It “officially” begins

Between my last blog post and now I have been accepted into the Google Summer of Code programme (or GSoC for short), which is basically an opportunity for students to work on open-sorce software projects throughout the summer and also receive a stipend (money) for it.

The coding period officially began on the 27th of May, but I actually started working on my project before that in order to get a head start.

Throughout the summer I will be implementing a feature for GNOME Games. To be more specific, I will be implementing a “Savestates Manager”. The feature itself has already been designed and the details about how it should work are explained very well in this wiki page: https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/Playground/Games/Snapshots

Currently I’m working on automatically migrating files from the old directory layout to the new one in order to support multiple savestates. This is how the new directory layout is going to look like:

savestates/
 [platform]-[uid]-[core]/
  [date]/
   snapshot
   screenshot
   save
   save dir/
   media

The snapshot file is probably the most important one because it’s used to set the state of the emulator core. The creation date is used to uniquely identify savestates.

I will keep adding blog posts as I continue to make progress and hopefully there will also be some UI to screenshot before the next post.