As the article mentions Google ended up funding a number of Gaming projects. There are a total of 7 game projects and 5 game related projects for a total of over 40 slots.
The following game projects have been accepted,
Battle for Wesnoth (projects), a very cool turn based strategy game in the theme of Heroes of Might and Magic.
BZFlag (projects), the classic tank first person shooter game. One of the oldest open source games around!
Linden Lab (projects), the makers of Second Life the largest "almost game like" online universe.
ScummVM (projects), an engine which lets you play all the classic Lucas Arts games and many more!
Thousand Parsec (projects), a framework for building 4x empire building games. Been around since 2001 and growing quickly.
Tux4Kids (projects), a group of multi-platform open source educational games for children.
WorldForge (projects), one of the original open source MMORPG which has even been mentioned on Slashdot multiple times (original called Altima).
My own project Thousand Parsec got 8 slots for a number of critical features. One of the coolest is a 3d client, which should make the games much more interesting to look at.
We will also finally have a few more interesting games to actually play, including a clone of Risk in Space and a very interesting game called DroneSec. Finally, we should have some opponents for you to play against as 2 AI clients being developed for our premier RFTS ruleset.
Oh for those interested in Thousand Parsec specifically, since GSoC was announced we have made another release! (Plus the 0.3.1.1 Yay for releasing with major bugs release.)
The client is getting a heap more usable and we could really use people actually helping test the game! If you are a hardcore 4X game fan, I would highly recommend checking it out.
The original announcement was made on the Monday, March 31, 2008 at 2:04 PM, I posted this announcment to Slashdot at Wednesday April 02, @12:34PM (although in my timezone it was closer to 10:00am). Both are outside the fateful 1st of April. Yay to failing at reading dates.
I know I posted roughly this comment in the last GSoC Slashdot announcement but I've been told the information is really useful and some people might have missed it.
On the note about how GSoC effects our project you should take a look at our web stats since we where announced as a GSoC mentor organisation. The increase has been massive!
Google has been very good to the Open Source gaming community again this year, there are a total of 7 game projects and 5 game related projects.
The following game projects have been accepted,
Battle for Wesnoth (ideas), a very cool tu
rn based strategy game in the theme of Heroes of Might and Magic.
BZFlag (ideas), the cla
ssic tank first person shooter game. One of the oldest open source games around!
Linden Lab (ideas), the makers of
Second Life the largest "almost game like" online universe.
ScummVM (ideas), an engine whic
h lets you play all the classic Lucas Arts games and many more!
Thousand Parsec (ideas), a framework fo
r building 4x empire building games. Been around since 2001 and growing quickly.
Tux4Kids (ideas), a group of mul
ti-platform open source educational games for children.
WorldForge (ideas), one of the ori
ginal open source MMORPG which has even been mentioned on Slashdot multiple times (original called Altima).
The Summer of Code had a huge impact my own project, Thousand Parsec and I hope that it
will again have a significant positive impact. GSoC 2007 helped us develop a number
of core utilities that the main developers just would not have time to
do. These projects should substantially increase the productivity of new
contributors and lower the barrier to entry into development. The huge amount
of web traffic brought to our website from just being a mentor organisation can
clearly be seen in our web statistics.
This year we are planning to concentrate on improving the player experience.
The two ways for achieving this is to create more full and interesting games
(rulesets) and making the game clients more attractive and easier to access
(such as a web-based client and improving the desktop client).
Out of the three students that where selected last year, two passed their final
evaluations. The code that the students produced was of both a high quality and
quantity.
One of the students projects, the RFTS clone ruleset, is now one
of the most complete and popular of our games (rulesets). The student has
continued to help with its development and is now currently considering being a
mentor this year.
Google has been very good to the Open Source gaming community again this year,
there are a total of 7 game projects and 5 game related projects.
The following game projects have been accepted,
Battle for Wesnoth (ideas), a very cool turn based strategy game in the theme of Heroes of Might and Magic.
BZFlag (ideas), the classic tank first person shooter game. One of the oldest open source games around!
Linden Lab (ideas), the makers of Second Life the largest "almost game like" online universe.
ScummVM (ideas), an engine which lets you play all the classic Lucas Arts games and many more!
Thousand Parsec (ideas), a framework for building 4x empire building games. Been around since 2001 and growing quickly.
Tux4Kids (ideas), a group of multi-platform open source educational games for children.
WorldForge (ideas), one of the original open source MMORPG which has even been mentioned on Slashdot multiple times (original called Altima).
The Summer of Code had a huge impact my own project, Thousand Parsec and I hope that it
will again have a significant positive impact. GSoC 2007 helped us develop a number
of core utilities that the main developers just would not have time to
do. These projects should substantially increase the productivity of new
contributors and lower the barrier to entry into development. The huge amount
of web traffic brought to our website from just being a mentor organisation can
clearly be seen in our web statistics.
This year we are planning to concentrate on improving the player experience.
The two ways for achieving this is to create more full and interesting games
(rulesets) and making the game clients more attractive and easier to access
(such as a web-based client and improving the desktop client).
Out of the three students that where selected last year, two passed their final
evaluations. The code that the students produced was of both a high quality and
quantity.
One of the students projects, the RFTS clone ruleset, is now one
of the most complete and popular of our games (rulesets). The student has
continued to help with its development and is now currently considering being a
mentor this year.
The other successful student made over 220 commits and produced 28,824 lines of
code, more than some of our other long term project members! He has developed a
ruleset editor which will make ruleset development significantly easier in the
future.
As well, the Open Source Office funded one student in a Summer of Code style
outside the program. The student successfully completed the project and we hope
the code will soon be rolled out.
Because of the success of our GSoC, our project has actively started to engage
with educational instit
I would recommend joining the mailing lists and joining us on IRC [irc://irc.freenode.net/#tp]. We are happy to help you interactively find interesting things to work on. We have also started a "Who's Who" page to help you track down the right person.
Most importantly, find something you are interested in! If you are interested in AI, then working on an AI client is a good idea. Like most FOSS, none of us are getting paid (unless you are lucky enough to be part of SoC:), hence doing something you like is important!
If you want to pursue the possibility of getting course credit for your work, I recommend finding a course councillor or senior lecturer who can help you to try and figure it out. We are happy answer their questions, fill out various paperwork and do other support tasks.
The effect on our project was really huge, not only did the students do some verycoolwork. We now have the creditability to approach Universities and help get their students involved with our project.
The auDA is extremely conservative in what they allow. This makes it really had to get domain names for things like OSS projects.
For example, I was unable to get thousandparsec.net.au or thousandparsec.org.au for my OSS project because there is no legal entity, registered trademark or similar associated with the project.
Slashdot Mirror
As the article mentions Google ended up funding a number of Gaming projects. There are a total of 7 game projects and 5 game related projects for a total of over 40 slots.
The following game projects have been accepted,
My own project Thousand Parsec got 8 slots for a number of critical features. One of the coolest is a 3d client, which should make the games much more interesting to look at.
We will also finally have a few more interesting games to actually play, including a clone of Risk in Space and a very interesting game called DroneSec. Finally, we should have some opponents for you to play against as 2 AI clients being developed for our premier RFTS ruleset.
Oh for those interested in Thousand Parsec specifically, since GSoC was announced we have made another release! (Plus the 0.3.1.1 Yay for releasing with major bugs release.)
The client is getting a heap more usable and we could really use people actually helping test the game! If you are a hardcore 4X game fan, I would highly recommend checking it out.
The original announcement was made on the Monday, March 31, 2008 at 2:04 PM, I posted this announcment to Slashdot at Wednesday April 02, @12:34PM (although in my timezone it was closer to 10:00am). Both are outside the fateful 1st of April. Yay to failing at reading dates.
I know I posted roughly this comment in the last GSoC Slashdot announcement but I've been told the information is really useful and some people might have missed it.
On the note about how GSoC effects our project you should take a look at our web stats since we where announced as a GSoC mentor organisation. The increase has been massive!
Google has been very good to the Open Source gaming community again this year, there are a total of 7 game projects and 5 game related projects.
The following game projects have been accepted,
The Summer of Code had a huge impact my own project, Thousand Parsec and I hope that it will again have a significant positive impact. GSoC 2007 helped us develop a number of core utilities that the main developers just would not have time to do. These projects should substantially increase the productivity of new contributors and lower the barrier to entry into development. The huge amount of web traffic brought to our website from just being a mentor organisation can clearly be seen in our web statistics.
This year we are planning to concentrate on improving the player experience. The two ways for achieving this is to create more full and interesting games (rulesets) and making the game clients more attractive and easier to access (such as a web-based client and improving the desktop client).
Out of the three students that where selected last year, two passed their final evaluations. The code that the students produced was of both a high quality and quantity.
One of the students projects, the RFTS clone ruleset, is now one of the most complete and popular of our games (rulesets). The student has continued to help with its development and is now currently considering being a mentor this year.
The other successful student made over 220 commits and produced 28,824 lines of code, more than some of our other long term project members! He has developed a
Google has been very good to the Open Source gaming community again this year, there are a total of 7 game projects and 5 game related projects.
The following game projects have been accepted,
The Summer of Code had a huge impact my own project, Thousand Parsec and I hope that it will again have a significant positive impact. GSoC 2007 helped us develop a number of core utilities that the main developers just would not have time to do. These projects should substantially increase the productivity of new contributors and lower the barrier to entry into development. The huge amount of web traffic brought to our website from just being a mentor organisation can clearly be seen in our web statistics.
This year we are planning to concentrate on improving the player experience. The two ways for achieving this is to create more full and interesting games (rulesets) and making the game clients more attractive and easier to access (such as a web-based client and improving the desktop client).
Out of the three students that where selected last year, two passed their final evaluations. The code that the students produced was of both a high quality and quantity.
One of the students projects, the RFTS clone ruleset, is now one of the most complete and popular of our games (rulesets). The student has continued to help with its development and is now currently considering being a mentor this year.
The other successful student made over 220 commits and produced 28,824 lines of code, more than some of our other long term project members! He has developed a ruleset editor which will make ruleset development significantly easier in the future.
As well, the Open Source Office funded one student in a Summer of Code style outside the program. The student successfully completed the project and we hope the code will soon be rolled out.
Because of the success of our GSoC, our project has actively started to engage with educational instit
It's great to see people interested in Thousand Parsec. There are quite a few ways to get involved in the project.
As part of the process of applying for the Summer of Code, we have started putting together an ideas list. We also have a TODO tracker on SourceForge which listed various tasks. There is also Getting Started page and development environment setup HOWTO's.
I would recommend joining the mailing lists and joining us on IRC [irc://irc.freenode.net/#tp]. We are happy to help you interactively find interesting things to work on. We have also started a "Who's Who" page to help you track down the right person.
Most importantly, find something you are interested in! If you are interested in AI, then working on an AI client is a good idea. Like most FOSS, none of us are getting paid (unless you are lucky enough to be part of SoC :), hence doing something you like is important!
If you want to pursue the possibility of getting course credit for your work, I recommend finding a course councillor or senior lecturer who can help you to try and figure it out. We are happy answer their questions, fill out various paperwork and do other support tasks.
As you have skills in C++ maybe looking at the C++ components like the C++ server, KDE C++ client and the C++ protocol library could also be a good start.
Look forward to seeing you around!
Thousand Parsec (a game framework for turn based strategy games) was one of the mentor organisations last year.
The effect on our project was really huge, not only did the students do some very cool work. We now have the creditability to approach Universities and help get their students involved with our project.
We already have one student working on Thousand Parsec as part of a high school internship and two students from the University of South Australia working on a Java MIDP client.
Thanks a huge amount to Google and the Summer of Code team, hopefully we can get in again this year and have even more fun!
What about Eve Online? http://www.eve-online.com/ That is getting closer to your description above.
The auDA is extremely conservative in what they allow. This makes it really had to get domain names for things like OSS projects.
For example, I was unable to get thousandparsec.net.au or thousandparsec.org.au for my OSS project because there is no legal entity, registered trademark or similar associated with the project.
There are also a bunch of other Open Source Game projects you can work on, here is a short list.
If you are interested in game programming you should give them a look.