So this summer I’m going to keep working from 9 to 5 every day. /me sighs. And I’m going to be almost totally alone in Rochester with 3 gentoo linux boxen, a pile of money and lots of free time. Given a lot of that time will go into just fooling around and playing Puzzle Pirates and such. But I’m definitely going to do a coding project. I just need help in deciding what to do.
The first thing on my list is to turn Puerto Rico or Tigris and Euphrates into network playable computer games. I’ll probably write in C and use GTK. I’m just worried about how legal this will be considering IP and what not. It’s a possibility.
Another possibility is to make a useful GUI for Megamek. Megamek is a great open source project that lets you play pen and paper Battletech online with friends. The problem is that like most open source projects, the user interface is terrible. I’m considering forking megamek and making a better interface. It would get a lot of use at least between me and my friends.
Another thing on my list, that I’ve wanted to do for some time is to make an original pc game. It would be somewhere in between X-COM and Advance Wars. I could use SDL to make it cross platform and awesome. It would also be playable over the internet, maybe even with a central server to match up players and such. I think this kind of game really needs to exist in the world, and the fact that it doesn’t is a travesty.
A smaller project I’m thinking of is maybe an XMMS Visualization that runs as a screensaver. So when you lock your computer random music plays and the visualization looks cool. This has lowered in priority since I discovered electric sheep.
Oh yeah, Grandma Linux. This would probably be a really big project. I want to make a linux “distribution” that is so unbelievably easy while simultaneously absolutely flawless. I would have to make a new window manager or modify an existing one. I would have to make a system by which even the dumbest person could format and partition their drives without screwing up. And I would need to use knoppix hardware detection of perfect. I imagine someone putting in a CD and 30 minutes later having a perfect linux system that consists only of a few very large icons on the desktop. Word Processor, Web Browser, E-mail, AIM, etc. The last button would be Install Software, which would work perfectly every time. You get the drift.
So, I need some software to make this summer, apart from the software I’m getting paid to make. Maybe I’ll just end up helping out some other OSS projects. Anyone got any good ideas?
