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Developer Meeting Notes, August 19, 2012

25

Bug tracker count is on the rise - the beast is untameable! Still, BCon4 (release candidates) is planned for early september.

Ton Roosendaal writes:

Here's the notes of today's meeting in irc.freenode.net, #blendercoders:

1) Upcoming Blender 2.64 release status

  • Bug tracker up to 310 open reports again... what can we do? :)
  • Planning reminder.
  • Ton suggests to wrap up code work this month August, and move to BCon4 early September. Release would be end of september latest. This also to accompany the DVD box set for Mango.
  • Mango developers (Sergey/Brecht/Campbell/Ton) will sit down monday on final planning for release related to color management.

2) Other projects

3) Google Summer of Code

  • Tomorrow pencils down, August 24th is last day to submit work and reports to Google.
  • Alex Kuznetsov has Blender's UI running in Android (Using Jason Wilkin's work on opengl abstraction layers):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Orx9lQLoqos

That's it folks!

-Ton-

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

25 Comments

  1. Daryl Van Humbeck on

    Bloody 'ell! Blender on Android! And not just the player, either!
    Though I suppose it'd need a bit of a redesign to get it actually USABLE on a touch-screen device...

    • Campbell Barton on

      It doesn't necessarily have to be a re-design, we could have a custom keymap designed for touch, for limited use, (sculpting + painting for eg), This keymap could be included with an android blender without having to change blenders source code.

      • I am already looking at a Samsung Note - decission wise, so more reason for it? But around 600 € is hefty. Would this inherit those pencil pressure bugs? Maybe it would motivate more to work on those issues.
        As i am also wondering if already existing remote apps would transfer the stylus pressure.

    • It's not just me thinking the same thing then... how exactly can Blender be anywhere near usable without a keyboard and a large screen resolution?

      • Blender should run on my Dishwasher, TEXT-tv-chip, Vacuum cleaner and toaster if it could. It´s not so much why as - it´s because we CAN...thing...I think ;)

  2. "Daniel Genrich started a cloth-eltopo branch. This will update existing cloth collision in Blender. Optionally it could work with Bullet too."

    This is IMO sooo double work, why not start a bullet-physics cloth branch? I know sergof want's to do it if Daniel starts maybe they can share the branch. Otherwise when it's bullet physics it's just gonna replace both cloth, and eltopo cloth.

  3. Looking forward to the improved snapping tools; especially the edge snapping tools. Had a couple of instances recently where this would have dodged some awkward workarounds.

  4. why working on new tools, when old ones dont work good and need improvment. ex. bevel tool..
    or lack of buttons that were present in older blender's, like 'clockwise' button in spin tool.
    Thise are first things occurred to me, but i'm sure there is more things of this kind.

    • Sometimes focusing on old things ONLY will result in slow developments and lack of many features that are much more easier to implement. Just be patient, I am sure they are aware of what you are talking about, but it is a matter of time.

  5. Thanks everyone involved for all the hard work during summer time! Looking forward to having precision modeling tools in trunk :-)

  6. UseCodingStandards on

    Because you asked!

    For each known bug:

    I: Create unit-tests
    II: use assert to validate function/method parameter
    III: remove void pointer
    IV: remove duplicate code
    V: remove side effects
    VI: detangle the code

    AND:
    -i: document every method you changed/added
    - ii: use coding standards.

    additional benefits:
    - You will be able to understand your own code. (This is the main reason why your debugging efforts fail!)
    - You will find regressions very fast.

  7. Regarding the first half in the video " Precision modeling project". Can´t we already select vertex > press Shift+V to get the same effect/tool?

    • didn't know about that. wow. but still, this new feature permits you to snap it to the orientation of edges that aren't touching the vertex. The "shift-v" only permit you to snap to the orientation of the edges that are touching the selected vertex

  8. Alexandra Andersson on

    Excuse me for my ignorance. I don't know how bugfixing process works and my question is why every sunday the bug tracker has almost the same number (more or less)? "Official developers" work on that bugs or new bug reports are so many that cover all developers work? If the second, why this release has so many bugs?

    • I also think this series is showing a lot more bugs because even though blender had a lot of users til now, most were hobbyists or cube makers at the least. Now, as we can all see from the sudden increase of high level polished work, that many professionals are using blender more now, and since they probably get deeper into the guts of blenders internal workings they find the bugs that most casual users would never have come across. I feel for the devs. but this is a great sign that blender is getting recognized by more in the industry and forcing the need to have better tools, api's etc. developed to support these power users. Just a thought.

  9. RE the snapping tools video: its a bit of a misnomer to call it "parallel" to line or plane mode. What you were showing is really a "coincident" mode, where the point selected snapped to anywhere along that line or plane, not parallel to it. (Parallel would, in my mind at least, imply that the point maintains its current distance from the line or plane, but moves parallel to it - 1D for a line, 2D for a plane)

    Also, when you tried to make a line snap "parallel" to another line or plane, it appeared to only move one endpoint to be coincident with the line or plane. To me, it would be better to move the whole line to either be parallel (again maintaining one endpoint's current distance from the line, but then moving the other endpoint of the line segment to be the same distance from the line or plane that the first one was) or coincident with the other line or plane - letting the whole line lie along the other line or plane.

    Confused yet?

  10. Firstly big thanks to the Devs for what they are doing. I am sure that all the community is really grateful for what you are doing. Said it last time but, maybe 2.65 should be a bug fix release only. I'm sure that with 2.64 new great features are going to be added, 2.65 could be a stable where the tools we have already could get even more mature.

  11. Blender is getting more and more features, so more bugs are expected and unavoidable. The trick is prioritizing which bugs should be considered critical for the release. Anf following mailing lists and the trackers, developers are squashing bugs at a blazing rate already. They could probably continue bugfixing for the rest of the year, but I doubt neither we as users, nor the developers consider that an attractive idea.

  12. I think the developers need to take a look at the way some other Open Source applications are managed and start alternating releases; one version with new features, the next with bug fixes and simple changes only. I think this has even been done in Blender's past (am I in error there?); it brings good results with good developers and Blender has those for sure. There has been a period where that could not really be done, because of the new redesign of the way Blender works internally from the 2.4 series to the 2.5 and up to the present. But that stage should really be over now, and I'd like to see the alternating update methods used, or returned to if they were used before. Food for thought anyway.

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