As you know the gameplay Random Weapons has been a huge success and a lot of the games played on the server are played with Random Weapons.

This has rendered a lot of complaints in the IRC channel when people have tried to play a default game, but have only found rooms with Random Weapons. The same problem has occurring long before Random Weapons, namely shoppa games. Though I have personally tried to eradicate all shoppa related code from the game, it has still not been possible to stop people from making their own schemes and weapon sets resulting in us being powerless.

In retrospect I realize that by making Random Weapons I made something that would go out of control and this is what have happened. But this time it is controllable, we can end this terror. With the next release we will remove the gameplay Random Weapons so that the server will be a pleasant place again.

We have also set up guidelines on making new gameplays so that this will not happen again.

To GSoC applicants

It is so fun to see that so many are interested in working on Hedgewars during the summer. As it gets a bit hard to keep track of you all on irc we have decided to create a designated forum for you. This forum is for you to elaborate and discuss your ideas with us and each other, but it will be viewable by everyone. So create an account if you do not have any and send me or koda a pm, ask us on irc or include your account name if you are writing to our mailing list to get access. I will add you if I recognize your nick so you might already be registered.

I also want to say that being active and talking to us on irc will make you that more interesting to us. And submitting a small patch is also a good way to gain our confidence (see the Bug Tracker).

To Hedgewars players

Sorry for all the bureaucracy, it will probably not be to much of that after this week when we have been appointed GSoC students. I want to redirect your attention to the tournament (scroll down). There is 11 days remaining until the sign up ends so be sure to sign up. And remember to vote on what type of elimination you want.

Hedgewars has been selected to be part of Google Summer of Code 2011!

Thanks to Battle for Wesnoth and SDL for vouching for us!

What is he talking about?

If you do not know what Google Summer of Code is, you have probably not been active in the community for a while or just came to the site. GSoC is organized by Google (duh) and is an initiative for students to be able to code for open source projects and get money at the same time. More information here: http://www.google-melange.com/

So if I am an applicant...

Then you can start by going to http://hedgewars.org/gsoc.html and look at the information there, especially the ideas list. But you can also look around the forums and you should talk to us on IRC. And to get some knowledge and inspiration please download and play the game, there is always people playing on the official server. We hope to see you around. If no one would be available on irc you can send us a message on the mailing list (see the GSoC pages).

But if I am just...

If you just tune in the see if 0.9.16 has been released I am sorry to say sorry. But why not consider applying for GSoC as a student? But if you are only interested in playing, then there is good news anyway. Because hopefully we will have students that complete their projects and contribute to Hedgewars, maybe a new weapon, a game mode, better AI or any other of our ideas or something completely new. And be sure to take good care of the students!

The unofficial GSoC greeter,
Henek

PS:
This is my first blog post, hope I did well.