code_swarm is a really fun, new open source tool by Michael Ogawa helping to visualize the development activity of open source projects. Little dots represent the committed files of a day by a certain developer who is labelled in the animation. The colors of the dots may be chosen manually distinguishing different types of files or directories (legend top left corner - better visible in the original 640×480 pixel AVI file, 25MB).

Tonight Emanuel and I compiled code_swarm and started to create movies of the top 4 projects on hackontest.org. A newcomer is OpenLieroX, a funny 2D shooter game. This is its animated development history since 2006-20-25 (using 5087 single PNG files):

And that’s how code_swarm is executed in order to generate a fancy sounding movie clip (you don’t have to download the entire SVN directory as described on the official website):

svn log -v SVNURL > activity.log #Download log file of any SVN repository
python convert_logs.py -s activity.log -o activity.xml #Convert SVN log file within convert_logs directory
#Create new code_swarm config file changing directories and code colors
./run.sh #Execute code_swarm applying the new config file in order to create PNGs of code commits
mencoder mf://*.png -mf fps=24:type=png -ovc lavc -oac copy -o movie.avi #Create movie out of PNGs
mencoder movie.avi -oac copy -ovc copy -audiofile MP3FILE.mp3 -o movie_withsound.avi #Add MP3 sound to the animation

Cool and suiting music can be found on Mosaik.

Update 2008-07-25: Now sk1, TYPO3, OpenLieroX, phpMyAdmin, and Inkscape are animated in HD quality on Vimeo. All HD videos are available as download on www.hackontest.org/media