Developers Meeting Notes, November 20, 2011
Blender 2.61 is creeping closer (despite a worrying signal of Ton’s addiction). Two interesting new developments: no more splash screen contests (which apparently did not guarantee a high enough quality), and a new initiative to get more add-ons tested before release.
1) Blender 2.61 progress
- Splash screen: Ton suggests to have judges not held a contest anymore, but have them make a pick from public posted awesome (cycles) renders. The old judges have to appoint new ones still.
- Campbell: Add-ons now are included in Blender under testing section. See thread on BlenderArtists. [Ed.: this comment is a bit unclear: in development builds only, new add-ons will be available in a new add-on category, ‘testing’. This is meant to encourage community testing of these new add-ons. Stable releases will not contain this category.]
- Test build: next Wednesday we’ll advertise official test build for everyone on blender.org. Platform maintainers for OSX/Linux are OK. Nathan Letwory has time too? (Need work for Cuda still…).
- Camera/motion tracking docs in wiki now.
- Start of release log is here.
- Bug tracker: we have 2 weeks before release candidates get made. Everyone please help going over the list of open issues!
2) Other projects
- Jens Verwiebe mentions: Bullet physics library has thread support now; would be nice target for 2.62 Game Engine.
- Brecht: code review is awaiting for UV tools and GE lighting, both 2.62 targets: http://codereview.appspot.com/4961053/ and http://codereview.appspot.com/5306077/
- Attention to patch tracker would be awesome too…
- BMesh: it progresses steadily. If this can be ready for 2.62 is not sure… Brecht offers help with Cycles-related mesh code porting.
- Proposal: Ender and Campbell make a BMesh-friendly migration plan, even when it means freezing all code using old mesh code (DNA_mesh_types.h and BKE_mesh.h). Next meeting we try to agree on it.
Skyward Sword? Nah… Skyrim FTW!
On topic: Great job everybody! 2.61 is so close now!
Multi-threading for physics is great news!
+1 for multi-threaded physics
+1 for Bmesh
Thanks all Blender devs
It would be great if threaded scripts worked in the GE period. It’d allow me to finally write an efficient online multiplayer game! :D
I never see virtual displacement or parallax maps on the list D=
no plans on working this out?
How about a bundle of steep parallax occlusion, real-time tessellation of individual mesh coordinates, a Make-Awesome[tm] button, built-in procedures for modelling biological cell-division, and the missing knife-cut options? All this and more, with Blender 2.96-beta, available sometime-awesome-soon-eventually!
There are community posted glsl shaders for the game engine, but I’m not sure how good support is for these outside the game engine. My guess would be to wait until Cycles is finished before expecting any movement on custom shaders for the render engine. I hope it will support custom shaders for “faking it”, fingers crossed. ;)
For the game engine offerings just check out some posts by martinsh on blenderartists about such things as “steep parallax mapping”, “ssao shader”, “cube mapping”, etc.
based on what Tom mentioned on the Twitter, AMD is working on the fix to OpenCL for Cycles. :) That I hope is true. My Graphic card is waiting to provide me some support :)
Beyond that, very happy with the multi-threaded physics. Hope the rest will also get the multi-threaded treatment :)
how about PNG support and particle support for cycles? both of these would be nice, because I have many PNGs that I could use to add to my already made textures..: ive found a couple workarounds for PNGs, but the particles always come out white, and then explode upward and get REALLY BIG. like the previous text ;D
I would like to see another adaptive mesh build ><.
sounds pretty awesome!
…and Ton’s a Zelda fan?!? YAY! :D
Does anyone know what is happening with the SSL certificate for svn.blender.org? I keep getting a “Certificate verification error: signed using insecure algorithm” error through git-svn.
Are the public posted pictures on Blender Artists?
I’d assume that’s the best place to post them, yes.
I think that will be good when source blend file of splash screen will be attached to blender. Just like Inkscape. Splash screen is really SVG graphics which people can review in Inkscape and check there is no cheating.
Great work but did I see (cough, cough, cuda/opencl accelerated?) threaded phyiscs penned in for 2.62!? Great stuff! Amazed at the speed this lot develops tis amazin.