GSoC/2017/Ideas
See also: GSoc Instructions, Last year ideas
Guidelines
Information for Students
These ideas were contributed by our developers and users. They are sometimes vague or incomplete. If you wish to submit a proposal based on these ideas, you may wish to contact the developers and find out more about the particular suggestion you're looking at.
Being accepted as a Google Summer of Code student is quite competitive. Accepted students typically have thoroughly researched the technologies of their proposed project and have been in frequent contact with potential mentors. Simply copying and pasting an idea here will not work. On the other hand, creating a completely new idea without first consulting potential mentors is unlikely to work out.
When writing your proposal or asking for help from the general KDE community don't assume people are familiar with the ideas here. KDE is really big!
If there is no specific contact given you can ask questions on the general KDE development list [email protected]. See the KDE mailing lists page for information on available mailing lists and how to subscribe.
Adding a Proposal
Note
Project:
Brief explanation:
Expected results:
Knowledge Prerequisite:
Mentor:
When adding an idea to this section, please try to include the following data:
- if the application is not widely known, a description of what it does and where its code lives
- a brief explanation
- the expected results
- pre-requisites for working on your project
- if applicable, links to more information or discussions
- mailing list or IRC channel for your application/library/module
- your name and email address for contact (if you're willing to be a mentor)
If you are not a developer but have a good idea for a proposal, get in contact with relevant developers first.
Ideas
Your Own Idea
Project: Something that you're totally excited about
Brief explanation: Do you have an awesome idea you want to work on with KDE but that is not among the ideas below? That's cool. We love that! But please do us a favor: Get in touch with a mentor early on and make sure your project is realistic and within the scope of KDE. That will spare you and us a lot of frustration.
Expected results: Something you and KDE loves
Knowledge Prerequisite: Probably C++ and Qt but depends on your project
Mentor: Try to see who in KDE is interested in what you want to work on and approach them. If you are unsure you can always ask in #kde-soc on Freenode IRC.
Krita
Krita: digital painting for artists. It support creating images from scratch from begin to end. Krita is a complex application and developers need to have a fair amount of experience in order to be able to do something.
Krita is a widely used digital painting application for professional artists. Last year, Krita gained the ability to create hand-drawn 2D animations, among other new features. For this year, projects that the Krita team would be interested in include:
Brief explanation: Share.krita.org is a place where users can share krita scripts, images, brush packs and more. Krita used to use GHNS (Get Hot New Stuff) to integrate with the predecessor of share.krita.org, but that support has disappeared. This project has two parts: integrate with the new ghns KF5 library and create a gui for sharing. The second part is improving the support for creating and editing bundles. Bundles can contain brushes, patterns, gradients and so on. Krita has basic support for creating and editing bundles, but it doesn't work very well in practice. For this part the student must work together with our UX design team to create a better gui design, then implement it.
Expected results: by the end of the summer, a user should be able to create a bundle from resources registered with Krita, upload it to share.krita.org and install bundles that have been uploaded to share.krita.org.
Knowledge Prerequisite: C++, Qt
Mentor: Boudewijn Rempt (IRC: boud), Scott Petrovic (IRC: scottyp)
Project: Extending Animation Support for curves
Brief Explanation: Last year, we added curves that could be applied to some properties of a layer, like opactity. We want the animation support extended by allowing users to place masks (filter masks, transformation masks, transparency masks) on the timeline and animate their properties using curves. Every property of a layer or mask placed on the timeline should be animatable.
Expected results:
- Implementation of a gui for applying the curve settings to one or more properties of a mask or layer
- Implementation of the actual rendering of the properties in the frames
- Saving of these settings
Knowledge Prerequisite:
- C++ and Qt
Mentor: Boudewijn Rempt (IRC: boud) or Dmitry Kazakov (IRC: dmitryk_log)
Project: Taking the Shape Brush to the next level
Brief Explanation: Krita has a number of interesting brush engines. One of them is the Shape Brush engine. Inspired by Alchemy, the shape brush "throws" shapes on the canvas. The current implementation is limited to geometric shapes. We want the brush engine to be extended to make it possible to load vector shapes defined as PDF or SVG and use those to draw on the canvas as well. Other improvements are the addition of Feathering, an outline mode, edge sharpening and background textures.
Expected Results: A revampted and exciting shapes brush
Knowledge Prerequisite:
- C++, Qt, Krita
Mentor: Boudewijn Rempt (IRC: boud) or Lukas Tvrdy (IRC: LukasT)
Project: Implementation of experimental OpenCL support for layer composition, filtering and painting
Brief Explanation: Krita in the current state relies purely on CPU power for vast majority of operations. Many of them can be offloaded onto GPU. This will improve performance due to high throughput of parallel operations and potentially will enable power-efficient port of Krita for mobile devices.
Expected Results: Architecture for OpenCL module which allows to interact with existing code seamlessly and preliminary support for GPU acceleration. Ideally, there should be a separate tool that paints directly on a OpenCL/OpenGL buffer stored in GPU memory. This buffer should be painted over the existing Krita canvas.
Knowledge Prerequisite:
- C++, OpenCL
Mentor: Boudewijn Rempt (IRC: boud) or Dmitry Kazakov (IRC: dmitryk|log)
Project: Implementation of experimental OpenGL-enabled brush
Brief Explanation: Krita in the current state relies purely on CPU power for vast majority of operations. Many of them can be offloaded onto GPU. This will improve performance due to high throughput of parallel operations and potentially will enable power-efficient port of Krita for mobile devices.
Expected Results: this is another experimental GPU-related project that allows the user to paint over the canvas purely on GPU. But this project relies on a different technology: openGL. There should be a special kind of layer that is stored in GPU memory and a special tool that is capable of painting over this layer. The tool should be able to use basic Krita brush presets (for the Pixel Brush engine) to paint over the canvas with the speed of lightning. To make this project easier, we put a limitation: this special layer should be on the top of the layers stack and therefore, just painted over the Krita openGL canvas.
Knowledge Prerequisite:
- C++, OpenGL
Mentor: Boudewijn Rempt (IRC: boud) or Dmitry Kazakov (IRC: dmitryk|log)
Project: Add 3D Painting Assistants
Brief explanation: One of the more innovative features in Krita are the painting assistants. These are shapes overlaid on the canvas that the artist can use to help him achieve perspective, straight lines and other shapes freehand. For complex drawings it would be useful to be able to place 3D models on the canvas, position and scale them and use those as guides for drawing.
Expected results: by the end of the summer, 3D models should be shown on canvas as canvas decorations, using OpenGL in hidden-line wireframe mode. The models should be manipulated using on-canvas controls like other assistants. Magnetic snapping is an optional extra.
Knowledge Prerequisite: C++, Qt, OpenGL, Assimp
Mentor: Julian Thijssen (IRC: Nimmy)