GCI Low Hanging Fruit

I have to admit I'm pretty surprised that at halfway through Google Code-In 2011 only about a quarter of the tasks we posted for the first half have been completed or in-progress. Further, most of the tasks thus far haven't been coding tasks.

I'm going to publish here a list of what we consider "low hanging fruit"; coding tasks which are fairly easy to get started with. If you're a student age 13-17 these would be an easy way to earn a Google tshirt and some cash. All of these tasks deal with OpenGL rendering, usually just arrays for points and lines/triangles which connect the points. There's a lot of examples in the code already for this and numerous tutorials on the web (such as NeHe).

Simple Rendering

We have 2 new tasks listed for rendering simple models; Camera and Light. Camera is very simple, while Light can be as simple or complex as you want to make it.

Shapes Rendering

We have 3 tasks for rendering shapes, Box, Room, and Sphere. Any of these could be knocked out in a few hours even without prior OpenGL knowledge.

Joints Rendering

We have 6 new tasks up for rendering joints; Ball, Fixed, Hinge, Piston, Slider, and Universal. Joints (soy.joints) connect two bodies such that they can only move in respect to each other in a certain way, such as a door hinge or piston. These are all documented with graphic depictions. This is slightly more complex than the simple rendering tasks (above) in that there's two pieces to each joint and they can be rendered as either wireframe or solid (with provided materials).

As always, we're on IRC if a student wants to discuss these or other tasks.