Ideas 2012:Guichan and Pychan

Improvements to the FIFE GUI bindings: Guichan and Pychan

Our problem

One of FIFE's major dependencies is Guichan. In fact one of the python extensions for FIFE is written completely around Guichan.

The biggest problem is that Guichan is no longer in active development and we have uncovered a lot of bugs with Guichan+Pychan as a whole.

What we would like to do is take Guichan and make it an optional dependency for FIFE but still compile it as a shared library if users want.

This way we can maintain the code ourselves and fix bugs when we find them.

More importantly we can then add more functionality to Guichan and start supporting other GUI libraries.

Our idea

Some features we would like to see implemented, but not limited to are:

• Make Guichan an optional dependency for FIFE
• Rename Guichan and modify/rename Pychan to use the new library (we are open to ideas here)
• Fix some Guichan/Pychan tickets
• Add some new features

What you need

• Moderate python programming skills (must)
• Strong C++ skills (must)
• Ideas and features you want to implement (must)
• Finding problems and solutions to them independently (generally important)
• Experience working with autotools (bonus)
• Experience working with scons (bonus)
• Estimated difficulty: Hard

What we provide

• Guidance with all aspects of the task.

As a pre-GSoC task you could try some of the following:

• Fix some Guichan/Pychan tickets! Tickets can be found in the [FIFE Trac system] (http://trac.fifengine.net)

What we expect

You can shift around release goals and target dates in the planning stage as you like. Once your mentor and you agreed on a rough timetable, only light modifications should occur if there happens nothing unforeseeable.

• No milestones from our side. Propose some to your mentors!
• SoC Deadline: ... and you tested where possible that it does not break badly

What you can add

In general: If your mentor agrees, you can change almost everything in our descriptions. They are just meant to provide guidance if you are not sure where to start or which way to choose.

You are especially free to alter the following parts:

• More features
• Add additional support for another GUI library
  • for LibRocket, you could check [this FIFE ticket] (http://fife.trac.cvsdude.com/engine/ticket/558) and [the github repository of manuel] (https://github.com/manuelm/FIFE) who works on librocket integration right now
• Make a Guichan GUI WYSIWYG editor

Who looks after you

Your mentors for this task will probably be: vtchill, prock

These devs might also help out if your mentors are not around right now: helios, manuel