Whaaaaaaaaaaaat ?!
Whyyyyyyyyyyyyy ?!

that's a really bad news indeed ! i bet that lot of stuff was in wait to find a studient that would do it, like maybe mission editor, or the construction mode, the game improvement, theme editor, and loooot of other idea that've been suggested in the past...

:'(

But, crying won't be a solution, so i ask : is there any other way to find some students, person, that would like to getinvolved in thoses kind of task ?

hope its just a bad and late april fool

Ah, 'tis a shame. Still hope there's room for GCI though.

Any idea why? I mean, it's not like we've declined in quality over the last year.

I have no idea... apparently there's an explanation meeting on #gsoc on Freenode on Friday, April 19, 2013 at 16:00 UTC . Perhaps it has something to do with hedgewars' apparently waning popularity (forums less active, fewer people on the server, depressing google search trends...).

Yeah, that makes sense... I do kinda miss when the forums were more active.

I guess Tiy leaving had something to do with the popularity drop, since news posts about new features and other things seem to have gone down since then. (One of the major reasons I want to eventually become a developer.)

I think the "declining popularity" theory seems rather unlikely.

Hedgewars had a brief spike in google trends due to a horrible re-release of another game a while ago combined w/ a rather good Armagon trailer. But that was a one-off.
There's no sign of any declining trend in download stats. Server activity levels remain as strong as they did last year.
Popularity of the game in places like the Ubuntu software centre is just as high as ever (right now is the #2 FOSS game, if you ignore libs/content packs/pay+closed games - just behind Wesnoth).

Whatever the reason was, I doubt it was that.

This doesn't mean all hope is lost, there's a small possibility of getting in under an umbrella org.

I have to concur with nemo on usage statistics. I've been monitoring usage statistics for a while, and despite a fairly low rate of retention the influx of new players has remained rather constant. However the number of players who play longer than a month has been in steady decline since around 2011, a fact with I attribute to the rise of highlander and random weapons.

Ah, shame to hear about GSoC. I haven't been tracking any stats, but the community areas (website and forum) do feel a little dead these days.

I came here just before 0.9.13 and fell in love with the game. Around that time things seemed really busy and exciting. Claymore was posting results of tourney matches, Tiy regularly uploaded gameplay previews of upcoming versions, and the forum was alive with shoppas arguing about their fastest rope times, people posting hats/maps/etc.

Now the main ‘life’ of the forum is the constant barrage of spam bots and n00b posting dumb image macros over everything.

I’m not sure a hundred percent sure, but I would hazard a guess to say our development around then might have been a bit more active as well. I mean at that time Tiy, Palewolf, Smaxx and Armagon were all kicking about. Updates were full of crazy, game-changing features. It was pretty easy for me to get into Hedgewars. It was a load of fun and the community appealed to me. I didn’t even think about really wanting to start contributing stuff until after I had been lurking around the forum for a long time. If I joined today the game would still be awesome, but I am not sure I would get the same impression as I did then.

If we want to keep newcomers and encourage new contributors, I think it would be good to take a hard look at the forum. Of course, not everything can be blamed here. Games get old, and Hedgewars is no exception. It is hard to keep adding stuff to a game without it becoming bloated, but I think there is still plenty of opportunity for new content. It’s just hard to find the time and people to enable that. :P

I think the changelog from last few versions contradicts the lack of game-changing stuff.
And mikade. heck, you should know that lua has become more powerful, and can do quite a bit of game-changing stuff.

I'm not terribly worried on that front, although, is true that list of stuff it is reallly missing is shrinking.

Sooo... OpenSUSE will give us a slot in the GSoC 2013. https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:GSOC_ideas#Hedgewars

It is not necessary to be sad...

Maybe. Not guaranteed.
And. Possibly more than one.

Thank you to the OpenSuse community! I would love to see the AI improvements.