GSoC 2017 Ideas

Even though it's still unclear whether SuperTux will be accepted into GSoC 2016, this page should serve as a list of potential ideas for students. This is not an exact plan, and changes can be proposed. The page can also be used to coordinate mentor assignments.

Multi-Player

A long-requested feature from the user community is having two people (or even more) playing the game. An old patch implements the basics such as multiple instances of the player and multiple input devices, but it does not affect the camera. The plan would be to either repeat this more effectively (the patch mentioned is now out of date) or implement split-screen display, preferably in a way that also allows it to be used for cutscene animations such as pulling a switch.

Possible mentors: Tobbi

Web application

The current implementation of our add-ons system as a simple addons repo hosted on GitHub isn't really flexible or friendly to normal users who just want to submit add-ons. This is why a better solution should be made.

This project includes writing a web application that allows admins (and later on, users) to easily manage the add-ons that are available in the game's add-on manager. This web application should also provide a stable API for accessing add-ons from within the game's add-on manager.

For future goals, this service could be opened so that users can easily contribute own levels and add-ons using either the in-game level editor (if available) or flexlay.

Possible mentors: maths22

Font improvements

Our current font system is using png images containing the glyphs. This has proven to be hard to maintain and hard to understand for contributors, and has bugs in right-to-left languages and isn't able to properly display Arabic.

The plan is to move to a TTF rendering library such as SDL_ttf or HarfBuzz/FreeType and integrate it into the game.

Possible mentors: Mathnerd314

In-game level editor

Since removing the in-game level editor in favor of the external ones, players have complained about level editing being hard, and even the developer team has had problems with running the editor on their computers, mostly due to portability issues.

As such, we'd like to re-introduce an in-game level editor. Work has started at #269 but it is far from being finished

Possible mentors: Hume2

OpenGL ES support

Update our opengl renderer option to be able to support OpenGL ES. This would make running SuperTux on lower-spec devices more fluent, with more fun for the player. Graphics skills are required for this task.

Wiimote support

SuperTux does not currently support WiiMotes; this project would implement support, using the popular Wiiuse library.

Water Physics / Sliding Physics

Penguins swim quite frequently, but there has not been any swimming in SuperTux so far. This project would add buoyancy and possibly some fluid simulation to SuperTux, allowing Tux to swim as well as any other penguin. Ideas for swimming are here. Also interesting would be the ability to slide down slopes and jump off ramps. Both of these would entail adding support for oriented bounding boxes to the collision detection system.

Possible mentors: Mathnerd314