User:MGoods

This page is related to Summer of Code 2011

See the list of Summer of Code 2011 Ideas

This is a Summer of Code 2011 student page

Project: SoC_Ideas_Your_Own_Ideas2011

Description

TODO: Copy this page and write "your name - proposal title" in this h4 section

TODO: Write a small (1-4 sentences) description of your proposal here.

TODO: Add more first-level sections to detail your proposal

IRC

MGoods,MGoods|RangerM

Questionnaire

1.1) My name is Mark Goodenough. About four years ago I worked on Wesnoth as a UMC creator and a minor art contributor. I joined the community when I picked up some WML and coded up some scenarios, just to see if I could (the idea that I could actually create content and then play it intrigued me), and I started creating art mainly because I needed art assets for my campaign, but couldn't find anyone to make them (artists being much much rarer than aspiring campaign developers). Since then I left the project because I simply didn't have enough time to work on it, especially as creating art takes me... well a long time and aside from WML and failing at Java I had no coding experience, and I had to focus on getting into the best uni that I could.

1.2) mg545@cam.ac.uk

1.3) My IRC nick is MGoods or MGoods|RangerM, my forum nick is the one I created four years ago, RangerM

1.4) Wesnoth was my first open source project, my first introduction to any form of coding (although at the time I had attempted to code in Java, it hadn't really clicked, WML was easier), I'd like to work on it because I remember it as being a good, welcoming community, and I'd like to give something back. I also quite enjoyed playing Wesnoth, and if I had time right now I expect that I still would (It's been about a year since I played), and Wesnoth is also one of the most successful open source game projects that I know of, and I plan on going into games creation as my job in the future, so I feel that this will give me a feel for being in games development that I don't currently have.

1.5) I study Computer Science at Cambridge University, I'm about to take my second year exams so in the summer I will be between the second and third years.

1.6) England, most of the time I will be on IRC between 11 AM and 8 PM GMT, although I have been known to stay up late on occasion when I get stuck on something.

1.7) No Vacations, and I have no other commitments over the summer period.

2.1) I have written a few programs to perform various small tasks (once when I tried to make time for wesnoth again I wrote a WML parser to update my old campaign code) and of course I've written programs for my university course (a basic chat client, the game of life, and a couple of other programming exercises). I also worked on a larger group project, as described in 2.2

2.2) Just before the easter holidays I finished working on a graded group project for my course, a part of the course being to teach us how to work as a group, possibly as a group that disagrees on the best course of action. A client (amongst others) had approached the university and submitted a group project to create automated cricket commentary based on the locations of the players on the pitch, as provided by a system of transmitters and receivers. We had to triangulate the player's locations based on the raw data and then interpret these locations such that we could send out meaningful commentary to twitter and RSS feeds, and create a top down view of the pitch that indicated player names and locations.

2.3) No, never.

2.4) No, although I was involved in Wesnoth before (I made a few art contributions to trunk, mainly working with Jetryl) and, time permitting, I would like to become involved again once I finish uni.

2.5) Yes.

2.5.1/2.5.2) I have played a variety of games over the years, some of my favourites have been strategy games, the civilization series in particular was quite enjoyable (more so the older ones than the newer ones) but I have also played MMOs, which I got entirely too addicted to before I realised I was about a month in and quit, and I quite enjoy FPS games because you can just pick one up for a bit and relax (especially left 4 dead, shooting zombies is just fun). Oh, and wesnoth too (you didn't really think it wouldn't get a mention?) although in the end I was spending more time creating my campaign than I was playing the game.

2.5.3) Friendly ones, I dislike being insulted by random people while I'm trying to relax and generally would prefer a less challenging friendly player to a difficult interesting match against an annoying insulting player.

2.5.4) Do I have to pick one? I always watch videos and read the dialogue on the first playthrough (or after not playing a game for a while) so I value story, but a game without good gameplay is rather pointless.

2.5.5) Yes, I've mentioned it a few times earlier in the questionnaire. I tended to lean towards single player, but that was because at the time I didn't tend to have long periods of free time available to me, and I always felt quite rude asking someone to wait because I needed to do something.

2.6) Invasion of Arendia Campaign, and some sprite contributions (I never made good enough portraits), the one I can clearly remember doing is helping Jetryl with the attack animations of the Orcish Archer. (not that art contributions are particularly relevant for gsoc)

3.1) Born and raised in England, so quite fluent.

3.2) English.

3.3) I tend to be friendly and courteous while talking on the internet, in any way, and I tend to avoid people who take a disliking to me (fortunately, even on MMOs there weren't many of them)

3.4) I've always been a great believer in constructive criticism, where it is asked for (or for anything destined for mainline in the specific case of Wesnoth)

3.5) I think so, Jetryl spent a long time trying to teach my to draw, and I like to think he didn't completely fail, but he probably has a good idea of how well I take advice.

3.6) Again I like to think so.

3.7) To be honest I veer between the two. If I'm not coding at the time, I might spend allot of time thinking about how I would go about doing something, and considering possibilities. But that tends to happen before I begin any specific task, once I've started I'll write something, see how it works out, see if it can be improved, and then either use or abandon it. I'm definitely not afraid of abandoning work if it actually makes the code worse, or has some unforseen problematic side effect (eg, slowing the program down more than expected)

4.1) to be decided.

5.1) Subversion: yes C++: although my course does cover C++, most of the teaching was done in java. I have not used C++ much, but I have used C more. STL, Boost, sdl: I'm not familiar with them Python: never used build environments: I've never used cmake or scons WML: used extensively about three to four years ago Lue: never used.

5.2) Eclipse mainly. It's a useful tool that immediately highlights simple typos or smaller errors, and it provides useful bug fixing information.

5.3) Java.

5.4) I wouldn't mind, phone number to be included later.