Heya,

we still try to give feedback on a way more regular basis, so here comes right another update. It has already been two weeks since our last entry!

Merging master

In case you remember me writing about the new tile set structure: it is still under development. Because we want to release UH 2011.1 anytime soon, we merged all features of the dev branch into master (with the old maps still being playable there) and plan to fully implement the new tile set in 2011.2.

The only bugs we found so far with the merge were related to the boat builder, which is a rather nice quota for merging more than 200 commits into a branch that had its own commits in many files as well. We would like to encourage anybody: Please test and report bugs you encounter, else we possibly cannot fix them!

Replacing content that's not free enough™

Who has not fiddled around with this funny, funny topic of licensing? Sometimes it just is not enough to willingly fulfill all conditions the creator asks for through the license — it's still considered not free by distributions we would love to see UH packages shipped with.

In our particular case, the whole bunch of animated human units is affected (provided by Reiner's tileset which is covered by his own Freeware license). We even consider a separate "very free" release version of UH with fancy black CC0-boxes instead of cute podgy inhabitants. This might attract contributors if they *really* see what we are missing.

Opinions welcome: Would you appreciate such an additional release version or do you see it as unnecessary workload?

Another issue comes up with our sounds. There are a few sound effects which we sampled from tracks obtained through freesound.org. Sadly, their CC-Sampling+ won't make it into Debian, so we need replacements here, too. hazure was kind enough to put the work we use under CC-BY-SA 3.0 as well, but I fear that not everybody is that lucky. Props for doing us this great favor!

Google Summer of Code 2011

Now on to the most important news of this entry: We decided to apply for this year's Summer of Code. What are our expectations? Well, of course we hope to get accepted, gaining new coders and trying our best to keep them with our project after GSoC ended. But even if the application is not successful, we still made ourselves clear what we would like to work and be worked on in the next rough 6 to 9 months.

The preparations for applying are a rather large task and I work on this for almost three weeks now. Collecting and sharpening ideas for our students, preparing mentors for their task and setting up the overall infrastructure is nearly finished by now. The current plans are to set us a limit of four student applicants at most. We are a small organisation and as such won't try to take care of ten students. It is simply not going to work – and not fair to mentors and mentees alike if there is not enough time to properly answer questions and be a guidance ;-)

If you by any chance are interested in working with us this summer (and longer of course): Visit us on IRC, introduce yourself, try to get familiar with the tools we use and you are likely to be recognised when it comes to selecting students. A good start for that would be the next public meeting in our channel, which is currently scheduled for Sunday 14:00 UTC+0.

So … coming to an end, I'll just copy several old lines and add something new:

Not only are graphic artists needed, even playtesting users, evolving into professional bug hunters, are of invaluable help. For new features, we also need requests and thoughts about how they could look like. Feel free to throw anything in our channel or bugtracker – and be assured that we will evaluate it!

Help wanted:

• 3D-modelling, urgent need ;-)
• playtesting and balancing, can be done by everybody
• animation, human models

Of course, if you are an interested programmer or have something different in mind, we can also make use of anything you work on – we are not only open to students that want to join the team! If you are a C++ developer, you might also consider lending our engine FIFE a helping hand. We directly profit from any performance gain.

Regards
Your team of Unknown Horizons