This year Tiled applied as an organization to participate in the Google Summer of Code for the first time, thanks to Leon Moctezuma who helped a lot with the process. We were accepted by Google, after which many interested students approached us with their proposals and send in pull requests. Two more mentors joined the Tiled organization (Erik Schilling and Elvis Stansvik), so we told Google we were ready to take on 3 students (out of 11 proposals).

Now we’re happy to announce that we were granted all three slots! This summer we’re going to be working with:

Ketan Gupta (ketanhwr)

Ketan already submitted half a dozen of small patches, mostly improvements to the custom command system. His project is an ambitious collection of enhancements he’d like to make to Tiled, ranging from small things like auto-crop to layer locking and bigger projects like improving the custom command system, the polygon editing tools, support for infinite maps and moving of selected tiles.

Erik Schilling (Ablu) will be the primary mentor for Ketan and you can follow his progress in this forum thread.

Ben Trotter (Bdtrotte)

Ben made some very nice improvements to the support for hexagonal and staggered maps. His project for this summer is about Wang tiles and how they could be used to automate tile placement in Tiled. Once a Wang set is defined, it can be used to fill areas or to automatically pick the right tiles while editing in similar fashion to the Terrain tool. Ben will work to unlock the full potential of this system.

Leon Moctezuma (leonidax) will be the primary mentor for Ben and you can follow his progress in this forum thread.

Mohamed Ahmed Thabet (thabetx)

Mohamed accompanied his proposal with patches to add a marching-ants effect to selected objects and to enable changing the tile of tile objects. His project is about adding reusable object templates, in similar fashion to Unity prefabs. You will be able to instantiate object templates from a library and the instances will update when the template in the library is changed. This much requested feature should be a real time saver.

Elvis Stansvik will be the primary mentor for Mohamed and you can follow his progress in this forum thread.

Thanks to Everybody!

I would like to thank everybody who made this possible. Google for running this program, Leon for getting our participation started, all students for their great work as part of applying for a slot, and Erik and Elvis for stepping up as additional mentors!

Now the time for “community bonding” has started, in preparation of the first coding period starting on May 30th. Please feel free to join in to any discussions, code reviews and functionality tests throughout the program to help make these projects successful!