[Scummvm-devel] Preparing GSoC 2012

[Willem Jan Palenstijn]

On Sun, Feb 05, 2012 at 10:28:41AM +0100, Sven Hesse wrote:
> On 2012-02-01 11:25:10 +0100, Arnaud Boutonné wrote:
> > Google Summer of Code 2012 has not been announced yet, but based on the
> > previous years' schedule it should occur really soon.
> 
> It's been announced now:
> <http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2012/02/google-summer-of-code-2012-is-on.html>

Let's try to create a set of cool tasks this year.
Some random considerations:


Support for touchscreen devices has the potential for quite a few tasks.
I'm not saying any or all of these would be good, but just throwing some ideas
out there:
* improve the input code of a number of engines to work better on
  touchscreens. (Which engines would be suitable for this?)
* create a custom theme/layout for the existing GUI code, and add small
  improvements to the code without any full rewriting
  (Higher resolution, 32bpp support in the launcher, better cursor
  behaviour, force (vibration) feedback, ...?)
* implement a new-and-improved custom cross-platform GUI
* implement a custom native ios and/or android GUI (after refactoring
  the existing GUI to move all logic out of it, which might admittedly be
  a rather annoying hurdle to start with)
* ...?


I think engine refactoring/objectification tasks are not very motivating, since
it's very hard to determine progress, and you don't build any new "shiny"
things.


Does anyone have any good ideas for tasks that would draw students into actual
engine development somehow? ("Reverse engineer this entire new game" is
probably too big...)


What is the state of the event recorder/playback for game testing?


What is the state of the decompilation tasks that were done in previous years?


More random ideas:
* Can certain engines' scripts be JIT-ified with LLVM?
* Advanced debugging/cheating capabilities for engines?
  (Particularly interesting for ones with fan-games, such as SCI. Having
   an external graphical debugger that connects to a running game in ScummVM
   could be very nice .)
* 32bpp scalers? (Is that interesting or boring?)
* Any more OpenGL things worth doing? (Again, is the remaining work interesting
  or boring?)


Any other suggestions? Any tasks on the current opentasks lists that you feel
are still cool and relevant? Or that we should remove?


Feedback welcome!


-Willem Jan