GSoC Ingame lobby

GSoC idea: Basic ingame lobby

Why

All existing Spring interfaces (lobbies) are either difficult to customize for game developers or have a different look and feel from the game itself and require focus switch from the game itself to operate.

What

All existing Spring interfaces (lobbies) are either difficult to customize for game developers or have a different look 'n feel from the game itself and require focus switch from the game itself to operate.

A new, Lua scriptable, lobby should be implemented with customization and control in mind, possibly integrated with spring codebase and/or running as a separate process overlaying the game's UI.

Optionally, the engine's start screen should be replaced and integrated with it.

Required skills

• Knowledge of C++
• Knowledge of Lua
• Knowledge of Lua API/C bindings
• Knowledge of basic OpenGL programming

Difficulty

Estimated: hard

Technical details

• ensure Spring can clean up properly
• ensure Spring can change mod during program runtime (requires that some singletons be converted to Spring's *handler pattern)
• The lobby API should reuse/be identical to spring's LuaUI where possible ( GL calls, access to game infos )
• to prevent Spring <-> lobby crash propagations they should run as separate processes, with lobby overlaying on top of Spring's UI, the only exception could be made for start screen.
• create a new Lua context or initalize current context earlier in the code and rewrite Spring's start interface using Lua scripting.

Possible Mentor(s)

FORUMLINK

Google_Summer_of_Code_2010