GSoC 2011 - introduction

[Józef Kucia]

Hi,

My name is Józef Kucia. I'm a Masters student in Computer Science at
Wrocław University of Technology in Poland. I would like to apply for
Google Summer of Code this year.
I have a good knowledge of C and OpenGL. I also have limited
experience with Direct3D and win32 programming.
With regard to the Wine project, I'm familiar with the project from user
perspective. I used to run some applications in Wine on my Gentoo
Linux box, mostly games to be exact. Unfortunately, I haven't made any
previous contributions to the Wine project, except submitting two small
patches recently.
I have read your project ideas for GSoC, and I am primarily interested in
projects related to Direct3D. Nevertheless, I'm open to other projects.
I would appreciate any suggestions or comments.

Thanks,
Józef Kucia

[Matteo Bruni]

Il 09 marzo 2012 23:41, Józef Kucia  ha scritto:
> Hi,
>
> My name is Józef Kucia. I'm a Masters student in Computer Science at
> Wrocław University of Technology in Poland. I would like to apply for
> Google Summer of Code this year.
> I have a good knowledge of C and OpenGL. I also have limited
> experience with Direct3D and win32 programming.
> With regard to the Wine project, I'm familiar with the project from user
> perspective. I used to run some applications in Wine on my Gentoo
> Linux box, mostly games to be exact. Unfortunately, I haven't made any
> previous contributions to the Wine project, except submitting two small
> patches recently.
> I have read your project ideas for GSoC, and I am primarily interested in
> projects related to Direct3D. Nevertheless, I'm open to other projects.
> I would appreciate any suggestions or comments.
>
> Thanks,
> Józef Kucia

Hi Józef, and welcome!

Don't worry about not having contributed to Wine in the past, it's not
important. Also, the patches you sent in the last few days make
perfectly sense to me i.e. it shows you understand the code.

About the project... that's the hard part. As Stefan wrote to another
student interested in 3D-related GSOC projects, most of the missing
stuff in wined3d is either too small or too big/hard for GSOC. We
typically suggest to "newcomers" to just pick a game of their choice
and make it run correctly on Wine, but that's not going to work for
GSOC, essentially because you don't know how difficult it would be
until you do it, while accountability is an important prerequisite for
a project. So, while you can still try to follow this route, you'd
need to figure out NOW what you'll be going to do during the project.
Maybe implementing some easy pieces of d3d9ex or d3d10 (assuming there
really are easy pieces to be done, I haven't really looked) is a
possible alternative, but, again, hard to say.

May be simpler to make a project out of d3dx9. There are still quite a
few functions/object without an implementation and, at this point, a
few of them (I'm thinking about mesh, surface and font functions, for
example) are pretty much self contained. Probably you could choose an
interesting subset of those for a project.

Anyway, I'd suggest to look around in the code and/or Wine bugzilla
and see if you find something interesting. Then just post a proposal
of your own, we can adjust it if it looks too small or too big (it may
very well happen that something which seems simple at first sight
actually isn't, or even the other way around). You can also come by
#winehackers on freenode, to further discuss this.

[Stefan Dösinger]

Hi Jósef,
(I've CCed Danien since this is relevant for him as well)

I wanted to write an answer to your mail as well, but Matteo beat me to it :-)

First of all, do not hesitate to submit more than one proposal. This gives us 
more flexibility in selecting "compatible" proposals should we happen to 
select two or more proposals in the same code area(d3d in your case). 
Generally it is discouraged to have two gsoc projects that depend on each 
other because problems will occur if one student cannot complete his proposal 
for some reason.

Am Montag, 12. März 2012, 15:45:29 schrieb Matteo Bruni:
> Maybe implementing some easy pieces of d3d9ex or d3d10 (assuming there
> really are easy pieces to be done, I haven't really looked) is a
> possible alternative, but, again, hard to say.

d3d9ex(not to be confused with d3dx9) may be an option. We have thunks 
already, and a few implemented features. The remaining features is mostly a 
matter of writing tests and preferably finding apps that use them. Some 
features like screen rotation may require extra work in user32.dll and 
winex11.drv.