Dev:GoogleSoC/ApplicationForm

Administrators and Mentors

Please read: Some insights on Google Smmer of Code

Particiapnts please double check your link ID's!!!

• Administrator: Konstantin Dmitriev aka Zelgadis, LinkID: zelgadis
• Mentor: Carlos López González aka Genete, LinkID: genete
• Student: Diego Barrios Romero aka Eldruin, LinkID: eldruin ???
• Backup Mentor: Nikita Kitaev aka Nikitakit, LinkID: ???
• Backup Administrator: David Rylander aka Rylleman, LinkID: ???

Application form

Questions from http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/org/application/google/gsoc2012 (needs registration)

• Organization name:
  • Synfig

• Organization description:
  • Synfig is a free and open-source 2D animation software, designed as powerful industrial-strength solution for creating film-quality animation using a vector and bitmap artwork. It eliminates the need to create animation frame-by frame, allowing to produce 2D animation of a higher quality with fewer people and resources. Synfig is available for Windows, Linux and MacOS X.

• Organization home page url:
  • http://synfig.org/

• Main organization License:
  • GNU GPL v3 or later.

• What is the URL for your Ideas page?
  • http://synfig.org/wiki/Dev:GoogleSoC#Ideas

• What is the main IRC channel for your organization?
  • #synfig on irc.freenode.net
  • Comment: We keep logs at http://dooglus.rincevent.net/synfig/logs

• What is the main development mailing list for your organization?
  • http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/synfig-devl

• Why is your organization applying to participate in Google Summer of Code 2012? What do you hope to gain by participating?
  • We have a student contributing to the project. By participating to Google Summer of Code we want to get funding to let him dedicate full time to the project and complete one of the important features (see our ideas list).

• Did your organization participate in past Google Summer of Codes? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation.
  • Our organization have not participated in the past GSoCs.

• If your organization has not previously participated in Google Summer of Code, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)?
  • Yes, we did - 2008, 2010.

• Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now.
  • No, we do not.

• What criteria did you use to select your mentors for this year's program? Please be as specific as possible.
  • The individual selected for the mentor role should be highly-motivated, long-standing contributor of the project. He must have a very good knowledge of C/C++ and Synfig Studio program code (or it's specific area). It could be easily determined from the svn/git commit history (http://synfig.git.sourceforge.net/git/gitweb.cgi?p=synfig/synfig;a=summary) or Ohloh statistics (https://www.ohloh.net/p/synfig/contributors). He also must be a regular on IRC, wiki and forums (see previous http://dooglus.rincevent.net/synfig/logs/, http://synfig.org/Special:RecentChanges and http://synfig.org/forums/). Synfig is an animation program, so the selected mentor should know its common animation concepts. Carlos López González (aka Genete) is willing to be a mentor because he is complying with all these requirements: he is contributing to Synfig code since 2009, he is experienced with Synfig code (http://cia.vc/stats/author/Carlos%20Lopez), he is experienced in animation (http://www.youtube.com/user/Genete) and there is one more thing - he lives in the same city as the student and they already have direct meetings working on Synfig code.

• What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?
  • Participating student should provide this contact information (email, phone number, living address) to both mentor and administrator. We already have student willing to work on the particular project idea during SoC. That student already proved his capabilities by contributing the patches to the source code (http://cia.vc/stats/author/Diego%20Barrios%20Romero). As he lives in the same city as his mentor, the mentor will have the opportunity to visit him personally in case of his disappearance.

So the plan is: 1. If student not responses to mail for 3 days, then phone him personally. 2. In case of no response via phone - mentor visits student personally to specify the reason of student's absence. 3. In case of emergency situation leading to student unability to continue work on the project - report the accident to google soc.

• What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?
  • During the SoC we have one backup mentor. If active mentor become unavailable or unresponsive during the project period then project administrator contacts him by phone. At the same time backup mentor takes the place of absent mentor.

• What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?
  • Student and mentor have already met directly (offline) and have discussed their plans for development. The student is contributing to the wiki, participating in forum discussions and hangs on the IRC channel.

• Are you a new organization who has a Googler or other organization to vouch for you? If so, please list their name(s) here.
  •  ???

• Are you an established or larger organization who would like to vouch for a new organization applying this year? If so, please list their name(s) here.
  •  ???

Ideas

As we already have a mentor and a student defined, they chose a particular idea to work on:

Implement OpenGL render engine

You may notice that Synfig Studio is SLOW, making it practically unusable on hardware that is over 6 years old. The biggest reason for this is that all of the color calculations are done in floating point -- because Synfig Studio was built from the ground up with High-Dynamic-Range Imaging in mind. HOWEVER, this will not be the case forever.

Today's graphics processors are powerful and we want to speed up Synfig Studio by implementing the rendering via OpenGL.

First attempts for such implementation were made earlier (1), (2) and the first tests showed speed increase up to 14 times.

Unfortunately the person who initiated the development of the OpenGL branch was unable to continue development because of personal issues and the branch were abandoned.

We want to pursue implementing full OpenGL-powered rendering for Synfig Studio. That will result in faster redraw for the workarea during the animation construction and thus make a much better user experience. A good performance of the application during playback and screen redraw is vital for implementing other resource-consuming features like bones and sound support (we need close to real-time response for that).