Google has just released the list with this year’s GoogleSummerOfCode accepted student projects. So it is time for us to welcome the following students on board at Ogre this year:

• Andrei Radu (andrei_radu) – mentored by Noam Gat (Noman) – will implementing several modern illumination techniques, that are either related to, or benefit from deferred shading. Most of these have been used in several shipped games, while a couple are still considered ‘bleeding edge’.
• John Soklaski (mysterycoder) – mentored by Mattan Furst (Mattan Furst) – will work on Dual Quaternion Skinning which addresses problems commonly associated with the linear blend skinning of animations such as skin collapsing. This technique utilizes dual numbers to extend quaternions to represent both rotation and translation. This allows for an efficient representation of the transformations and for application of low-cost linear blending.
• Riley Adams (Praetorian) – mentored by Assaf Raman (Assaf Raman) – will build a visual unit testing framework. Traditional unit testing doesn’t help much in a context like OGRE, given the sheer size and heavy dependence on graphics API’s. The best way of doing tests without needing significant modifications or mock rendersystems, appears to be a visual solution, wherein test screenshots are compared between builds.
• Martin Holas (kuxv) – mentored by Steve Streeting (sinbad) – will implement Terrain paging improvements to the Ogre::Terrain component. The project will bring new paging strategy which will try to be more accurate using actual terrain shape visibility from camera.

A big thank you to everyone who applied for a slot this year, but unfortunately had to be turned down. We only have a limited number of spots assigned by Google as well as only a limited number of possible mentors that can pull off the task. Nontheless, we are very grateful for all the great ideas you chipped in and the good discussions that took place. And of course: You are still very, very welcome to tackle your idea, even if not as a GSoC project. Anything from simple patches to huge code base additions are most certainly welcome all the time! If you have any question, feel free to contact us…and apply again next year.

Another big thank you goes out to our mentors who have offered (again) to share their time and expertise to support the projects as good as they can to make it another successful GSoC year for Ogre!

So thanks to all that are involved and best of luck to all participating students!