This proposal is a stub that's currently being worked on.

About me

My name is Leszek Godlewski and I would like to apply to work on Battle for Wesnoth in the course of this year's Google Summer of Code.

I'm a student of the [Staszic High School http://www.lostaszic.pl] in Tarnowskie Góry, Poland, in my final year of pre-university education, attending a class with focus on mathematics and physics. I'm hoping to go to the [Silesian University of Technology http://www.polsl.pl/] next year to study computer science.

I treat the participation in GSoC as a means of joining the pleasant with the useful: programming (game development in particular) is my passion, and the experience for future work in this profession that I can obtain from this program is invaluable.

I chose to help with the development of BfW for several reasons. Firstly, because I come from a game modding background, and game development is bringing my passion one step further. Secondly, because I'm a free software enthusiast, and through some FLOSS promotion activities I took part in I found out that the relative lack of attractive games is one of the main reasons that casual users stay away from free platforms. I'd love to be part of a movement that changes that.

I haven't participated in BfW development yet, but I've played it several times in multiplayer mode. It was one of the most popular activities in the FLOSS workshops I ran.

Experience

Programming

As of yet, my record in the programming department is a humble one, despite having been coding for 8 years now. It includes mainly unreleased work, concentrated around games: Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, Quake 3 and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory mods (unfortunately, none of those built for the latter two actually got past early alpha versions), lots of little utilities built to speed up everyday work or perform small-scale fun research, some stand-alone id Tech 3 (a.k.a. Quake 3 engine)-based efforts (mostly unfinished, too) and a few strictly open-source projects:

q3mass – a Quake 3 master server; stub but operational state
libscotty – a simple text UI library; plug-and-play wrapper for curses, appears stable and suitable for use
OpenMoHAA – a game engine recreation project that aims to modify ioquake3 in such a manner so as to run Medal of Honor: Allied Assault game assets; some asset loading routines (including levels) working, project currently on hold due to lack of interest from the MoHAA community
Mobile Arena and the Destination engine – my own, built-from-scratch game engine technology and its showcase game; about 60% of the planned infrastructure in place, currently on hold due to school responsibilities
z0mg antihax (unreleased yet) - heuristic/behavioural analysis server-side cheat detection system for first-person shooter games; general framework in place, data collection mechanisms in stub state, currently on hold due to school responsibilities

For more information on these projects, please see [my Ohloh account http://www.ohloh.net/accounts/inequation]. I am all too willing to add Battle for Wesnoth contributions to this list.

My language of choice is ISO C (with about three years of experience using it), but I'm also comfortable with C++ (about two years). Other languages I've used include Pascal, Lua, Python, PHP and a bunch of dedicated scripting languages for games.

Due to the game modding background, I have a pretty good understanding of computer graphics and spatial geometry and mathematics. This includes some SDL and OpenGL experience.

Teamwork and GSoC

I haven't really worked in a team environment before. Some of my mod projects involved were team-driven, but even then I was the only one in my department. OpenMoHAA was a team effort (with me taking the lead), but the development history is so short that it's neglectable.

This is my first time in GSoC. As for other projects, apart from Battle for Wesnoth I am applying to work with Crystal Space and considering OGRE and BZFlag.

Gaming

I got my first computer at the age of five and instantly fell in love with games. I'm not a hardcore gamer, though. I see games as the ultimate means of storytelling - I prefer to set the difficulty to "easy", immerse in the storyline and role-play, instead of getting engaged in demanding, but depth-lacking gameplay. This doesn't prevent me from enjoying simpler games, however. Considering this, it may sound ridiculous that first-person shooters are my favourite games; but it's not, really, given that my all-time favourites (MoHAA, Operation Flashpoint, Project Reality mod for Battlefield 2) involve a fair deal of role-playing in multiplayer.

I'm also more of a tinkerer than a player. Sometime around 2000 I had what could be described as my first attempts at game modding. It wasn't long till I noticed that changing the way the games are played is more rewarding for me than actually playing them, and soon I became involved in the modding communities for several games.

Contact information

IRC, the forums and the wiki: IneQuation
Gna!: inequation
E-mail: ineqvation <at> gmail <dot> com
XMPP (Jabber): same as e-mail

To be continued

SummerOfCodeProposal IneQuation

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