SummerOfCodeProposal Awilkins

This page is related to Summer of Code 2010

See the list of Summer of Code 2010 Ideas

This is a Summer of Code 2010 student page

Description

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

IRC

put ONLY your irc nickname in there. in case of alternate nicks, separate by ,

Example content of this section: "user" "user1, user2"

Questionnaire

Basics

1.1) Write a small introduction to yourself.

Hey, my name is Andrew Wilkinson. I have a large interest in computer gaming, and will eventually be apart of the industry. I will either work for a big company or form my own indy studio.

1.2) State your preferred email address.

andrewwilkinson88@gmail.com

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

awilkins

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

With my senior year coming to a close, I want to become more and more a part of the computer science community. Open source projects seem to be the best way to meet people, and gain experience on actual project code. I haven't been able to participate before to do full time jobs over the summer and other obligations. This might be my last year of school if I can't get the research assistant position I'm aiming for, and could also be my last chance at the program.

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

Senior year, Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Lowell.

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

United States, east coast on Eastern Time or UTC -5. But, honestly I can be on IRC at any time.

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

I'll be working part time at a lab at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. The work load there is incredibly lax, and a very loose schedule. I plan on giving this project the majority of my attention. Beyond that I'll be off the first week of August, but will still be able to work on the project with reduced time on IRC.

Experience

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

I've worked with the API's OpenGl, quicktime, and briefly gstreamer to write C files that add new features to the graphical language LabVIEW. Of course there's also the various programming assignments I've done through my four years at school.

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?

yes indeed. I've been playing games since the nintendo.

2.5.1) What type of gamer are you?

I do enjoy single player games still as a puzzle solving experience.

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.

We do not plan to favor Wesnoth players as such, but some particular projects require a good feeling for the game which is hard to get without having played intensively.

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.

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

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?

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)
• Python (optional, mainly used for tools)
• build environments (eg cmake/autotools/scons)
• WML (the wesnoth specific scenario language)
• Lua (used in combination with WML to create scenarios)

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

5.3) What programming languages are you fluent in?

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!