On Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 4:21 AM, Conrad Buck conartist6@gmail.com wrote:
Hello devels, I'm looking at submitting a SoC proposal to the wine project, but I'm feeling a little overwhelmed as my current coding experience is all over the place, and very little of it working with existing projects. My most recent work has been looking low-level code and algorithms behind basic OpenGL, so I thought perhaps I might be able to make relevant contributions to the project of testing and improving Direct3D support. Can anyone that knows more about whats under the hood for that sort of functionality in wine tell me what kind of magnitude of project I might be looking at? Only a limited number of bug reports have been filed, but all seem to be indicative of fairly major issues. Once I get more of an idea of what I might be dealing with (and examine some of the problems myself) I can fine-tune my proposal. Thanks, Conrad
Hi,
First of all welcome to Wine. Our Direct3D -> OpenGL code is quite complex and has a steep learning curve, so just hacking on Direct3D to improve big chunks of code isn't that suited. That said there is certainly work which you could do in the testing / bug hunting area.
For instance you could work on improving our test suite. Currently mostly Nvidia systems pass the tests. For a part this is due to driver bugs in the other drivers but some tests are also too strict and there might be some WineD3D bugs. You could fix broken tests, fix bugs in our Direct3D code found by the tests, you could add new tests and perhaps you could also improve the tests on Windows. If you want you might be able to fix some normal Direct3D bug reports as well (those will likely require new tests). It might be hard to write a good proposal though (especially judging whether you reached your goals might be hard).
Another form of testing which you could improve is our 'gaming' test suite in which performance in games is tested for regressions. I have never used those tests but according to Stefan the test suite can use improvements. Perhaps some visual tests could be added to them as well, to see if there are no visual regressions. Not sure how that should work but I guess you would need a mechanism for recording keyboard/mouse movements and playing them back, so that you reach fixed spots at which you can make screenshots for comparisons.
The two suggestions and some more info can also be found in a recent thread which can be found here: http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2010-March/082698.html http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2010-March/082707.html
Good luck writing a proposal and if you have questions just ask! Roderick