Welcome To Google Summer of Code and Atomic Blue!

Atomic Blue is a Non Profit Corporation with the mission to foster the growth of a community of developers skilled in developing multiplayer online role playing games. Our activity is divided in two areas:

  • building the PlaneShift Engine: an Open Source (under GPL) engine for Massive Multiplayer Online Worlds, and one of the few to be really usable and in production with thousands of users.
  • applying the engine to our major project the PlaneShift game

Our team is a distributed team of talented and motivated people, which share the same objective of building a great mmo engine and to see it in action.

How to proceed in your GSoC experience!

Hi, since the beginning of the program we have moved our main page for GSOC to a wiki, where we can more easily edit and expand the ideas.

Here are the next steps!:
1) Read our mission in the Atomic Blue web site
2) Read our PlaneShift web site and learn more about the game we are building
3) Review the ideas list below to get a feeling of what we want to implement
4) Connect to our GSoC wiki page for latest news and your next steps!

Ideas for Google SoC 2011!

This page holds ideas collected for Google SoC. They are divided in two sections, the one for which we have already a detailed description and some initial design, and the ones for which we just have a description. As soon as ideas get selected, we will document more also the second group.

For each idea you can find in parenthesis the complexity (easy, medium, hard) and the mentor name.

The program started, and we began to move this content to our Wiki site, to allow collaborative editing and addition of your ideas to the design documents.

Ideas with documentation

Economy

Tribes

  • Artificial intelligence for Tribes (composed of various tasks from medium to high)

Statistics

Sound

  • Sound System: improve the sound manager, make it more flexible and allow association of sounds to in game events, scripts, monsters actions.

GUI

  • GUI improvements. Includes improvements to the Help system, fixes to the interface, conversion to plugin. Enhancement to the Container System, and Crafting of books.

Ideas without documentation

Database

  • Database reconstruction: Optimise database with innodb triggers, rework of tables, new index, scalability and subdivision of data between different servers...(hard)

Networking

  • IPV4 TO IPV6: changing the code so it doesn't rely specifically on IPV4 or IPV6, allow to define various listen interfaces either IPV4 and IPV6. Remove network logic which can be left to system libraries. Conversion to plugin.(easy to medium depending on the parts which are picked up)

Effect Library

  • PSEFFECT: conversion to plugin and performance optimizations. Maybe adding support for 2d objects.(medium)

Server reliability

  • Unit Testing: Implement a basic unit testing framework for common server commands and actions. (Medium)

Entities Behaviour

  • Script additional NPC brains/types/behaviours. (Easy)
  • Improve pathfinding and combat AI. (Medium)

General

  • Hardcoding removal: Due to the fact the PlaneShift engine has been in development for years, unfortunately, it brings with itself some design faults which at the time allowed to speed up development but now are an hindrance and will require editing of the project source for deployment. The scope of removing hardcoding is moving all the resources previously in code (like skills, money specifications, interfaces, database tables design) in order to be data driven (at maximum script driven) and not anymore hard wired in the internals of the engine. This is actually a lot of sub works some bigger and more difficult and some more easy and fast to accomplish.(easy to hard)