SoC2014 lipkab SDL2

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See the list of Summer of Code 2014 Ideas

This is a Summer of Code 2014 student page

Description

lipkab - SDL2 transition

I propose to help with the SDL2 transition.

I'd like to work on implementing hardware accelerated rendering for Wesnoth and enabling it for the map/unit rendering system.

IRC

lipkab

Questionnaire

1) Basics

1.1) Write a small introduction to yourself.

1.2) State your preferred email address.

lipkab zoho com

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

lipkab and lipk, respectively.

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

I have a number of reasons:

• Do something useful during the summer holiday.
• Get a nice reference in my CV.
• Earn money.

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

I'm doing my second year on Computer Science BSc at the Pázmány Péter University (Faculty for Information Technology).

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

I'm Hungarian, I usually join IRC at CET nights on weekdays and at unpredictable times during weekends/holidays.

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

I don't have other commitments. TODO: vacations?

2) Experience

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

I have written a large number of small programs over the years as school work, or practice. As for bigger ones, I've been contributing to Wesnoth since 2012, and I produced a visual editor for Apertium's transfer rule format during last year's GSoC. That project is put on hold, though, since the concept (converting Apertium's declarative semantic to procedural) made further development very difficult. I'm semi-working on a replacement program for Visruled designed with a slightly different approach to avoid the structural problems of the former.

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

If Wesnoth development is considered a team environment, yes...

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?

I successfully participated in GSoC 2013 as a student, see 2.1 for details.

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

I worked with the Apertium folks during last summer and I remained more or less active in the project maintaining and developing the software component I worked on during GSoC (again, see 2.1). I'm also a semi-active Wesnoth developer, my contributions include:

• New storyscreen background WML (was required for the new bigmaps)
• Multiplayer features (modifications, custom add-on options, dependencies)
• MP interface redesign (in collaboration with thunderstruck and Coffee)
• Various bugfixes and PRs

2.5) Gaming experience - Are you a gamer?

2.5.1) What type of gamer are you?

I don't consider myself a gamer, although there're a few games I can play quite a lot of with.

2.5.2) What type of games?

I prefer brain-working ones like strategy or puzzle games. Some of my favorites are Trine 2, Civilization V and Splice. I also like LEGO games!

2.5.3) What type of opponents do you prefer?

Ones that are challenging to beat but can be beated, so roughly the same skill level, I'd say.

2.5.4) Are you more interested in story or gameplay?

As above, I mostly play with strategy and puzzle games and there gameplay definitely weighs more than the plot. That being said, I do appreciate an interesting and thoughtful story.

2.5.5) Have you played Wesnoth? If so, tell us roughly for how long and whether you lean towards single player or multiplayer.

I've been playing Wesnoth for roughly 3 years now. I was an SP player initially, but nowadays I play MP almost exclusively partly because I've run out of good campaigns and partly for the bigger challenge.

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.

I have commit access since 2012. I made approximately 100 commits since then, see 2.4 for an overview on their scope.

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.

I had no problem communicating with the team in the last 3 years :)

3.2) What spoken languages are you fluent in?

Hungarian (native) and English. I'd like to believe that I'm also capable of communicating in French.

3.3) Are you good at interacting with other players? Our developer community is friendly, but the player community can be a bit rough.

I can get along with sane people with different opinions reasonably well but I'm not good at handling idiots.

3.4) Do you give constructive advice?

Well, at least I try to.

3.5) Do you receive advice well?

3.6) Are you good at sorting useful criticisms from useless ones?

I believe so, although I have gotten very little feedback on my work for both Wesnoth and Apertium and none of my other works were subject to critique from a wider audience.

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.

That depends on how confident I'm about what I'm doing and also the impacts of a possible failure. I'm much more careful when risking wasting other people's time than my own.

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?

I've chosen the SDL2 transition project. I'd like to concentrate on revamping the rendering system to make use of SDL2's hardware acceleration facilities.

4.2) If you have invented your own project, please describe the project and the scope.

-

4.3) Why did you choose this project?

I've been playing with the idea of porting Wesnoth to SDL2 for a long time. ...

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

The first step of the project is to implement a wrapper class for SDL_Texture, which supports rotating, clipping and scaling the object. Since these operations (SDL_RenderCopyEx, SDL_SetScale) don't require the actual texture data to be modified in any way, multiple instances of the texture class can share a single SDL_Texture. A texture's pixels can't be accessed directly, thus we may also want to keep a copy of the surface the texture was created from in the class, in case a modified image is needed later.

The second task is to enable access to hardware accelerated facilities through the usual global objects. This includes an SDL_Renderer available through CVideo and texture loading via the image class. Both changes should be straightforward.

The third task is to deploy the texture class in the storyscreen code. The storyscreen's implementation is relatively self-contained and well documented so it's an ideal place to try out new features. Furthermore, it involves scaling large pictures which is currently one of the performance bottlenecks of Wesnoth and hopefully will be resolved by enabling hardware acceleration.

TODO: write something on display and game_display.

4.6) What do you expect to gain from this project?

A deeper understanding of both SDL2 and Wesnoth's rendering and event handling system. Plus a T-shirt.

4.7) What would make you stay in the Wesnoth community after the conclusion of SOC?

My affiliation with Wesnoth didn't begin with GSoC, so I don't expect it to end with it.

5) Practical considerations

5.1) Are you familiar with any of the following tools or languages?

• Git (used for all commits) yes
• C++ (language used for all the normal source code) yes
• STL, Boost, Sdl (C++ libraries used by Wesnoth) SDL, STL: yes, Boost: somewhat
• Python (optional, mainly used for tools) at a basic level only
• build environments (eg cmake/scons) yes
• WML (the wesnoth specific scenario language) yes
• Lua (used in combination with WML to create scenarios) yes

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

I use Vim/GVim for smaller projects because of the almost perfect code completion and error detecting features I can get from YCM (a clang integration plugin). For bigger and/or Qt related stuff I use Qt Creator, which I like in particular for its friendly debugger interface and code navigation capabilities.

5.3) What programming languages are you fluent in?

C++, Java, Lua.

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!