All Students Passed!

Back in May we announced that three students would work on Tiled as part of the Google Summer of Code. Today I can say that all of them have successfully completed their projects, thanks most of all to their hard work and of course the efforts from their mentors and endless reviewing by yours truly.

Not only did they each pass their project, but also most of the changes they made are already merged in master and included in the current development snapshots. Check out the Tiled 1.1 Alpha and the follow-up Tiled 1.1 Alpha2 posts for more information about the new features.

I’d like to release Tiled 1.1 as soon as possible, but there remain a large amount of “small things” to be done as can be seen in the updated Roadmap. I am aiming for a release in early October.

Project Summaries

At the end of the GSoC, each student submits a link to a page detailing the work they have done. Here are the links to the pages submitted by our students, where they also included a few words about their experience:

• Ketan Gupta: General Improvements and Bug Fixes (mentored by Erik Schilling)
• Mohamed Thabet: Reusable Object Templates (mentored by me)
• Benjamin Trotter: Wang Tiles (mentored by Leon Moctezuma)

They have all really enjoyed participating in this program and working on Tiled, and have learned a lot of new things: from advanced Git operations (like interactive rebase) to becoming better C++ coders or working in a team. I’m really happy about this and of course I hope they will find time in the future to contribute to Tiled also outside of the GSoC program.

My Own Experience

It was a real pleasure to take part in this! The students have been generally motivated and fast learners, which unfortunately meant I was the bottleneck from time to time as I was struggling to catch up with code reviews. But in the end I think it went quite well.

This program has without a doubt also been very good for Tiled, with so much effort going into features I may have never gotten around to. It also showed clearly that Tiled is free software and is open to contributions from everybody (the recent devlog posts also show this by grouping the changes by author). Soon I want to stress that further by putting open bounties on certain issues with the extra money coming in through Patreon (check out the current goal).

Now I’m looking forward to attending the GSoC Mentor Summit in October, together with Leon. There we will meet up with hundreds of other mentors and will share our experiences, so we can make the next GSoC even better!

Thanks to Everybody!

Once more I would like to thank everybody who took part in this! Of course Google for making this possible, Leon and Erik for mentoring their students, and all students for seeing their projects through! And last but not least, thanks to all the people who are supporting Tiled development financially, because I would have never had time for this otherwise!

On to Tiled 1.1!