GameFilter

Basics

• Introduction
  • My name is Ben Hwang. I am a senior college student at Yonsei University, Korea majoring computer science. During year 2001 ~ 2005, I have actively participated in the ACM-ICPC and advanced to the World Finals on year 2003 and 2005. On year 2006 to 2007, I worked at NHN Corporation, which is one of the biggest IT software company in Korea, as a game developer. The long time contest participating gave me a habit to think up with efficient algorithms and to consider the boundary limits. I am especially comfortable writing the algorithms with either c or c++.

• Contact Info
  • Email Address: ben_DOT_hwang_AT_gmail_DOT_com
  • irc: BenHwang
  • Awake time: UTC 00:00 ~ 15:00
  • No problem with communicating by phone
  • Preferred contact time by phone: UTC 09:00 ~ 15:00

• Summer of Code
  • This is the first time for me to participate in an open source project. Although It is a little bit late, I would like to join the open source community and learn a lot and contribute a lot.

• Experience
  • Worked as a game developer for more than 4 years.

• Communication skills
  • Fluent in both written and spoken English.
  • Lived in the US for 7 years.

Project

• Concept
  • Player can add filter options to easily find games the player is interested in. Some filtering criteria can be game type, map size and type, number of free slots/players, etc.
  • When I was working at NHN Corporation, I developed a similar room-searching filter for the online poker game products.
    • Usage: player can customize one to three filter options
    • Categories: game rule, betting rule, betting money, maximum number of players
    • Outcome: games that match more filter options were shown earlier in the list
    • Reaction: Satisfied! 7 variations of poker games had their custom categories and work perfectly.
    • Product reference: can check out the poker game products at http://www.hangame.com, but may have difficulties due to language.
• Timeline (roughly)
  • 3 weeks: research and code review
  • 2 weeks: structure the algorithm
  • 2 weeks: implementation and documenting
  • Rest: debugging, testing, improving
• Technical details (Just an example based on my previous project. Need more research to apply on Battle for Wesnoth)
  • Game-Option string: A string that stores the option setting of the game. Data received from the server.
    • ex) AABBBBCCCDD
      • AA: game type
      • BBBB: scenario number
      • CCC: map info
      • D: max players
  • Filter option retriever: retrieves the players custom filter option and generates a key to compare with the game-option string.
    • ex1) scenario number - 1537: generated key - 153700000
    • ex2) max players - 4: generated key - 4
    • ex3) game type - free for all(12), map info - 100x100(191): generated key - 12000000000, 19100
      • keys are generated separately to count the matching options number.
  • Compare function: two games are given as arguments and return the game that matches more player custom filter options.
    • filter option retriever is used to know what is trying to be match.
    • if the two games has the same number of matches, they are compared with the default comparison function.
  • Bottom line: Perform a single sort with the above compare function!
  • If the compare function is implemented generally, it can be encapsulated. It will work well even on future changes in the options once the filter option retriever is updated.
• My gains
  • First step into the open source community.

Practical considerations

• Languages
  • Fluent in C/C++
  • Beginner of Python
• IDE, Tools
  • Visual Studio .Net 2003 - usually developed Windows games in the past
  • Subversion