Saturday, 6 June 2015

Got Selected for Google Summer of Code(GSoC) 2015


It is a bit late for the news, but my proposal "Terrain Engine for Generating Procedural Terrains" got selected by Copyleft Games in GSoC'15. It all started back in February 2015 when I was looking for a nice organization which can get me engaged in computer graphics and game development. Apparently Copyleft Games was the only organization which was involved in this and of course the C and Python programming language tags were one of the main attractions.

About GSoC:
It is a global internship opportunity for students that offers stipends to write code for FOSS projects. Through GSOC, accepted student applicants are paired with mentors from the organization, thus gaining exposure to real-world software development scenarios and other opportunities. In turn, the participating projects are able to more easily identify and bring in new developers.

About organization:
Copyleft Games is building a 3D cloud based game engine which will eliminate the hassle of downloading and installing games. It will also save a lot of memory and processing power of consoles and handhelds. Along with this, it will also promote the culture of multiplayer social gaming with its network libraries.  



About the project:
My main aim is to integrate an efficient terrain engine that will produce nice procedural terrains whenever needed. This will also call for a lot of optimization with level of details technique and polygon count reduction. Another important aspect of the project is texture mapping over the generated terrain. A terrain would not look complete with just a monotonous material over it. With just the right keywords, we can just change the type of terrain from hilly to plains, from mountainous to plateau, from forests to desert. This magic will be done by controlled pseudo random generators and terrain specific texture mapping and blending.

After all of this is done, the final stage of project will include some procedural tree generation. Well this would be a hard nut to crack, just reading the theoretical part of procedural tree generation will give you nightmares. Although I am quite excited to reach to that state, but still it is a long way to go.

About me:
I am an open source enthusiast and like developing 3D simulations and games. This is the first time when I am participating in GSoC and sadly the last time as I will be graduating within the next few months with no scope of higher studies for now. But hopefully I will continue my love for FOSS and keep contributing, or maybe mentor some of the projects in future.

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