Well, this is a surprise. My hit PAotH comics are now going to be posted on the Front Page!

For those of you who don't know: PAotH is about hedgehog astronauts seeking to explore the cosmos, a goal constantly hindered by their incompetent staff. Moon, the head of the Planetary Association of the Hedgehogs (PAotH) and the carefree, clueless astronaut-in-training Star are forced to endure a series of outlandish adventures, each less plausible than the last.

You can read all the comics here or here.

(Oh, and for those of you that are curious, new comics should be coming this weekend.)

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.

Greetings to all!

I'm glad to announce that the campaign (A Classic Fairytale) is pretty much finished. Anyone who doesn't wish to wait until the next release, or wants to help in hunting down bugs is welcome to try it out via the clone set up at http://code.google.com/r/szabibibi-campaign/

There are 4 endings in total, none of them are good or bad, and 9 and a half missions (9 actual missions and an ending cinematic). So, for the more curious individuals out there, the campaign gains some replay value. The story is mainly influenced by the choices made, not so much by the performance (although the latter does have minor effects).

Should any bugs be found, please describe them as thoroughly as possible in the comment section and I'll make sure to fix them.

That's it, I hope you'll like it!

UPDATE: the campaign is now available in the official repository. Also, the clone has been moved here: http://code.google.com/r/szabibibi-campaignn/

The three months' coding for GSoC has ended and I'm proud to say that I've achieved the main goals in my project proposal. The final product is here:

http://hedgewars.org/hwjs/hwjs.html

In fact, when I started the project, I didn't have much idea about how well it would go. The tools I was going to use were not mature so it was hard to predict how many obstacles I might encounter. Fortunately, the developers in the channel, especially my mentor nemo, offered a lot of help so that I could proceed in the right direction. And finally, it turns out to be very successful.

I will still hang around in the channel and maintain the web port, though I won't be as free as in the summer vacation. There are still a few things to be done, probably also a project idea for next year's GSoC

1. Pas2C is not completely worry-free. I need to patch a few places in the generated sources. But luckily, most of the issues have been addressed;
2. AI is running in main thread and may not be as "smart" as the native version. Using web worker or reworking the AI code could solve the problem;
3. Optimize math operations (esp. Rope);
4. Write a html frontend;
5. Add multiplayer for the web version (this could be fun!);
6. Add sound. This is not hard since sound files are not critical, but loading them when needed may also degrade the gaming experience (if you have a slow network). Preload all or load on-the-fly, that's the hard choice.

Finally, thanks to all developers and GSoCers working for hedgewars!

xymeng

Hi all!

Here is another one of my not-so-frequent posts about my GSoC project.

One of originally planned features of my project that is now implemented is YouTube uploader. It allows you to upload any of recorded videos to YouTube in just several clicks. Maybe it is not so important feature, because you always can go to youtube.com and upload it, but still nice to have this uploader in game.