One week ago GCI ended!

Why am I announcing it one week later? We needed rest!
For two months we've been literally swarmed by GCI students who needed to be mentored and helped, but we didn't expect such a successful invasion of new contributors!

So now that we gained our strenght back, let's sit down and think about our experience.

We proposed 150 different tasks, mentored 110 and completed successfully 65! Not too bad, I must add! Some of the tasks regarded documentation or wiki, but a relevant portion of them consisted of writing some actual code! You are going to see a lot of neat interface improvements in .18 as well as two new languages.

In the following days we will go through the submitted work and double check we didn't forget anything! In the meantime we prepared a new wiki page that contains all the tasks left, useful for some future projects or for beginners' contributions.

So in the end was it worth it? I've got different feedbacks from the mentors: some said it was too tiresome and didn't add much, others said that it was nice to help the kids and that there is the possibility of having long time contributors...

In the end, even though it required a lot of effort, we've taught students what is opensource and how to work in a real world team.
And that's what GCI is all about!

A BIG THANK YOU FROM ALL THE HEDGEWARS TEAM TO EVERY PARTICIPATING STUDENT

AND A WARM HUG FROM THE GCI ADMINS TO ALL THE MENTORS THAT MADE THIS POSSIBLE!!

Koda

SOPA RULES!

In case it wasn't clear, Hedgewars participated in the anti-SOPA strike, that took place all over the Internet on January Wed. 18th (a date to remember).

We are obviously against such anticompetitive and censoring legislations, but we yesterday we presented what could happen in a SOPA'd world by replacing all the homepage content with SOPA RULES messages.

If you want to understand more and know what you can do against it, please visit http://americancensorship.org/ or http://www.mozilla.org/sopa/ or http://vimeo.com/31100268 or http://sopastrike.com/

...we just destroyed the Googlecode repository!

This should be no problem for normal users and for contributors; however developers with commit access are *highly* invited to either clone again the main repo or, before doing any operation on their sources, run

hg pull
hg strip da1e7fe7cff7

HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM THE HEDGEWARS DEVTEAM

How time does fly!
This has been an hectic week, with floods of questions and warmining newcomers!

From having almost non existant documentation and guides, we now have...
- A wonderful IRC guide: http://www.hedgewars.org/node/3421 by Andor Uhlar
- Documentation about how we store files by Jacob Bundgaard
- A complete research for possible future configuration files by Tristan Hume
- Nice wiki articles about creating a scheme and a team and multiplayer by jerryma1121
- A new tutorial about Ropeing by Patrick Nielsen
- A list of amazing reviews about us by Jacob Bundgaard http://hedgewars.org/node/3430
- A written tutorial about Highlander mode http://www.hedgewars.org/node/3413 by Samuel
- A full check on our first 100 bugs, by jerryma1121
- An updated Wikipedia page by jerryma1121: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedgewars

But we also have updates to our codebase!
- Neat transtions between menus by Anthony Granger
- Translation of the iOS port to Spanish by Ángel Alonso, to French by Rom le Clair, to Polish by Kamil Pilarski

Right now we have 16 closed tasks, 12 in-progress tasks, over more than 130 available tasks for everyone to enjoy!

Woooo :D

You read it right! I've just got news that we've been selected for GCI 2011, the Google sponsored compotetion for young students (13-17).

What makes it different from Google Summer of Code is that we don't have a few students working on a single long term coding project, but we are going to have A LOT of students carrying out A LOT of tasks about A LOT of topics!

What tasks do you ask? You can check them out here: http://www.hedgewars.org/gci2011.html (also available from the new top link that replaced the GSoC one). Note that only half will be available from the start.

As you can see everyone can join in! With more than 80 tasks of varying difficulty we've got projects for future PRs, translators, documentation writers as well as for coders!

So GCI for students officially will start on November 21st, you can start reading up some of the task proposal and, why not, even suggest a few more as we still have some time before submitting our tasks!

Exciting times leads ahead of us and I hope everyone will have his share of fun in this next amazing adventure!

Koda