As GSoC admin I get to write a summary of the Google Summer of Code, praise the students' works and give confetti away at the end of the program.

However for me this is the most difficult part of the job, I am at a loss for words for what the students have carried through this summer. We started really big when Google assigned even more slots than we could handle and, despite our best intentions, we settled with FIVE brilliant projects!

We had a really hard time picking the best(est) projects from some very good ideas that were submitted and among them we had some doubts about timing/deliverable feasibility. BUT, we accepted the risk and provided safe snorkeling masks and air tubes before the students dived in the code.

Four projects were successfully completed and it's showcase time!
- Android netplay
by Simeon "medo42" Maxein, mentored by xeli
Lots of GUI and API design involved with code portability issues and many several days of protocol analysis, this will help unify our configuration handling across our many platforms;
- A new campaign
by Szabolcs "belphagorr" Orbàn, mentored by mikade
an essential feature to have, coding skills as well as storyline writedown, maybe it's the last milestone before 1.0;
- Video Output Tool
by Stepan "Stepan777" Podoskin, mentored by unC0Rr
replay showcasting, with a neat Youtube uploader. A lot of new dependencies added by it will be interesting to see how the community uses this;
- WebGL port
by Meng "xymeng" Xiangyun, mentored by nemo
the Pandora's Box of coding, with an eyecandy demo.

Hi everyone,
let's interrupt the flow of GSoC updates for a special announcement!

If you hang around with us in IRC you've probably noticed that Xeli set up a nice buildbot system that automatically compiles the latest version of Hedgewars and checks if each commit breaks a particular configuration (not that it ever happened )

One of the amazing thing of our configuration is that we were able to setup a full platform check for Linux, Android, Windows and OSX (iOS might come up later on). Windows is compiled from unc0rr's machine through WINE while OSX is actually crosscompiled from Linux (yeah, we're officially in the club "I managed to crosscompile for Apple, yo!")

Today we bring this to a step further, nightly builds are available! Now our buildbot prepares some easy packages for every platform, so that you can live on the bleeding edge and try our new exciting features before official release! Getting some early feedback will help understand the community position on certain design decisions and also improve our release capabilities, by spotting and (hopefully) fixing bugs before an actual release.

So, don't waste any more time and head to http://xelification.com/nightly/

Koda

Insert standard disclaimer clause here: nighly software is completely untested and unsupported and might not play nice with your current profile, so make backups as always!

Hi all,
it's my great pleasure to finally announce the GSoC 2012 participants!

We've had around 70 single proposals and lots of activity in our IRC channel! Our participation in last year GSoC and GCI has granted us five slots!

So without further ado let me introduce the students that will acoompaign us throughout all the summer

• stepan777, mentored by Hedgewars author unc0rr, will create a demo converter tool that will simplify capturing live matches and sharing them with your friends or on Youtube;
• xymeng, mentored by our IRC icon nemo, will restructure most of the sources and prepare a full blown WebGL port to play this game on your browser;
• belphegorr, mentored by our Lua guide mikade, will bring a complete story campaign with training missions to add more flavour to this game and to teach newcomers how to play;
• medo42, mentored by our past GSoC student xeli, will complete the Android port writing the remaining customisations and a working client for online netplay;
• wolfgang, mentored by your source breaker koda, will rewrite the rendering pipeline to GLES2.0 for improved graphics performance on desktop and mobile.

The whole team would like to thank all participants for their time spent with us! It is always hard to select the best proposals from such high quality contributions that were sent in for this year GSoC: we hope that everyone has had a good time during the selection period and that everyone is going to hang around our crazy community!

Now let's send our congratulations to the five selected students and wish them good luck with their work! In the following days blogposts will appear to introduce them to the community and present their work in more detail.

We are in for an exciting summer!
Koda

A quick reminder to any applying student who wishes to participate in Google Summer of Code 2012 with the Hedgewars Project: you can submit your proposal until April 6th, 12:00am pacific time.

We will then take a two week break where we will further discuss and analyse each proposal with all the students. Make sure you use this time to improve your proposal with graphics and to fully join the development community, with your (active) presence in IRC and with patch submissions (optional but highly suggested).

Update: Thanks for all the attending students! We've got 73 applications, 2 more than last year! If you wish to edit your proposal, please contact the assigned mentor for it, only he can grant you editing powers.

The selected proposals will be published on April 23rd!
Good luck to every participant!

Hi everyone,
we've got some great news!
We've been accepted to Google Summer of Code for the second consecutive year! :D

The organisation page is already set up: http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/org/google/gsoc2012/hedgewars
In that page both mentors and students can apply after creating a Google Account.

Please don't forget to visit our GSoC portal at http://www.hedgewars.org/gsoc.html where you can read more about the general rules and about our proposal ideas.
As always for any question visit our IRC channel (#hedgewars on irc.freenode.net) or leave a comment in this blogpost

Good luck to all participating students (as well as mentors!)