Hi, I filled out application materials to volunteer as a mentor on the google site, but apparently I should have sent that here instead:
My name is Damon Loren Baker. I use and develop with Blender as part of the courses I teach at NYC College of Technology where I am the Emerging Media Technologies Program Director and Assistant Professor of Interactive Entertainment. We use Blender heavily in our classes (My Interactive 3D Environments Programming and Interactive Audio for Games and Simulations courses are taught entirely using Blender Game Engine and several students in my lab are developing blender games using the oculus rift, kinect and leap motion interfaces) and I would like to contribute back to the project by mentoring students if possible for GSoC. My main areas of interest are in the game logic/game engine and Audio sections. I'm familiar with Python and C development with Blender and I also have a background in digital audio programming/signal processing (I do most of my work in Games/AR/VR/Human Computer Interaction with Virtual Worlds these days but my graduate training was originally in computer music and spatialized audio specifically.). . Of the proposed projects these are the ones that I would be most useful as a mentor for: Group propertiesAt the moment working with group instances can be rather bothersome if a user wants to have per instance properties. In other words, it would be nice to define a set of properties for a group object that each instance could change. At the moment, this type of behavior can be emulated with a Python script, but it gets rather clunky. Having a clean way to do this via the logic/property UI would be much nicer. -Moguri<http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Moguri>Cleanup Blenderplayer Command Line Argument ParsingThe Blenderplayer's parsing of command line arguments is currently very picky and prone to breaking, and adding more command line options can be a bit painful. Instead, we should take advantage of a library such as one listed on this Stack Overflow page<http://stackoverflow.com/questions/865668/parse-command-line-arguments>, or BLI_args, which is used by Blender. The BGE already has Boost as a dependency, so Boost.Program_options is an option. This project would also involve adding some more command line arguments for controlling audio options, anisotropic filtering, and possibly others. -Moguri<http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Moguri>Using blender as game engine/level editorThe target of this project is to utilize blender as a game development tool for external engines. To get an idea what blender should be used for, have a look at other game engine tools like the UDK or CryEngine toolset. The outcome of this project should be either a usable editor for a specific engine or a very good document on how to use blender like this, focusing on the actual implementation and showing samples for some imaginary non-existent game engine. Examples of features and important things to think about: adding a RenderSettings.engine (next to Blender Internal, Cycles and Blender Game) to select the game engine and change the UI elements to what is used for the engine; level editing tools, for example setting entities and their properties; necessary exporters for levels, game engine models, etc; baking of light-/shadowmaps and similar for the asset pipeline of the game engine; and many more! -neXyon<http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:NeXyon> Audio Contact: neXyon <http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:NeXyon> - Playback manager - A class/interface that can handle multiple sounds being played back with different categories assigned (e.g. voice, music, background noise, notifications, etc.) where each category can be controlled. Useful for the game engine for example to easily pause/stop all sounds and adjust volume levels of different categories. - Binaural audio: 3D audio with headphones, using HRTFs (head-related transfer functions) - Environmental audio: different sound modifications (filters, reverb, etc.) which are spatially dependant on sound source and listener position. For example a gunshot in a tiled bathroom sounds different than in a room with sound absorbing walls. - Dynamic music: a music playback interface which can change the music based on some user-defined flags. For example: a game has some random background music while the player runs around and then he starts fighting against a bunch of enemies and the music gets more exciting. This interface should then use predefined loopable music samples and transition nicely between them changing the mood of the background music according to the action that is currently going on. - Random sounds: repeating sounds all over again sounds boring and is easily noticed by the player (for example footsteps) so this functionality should add a list of sounds to the sound actuator instead of a single one, with the ability to choose sounds randomly or sequential when it is triggered. - Reverberation - Back- and front-ends (libogg, libvorbis, alsa, pulse, Windows and OSX backends) - Plugins (including plugin architecture) - Filters On Sun, Mar 2, 2014 at 4:44 AM, Ton Roosendaal <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi all, > > People who like to mentor a student can now apply here: > http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/homepage/google/gsoc2014 > > Mentors should be proficient with (a part of) Blender code, and preferably > in a module team. We also expect them to be able to do code reviews for the > student's work, and assist on merging or integration. > > Reward: our gratitude, and 500 USD from Google. :) > > Additionally - mentors should check on the ideas page, if this is still > valid. > http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/GoogleSummerOfCode/2014/Ideas > > (Note - this is not a feature request page! Only add ideas if you know > there's someone in the team who'll mentor it). > > Thanks, > > -Ton- > > -------------------------------------------------------- > Ton Roosendaal - [email protected] - www.blender.org > Chairman Blender Foundation - Producer Blender Institute > Entrepotdok 57A - 1018AD Amsterdam - The Netherlands > > > > _______________________________________________ > Bf-committers mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers > _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
