[Supertuxkart-devel] End of GSoC and future work

[Joerg H. <jo...@lu...>]

Hi all,

the "Google Summer of Code" is finally over - technically it ended last 
week with the announcement of the results, but real life has kept me too 
busy to send this email earlier :(

First of all a congratulation to your three students - hilnius, 
unitraxx, and cand. From our side of view you have all passed GSoC - so 
just make sure that you submit your code in time (I don't know the exact 
deadline), and you all should be fine.

All three students have done a rather excellent job: we have three 
branches with huge improvements waiting to be merged into the trunk.

- Cand added significant graphical improvements. On one side that made
   our artist samuncle very happy, on the other hand this will keep
   him busy, since now he has to improve all tracks to make use of
   the new features.
- unitraxx added an online lobby, allowing people to login, declare
   friends, and even store achievements. All in preparation for a full
   online experience ... which will keep our team busy ;)
- hilnius added networking support, allowing people to connect different
   computers and play against each other. The first online game was
   already played between Arthur and hilnius.

Also a big thanks to our mentors - Stephen, funto, and auria, who helped 
and supported our students. Your guidelines and experience was important 
to give us all the excellent outcome we had. A special mention also to 
Arthur, who was the go-to person on irc, tirelessly motivating our 
students, keeping them motivated with his puns, and acted as a tester.

I am aware that all of you are very keen to see the next improved 
version of STK, so here a brief overview of the things that will happen 
next:
- Arthur is already organising the 0.8.1 release. It will not include
   any GSoC work yet, but all the improvements and bug fixes that have
   been done in the months since the 0.8.1 release. Note that the main
   developers (esp. auria and myself) have not done very much work
   for that release, but we had important contributions from the
   community, esp.:
   - deveee who tireless fixed bug after bug, earning himself the title
     'Bug Fixer of the Year' ;)
   - Funto's and Yasin's soccer mode
   - using the bubble gum as shield thanks to johannesr1
   - filtering and sorting of addons thanks to unitraxx (contributed
     before he started working on stk)
   This is not supposed to be a complete changelog, I just picked those
   improvements to show our growing community.

- The next release will merge in cand's graphical improvements. This
   will require a fair amount of work on tracks to improve them. Samuncle
   has developed a new style for this, and he has started to create a
   great looking track following the new guidelines. This takes a huge
   amount of work (creating new textures, new models, ...), so any
   support here is appreciated.
   At this stage I am not entirely sure if this release will be called
   0.8.2, or 0.9. The latter would make more sense, since it will
   visually be a big change, on the other hand 0.9 was according to our
   milestones the online version (which would then need to be 0.10 or
   so). Well, numbering is not important - 0.XY it will be ;)
   While samuncle is quite keen on that version, the fully graphically
   improved version of stk might only arrive after 0.XY. I would be happy
   to release an early version with only one or two new tracks. We
   really want to have more artists working on STK, so showing off a
   glimpse of what STK can look like will hopefully motivate more
   artists.

- After that we will start working on the online mode in earnest. Even
   though thanks to GSoC we have a solid base to build on, there's still
   a lot to be done. We have to merge the work from hilnius and unitraxx.
   And while they did a good job, there is still a lot of testing and
   polishing to do. One important outstanding thing (which was not part
   of hilnius' task): hiding latency by using rewinding. Without this
   stk can be played with 'good' network conditions, but not reliably
   and fluently enough under real world conditions. At this stage we are
   not sure what 'good' conditions actually mean - LAN with cable only?
   LAN with wireless connections? WAN? A lot of things to test ;) And
   depending om time we might release some WAN-only networking versions
   before.
   Also, depending on features we want to include, we might also need at
   least one dedicated server for the lobby, and ideally to prevent
   cheating perhaps also dedicated online servers - though discussing,
   testing, and evaluating various approaches are the things that will be
   on our todo list over the next months.

Now, I will not present a timeline here. After all, STK is a hobby 
project for all of us, and delays do unfortunately happen. But for us it 
feels we are getting close to the long awaited 1.0 release. As always, 
we can use any help to speed things up - bug fixes, coding new features, 
testing, documenting, 2d / texture artists, 3d modelling, ... And we are 
happy to give anyone a hand with getting started. So, don't hesitate and 
contact us - either here on the list, or for more immediate answers on 
irc (#stk at freenode)


Cheers,
    Joerg