March 27, 2014

Google Summer of Counting Proposals

The proposal period for students is now over, and we are currently in the process of reviewing them. Anyone want to guess how many we got? One more than last year, which brings us to the round number of 80!

The very first proposal were submitted 10/03 at 21:40:09 UTC (yes I am doing the only sensible thing which is writing in the format of DD/MM HH:MM:SS), and the last one 21/03 at 18:59:04 UTC. The latter, for the observant among you, is just 56 seconds before the deadline! I don't want to comment on proposal quality yet, but I would say it's about the expected.

 
Students have been fixing some bugs and implementing some minor features, among them some more achievements. Also parachutes got some more fine-grained values so you should no longer experience the issue where they seem to hang on to you forever at some speeds. AI doesn't waste cakes any longer if it is driving too slow. In the multi-player kart selection screen each player name is now coloured the same as the selection border, also thanks to a student.

There are more new features, among them better saving/resuming Grand Prix support, but I can't go into every small little detail or I'd copy + paste commit logs, so I'm just going to leave this here: thanks a lot for your contributions! Even if you don't get selected as a student this year (we only have room for a very limited number), I hope you will feel good about helping us out and if you want to continue doing that, please be our guest! However you'd most likely have to figure most out on your own as mentors will be rather occupied for a while, but we always try to support anyone wishing to contribute to the game.

Good luck to everyone; hopefully you've had a pleasant time so far, and we'll do our best to ensure you'll continue to have a good time throughout the summer and beyond if you wish. :)

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