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Description

Dmitry Kovalenko(Nephro) - Further Lua

Simplify LuaAI
Right now, the LuaAI system is in a state, where it can be used for artificial intelligence system development for Battle for Wesnoth campaigns, but it's usage is quite complicated and requires effort to get the system off the ground and make it run. To simply to launch a campaign with an empty LuaAI(by empty, I mean, not doing anything) a UMC developer is required to write a couple dozens of lines of code(not even mentioning the bugs that he will encounter on the way). While it seems, that we could simply hide the boilerplate code in a template or behind a macro, the situation is a bit more sophisticated(Later I will describe that in more detail). Instead of running away from this problem, I will work towards an elegant solution, creating an effective back-end system, and a clean user development environment.

The project

Under construction, I plan to post it in the evening of April 3rd(Europe time)

IRC

Nephro, neph

Questionnaire

Off topic: I did this questionnaire last year, but I don't remember what I wrote in it. I won't look on purpose, until I complete this one, and try to see, whether I've changed at all...

1) Basics

1.1) Write a small introduction to yourself.
Hi, my name is Dmitry Kovalenko and I am aspiring software developer. I've been interested in sciences and engineering since about 5th grade, about that time, I got my first PC without and, without any internet, started to hack around it. It was old and semi-broken, but I got it to run Windows 95 and was very proud of myself. I played a lot of games on it, despite the fact that my games were 10 years older than the games of my classmates, and one day, I decided to write my own game, which would combine the brilliance of my favorite games, lacking their flaws. I failed, of course, at the very first steps, but those were also the first steps towards the career I am pursuing now, 5 years later.

1.2) State your preferred email address.
nephro dot wes at gmail dot com

1.3) If you have chosen a nick for IRC and Wesnoth forums, what is it?
Nephro on irc.freenode.com and Nephro in the forums

1.4) Why do you want to participate in summer of code?
Last year, it was all about proving to myself that I can get accepted and make it through. This year it's exactly the same, only to add the word "again" to the previous sentence. To be honest, I was very disappointed in my performance last year. I was slow, inefficient, imprecise(left a fair amount of bugs after myself) and a bit unorganized. This year I want it to be good, like it should be.
I can't even compare the experience gained working on this project with a mentor to anything else. The large sophisticated codebase, working with other people directly, designing for long term, milestones(which I like to consider deadlines), it all allows to immerse in gamedev, while not applying too much pressure, like corporate development.

1.5) What are you studying, subject, level and school?
Computing Science, year 2
University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland, UK

1.6) What country are you from, at what time are you most likely to be able to join IRC?
Right now I reside in Scotland, but will, most probably, live in Latvia during the summer. I am usually online during the working day time in Europe and most of the evenings.

1.7) Do you have other commitments for the summer period ? Do you plan to take any vacations ? If yes, when.
I have no commitments during this summer, except for maybe rare sports matches, but they usually take place on the weekends, so will not affect my workflow.

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.

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)

I have been using the three technologies listed above quite extensively for Wesnoth development during last summer.

Python (optional, mainly used for tools)

Python is the language used in our University during first year computing courses, so I am quite agile with it.

build environments (eg cmake/scons)

I use cmake for my wesnoth builds and try not to forget add new files to other build system config files.

WML (the wesnoth specific scenario language)
Lua (used in combination with WML to create scenarios)

Used both WML and Lua during my project last summer.
5.2) Which tools do you normally use for development? Why do you use them?
While working on Wesnoth, I usually use KDevelop and Subversion(cli). KDevelop provides me with a neat and comfortable development environment, it has decent autocompletion, code checking and never causes problems for me. Also, wesnoth has a project file for this IDE, so I don't have to worry about more technical, not related to my actual tasks, things.
Subversion is, of course, the version control system that wesnoth generally uses, it also suits my needs, and I am not even considering switching to something else at the moment.
For university work, we are forced to use Eclipse for most of the development, some other custom IDEs for processor/chip programming and IDLE for Python scripts.

5.3) What programming languages are you fluent in?
Languages relevant to BfW: C/C++/Lua, + basic WML I might require during testing, documentation and demonstration of features I'm working on.
Experiences irrelevant to the project:

PHP/MySql - moderate level, used it once for professional development
Java/Python - Languages I use for university and take courses in
C#/Monodevelop - used once for professional development and a couple of times for contest programming
Pascal - used quite a lot for contest programming and algorithm studies, when I was younger.

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!

No problems with talking on the phone. I will provide my telephone number and my skype ID later.

SoC2012 Nephro

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