GSoC - Deadline for Student Proposal

May 3rd was the deadline for all proposals from students who wanted to participate in the 2013 Google Summer of Code. We received an amazing 79 proposals,which kept our mentors certainly very busy. A big thank you  to all our mentors for their tireless and patient work they did over the last two or three weeks. They were constantly answering questions, giving feedback, and helping students to get started. I have over 600 GSoC related emails during those three weeks (not counting those on the google list), and according to my log files talked to more than 30 people in private chats. It got quite frantic towards the end. Here the list of proposals per day:

In contrast to what we heard before the proposals mostly had a rather high quality, we didn't receive many 'spam' proposals (e.g. proposals completely unrelated to SuperTuxKart). Google had changed the number of proposals a student can submit from 20 to 5, and this might be responsible for this: less opportunity for students to 'spam' mentoring organisations with bad proposals (and since it appears we had an above average number of proposals we were even less likely to be targeted by those, since the chances for a bad proposal with us would be even worse).

Some of the proposals were extremely long and detailed (one proposal had 18 pages in an attached pdf file). Not that we expected that much detail in the proposals, but it shows how much effort some students put into their proposal. And most of them also reacted positively to feedback we gave them, so a compliment to the students at this stage as well.

Here some common problems we noticed so far:

• Not having the right level of description: Stating that you are going to 'write a battle AI using some existing path finding algorithm' isn't really enough to tell us how your code is supposed to work. Path finding was only one part of that project, how does this work with all the other missing parts? On the other hand, a list of function names and parameters does not tell us how those functions are supposed to work together. That part is the important part, we don't need to know about function names here. 
• Not understanding the project. Many people used encryption/signing to make sure that replay files saved from SuperTuxKart can not be altered, completely forgetting that it's trivial with an open source game to modify the data written before it is signed.
• Untested patches. Some of the patches appeared to have not been tested, and did not work as expected. If you replace a printf warning message with our new Log::warn(...) interface, you should at least test that this warning works as expected, and not only if it compiles: do something to get this warning printed, and make sure it works as expected.

We are probably not able to provide individual feedback on all proposals, but I intend to write a follow up blog post detailing some of the common problems for certain ideas, and in general some other things we noticed. Hopefully we will be able to publish some of the better proposals as an example for everybody later.

It will be another few days before google lets us know how many slots (students) we are going to get. Then we will be busy for the next two weeks to read and rank 79 proposals, and pick the final selection of students. But one thing is already obvious: we have many more good proposal than we will get slots in the best case.

SuperTuxKart participating in GSoC 2013!

We are proud to announce that SuperTuxKart is among the accepted projects into Google Summer of Code 2013! We have already made contact with a lot of excited students, and we look forward to participating with one or more of them during this summer. We will ask Google for three slots, but considering this is our first time participating we may get less.

The official Google Summer of Code page for SuperTuxKart is:
https://google-melange.appspot.com/gsoc/org/google/gsoc2013/supertuxkart

GSoC overview page:
http://supertuxkart.sourceforge.net/GSoC_overview
GSoC ideas:
http://supertuxkart.sourceforge.net/GSoC_ideas

If you are interested, please read through the GSoC pages and contact us as soon as you want to. Please note that we are very busy trying to respond to everybody and it might take a while before you'll get an answer (especially if you contact us by IRC - you might need to ask several times to get an answer there, so please subscribe to our e-mail list and use it instead or in addition if that is more convenient). However, in the end your proposal is what will matter most to us when choosing who we'll work with.

Other news
 
The interview with us for SourceForge's Project of the Month for April is now up for you to read. Hopefully you will find it interesting, and again thanks a lot to everybody who voted for us! Without your help we would not have made it.

Improved Konqi

We have a new version of Konqi in the game, made by betharatux1 with some help and advice from jymis. It really shows that community collaboration pays off; thanks to everyone involved!

Improved Old Mine

Samuncle has been working on the Old Mine track, refining it. The road should feel the same, but textures and topology has been improved.

Improved icons

Courtesy of Totoplus62 and tavariz91 - more nice community collaboration! :)


Do you think Expert difficulty is too easy? Due to popular demand an extra difficulty has been added, where all karts go a little faster (maybe not noticeable), and the AI always try to use skidding whenever it can, no matter where they are positioned relative to you. Possibly other changes may be made in the future, but we will not make challenges for this difficulty; instead it will be unlocked if you manage to do all challenges as Expert.


A lot of code refactoring and bug fixes has been done as well, among others for the camera and rendering. The only change that should be directly visible for the user is that we now support motion blur also while playing multiplayer (splitscreen) games.


Lastly, I'll just quote the log message for revision 12535:

File manager now provides the directory for screenshots and
shader. Location of screenshots is now changed:
windows: %APPDATA%/supertuxkart/screenshots
osx: ~/Library/Application Support/SuperTuxKart/Screenshots
Linux: $HOME/.cache/supertuxkart/screenshots

[April's Fools Joke] SuperTuxKart 1337

We are pleased to announce a new edition of STK called SuperTuxKart 1337, or lite, which will be a stripped down version of the game for low-powered devices. We owe Minecraft our gratitude for showing that you can make a modern game with low system resource requirements, and we will therefore have this special edition run on the Java(R) platform under the Cube engine using a wrapper.

Remodelling in progress

More info to come soon.

SuperTuxKart applying for Google Summer of Code 2013!

We are proud to announce that for the first time in the project's history, SuperTuxKart has applied for participating in this year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program.

So what is this about? From their website:

Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers students stipends to write code for open source projects. We have worked with the open source community to identify and fund exciting projects for the upcoming summer.

In other words, us applying for this program means that potentially we can get one or more students aged 18 or older helping with the code side of STK, if we are among the selected open source projects. The students themselves will receive stipends of up to 5000$ (USD) each for their work, provided by Google, and we as a project can also receive 500$ per student we mentor. It's a huge win-win! They get to improve their programming skills, being helped and mentored by us, and also getting paid and hopefully seeing their work in an upcoming version of SuperTuxKart. We get more developers for the summer we can get exciting and useful code from, and hopefully they'll want to stay with us afterwards as well.

Still unsure of what this is about? Please head over to the GSoC FAQ page, where this concept is explained in detail and probably more clearly than what I've been able to do.

Our GSoC overview and idea pages are here:
supertuxkart.net/GSoC_overview
supertuxkart.net/GSoC_ideas

However, after all this is said and done, we don't know yet if we will be among the chosen projects this year. On April 8 Google will announce which of the applying projects have been selected.

Are you a student wanting to participate with SuperTuxKart as your project? If you already want to get in touch with us, please do! Even if we don't get selected and you want to work on something else this summer, getting to know us and the project won't hurt, and hopefully you'll want to help with this project later.

Are you a programmer but not participating in Google Summer of Code 2013 for various reasons? Please feel free to join up with us any time! We could use more people in all programmer related areas, be it new features, bug fixes, documentation or code cleanup.

Good sports and rabbit season

It's that time again! No, not to adjust our watches, nor the brightness settings of our monitors (though both may be needed as well), but to look at what's been going on with SuperTuxKart development the past couple months. Truth to be told, things have been a little slow lately due to winter break and also time going towards promoting the game for SourceForge's Project of the Month.

Speaking of which, how did it go? Very well, thanks to all our voters and community members promoting it. Congrats to PostBooks ERP for winning the contest for March. But we were graciously awarded the prize of Project of the Month for April, due to our close race with PostBooks and promotional efforts going into it. Thanks again to everyone participating, even though Twitter membership was a requirement.

We recently launched our own Twitter account, so if you want to get news snippets a bit more often than what we make for the blog, follow @supertuxkart. Naturally there will be quite some overlap in content, but it can be an additional avenue for those interested in the ongoing development. Please note, it is NOT a support channel and you should contact us via forums or e-mail for support and suggestions - otherwise it is likely to be overlooked and/or have high answer delay. Not to mention the fact that 140 characters isn't exactly a good limit for this sort of communication.

Beginner's tutorial

 

Auria made a short tutorial for beginners which learns how the basic gameplay works. It does not go through each weapon and their usage, but covers basics and should hopefully make the game easier to learn for new players.

 Soccer mode

Long-time contributor funto has worked on a new game mode called soccer mode. In it, 2-4 players across two teams are competing in split-screen mode trying to score goals on each other like in English football/soccer. There are some things left to be done, mainly balancing physics better to make it easier to control the ball, so whether this game mode will be available in 0.8.1 is still left to see. Most likely it will have to wait until 0.8.2.

Easter egg hunt

Also, another game mode by hiker is in the works, so far known as Easter Egg Hunt, where your goal is to find all the hidden bunnies. This is intended to be a more family-friendly relaxed mode, where kids and adults alike can explore the tracks without the pressure of AI or other players. However, people will probably be able to choose to compete on time for this mode, similar to time trial races. It's also still a work in progress, but should hopefully be ready in time for the upcoming release.

Planetarium

I'll end this post with a small teaser from samuncle, showing his work on a new version of Star Track, with stunningly beautiful surroundings - makes you want to land on that planet, doesn't it? :)

Final Spurt and Showing Wiimote in Action

A bit less than 3 days to go in the race to become SoureForge's "Project of the Month". We were more than 30 votes ahead, then suddenly more than 50 votes behind, and now we are catching up. Only 10 votes missing to share the lead (and quite a few more to put us securely in first place).

We created a promotional video showing the upcoming wiimote support in SuperTuxKart - hopefully in 0.8.1. We couldn't help adding a call for votes - in English, German and Chinese by our little SuperTuxKart ambassador:

So we need every vote we can get - please support us and go to http://vote.supertuxkart.net to cast your vote. We have been told that using twitter is not convenient for many of our fans, but we don't really have a choice.

Any kind of advertising helps, too - best of all if you tweet about it (since your followers obviously have a twitter account), but also making a video about STK, posting appropriately in a forum, contacting your local radio or TV stations, ... Feel free to use the above video, since seeing the wiimote support is indeed a news-worthy item.

Vote for STK as SourceForge's Project of the Month

Image created by qubodup

We have been nominated as SourceForge.net's Project of the Month for March! Please vote for us at vote.supertuxkart.net and spread the link and image. This would mean we get an interview and additional exposure on the SourceForge front page and in their monthly e-mail.