areas, there are other, presently uncovered, areas of the code with a need for improvements but a high barrier to entry for casual contributors.

Our previous SoC experience shows that a motivated, full-time, student can be brought up to date in any area fairly quickly.

By bringing new people in and allowing them to be actively responsible for an area of code, we hope to kickstart some areas of the project that are currently lagging behind.

Moreover, our previous experiences has shown us that SoC developers tend to stay after the end of the Summer of Code and become valuable members of our community. This has been a win in all directions and we want it to happen again.

==== If accepted, would this be your first year participating in GSoC? ====
No

==== Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation. ====

2008 results:
Wesnoth participated in GSoC 2008 with four students. Out of these, two were great successes (that is they became full-fledge developers before the actual start of GSoC), did huge improvement during GSoC (A new recruitment algorithm for the AI and the basic structure for a new map editor, the student finished this work after the summer), and are still active developers in the Wesnoth community.

Of the two other, one of them was very active for the first half of GSoC and provided some useful infrastructure for AI development that we used as base in GSoC 2009, but was much less active and didn't reach expectations for the second half of GSoC. The lesson we learned is that great students should be left on their own, that's the best way to have them work, but average students should be monitored much more closely than we did. If things seems to start to go wrong, it's important to react very quick, to meet with other mentors and get things back on track early.

Timezone problems were also a serious barrier for student/mentor communication, and we will take that more into account when pairing mentors and students

For our other students, multiple problems collectively led to failure
* We should enforce IRC communication, E-mail is a barrier. This applies both for students and mentors. Both should be on IRC several hours a day, with overlapping hours.
* We should be more strict about mid-term evaluation. If the student is slightly lacking at mid-term we should give a clear message that he needs to get back on track.

2009 results:
In 2009 we mentored 6 students as part of Summer of Code. Out of these 5 projects were a success. From those 5 developers 3 are still part of our core development group and still maintain and improve the work they submitted as part of Summer of Code. One of the students even became the "head" of our AI development department and mentored a student this year. For a summary of the 2009 results have a look at [1].

Sadly one student was not able to continue his work past midterm due to his computer failing completely as well as personal problems that we won't delve into further here. It was not a salvageable situation.

2010 results:
In 2010 we mentored 4 students as part of Summer of Code, all the projects were a success. from those 4 developers, 1 is still part of our code development team and maintains the work he has done as part of Summer of Code.

2011 results:
In 2011 we mentored 5 students, with 4 four successfully completed

[1] http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=26955

==== If your organization participated in past GSoCs, please let us know the ratio of students passing to students allocated, e.g. 2006: 3/6 for 3 out of 6 students passed in 2006. ====
2008: 2/4
2009: 5/6
2010: 4/4
2011: 4/5

==== What is the URL for your ideas page? ====
http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas

==== What is the main development mailing list for your organization? This question will be shown to students who would like to get more information about applying to your organization for GSoC 2012. If your organization uses more than one list, please make sure to include a description of the list so students know which to use. ====
The main development mailing list is "wesnoth-dev@gna.org". Our main means of communications is our IRC channel on freenode. If you have questions you should ask them in #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net and wait for a reply (might take some hours!). The Wesnoth related channels are logged in public and the logs tend to be read by developers.

==== What is the main IRC channel for your organization? ====
#wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net

==== Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now. Please note that it is a very good idea to ask students to provide you with their contact information as part of your template. Their contact details will not be shared with you automatically via the GSoC 2012 site. ====
We plan mainly to meet potential students through our IRC channel, but the following questions are Wesnoth specific and are worth pondering for any student, even if we don't need a formal answer. So please beside just answering these questions consider visiting us in IRC: #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net. This is where most of our work takes place and participating in IRC is mandatory for GSoC students participating with Wesnoth. Our experience is that this is the easiest way to communicate and solve problems that come up.

If you want to participate in GSoC as a student please copy http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SoC2011_Template_of_Student_page to a new page and fill it with the answers to the following questions

Again, participating on IRC will be highly considered, you should not hesitate to ask any questions there, including how to fill a good proposal. We highly value your capacity to communicate and work in a team, so help other students, actively ask for proposal criticism, this can only help your proposal

1) Basics

1.1) Write a small introduction to yourself.

1.2) State your preferred email address.

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

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

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

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

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

2) Experience

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

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

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?

2.4) Are you already involved with any open source development projects? If yes, please describe the project and the scope of your involvement.

2.5) Gaming experience - Are you a gamer?

2.5.1) What type of gamer are you?

2.5.2) What type of games?

2.5.3) What type of opponents do you prefer?

2.5.4) Are you more interested in story or gameplay?

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.

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.

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.

3.2) What spoken languages are you fluent in?

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?
* 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)

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

5.3) What programming languages are you fluent in?

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!

In general please try to be as verbose as possible in your answers and feel free to elaborate.

==== What criteria did you use to select the individuals who will act as mentors for your organization? Please be as specific as possible. ====
Our first criterion was that all the people had to be volunteers. According to other open source projects and our experience from the last two years, being a SoC mentor takes a lot of time and the person has to be ready to spend quite some time with the student.

Boucman is one of the oldest active developers around. He has rewritten the whole animation engine and made it an easily pluggable system allowing artists to easily specify exactly how they want the units to appear. He also started many community oriented projects like the Art Contribution[1] section of the wiki (now deprecated) and the WML Reference Manual[2]. He is responsible for dispatching and sorting the patches at http://patches.wesnoth.org that has created the new developer process we currently use. Boucman was a mentor in 2008, 2009 and 2010.

Iurii Chernyi (Crab) has joined the team in 2009, taking part in Google Summer of Code 2009, and staying with the project as a developer after successful completion of GSoC. He's an expert on all aspects of current Wesnoth AI codebase (having fully reorganized it as part of GSoC 2009), and has fixed numerous bugs all over Wesnoth. He was a GSoC mentor and a GCI mentor and administrator in 2010. He is experienced in teaching other people, in areas like programming languages and math.

Fendrin has some skills on both ends of the Wesnoth world, knowing parts of the c++ engine and how to use the Wesnoth markup language. He is the coder and maintainer of Wesnoth's first multiplayer campaign that is hosted in the mainline repository. His experience as a content developer ensures that there is an eye kept on the usability of those new features which are accessible to content designers. Fendrin was a mentor in 2010.

Mordante is one of the most active developers on our IRC channel. Not only has he done preliminary studies and coding in multiple areas that are candidates for Summer of Code ideas, he also is one of the coders with the best overview of the Wesnoth code. A large part of his work involves refactoring and polishing existing code. Next to that he's very active with fixing bugs which leads him to all areas in the code base. He is currently completing a rewrite of the Wesnoth GUI library, making all windows configurable through WML. This should make it easier to use Wesnoth on different resolutions, from small handheld devices to large 30 inch screens. Mordante was a mentor in 2008, 2009 and 2010.

All other developers listed in the ideas page are the leading capacities we do have for the respecting areas. Have a look at our list of "people who to contact" [3] for an easy reference. In general all our developers will mentor all students. That is, questions should just be asked in our IRC channel, where basically every developer who has an idea can and will directly answer.

When choosing the mentors, we have kept in mind that most developers can answer most technical questions, and we have chosen people that are well known for interacting with new-comers/external developers and can provide general guidance and design advice, more than people with specific technical knowledge.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/UnsortedContrib

[2] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/ReferenceWML

[3] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SoC_People_to_bug_on_IRC

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students? ====
The first thing to do is to avoid this situation altogether.

Wesnoth is a game, and as such has lots of developers that are not coders. In particular, artists are well known in the Wesnoth community for being very sensitive about criticism and our community is used to people being sensitive to critics.

We will try to choose students that accept criticism and are able to filter constructive criticism from useless one. The Wesnoth developer community is used to judging people according to these criteria and the special title we are going to give to applicants will allow us to easily spot any such problems and discuss them before they grow out of control.

If a student disappears, their mentor will be in charge of recontacting the student to see what is going wrong (available time, tension with other developers, with members of the community etc...). Depending on the actual problem, the mentor and the student will have to agree on possible ways to defuse the problem.

If a student disappears completely and there is no way to get back to them, there is little the project can do except salvaging whatever can be salvaged from the code (the students will have SVN write access, so most of the work will be committed either to trunk or to a specific branch) and find a core developer to take on the job. This will probably be slower and less effective for the project, but it's the best we can do.

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors? ====
All our mentors are long time developers that volunteered for the job, so we don't expect that to happen. We observed in during the last years the amount of time required to mentor, and our mentors accepted the job knowing the amount of work it involved. All of this years mentors mentored last year as well.

However, should it happen, we would continue to mentor as a developer community the student until we find a new "official" mentor to take on the job.

==== What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program? ====
Wesnoth has a particularly healthy community, both for developers and for players.

Our general policy regarding new coders has always been "two (non trival) patches... you're in". With other words, anybody that is able to get two non-trivial patches applied is offered commit privileges.
We have a developer responsible for applying patches and guiding new developers into our community. This is a well known and effective process we plan to apply to students, directing them to our EasyCoding pages [1] (these projects are usually a couple of hours long and hve been chosen to provide easy access to the respective area of code). This year, we also have added some simple coding tasks directly related to our GSoC ideas to be able to test students more specifically on their future project

Usually, patches go back and forth a couple of times, to make sure that all secondary things are in place (indenting, coding style, modified buildfiles etc.) The idea is that coder education should take place before the coder gets commit rights, but that getting new coder in is one of the most important things to keep our project alive.

If the student is proactive and ready to join IRC, all the developers are usually very welcoming, and good at directing newcomers to quickly give useful results.

In 2008, 2009 and 2010 all students that were accepted (and a couple more) managed to have commit access before the start of the coding phase. We consider that this policy was successful and we plan to keep it this year.

We also plan to give a special forum title to any students. This will allow all forum members to tell them apart from normal users and give them read/write access to the developer only forums. This will also allow us to quickly spot any problem they might have interacting with the player community. We have a very mature developer community, but our player community is made of all sort of people of all age and education, and it can sometimes be rough.

Last, our experience from previous years is that students that participate in the community during the evaluation period will stay active in the community after that period. In previous years this has been a discriminating criterias for students of similar level, and overall we never had problems of students working "behind a black wall." Our selection process tend to favor students who participate, and participation hasn't been a problem so far.

[1] http://wiki.wesnoth.org/EasyCoding

==== If you are a small or new organization applying to GSoC, please list a larger, established GSoC organization or a Googler that can vouch for you here. ====

==== If you are a large organization who is vouching for a small organization applying to GSoC for their first time this year, please list their name and why you think they'd be good candidates for GSoC here: ====
* Darktable:
Darktable (see http://darktable.sourceforge.net/ and https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/darktable/wiki/GSOC) is an open source raw development tool.

There are currently no major open source raw development tools. Multiple tools cover the need (ufraw, rawtherapee etc...) but most of them are targeting technical users with interest in photography or signal processing experts rather than "normal" photographer.

Darktable has a very good UI designed around what most photographers expects. It is also a project which is at this interesting stage where there is a solid infrastructure and it needs developer to do the fun part of adding new feature. This is the stage of a project which is the most interesting for developers to join.

The Darktable development community is rather small (3 active developers plus occasional contributors). It could use the extra manpower but is large enough to mentor a student into a core developer pretty fast.

Chances of a student finding it interesting are high, chances of the student bringing major contributions to the project are very high

One of the experienced wesnoth mentor (boucman) is an active member of the Darktable community and has been spearheading the GSoC effort for that community and will offer advice and participation for the new mentors in that community. Wesnoth has had a dedicated IRC channel for mentor discussion which could be used by smaller projects for advice if the need arise

* Unknown Horizons:
Unknown Horizons (http://www.unknown-horizons.org/) is a 2D realtime strategy simulation with an emphasis on economy and city building.

This is a smaller open source game project with a really dedicated core team of developers. During our talks with the dev who wants to work as admin it was easy to see that they do think about what they do and got some well working infrastructure. Even though the team is rather small at the moment, they are well suited to handle some students and the project has a proven record of being able to actually release something and continue working on the code. Beside their abilities it is always good to support open source gaming, especially when it comes to rather underrepresented areas like real time strategy games.

==== Anything else you'd like to tell us? ====
There is nothing more to say.

==== Backup Admin (Link ID): ====
noy

==== Admin Agreement: ====
(some terms of service by Google that have to be agreed upon)

GCI

2010-10-28T22:13:40Z

Noy: /* Difficulty */

== Google Code In task list ==

This page is a list of task ideas for the google code-in (see http://code.google.com/gci)

exemple of tasks from previous year
http://code.google.com/p/google-highly-open-participation-gnome/issues/list

=== Task Template ===
One paragraph description of task

requirement (expected technical knowledge)

expected time for completion

difficulty

deliverable/expected proof

=== Graphics ===
Various Graphics for Wesnoth

requirement (expected technical knowledge) - speak with thespaceinvader?

expected time for completion

difficulty - easy to hard

deliverable/expected proof

=== Translations / Internationalization ===
==== Description ====
You work on translating some specific content from English into the lang of your choice (we will have to provide a list of possible translations that are offered, since an active maintainer for the language is mandatory). The specific work could eg be translating a smaller campaign, the unit descriptions for a race, translating a number of scenarios of one of the larger campaigns, proofreading and polishing some already translated content and things along those lines.

==== Requirement (expected technical knowledge) ====
For this task there is not much technical knowledge required. You just need to be able to open a text file in either a text editor or a special program for internationalizations. You need to have some basic knowledge of English (since this is the origin language) and need to be able to produce "correct" text of the language you want to translate things into.

When proofreading you should be able to handle a tool like "diff" so that you can provide some diff/patch for the already existing translations.

==== expected time for completion ====
The time for completion depends on the content and what you are doing. It can be anything between 4h and maybe 10h. It is not expected that a huge campaign is translated as one "working block" and things have to be split to be of "just the right size".

==== difficulty ====
Hard to say. In general it is a rather easy task, though it is really difficult to do it "perfectly". Basically you have to be able to tell a good story. If you are good at doing this, it is easy. If you have extreme problems with the language you want to translate into and are not much into writing stuff this is a really hard task.

==== deliverable/expected proof ====
For a new translation there would be the new translation file. When proofreading there would be the diff correcting issues and recommending possible changes.

===AI recruitment algorithm===

====Description====
Wesnoth AI has to select what units to recruit. AI leader stands on keep and can recruit a number of units, up to the number of free hexes in his castle. AI can choose between a number of different unit types. Each unit type costs a certain amount of gold to recruit and the AI knows how good a specific unit is, and should try to recruit better unit types. AI knows how many units of a particular type it has at the moment and the scenario creators want to limit the amount of units of a certain type that the AI can have at the same time. There should be a tunable parameter that will tell the AI to go either for a mass of low-cost low-quality units or few high-cost high-quality units.
====Input====
# (integer) gold
# (integer) maximum number of units to be recruited
# (double) quantity vs quality - 0 means 'go for mass of low-quality units', 1 means 'go for few high-quality units), and other values are in between
# table of potential recruits
## (string) recruit name
## (integer) cost to recruit
## (double) how good each unit is
## (integer) current quantity
## (integer) maximum quantity

====Output====
a list of units to be recruited.
====Example input====
# AI has 120 gold
# Up to 5 units are to be recruited
# go for quality (1.0)
# table of potential recruits
{| border="1"
|+
| Recruit name
| Cost to recruit
| How good this unit is
| Current Qty
| Maximum Qty
|-
| Spearman
| 13gp
| 12.6
| 1
| 10
|-
| Royal Guard
| 30gp
| 40.0
| 0
| 2
|}

====Example output====
Royal Guard, Royal Guard, Spearman, Spearman, Spearman

(we go for quality but we can recruit up to 2 royal guards, so the rest of 5 units are spearmans)

====Difficulty====
Should not be too difficult. But, you need to know either C++ or lua, and you need to think out and code a good algorithm for picking out the units to be recruited.
====Deliverable/expected proof====
We will provide a incomplete program that provides the correct input and you must complete it, coding a suitable recruitment algorithm.

=== Testing of mainline campaigns ===
Wesnoth ships with 16 campaigns which total over 200 scenarios, each one with varying amounts of events, dialogue, cutscenes, special gameplay mechanics, and so on. It's inevitable that many scenarios contain bugs which have gone unnoticed or unreported. Also, most scenarios were originally written a long time ago when the game engine was much less versatile, meaning that some scenario mechanics don't function as naturally and conveniently as they could.

This task involves picking a mainline campaign, playing through it and reporting in as much detail as possible all bugs and glitches encountered as well as suggestions for improvement. Campaigns vary greatly in length, so you could pick either one long campaign or 2-3 of the shorter ones. Campaigns with scenario branching should get all their branches tested.

Campaigns to choose from (list is subject to change) in a roughly prioritized order:
*Dead Water
*Heir to the Throne
*Rise of Wesnoth
*Eastern Invasion
*Under the Burning Suns
*The South Guard
*Liberty
*Son of the Black-Eye
*Northern Rebirth

==== Requirements ====
Reasonably familiar with Wesnoth campaigns, so as to be able to identify bugs and suggest realistically doable gameplay-enhancing changes in detail. No coding in WML or otherwise required.

==== Difficulty ====
Depending on the student's skill medium to low. Students able to learn WML and fix bugs would increase the difficulty.

====Deliverable/expected proof====
Depending on the campaign there maybe specific tasks or targets, however all will require about 50 hours of work at a minimum (possibly up to 80 hours.) Students must contact the project for details.

GCI

2010-10-28T22:12:26Z

Noy: /* Difficulty */

== Google Code In task list ==

This page is a list of task ideas for the google code-in (see http://code.google.com/gci)

exemple of tasks from previous year
http://code.google.com/p/google-highly-open-participation-gnome/issues/list

=== Task Template ===
One paragraph description of task

requirement (expected technical knowledge)

expected time for completion

difficulty

deliverable/expected proof

=== Graphics ===
Various Graphics for Wesnoth

requirement (expected technical knowledge) - speak with thespaceinvader?

expected time for completion

difficulty - easy to hard

deliverable/expected proof

=== Translations / Internationalization ===
==== Description ====
You work on translating some specific content from English into the lang of your choice (we will have to provide a list of possible translations that are offered, since an active maintainer for the language is mandatory). The specific work could eg be translating a smaller campaign, the unit descriptions for a race, translating a number of scenarios of one of the larger campaigns, proofreading and polishing some already translated content and things along those lines.

==== Requirement (expected technical knowledge) ====
For this task there is not much technical knowledge required. You just need to be able to open a text file in either a text editor or a special program for internationalizations. You need to have some basic knowledge of English (since this is the origin language) and need to be able to produce "correct" text of the language you want to translate things into.

When proofreading you should be able to handle a tool like "diff" so that you can provide some diff/patch for the already existing translations.

==== expected time for completion ====
The time for completion depends on the content and what you are doing. It can be anything between 4h and maybe 10h. It is not expected that a huge campaign is translated as one "working block" and things have to be split to be of "just the right size".

==== difficulty ====
Hard to say. In general it is a rather easy task, though it is really difficult to do it "perfectly". Basically you have to be able to tell a good story. If you are good at doing this, it is easy. If you have extreme problems with the language you want to translate into and are not much into writing stuff this is a really hard task.

==== deliverable/expected proof ====
For a new translation there would be the new translation file. When proofreading there would be the diff correcting issues and recommending possible changes.

===AI recruitment algorithm===

====Description====
Wesnoth AI has to select what units to recruit. AI leader stands on keep and can recruit a number of units, up to the number of free hexes in his castle. AI can choose between a number of different unit types. Each unit type costs a certain amount of gold to recruit and the AI knows how good a specific unit is, and should try to recruit better unit types. AI knows how many units of a particular type it has at the moment and the scenario creators want to limit the amount of units of a certain type that the AI can have at the same time. There should be a tunable parameter that will tell the AI to go either for a mass of low-cost low-quality units or few high-cost high-quality units.
====Input====
# (integer) gold
# (integer) maximum number of units to be recruited
# (double) quantity vs quality - 0 means 'go for mass of low-quality units', 1 means 'go for few high-quality units), and other values are in between
# table of potential recruits
## (string) recruit name
## (integer) cost to recruit
## (double) how good each unit is
## (integer) current quantity
## (integer) maximum quantity

====Output====
a list of units to be recruited.
====Example input====
# AI has 120 gold
# Up to 5 units are to be recruited
# go for quality (1.0)
# table of potential recruits
{| border="1"
|+
| Recruit name
| Cost to recruit
| How good this unit is
| Current Qty
| Maximum Qty
|-
| Spearman
| 13gp
| 12.6
| 1
| 10
|-
| Royal Guard
| 30gp
| 40.0
| 0
| 2
|}

====Example output====
Royal Guard, Royal Guard, Spearman, Spearman, Spearman

(we go for quality but we can recruit up to 2 royal guards, so the rest of 5 units are spearmans)

====Difficulty====
Should not be too difficult. But, you need to know either C++ or lua, and you need to think out and code a good algorithm for picking out the units to be recruited.
====Deliverable/expected proof====
We will provide a incomplete program that provides the correct input and you must complete it, coding a suitable recruitment algorithm.

=== Testing of mainline campaigns ===
Wesnoth ships with 16 campaigns which total over 200 scenarios, each one with varying amounts of events, dialogue, cutscenes, special gameplay mechanics, and so on. It's inevitable that many scenarios contain bugs which have gone unnoticed or unreported. Also, most scenarios were originally written a long time ago when the game engine was much less versatile, meaning that some scenario mechanics don't function as naturally and conveniently as they could.

This task involves picking a mainline campaign, playing through it and reporting in as much detail as possible all bugs and glitches encountered as well as suggestions for improvement. Campaigns vary greatly in length, so you could pick either one long campaign or 2-3 of the shorter ones. Campaigns with scenario branching should get all their branches tested.

Campaigns to choose from (list is subject to change) in a roughly prioritized order:
*Dead Water
*Heir to the Throne
*Rise of Wesnoth
*Eastern Invasion
*Under the Burning Suns
*The South Guard
*Liberty
*Son of the Black-Eye
*Northern Rebirth

==== Requirements ====
Reasonably familiar with Wesnoth campaigns, so as to be able to identify bugs and suggest realistically doable gameplay-enhancing changes in detail. No coding in WML or otherwise required.

==== Difficulty ====
Depending on the student's skill medium to low.

====Deliverable/expected proof====
Depending on the campaign there maybe specific tasks or targets, however all will require about 50 hours of work at a minimum (possibly up to 80 hours.) Students must contact the project for details.

GCI

2010-10-28T22:09:12Z

Noy: /* Testing of mainline campaigns */

== Google Code In task list ==

This page is a list of task ideas for the google code-in (see http://code.google.com/gci)

exemple of tasks from previous year
http://code.google.com/p/google-highly-open-participation-gnome/issues/list

=== Task Template ===
One paragraph description of task

requirement (expected technical knowledge)

expected time for completion

difficulty

deliverable/expected proof

=== Graphics ===
Various Graphics for Wesnoth

requirement (expected technical knowledge) - speak with thespaceinvader?

expected time for completion

difficulty - easy to hard

deliverable/expected proof

=== Translations / Internationalization ===
==== Description ====
You work on translating some specific content from English into the lang of your choice (we will have to provide a list of possible translations that are offered, since an active maintainer for the language is mandatory). The specific work could eg be translating a smaller campaign, the unit descriptions for a race, translating a number of scenarios of one of the larger campaigns, proofreading and polishing some already translated content and things along those lines.

==== Requirement (expected technical knowledge) ====
For this task there is not much technical knowledge required. You just need to be able to open a text file in either a text editor or a special program for internationalizations. You need to have some basic knowledge of English (since this is the origin language) and need to be able to produce "correct" text of the language you want to translate things into.

When proofreading you should be able to handle a tool like "diff" so that you can provide some diff/patch for the already existing translations.

==== expected time for completion ====
The time for completion depends on the content and what you are doing. It can be anything between 4h and maybe 10h. It is not expected that a huge campaign is translated as one "working block" and things have to be split to be of "just the right size".

==== difficulty ====
Hard to say. In general it is a rather easy task, though it is really difficult to do it "perfectly". Basically you have to be able to tell a good story. If you are good at doing this, it is easy. If you have extreme problems with the language you want to translate into and are not much into writing stuff this is a really hard task.

==== deliverable/expected proof ====
For a new translation there would be the new translation file. When proofreading there would be the diff correcting issues and recommending possible changes.

===AI recruitment algorithm===

====Description====
Wesnoth AI has to select what units to recruit. AI leader stands on keep and can recruit a number of units, up to the number of free hexes in his castle. AI can choose between a number of different unit types. Each unit type costs a certain amount of gold to recruit and the AI knows how good a specific unit is, and should try to recruit better unit types. AI knows how many units of a particular type it has at the moment and the scenario creators want to limit the amount of units of a certain type that the AI can have at the same time. There should be a tunable parameter that will tell the AI to go either for a mass of low-cost low-quality units or few high-cost high-quality units.
====Input====
# (integer) gold
# (integer) maximum number of units to be recruited
# (double) quantity vs quality - 0 means 'go for mass of low-quality units', 1 means 'go for few high-quality units), and other values are in between
# table of potential recruits
## (string) recruit name
## (integer) cost to recruit
## (double) how good each unit is
## (integer) current quantity
## (integer) maximum quantity

====Output====
a list of units to be recruited.
====Example input====
# AI has 120 gold
# Up to 5 units are to be recruited
# go for quality (1.0)
# table of potential recruits
{| border="1"
|+
| Recruit name
| Cost to recruit
| How good this unit is
| Current Qty
| Maximum Qty
|-
| Spearman
| 13gp
| 12.6
| 1
| 10
|-
| Royal Guard
| 30gp
| 40.0
| 0
| 2
|}

====Example output====
Royal Guard, Royal Guard, Spearman, Spearman, Spearman

(we go for quality but we can recruit up to 2 royal guards, so the rest of 5 units are spearmans)

====Difficulty====
Should not be too difficult. But, you need to know either C++ or lua, and you need to think out and code a good algorithm for picking out the units to be recruited.
====Deliverable/expected proof====
We will provide a incomplete program that provides the correct input and you must complete it, coding a suitable recruitment algorithm.

=== Testing of mainline campaigns ===
Wesnoth ships with 16 campaigns which total over 200 scenarios, each one with varying amounts of events, dialogue, cutscenes, special gameplay mechanics, and so on. It's inevitable that many scenarios contain bugs which have gone unnoticed or unreported. Also, most scenarios were originally written a long time ago when the game engine was much less versatile, meaning that some scenario mechanics don't function as naturally and conveniently as they could.

This task involves picking a mainline campaign, playing through it and reporting in as much detail as possible all bugs and glitches encountered as well as suggestions for improvement. Campaigns vary greatly in length, so you could pick either one long campaign or 2-3 of the shorter ones. Campaigns with scenario branching should get all their branches tested.

Campaigns to choose from (list is subject to change) in a roughly prioritized order:
*Dead Water
*Heir to the Throne
*Rise of Wesnoth
*Eastern Invasion
*Under the Burning Suns
*The South Guard
*Liberty
*Son of the Black-Eye
*Northern Rebirth

==== Requirements ====
Reasonably familiar with Wesnoth campaigns, so as to be able to identify bugs and suggest realistically doable gameplay-enhancing changes in detail. No coding in WML or otherwise required.

==== Difficulty ====
Depending on the campaign there maybe specific tasks or targets, however most will require about 30~40 hours of work at a minimum.

SoC People to bug on IRC

2009-03-26T02:06:23Z

Noy:

== People to bug on IRC ==
We have prepared a list of people with their "area of competence". This is to give you an idea on which areas those people can be of help for you. Of course you should always just ask in the IRC chan, but those are the most likely ones to answer questions in the respective area. And here is the list:

=== boucman ===
As our "patch monkey" he accustomed to critiquing patches of every kind. Beside this, he knows many areas of the game due to working on applying patches. He is particularly used to answering question from new coders, and doesn't mind explaining trivial stuff. He was the one who started the "two patches, you're in" policy and the ReferenceWML part of the project.

=== Daniel Franke (dfranke) ===
Daniel is the devteam's most recent addition, and has been primarily concerned with security auditing. Bug him privately if you think you've found a security issue.

=== Dave alias Sirp ===
Sirp started Wesnoth and is our lead developer. He is currently our C++ expert and is also the one that is working on the new Formula AI. Any questions regarding the formula AI should be directed to him.

=== Dragonking ===

He is one of our best Wesnoth players, and understands the various strategies well. He has also programmed much of the Wesnoth Formula AI system and understands it well.

=== Elias Pscherning (elias) ===
He wrote the original version of campgen and as such will know a lot about what is needed to to make such an editor work correctly. The work on a scenario editor might be based upon campgen and as such his knowledge will be really helpful.

=== Eric S. Raymond (ESR) ===
ESR is our project toolsmith; he has written several tools that semi-automate various aspects of WML maintenance. While most of our developers/designers concentrate on either the C++ core or WML but not both, he has a balanced understanding of both levels and may be helpful in helping students develop a grasp of the overall architecture. Finally, he did the last overhaul of the Wesnoth UI and understands UI design principles; he is well-equipped to guide students working in that area.

=== Happygrue/Wintermute ===

A recent addition to the development team, Winter has recently been helping to test the AI and is a useful person to ask about behavioral problems in this area.

=== ilor ===
2008 GSoC student, worked on and maintains the new map editor in Wesnoth 1.5/1.6. Has some fairly recent experience with getting "in" the Wesnoth codebase.

=== Karol Nowak (grzywacz) ===
Two years he participated at GSoC as a student, so he will understand the situation of GSoC students. Beside this he is our top expert on Wesnoth for embedded devices as he worked on the gp2x support.

=== loonycyborg ===
Maintainer of Wesnoth's SCons build system and windows packager. Might also help out with other buildsystems.

=== Mordante ===
Many of the possible projects involve the code for which he is an area expert. Also, many of the possible projects currently listed on the ideas page require GUI parts to work. Mordante is currently busy rewriting the old gui engine, he will be our expert there as well as already being our area expert for the terrain engine.

=== Nils Kneuper (Ivanovic) ===
He is doing nothing special, he just does some "administrative work" like packaging fresh tarballs when it is time for them and works on setting up any kind of deadlines and timetables related to releasing. He has administrative powers in most areas, no matter if website, forum or IRC. Beside this he uploads translation updates, tries to communicate with the translation teams when it is required and translates a little bit himself every now and then. But in general he is not a real expert in anything, just has a look at things that come up and redirects people to the correct contacts.

=== Noy ===
Noy is an oddity among developers; he's got no coding skills whatsoever and possesses a limited understanding of computers, which is illustrated by his difficulty operating a Mac. Instead, Noy makes his contribution in gameplay and multiplayer design, drawing upon his background in social sciences research, military strategy and playing games online, to understand the effects of development on the playing community behavior. Along with Soliton, Noy is a useful conduit to discuss any issues in this area.

=== Noyga ===
Another versatile developer, on the C++ side he doesn't concentrate on a particular area, did some tweaks to improve translations in some languages (like enabling the female forms for names in various place) but know quite well the C++ side of units, abilities and WML. On the WML side he's an expert.

=== Sapient ===
This developer started working on the GUI and widgets, but recently he focused more on improving the internal mechanics of the WML engine such as variable look-ups and filtering. Sapient is not as active anymore but he does come one IRC in the evenings (U.S.A.). He has touched-up many areas of the code in small ways over time, thus he has a good general knowledge of the C++ code and also has worked a little on some python maintenance scripts.

=== Shadow Master/ShikadiLord ===
He has been around since late 2007, and has worked in many areas of the engine, including the game events handler, the image path functors and the add-on management engine. As an add-on developer, he knows a lot about the WML language itself (preprocessor, basic structure) and its various single-player oriented dialects. He may also answer different kinds of questions about C++ as long as you don't start cursing the language.

=== Soliton ===
He knows our MP server setup best. Beside this he has already done a lot of work on the MP server himself. So he probably has most knowledge about it and, being one of our MP-developers, might provide important help from the perspective of the MP player community and what is needed there.

=== YogiHH or Piotr Cychowski (cycholka) ===
Since they are the two developers who know most about building under Windows, they will probably be really helpful. Either if the student comes from the Windows side, or to help test resulting work to make sure that it does work on Windows and, for the case that it does not, to show them where problems are.
YogiHH also knows quite a bit about the game engine and everything that has to do with replays and savegames.

=== zookeeper or Mythological or Rhuvaen ===
As our leading WML experts those are to be contacted when it comes to anything related WML problems since they know this stuff best. They do maintain most of the campaigns and improve them whenever they have a good idea for changes.

=== See also ===
[[SummerOfCodeIdeas|Summer of Code Ideas]] - The root where all information regarding SoC is (or better should be) linked from.

[[Category:Summer of Code]]

SoC People to bug on IRC

2009-03-26T01:43:41Z

Noy: /* Noy */

== People to bug on IRC ==
We have prepared a list of people with their "area of competence". This is to give you an idea on which areas those people can be of help for you. Of course you should always just ask in the IRC chan, but those are the most likely ones to answer questions in the respective area. And here is the list:

=== boucman ===
As our "patch monkey" he accustomed to critiquing patches of every kind. Beside this, he knows many areas of the game due to working on applying patches. He is particularly used to answering question from new coders, and doesn't mind explaining trivial stuff. He was the one who started the "two patches, you're in" policy and the ReferenceWML part of the project.

=== Daniel Franke (dfranke) ===
Daniel is the devteam's most recent addition, and has been primarily concerned with security auditing. Bug him privately if you think you've found a security issue.

=== Dave alias Sirp ===
Sirp started Wesnoth and is our lead developer. He is currently our C++ expert and is also the one that is working on the new Formula AI. Any questions regarding the formula AI should be directed to him.

=== Dragonking ===

He is one of our best Wesnoth players, and understands the various strategies well. He has also programmed much of the Wesnoth Formula AI system and understands it well.

=== Elias Pscherning (elias) ===
He wrote the original version of campgen and as such will know a lot about what is needed to to make such an editor work correctly. The work on a scenario editor might be based upon campgen and as such his knowledge will be really helpful.

=== Eric S. Raymond (ESR) ===
ESR is our project toolsmith; he has written several tools that semi-automate various aspects of WML maintenance. While most of our developers/designers concentrate on either the C++ core or WML but not both, he has a balanced understanding of both levels and may be helpful in helping students develop a grasp of the overall architecture. Finally, he did the last overhaul of the Wesnoth UI and understands UI design principles; he is well-equipped to guide students working in that area.

=== ilor ===
2008 GSoC student, worked on and maintains the new map editor in Wesnoth 1.5/1.6. Has some fairly recent experience with getting "in" the Wesnoth codebase.

=== Karol Nowak (grzywacz) ===
Two years he participated at GSoC as a student, so he will understand the situation of GSoC students. Beside this he is our top expert on Wesnoth for embedded devices as he worked on the gp2x support.

=== loonycyborg ===
Maintainer of Wesnoth's SCons build system and windows packager. Might also help out with other buildsystems.

=== Mordante ===
Many of the possible projects involve the code for which he is an area expert. Also, many of the possible projects currently listed on the ideas page require GUI parts to work. Mordante is currently busy rewriting the old gui engine, he will be our expert there as well as already being our area expert for the terrain engine.

=== Nils Kneuper (Ivanovic) ===
He is doing nothing special, he just does some "administrative work" like packaging fresh tarballs when it is time for them and works on setting up any kind of deadlines and timetables related to releasing. He has administrative powers in most areas, no matter if website, forum or IRC. Beside this he uploads translation updates, tries to communicate with the translation teams when it is required and translates a little bit himself every now and then. But in general he is not a real expert in anything, just has a look at things that come up and redirects people to the correct contacts.

=== Noy ===
Noy is an oddity among developers; he's got no coding skills whatsoever and possesses a limited understanding of computers, which is illustrated by his difficulty operating a Mac. Instead, Noy makes his contribution in gameplay and multiplayer design, drawing upon his background in social sciences research, military strategy and playing games online, to understand the effects of development on the playing community behavior. Along with Soliton, Noy is a useful conduit to discuss any issues in this area.

=== Noyga ===
Another versatile developer, on the C++ side he doesn't concentrate on a particular area, did some tweaks to improve translations in some languages (like enabling the female forms for names in various place) but know quite well the C++ side of units, abilities and WML. On the WML side he's an expert.

=== Sapient ===
This developer started working on the GUI and widgets, but recently he focused more on improving the internal mechanics of the WML engine such as variable look-ups and filtering. Sapient is not as active anymore but he does come one IRC in the evenings (U.S.A.). He has touched-up many areas of the code in small ways over time, thus he has a good general knowledge of the C++ code and also has worked a little on some python maintenance scripts.

=== Shadow Master/ShikadiLord ===
He has been around since late 2007, and has worked in many areas of the engine, including the game events handler, the image path functors and the add-on management engine. As an add-on developer, he knows a lot about the WML language itself (preprocessor, basic structure) and its various single-player oriented dialects. He may also answer different kinds of questions about C++ as long as you don't start cursing the language.

=== Soliton ===
He knows our MP server setup best. Beside this he has already done a lot of work on the MP server himself. So he probably has most knowledge about it and, being one of our MP-developers, might provide important help from the perspective of the MP player community and what is needed there.

=== YogiHH or Piotr Cychowski (cycholka) ===
Since they are the two developers who know most about building under Windows, they will probably be really helpful. Either if the student comes from the Windows side, or to help test resulting work to make sure that it does work on Windows and, for the case that it does not, to show them where problems are.
YogiHH also knows quite a bit about the game engine and everything that has to do with replays and savegames.

=== zookeeper or Mythological or Rhuvaen ===
As our leading WML experts those are to be contacted when it comes to anything related WML problems since they know this stuff best. They do maintain most of the campaigns and improve them whenever they have a good idea for changes.

=== See also ===
[[SummerOfCodeIdeas|Summer of Code Ideas]] - The root where all information regarding SoC is (or better should be) linked from.

[[Category:Summer of Code]]

SoC Information for Google

2009-03-10T18:32:20Z

Noy: /* Describe your organization. */

== SoC Information for Google ==
==== Describe your organization. ====
The Battle for Wesnoth, or simply Wesnoth, is a free turn based strategy game with role playing elements designed in June 2003 by David White (Sirp), who currently works at Google.

The game's general [http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy philosophy] (both for gameplay and coding) emphases simplicity. The core rules are meant to be easily learned but also provide interesting gameplay and diverse strategies. Strength of the project is reflected in application of Wesnoth Markup Language (WML), which provides a simple language to easily customize scenarios. It has created a significant modding community that has generated a considerable amount of user content.

The first stable release (1.0) was on October 2 2005, with the latest stable release (1.6) anticipated in the next few weeks. According to Ohloh, a site that collects activity statistics on open-source projects, the Wesnoth development effort is in the top 2% of largest and most active projects.

Wesnoth has grown substantially and is considered one of the largest open source games around.
* two servers (stable and developement) with a usual minimum load of more than a hundred players
* more than two thousands downloads a day
* 3 million downloads via sourceforge.net, many more via various mirrors of Linux Distributions
* best rated game at the [http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating linux game tome]
* game of the year 2007 and 2008 at [http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2007-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-awards-79/open-source-game-of-the-year-610236/ linuxquestions.org]
* One of the top 20 rated projects on [http://freshmeat.net/stats/#rating Freshmeat] (currently 14th highest rating, and the highest rated game).

Wesnoth's most notable features include;
* A mature project, but with active development and many improvements
* High quality artwork: both graphics and music
* Very well-balanced by a tireless team of playtesters
* Fun, unique gameplay
* Even after five years of development, and a very solid, fun product has been created, there are still plenty of new developers, and the number of commits to SVN is still increasing
* Strong support of internationalization with many supported languages and thus experience in working with not native English speakers (more than half of our developers are not native English speakers)

==== Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2008? What do you hope to gain by participating?====

Most of our developers have particular areas of interest in which they work. Though they are efficient in their areas, there are other, presently uncovered, areas of the code with a need for improvements but a high barrier to entry for casual contributors.

If a student were dedicated to any of these uncovered areas, we believe that person could be brought up to speed relatively quickly and function as a peer of the existing developers.

By bringing new people in and allowing them to be actively responsible for an area of code, we hope to kickstart some areas of the project that have lagged behind

==== Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation.====
Wesnoth participated in GSoC 2008 with four students. Out of these, two were great success (that is they became full-fledge developers before the actual start of GSoC), did huge improvement during GSoC (A new recruitment algorithm for the AI and the basic structure for a new level editor), and are still active developers in the Wesnoth community.

Of the two other, one of them was very active for the first half of GSoC and provided some useful infrastructure for AI development that we plan to use this year in GSoC, but was much less active and didn't reach expectations for the second half of GSoC. The lesson we learned is that great students should be left on their own, that's the best way to have them work, but average students should be monitored much more closely than we did. If things seems to start to go wrong, it's important to react very quick, to meet with other mentors and get things back on track early.

Timezone problems were also a serious barrier for student/mentor communication, and we will take that more seriously into account when pairing mentors and students

For our other students, multiple problems collectively led to failure
* We should enforce IRC communication, E-mail is a barrier. This applies both for students and mentors. Both should be on IRC several hours a day, with a huge overlapping of the hours.
* We should be more strict about mid-term evaluation. If the student is slightly lacking at mid-term we should get the message clear that he needs to get back on track.

==== If your organization has not previously participated in GSoC, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)?====

We only applied and participated in GSoC 2008

==== Who will your organization administrator be? Please include Google Account information.====
Nils Kneuper (Ivanovic)

crazy.ivanovic |ATTT| googlemail.com

==== What license(s) does your project use?====
Our project is entirely GPL.

All code is GPL.

All art is GPL, 99% was made for the project, everything else was taken from content that was checked to be GPL.

For more information on the licenses for the game and wiki, see [[Wesnoth:Copyrights]].

==== What is the URL for your ideas page?====
Our main summer of code page is located at http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/SummerOfCodeIdeas

This page contains various coding ideas and the thought the development team has already given them.

It also contains a list of the developers that are the most active on IRC and their domains of interest.

==== What is the main development mailing list or forum for your organization?====
Regarding development, the most important discussions are also posted on "wesnoth-dev@gna.org". Beside this some work happens at http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/. In particular, all art development takes place on the forum.

Most work and discussions take place in our (logged) IRC channel ''#wesnoth-dev''.

==== What is the main IRC channel for your organization?====

All our IRC channels are on the ''freenode'' network

* ''#wesnoth-dev'' is the main development channel, where most discussion takes place and students are required to be in regularly if accepted in our org for SoC
* ''#wesnoth'' is a generic channel for the community
* ''#wesnoth-mp'' is a separate channel for multiplayer games and balancing

==== Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now.====
We plan mainly to meet potential students through our IRC channel, but the following questions are Wesnoth specific and are worth pondering for any student, even if we don't need a formal answer

* Basics
** Write a small introduction to yourself.
** State your preferred email address.
** If you have chosen a nick for IRC and Wesnoth forums, what is it?
** Why do you want to participate in summer of code?
** What are you studying, subject, level and school?

* Experience
** What programs/software have you worked on before?
** Have you developed software in a team environment before? (As opposed to hacking on something on your own)
** 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?
** What development model would you use (e.g. keywords: V-model, XP programming, agile programming, iterative; with the help of prototyping, formal specifications, tests, etc).
** Open Source
*** Are you already involved with any open source development projects? If yes, please describe the project and the scope of your involvement.
** Gaming experience
*** Are you a gamer? If so...
*** What type of gamer are you?
*** What type of games?
*** What type of opponents do you prefer?
*** Are you more interested in story or gameplay?
*** 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.

* Communication skills
** Though most of our developers are not native English speakers, English is the project's working language. Describe your fluency level in written English.
** Are you good at interacting with other players? Our developer community is friendly, but the player community can be a bit rough.
** Do you give constructive advice?
** Do you receive advice well?
** Are you good at sorting useful criticisms from useless ones?

* Project
** Did you select a project from our list? If that is the case, what project did you select?
** If you have invented your own project, please describe the project and the scope.
** Why did you choose this project?
** Include an estimated timeline for your work on the project
** Include as much technical detail about your implementation as you can
** What do you expect to gain from this project?
** What would make you stay in the Wesnoth community after the conclusion of SOC?

* Practical considerations
** Are you familiar with any of the following tools?
*** Subversion (used for all commits)
*** C++ (language used for all the normal source code)
*** Python (optional, mainly used for tools)
*** build environments (eg cmake/autotools/scons)
** Which tools do you normally use for development? Why do you use them?
** What programming languages are you fluent in?
** What spoken languages are you fluent in?
** At what hours are you awake and when will you be able to be in IRC (please specify in UTC)
** Would you mind talking with your mentor on telephone / internet phone?

* Detailed answer (optional, but writing skill is a good predictor of ability to work on a programming team, so you will improve your chances by responding to this).
** Write a small essay (750-1000 words or more) explaining why you want to participate in a Wesnoth GSoC project. You can use the above questions as guides, but feel free to throw in more information if you feel it is relevant.
** What is your perception of 'open source'? Briefly explain what you think of the whole 'open source' concept, how you discovered open source, what you expect to gain/experience by participating in an open-source project. (Answer separately or as part of above mini-essay)
** What motivates or inspires you to write programs and develop software?

''''to be completed''''

==== Who will be your backup organization administrator? Please include Google Account information.====
David White (davewx7@gmail.com)

==== Who will your mentors be? Please include Google Account information.====

David White (davewx7@gmail.com)

Jeremy Rosen alias Boucman (boucman2|ATTT|gmail.com)

Mark de Wever aka Mordante (mordante.wesnoth|ATTT|gmail.com)

Jörg Hinrichs alias YogiHH (joerghh.hinrichs|ATTT|googlemail.com)

Patrick Parker a.k.a. "Sapient" (patrick.x99|ATTT|gmail.com)

==== What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please be as specific as possible.====

Our first criterion was that all the people had to be volunteers. According to other open source projects, being a SoC mentor takes a lot of time and the person has to be ready to spend quite some time with the student.

Dave is the project leader and one of the most knowledgeable in C++. He has also written the Formula AI code which we plan to develop via the SoC. He is well known in our community for formulating simple but effective explanations for complicated topics, and has good design intuition. The growth of Wesnoth demonstrates his capacity to get other developers to work together and keep them involved in a thriving community.

Boucman is one of the oldest active developers around. He has rewritten the whole animation engine and made it an easily pluggable system allowing artists to easily specify exactly how they want the units to appear. He also started many community oriented projects like the [http://wiki.wesnoth.org/UnsortedContrib Art Contribution] section of the wiki (now automated) and the [http://wiki.wesnoth.org/ReferenceWML WML Reference Manual]. He is responsible for dispatching and sorting the patches at http://patches.wesnoth.org and has created the new developer process we currently use.

Mordante is one of the most active developers on our IRC channel. Not only has he done preliminary studies and coding in multiple areas that are candidates for Summer of Code ideas, he also is one of the coders with the best overview of the Wesnoth code. A large part of his work involves refactoring polishing existing code. Next to that he's very active with fixing bugs which leads him to all areas in the code base.

YogiHH has been with the project for more than two years. He did a major refactoring to the gameplay engine and worked quite a bit on the multiplayer code. He also has been a professional trainer for C/C++, Java and C# for many years. Right now he works in a project where he serves as a mentor for a junior developer.

All other developers listed in the ideas page are the leading capacities we do have for the respecting areas. Have a look at our list of people who to contact for which regards. In general all our developers will mentor all students. That is, questions should just be asked in our IRC channel, where basically every developer who has an idea can directly answer.

When choosing the mentors, we have kept in mind that most developers can answer most technical questions, and we have chosen people that are well known for interacting with new-comers/external developers and can provide general guidance and design advice, more than people with specific technical knowledge.

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?====
The first thing to do is to avoid this situation altogether.

Wesnoth is a game, and as such has lots of developers that are not coders. In particular, artists are well known in the Wesnoth community for being very sensible about criticism and our community is used to people being sensible to critics.

We will try to choose students that accept criticism and are able to filter constructive criticism from useless one. The Wesnoth developer community is used to judging people according to these criteria and the special title we are going to give to applicants will allow us to easily spot any such problems and discuss them before they grow out of control.

If a student disappears, his mentor will be in charge of recontacting him to see what is going wrong (available time, tension with other developers, with members of the community etc...). Depending on the actual problem, the mentor and the student will have to agree on possible ways to defuse the problem.

If a student disappears completely and there is no way to get back to him, there is little the project can do except salvaging whatever can be salvaged from the code (the students will have SVN write access, so most of the work will be committed either to trunk or to a specific branch) and find a core developer to take on the job. This will probably be slower and less effective for the project, but it's the best we can do.

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?====

All our mentors are long time developers that volunteered for the job, so we don't expect that to happen. We took the time to ask other former GSoC projects about the workload needed to be a mentor, and our mentors accepted the job knowing the amount of work it involved.

However, should it happen, we would continue to mentor as a developer community the student until we find a new "official" mentor to take on the job.

==== What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?====

Wesnoth has a particularly healthy community, both for developers and for players.

Our general policy regarding new coders has always been "two patch... you're in" In other word, anybody that is able to get two non-trivial patches applied is offered commit privileges.

We have a developer responsible for applying patches and guiding new developers into our community. This is a well known and effective process we plan to apply to students, directing them to our [[EasyCoding]] pages (these project are usually a couple of hours long and has been chosen to provide easy access to code)

Usually, patches go back and forth a couple of time, to make sure that all secondary things are in place (indenting, coding style, modified makefiles etc.) The idea is that coder education should take place before the coder gets commit rights, but that getting new coder in is one of the most important things to maintain our project alive.

If the student is proactive and ready to join IRC, all the developers are usually very welcoming, and good at directing newcomers to quickly give useful results.

We also plan to give a special forum title to any students. This will allow all forum members to tell them apart from normal users and give them read/write access to the developer only forums. This will also allow us to quickly spot any problem they might have interacting with the player community. We have a very mature developer community, but our player community is made of all sort of people of all age and education, and it can be rough at time.

==== What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes?====

Since our community has a history of having developers easily and quickly join, we expect the student to be a full-fledged developer quite fast (probably a little after the end of the bonding period).

Thus there will be no "end of GSoC" transition. At the end of the Summer of code we expect the student to be responsible for the part he developed, and to continue taking care of it, just as other developers are responsible for their part.

== See also ==
[[SummerOfCodeIdeas|Summer of Code Ideas]] - The root where all information regarding SoC is (or better should be) linked from.

[[Category:Summer of Code]]

SoC Information for Google

2009-03-10T00:06:57Z

Noy: Some minor grammatical edits; I intend to do some more.

== SoC Information for Google ==
==== Describe your organization. ====
The Battle for Wesnoth, or simply Wesnoth, is a free turn based strategy game with role playing elements designed in June 2003 by David White (Sirp). David currently works at Google.

The general [http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesnothPhilosophy Philosophy] of the game (both for gameplay and coding) emphases simplicity. The core rules are meant to be easily learned but provide interesting gameplay and diverse strategies.

On the other hand, or Wesnoth Markup Language (WML) provides a simple language to easily customize scenarios, which has lead to a significant modding community providing us with a large amount of content.

The first stable release (1.0) was on October 2 2005, the latest stable release (1.4) was on March 8 2008. According to Ohloh, a site that collects activity statistics on open-source projects, the Wesnoth development effort is in the top 2% of largest and most active projects.

Wesnoth has grown a lot and is considered one of the largest open source games around.
* two servers (stable and developement) with a usual minimum load of more than a hundred players
* more than two thousands downloads a day
* 3 million downloads via sourceforge.net, many more via various mirrors of Linux Distributions
* best rated game at the [http://www.happypenguin.org/list?sort=avg_rating linux game tome]
* game of the year 2007 and 2008 at [http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2007-linuxquestions.org-members-choice-awards-79/open-source-game-of-the-year-610236/ linuxquestions.org]
* One of the top 20 rated projects on [http://freshmeat.net/stats/#rating Freshmeat] (currently 14th highest rating, and the highest rated game).

* A mature project, but with active development and many improvements
* High quality artwork: both graphics and music
* Very well-balanced by a tireless team of playtesters
* Fun, unique gameplay
* Even after five years of development, and a very solid, fun product has been created, there are still plenty of new developers, and the number of commits to SVN is still increasing
* Strong support of internationalization with many supported languages and thus experience in working with not native English speakers (more than half of our developers are not native English speakers)

==== Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2008? What do you hope to gain by participating?====

Most of our developers have particular areas of interest in which they work. Though they are efficient in their areas, there are other, presently uncovered, areas of the code with a need for improvements but a high barrier to entry for casual contributors.

If a student were dedicated to any of these uncovered areas, we believe that person could be brought up to speed relatively quickly and function as a peer of the existing developers.

By bringing new people in and allowing them to be actively responsible for an area of code, we hope to kickstart some areas of the project that have lagged behind

==== Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation.====
Wesnoth participated in GSoC 2008 with four students. Out of these, two were great success (that is they became full-fledge developers before the actual start of GSoC), did huge improvement during GSoC (A new recruitment algorithm for the AI and the basic structure for a new level editor), and are still active developers in the Wesnoth community.

Of the two other, one of them was very active for the first half of GSoC and provided some useful infrastructure for AI development that we plan to use this year in GSoC, but was much less active and didn't reach expectations for the second half of GSoC. The lesson we learned is that great students should be left on their own, that's the best way to have them work, but average students should be monitored much more closely than we did. If things seems to start to go wrong, it's important to react very quick, to meet with other mentors and get things back on track early.

Timezone problems were also a serious barrier for student/mentor communication, and we will take that more seriously into account when pairing mentors and students

For our other students, multiple problems collectively led to failure
* We should enforce IRC communication, E-mail is a barrier. This applies both for students and mentors. Both should be on IRC several hours a day, with a huge overlapping of the hours.
* We should be more strict about mid-term evaluation. If the student is slightly lacking at mid-term we should get the message clear that he needs to get back on track.

==== If your organization has not previously participated in GSoC, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)?====

We only applied and participated in GSoC 2008

==== Who will your organization administrator be? Please include Google Account information.====
Nils Kneuper (Ivanovic)

crazy.ivanovic |ATTT| googlemail.com

==== What license(s) does your project use?====
Our project is entirely GPL.

All code is GPL.

All art is GPL, 99% was made for the project, everything else was taken from content that was checked to be GPL.

For more information on the licenses for the game and wiki, see [[Wesnoth:Copyrights]].

==== What is the URL for your ideas page?====
Our main summer of code page is located at http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/SummerOfCodeIdeas

This page contains various coding ideas and the thought the development team has already given them.

It also contains a list of the developers that are the most active on IRC and their domains of interest.

==== What is the main development mailing list or forum for your organization?====
Regarding development, the most important discussions are also posted on "wesnoth-dev@gna.org". Beside this some work happens at http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/. In particular, all art development takes place on the forum.

Most work and discussions take place in our (logged) IRC channel ''#wesnoth-dev''.

==== What is the main IRC channel for your organization?====

All our IRC channels are on the ''freenode'' network

* ''#wesnoth-dev'' is the main development channel, where most discussion takes place and students are required to be in regularly if accepted in our org for SoC
* ''#wesnoth'' is a generic channel for the community
* ''#wesnoth-mp'' is a separate channel for multiplayer games and balancing

==== Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now.====
We plan mainly to meet potential students through our IRC channel, but the following questions are Wesnoth specific and are worth pondering for any student, even if we don't need a formal answer

* Basics
** Write a small introduction to yourself.
** State your preferred email address.
** If you have chosen a nick for IRC and Wesnoth forums, what is it?
** Why do you want to participate in summer of code?
** What are you studying, subject, level and school?

* Experience
** What programs/software have you worked on before?
** Have you developed software in a team environment before? (As opposed to hacking on something on your own)
** 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?
** What development model would you use (e.g. keywords: V-model, XP programming, agile programming, iterative; with the help of prototyping, formal specifications, tests, etc).
** Open Source
*** Are you already involved with any open source development projects? If yes, please describe the project and the scope of your involvement.
** Gaming experience
*** Are you a gamer? If so...
*** What type of gamer are you?
*** What type of games?
*** What type of opponents do you prefer?
*** Are you more interested in story or gameplay?
*** 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.

* Communication skills
** Though most of our developers are not native English speakers, English is the project's working language. Describe your fluency level in written English.
** Are you good at interacting with other players? Our developer community is friendly, but the player community can be a bit rough.
** Do you give constructive advice?
** Do you receive advice well?
** Are you good at sorting useful criticisms from useless ones?

* Project
** Did you select a project from our list? If that is the case, what project did you select?
** If you have invented your own project, please describe the project and the scope.
** Why did you choose this project?
** Include an estimated timeline for your work on the project
** Include as much technical detail about your implementation as you can
** What do you expect to gain from this project?
** What would make you stay in the Wesnoth community after the conclusion of SOC?

* Practical considerations
** Are you familiar with any of the following tools?
*** Subversion (used for all commits)
*** C++ (language used for all the normal source code)
*** Python (optional, mainly used for tools)
*** build environments (eg cmake/autotools/scons)
** Which tools do you normally use for development? Why do you use them?
** What programming languages are you fluent in?
** What spoken languages are you fluent in?
** At what hours are you awake and when will you be able to be in IRC (please specify in UTC)
** Would you mind talking with your mentor on telephone / internet phone?

* Detailed answer (optional, but writing skill is a good predictor of ability to work on a programming team, so you will improve your chances by responding to this).
** Write a small essay (750-1000 words or more) explaining why you want to participate in a Wesnoth GSoC project. You can use the above questions as guides, but feel free to throw in more information if you feel it is relevant.
** What is your perception of 'open source'? Briefly explain what you think of the whole 'open source' concept, how you discovered open source, what you expect to gain/experience by participating in an open-source project. (Answer separately or as part of above mini-essay)
** What motivates or inspires you to write programs and develop software?

''''to be completed''''

==== Who will be your backup organization administrator? Please include Google Account information.====
David White (davewx7@gmail.com)

==== Who will your mentors be? Please include Google Account information.====

David White (davewx7@gmail.com)

Jeremy Rosen alias Boucman (boucman2|ATTT|gmail.com)

Mark de Wever aka Mordante (mordante.wesnoth|ATTT|gmail.com)

Jörg Hinrichs alias YogiHH (joerghh.hinrichs|ATTT|googlemail.com)

Patrick Parker a.k.a. "Sapient" (patrick.x99|ATTT|gmail.com)

==== What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please be as specific as possible.====

Our first criterion was that all the people had to be volunteers. According to other open source projects, being a SoC mentor takes a lot of time and the person has to be ready to spend quite some time with the student.

Dave is the project leader and one of the most knowledgeable in C++. He has also written the Formula AI code which we plan to develop via the SoC. He is well known in our community for formulating simple but effective explanations for complicated topics, and has good design intuition. The growth of Wesnoth demonstrates his capacity to get other developers to work together and keep them involved in a thriving community.

Boucman is one of the oldest active developers around. He has rewritten the whole animation engine and made it an easily pluggable system allowing artists to easily specify exactly how they want the units to appear. He also started many community oriented projects like the [http://wiki.wesnoth.org/UnsortedContrib Art Contribution] section of the wiki (now automated) and the [http://wiki.wesnoth.org/ReferenceWML WML Reference Manual]. He is responsible for dispatching and sorting the patches at http://patches.wesnoth.org and has created the new developer process we currently use.

Mordante is one of the most active developers on our IRC channel. Not only has he done preliminary studies and coding in multiple areas that are candidates for Summer of Code ideas, he also is one of the coders with the best overview of the Wesnoth code. A large part of his work involves refactoring polishing existing code. Next to that he's very active with fixing bugs which leads him to all areas in the code base.

YogiHH has been with the project for more than two years. He did a major refactoring to the gameplay engine and worked quite a bit on the multiplayer code. He also has been a professional trainer for C/C++, Java and C# for many years. Right now he works in a project where he serves as a mentor for a junior developer.

All other developers listed in the ideas page are the leading capacities we do have for the respecting areas. Have a look at our list of people who to contact for which regards. In general all our developers will mentor all students. That is, questions should just be asked in our IRC channel, where basically every developer who has an idea can directly answer.

When choosing the mentors, we have kept in mind that most developers can answer most technical questions, and we have chosen people that are well known for interacting with new-comers/external developers and can provide general guidance and design advice, more than people with specific technical knowledge.

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?====
The first thing to do is to avoid this situation altogether.

Wesnoth is a game, and as such has lots of developers that are not coders. In particular, artists are well known in the Wesnoth community for being very sensible about criticism and our community is used to people being sensible to critics.

We will try to choose students that accept criticism and are able to filter constructive criticism from useless one. The Wesnoth developer community is used to judging people according to these criteria and the special title we are going to give to applicants will allow us to easily spot any such problems and discuss them before they grow out of control.

If a student disappears, his mentor will be in charge of recontacting him to see what is going wrong (available time, tension with other developers, with members of the community etc...). Depending on the actual problem, the mentor and the student will have to agree on possible ways to defuse the problem.

If a student disappears completely and there is no way to get back to him, there is little the project can do except salvaging whatever can be salvaged from the code (the students will have SVN write access, so most of the work will be committed either to trunk or to a specific branch) and find a core developer to take on the job. This will probably be slower and less effective for the project, but it's the best we can do.

==== What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?====

All our mentors are long time developers that volunteered for the job, so we don't expect that to happen. We took the time to ask other former GSoC projects about the workload needed to be a mentor, and our mentors accepted the job knowing the amount of work it involved.

However, should it happen, we would continue to mentor as a developer community the student until we find a new "official" mentor to take on the job.

==== What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?====

Wesnoth has a particularly healthy community, both for developers and for players.

Our general policy regarding new coders has always been "two patch... you're in" In other word, anybody that is able to get two non-trivial patches applied is offered commit privileges.

We have a developer responsible for applying patches and guiding new developers into our community. This is a well known and effective process we plan to apply to students, directing them to our [[EasyCoding]] pages (these project are usually a couple of hours long and has been chosen to provide easy access to code)

Usually, patches go back and forth a couple of time, to make sure that all secondary things are in place (indenting, coding style, modified makefiles etc.) The idea is that coder education should take place before the coder gets commit rights, but that getting new coder in is one of the most important things to maintain our project alive.

If the student is proactive and ready to join IRC, all the developers are usually very welcoming, and good at directing newcomers to quickly give useful results.

We also plan to give a special forum title to any students. This will allow all forum members to tell them apart from normal users and give them read/write access to the developer only forums. This will also allow us to quickly spot any problem they might have interacting with the player community. We have a very mature developer community, but our player community is made of all sort of people of all age and education, and it can be rough at time.

==== What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes?====

Since our community has a history of having developers easily and quickly join, we expect the student to be a full-fledged developer quite fast (probably a little after the end of the bonding period).

Thus there will be no "end of GSoC" transition. At the end of the Summer of code we expect the student to be responsible for the part he developed, and to continue taking care of it, just as other developers are responsible for their part.

== See also ==
[[SummerOfCodeIdeas|Summer of Code Ideas]] - The root where all information regarding SoC is (or better should be) linked from.

[[Category:Summer of Code]]