SummerOfCode

Google Summer of Code 2009

GSoC 2009 has finished.

List of projects

The following projects were accepted for GSoC 2009:

Wine and the Google Summer of Code

Beware of Legal Requirements

You must state that you will follow these minimal legal requirements during the SoC (and have done so in the past):

  • You are not allowed to read or reuse Windows source code (leaked source / Windows Research Kernel* / ...)

  • (* we are following the SFLC's advice)

  • You are not allowed to reverse engineer Windows files by disassembling or decompiling them

  • You are not allowed to analyze Windows files with the trace functions of Wine

Ideas

Your own idea

Possible mentors: We'll provide you with the appropriate mentor

  • If you have an idea, please post it on Wine Developers mailing list so we can help you with your idea and find out if it's realistic or not. Showing initiative and willing to discuss your idea greatly improves your chances of getting accepted. Even more so than taking one of the ideas below.

  • As long as you work hard and interact with the community and your mentor in a positive and constructive way you don't have to worry about not meeting all your goals.

Graphics - implement DOS graphics modes more faithfully

Possible Mentors: DanKegel

  • Many DOS games use video modes that Wine's VGA implementation does not yet support (see e.g. bugs 2408, 15390, 15570, and 15688). It should be relatively easy to improve this situation (and fun, since most of the testing is playing classic games...)

  • Update: Jeremiah Flerchinger and Peter Dons Tychsen have done a bit of work on this.

Tools - Merge winecfg and control panel

Possible Mentors: DanKegel

  • Wine has a control panel, but it doesn't come with many pre-installed applets.

  • Wine's winecfg tool is a kind of control panel, but it only handles its own hardcoded applets, not real control panel applets. Why not? Let's unify them.

  • Looks like pure_evil at mail.bg has gotten started on this; he's got a script that splits winecfg apart into control panel applets...

  • Owen Rudge split out the Desktop Integration tab into its own control panel, but it hasn't been merged with WineHQ yet. (See here.)

Tools - Implement new control panel applets

Possible Mentors: We'll provide you with the appropriate mentor

  • Basic 3D and screen resizing (tests X 3D drivers via OpenGL from Wine, or verifies that Wine was compiled with OpenGL support)

  • Current network IP addresses, see IPaddress for inspiration

  • List of fonts, see FontPage for inspiration

  • An Internet Explorer control panel. This could set the default home page, configure proxy settings, allow you to manage certificates, and more.

Theming - Implement Wine GTK/QT theming support

Possible Mentors: ReeceDunn or RoderickColenbrander

Windows XP improved theming support in Windows with support for skinning controls with bitmaps, alphablending, shadowing and other forms of eye-candy. Theming support was achieved by shipping new versions of comdlg32/comctl32 with Windows which under the hood use uxtheme.dll for reading theme files (.msstyles file).

Wine has theming support using uxtheme and except for some rendering bugs and performance issues (especially when using alpha blending or a lot of bitmaps) the code is starting to become usable. Tne next step in theming would be a way to use GTK/QT themes in Wine. The path which needs to be taken for this is to write an external tool which can convert GTK/QT themes to .msstyles ones since GTK/QT can't be used in Wine. The end-result of this project would be a tool which can be used to give Wine apps a GTK/QT look.

Some info about XP theming can be found here along with a sample theme project.

DirectInput - Implement missing DirectInput8 features

Possible Mentors: MarcusMeissner

  • Implement DirectInput8 specific features, e.g. ActionMapping and Enumeration by Semantics. This allows application specific mappings of specific actions to specific keys/buttons/whatever. A sample game that requires this is Rally Trophy by JoWood games, which includes a demo.

Direct3D - Implement missing D3D9_xx DLLs

Possible Mentors: RoderickColenbrander

  • D3D comes with lots of numbered DLLs (e.g. d3dx9_36). These aren't as mysterious as they sound. They contain utility functions to make life easier for developers. For instance they contain math functions, functions for loading bitmaps, compiling shaders and much more. These days matrix math and some other parts have been implemented but most functionality is still missing. The work would consist of adding missing functions (I would choose a few simple demos or games and get those working) and writing behavioral tests to verify that the functions work correctly. It probably wouldn't be too hard to support the ones lots of games use, see D3DX

Direct3D - Implement Vertex / Pixel shaders using NV_vertex_program* / NV_fragment_program*

Possible Mentors: StefanDoesinger

  • Currently Wine implements 1.x shaders using GL_ARB_vertex_program/GL_ARB_fragment program and later versions using GLSL because the ARB extensions don't offer functionality behind 1.x. GLSL allows us to implement all SM2.0/3.0 support but it isn't used in entirely the same way as Direct3D e.g. in GLSL a vertex and a pixel shader are grouped together whereas on Direct3D they can be set independently. has various limitations (e.g. compiling / linking at runtime) which can cause major performance issues. Nvidia has their own GL_NV_vertex_program/_fragment_program extensions which are compatible to the GL_ARB_*_program ones and they even extended them to shader model 4.0 (GL_NV_fragment_program2 for 2.0, GL_NV_fragment_program3 for 3.0 and so on). The use of these extensions on Nvidia hardware (the S3 drivers offer them too) would take away some of the performance limitations and might even improve performance since D3D9 provides us with assembler and these extensions also use assembler instead of a high level language like GLSL. This would also give us proper Shader Model 2.0b support for GeforceFX cards.

  • The work would consist of extending our ARB shader backend with the new SM 2.0 / SM 3.0 instructions using the GL_NV_*_program extensions.

Direct3D - Implement Pixel shaders on Geforce 4 or ATI 8500 cards

Possible Mentors: StefanDoesinger

  • Currently our minimum requirement for pixel shader support is the GL_ARB_fragment_program extension. This extension is comparable to Shader Model 2.0 pixel shaders, and as such is not available on hardware that has Pixel Shader 1.x support only, like Geforce3/4 cards and ATI Radeon 8500 to 9200 cards. Those cards have vendor specific OpenGL extensions which cover up to pixel shader 1.4. Those are GL_NV_register_combiners and GL_NV_texture_shader on Nvidia cards, and GL_ATI_fragment_shader on ATI cards. This project would involve mapping the Pixel Shader 1.x functionality to those extensions. Implementing this for one brand of cards is big enough for a project already, we can also have two simultaneous projects for the ATI and NVIDIA codepath

  • Note that nvidia's NVParse does something that's pretty similar. The license for NVParse looks compatible with Wine. It certainly can't be used directly, but might be helpful in figuring out how to map shader instructions to the appropriate GL state.

Direct3D 10 - Write tests

For implementing Direct3D10 test cases will be very helpful. Writing a comprehensive d3d10 testsuite might be a good project.

DirectShow (Quartz) - Implement Gstreamer plugin

Possible Mentors: MaartenLankhorst, Edward Hervey (GStreamer developer)

At the moment native win32 codecs are required to play mpeg, divx and other files from applications like games and media players. This is uncovenient for users as they need win32 codec packs (those might be illegal) and second for commercial programs (e.g. Crossover) shipping of win32 codecs has licensing issues. In this project a gstreamer plugin for wine's directshow would be written, so that we can use codecs which are available on the system in wine (most systems ship with gstreamer). Second there are legal codecs for mpeg and other codecs available as gstreamer plugins from fluendo.org. That would be a legal way to distribute codecs. Further some distributions already strip wine of its mp3 codec because of legal issues. When users add the codecs to gstreamer wine would get support too.

It should be possible to hook gstreamer up to wine. Years ago transgaming did something similar with ffmpeg but we shouldn't use ffmpeg because its api isn't stable and for that reason we would have to merge it into Wine which is what we want to avoid.

Vista Game Explorer API - Implement the core functionality of this dll

  • Work on Direct3D 10.0 has resumed. It appears that most D3D10 games use the 'Vista Game Explorer API' whose task is to manage game settings, save games and things like that. Without this dll most D3D10 games won't work. Using the Windows version of the dll is illegal in most cases as it is bundled with Vista. The task of this project would be to implement this dll.

Richedit - implement Windowless mode

Possible Mentors: MaartenLankhorst

  • Richedit is supposed to support Windowless mode, and a number of apps use this. Wine has mostly a stub implementation, so there's lots of room for improvement. Maarten promises to help you with any COM problems you run into :)

  • DylanSmith has been working on this, after the SoC 2008 (See bug 5162).

Test Suite

Possible Mentors: DanKegel, AndrewRiedi

NTDLL - support performance registry keys

Possible Mentors: DanKegel

Improving Wine Internet Explorer GUI

Possible Mentors: JacekCaban

Improving HTML Help viewer

Possible Mentors: JacekCaban

  • Most functionality is not implemented (just run hh.exe and look...) and API is almost totally not implemented. Also current implementation can't handle many chm files.

Implement CHM compiler

Possible Mentors: JacekCaban

  • The task would be to implement CHM compiler similar to hhc as a plain UNIX application.

  • See wine-devel post.

Get Mozilla compiling as a Winelib application

Possible Mentors: StevenEdwards

  • See wine-devel post.

Make dxdiag usable

Possible Mentors: We'll provide you with the appropriate mentor

  • First thing requested in a forum of a game: Send me the logs of msinfo and dxdiag
  • dxdiag collects system information
  • With dxdiag, we have tests for ddraw, d3d, dsound, dplay
  • For collecting system information, WMI is used in many new games

Implement the Explorer

Possible Mentors: We'll provide you with the appropriate mentor

Winelib Aware Scons (or cmake)

Possible Mentors: Someone in Wine, or someone in the appropriate project (scons but not cmake is a GSoC organizations as well)

  • The goal is to be able to take a visual studio project file for a formerly windows-only program, run it through a magic script, and turn it into a winelib-powered linux-compatible build system.

  • See SconsWine

SummerOfCode (last edited 2009-11-19 10:46:12 by AlexanderScottJohns)