It looks like we'll see a 2.70a release in a few weeks as serious bug reports are only starting to come in after the release. Also, what I think could be a major step for the compositor: the code will be cleaned up, making it much easier for developers to add new compositing nodes.
Ton Roosendaal writes:
Hi all,
Here are the notes from today's meeting in irc.freenode.net #blendercoders.
1) 2.70 release review
- Last week 2.70 got released! Kudos for everyone who helped making it possible.
- Sergey Sharybin found already five commits/fixes he considers to be important enough to add in an update release. Bug tracker reports now also keep streaming in.
- As usual - testing is our weakest point, even when we do many Release Candidates. Best feedback we get is on actual releases...
- Two proposals: 1) do an 'a' release in a few weeks. 2) do a real 2.71 in 3-4 weeks, without or with minimal new features. Next week the topic will come back.
2) 2.71 development targets
- Meeting spent some time on filling in the targets and target candidates.
- Once we decide on an 'a' release (or not), the planning for 2.71 will be defined.
- Lukas Toenne: Compositor code cleaning was reviewed and approved by maintainers.
- Then a lot of time was spent on reviewing the status of supporting Windows XP, also related to moving from VC2008 to VC2013 compiler. Decision was to have the Windows platform maintainers together define a proposal.
- We move to Python 3.4x - Includes important bug fixings effecting blender users. Platform maintainers please update this for your platforms!
3) Other projects
- Google Summer of Code submission deadline was last friday. Aspiring mentors now review the proposals. As usual, by Google convention, proposals and reviews are kept private - unless a student makes it public (like in our wiki). Total submissions this year: 35.
- Amount of 'slots' will be defined by Google in 2 weeks, based on our reviews and requested amount - using a secret formula :)
Laters,
-Ton-
34 Comments
I'll see if I can make some time this week and do some testing. 2.70 has been really stable for my use so far.
Hi
You just miss one point (it's normal because it was posted by Ton after his classical report):
" Hi,
I forgot to paste in this note from Campbell, who went to bed in time once!
- 2.71: we move to Python 3.4x - Includes important bug fixings
effecting blender users. Platform maintainers please update this for
your platforms!
-Ton- "
Check the original page, it's just at the bottom of the page.
Thanks for the notes :-).
Lapineige.
Added, thanks!
Love the sound of the new constant detail setting in the sculpting room, one of the most annoying thing I found about the sculpting room is that when you zoomed into the model the detail size would shrink when you didn't want it to, so even if this is a small feature, it will make a very big difference to my workflow, and it will even let me have to flexibility to decide whether or not I want it to be relative or constant, which is really cool.
Cough......Cough, know all we need is a Z-Remesher like remeshing feature lol Cough......Cough
Well I can always dream lol
laggy blender viewport most problem this software. Can`t work with serios heavy scenes.
hallo, my wishes for 2.71...
when will we have the dimensions of selection, scale from one side and movable pivot, see attachment? is this so complicated to implement?
that will make blender much usable then today, i think, that is less complicated and probably more necessary then i.e. volumetric rendering.
Volumes for GPU please! Cool features are cool. But it's even better when they're practically usable in production :) Absorption at least would be great.
If anyone has info - is there any chance to see OpenVDB anytime soon?
Layer Manager is a fantastic addon that deserves to be included in the next release.
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/3D_interaction/layer_manager
yes please ! its such a basic thing that blender really lacks.
When is the reIease date for Fluid Designer? The interface is amazing plus it comes with a library of assets which you can drag and drop onto the canvas. Please make Fluid Designer and Layer Manager a part of Blender. Now that would be awesome.
"a lot of time was spent on reviewing the status of supporting Windows
XP, also related to moving from VC2008 to VC2013 compiler. "
XP is dead (support wise, and by the end of the year use-wise), and supporting it is not fun. The performance jump by culling XP support can be huge... and I'm sure people won't complain too much ignoring Vista too. Since IME support changed after XP, it would probably be far easier to finally add the IME support that keeps many non-European language users away.
By what definition is a 30% market share "dead"? It might be declining, but far from dead. At this rate, it will still continue to have a larger user base than Mac and Linux combined, for years.
Depends who you ask. NetApplications (the one you got your info from) always showed XP higher because they have a lot of (illegal copies in the ) chinese and russian market machines. http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp shows XP at less than Windows 8! In fact, at the current rate there will be less than 5% running XP by this time next year (as opposed to about 10-12% linux+mac) according to the data in w3schools.
XP is functionally dead, there's no need to continue to support it, just like Blender dropped support for older versions of CUDA (sm_1x) that included a lot of professional level cards (Quadro FX ) that people still use. According to Steam the percent still using (newly) unsupported cards may be as high as 30%. Why does sm_1x CUDA support get the ax but XP support stay around when both are huge limitations?
Yet there is a difference. If the support for a CUDA version is dropped you can still render on CPU. My graphic card doesn't support CUDA at all and I can render. If you drop an operating system you can't run Blender all together. That is a lot more serious than not being able to render through GPU. I'm still on XP, graphic card doesn't support CUDA, but I can use Blender if I want to. With your suggestion I'll have to buy a new computer.
Hardly, drop CUDA support and your $2000 Quadro FX4800 is useless. Drop XP and your 10 year old computer can upgrade to 7 for far less. For XP, you can still use Blender, just stick to 2.70, 2.71, and maybe even as far as whatever comes before 2.80. Nothing stops you from using older versions, just like nothing stops people from using older versions of Blender for sm_1x support. If your (soon to be irreparably infected) computer can't handle a newer OS, it probably can't make use of any of the new blender features anyway, they are far too processor intensive for Pentium 3 chips with 256mb of ram.
And just so you know, XP stopped being sold in ALL forms before the last sm_1x card was released! Any way you slice it XP is a dead and archaic OS, no matter how many people claim it is better (which is like saying your horse and carriage is better for the environment than a prius, it's only true when you ignore all the little calculations in the background that add up to some huge issues in the logic).
Hate to see winXp support go since it is the best OS microsoft has made. Much better than the atrocious windows-8? When it comes to installing a new OS, I would sooner install Linux than use another microsoft OS.
Interestingly enough Windows 8 sold more copies in the first year than XP did! People complained about the lack of DOS when XP came out, now they are
complaining that they were wrong to consider XP a horrible mess back in
2001 and it's the coming of the (PC ) savior. As an OS XP was great for it's time (with flaws and UI changes people weren't happy with), but like many other things it's just not a good system by modern standards. When's the last time you said "Ubuntu 6.06lts was the best Ubuntu"? (I know it's the first version I kept around because live-disk functionality was very useful for checking hardware or bypassing restrictions on computers) Sure it was great at the time, but it doesn't have USB3.0 support, TRIM, NCQ, fast user switching (which you probably use all the time without realizing), and many more things small and large. XP is missing many of the same things, and is perhaps even worse when considering programming for it means using non-optimal code for 7 and 8 or drawing away development resources to keep supporting XP.
Here's a few links that show why XP is bad (for Blender):
https://developer.blender.org/D216 (linux is faster because of XP support targeting MSVC2008, which can't use AVX extensions, possibly lacks SSE4 as well, but AVX is far more useful)
https://developer.blender.org/T38551 (all the developers are complaining about horrible code they have to use to get around MSVC2008 limitations, and how VC2013 would allow better cross-platform code)
As a small scale system admin (~40 computers and a server), I can tell you that supporting XP is a horrible waste of time, any any halfway decent machine from ten years ago supports the far better Windows 7 (which has powershell built in and plenty of other goodies). Now that it is finally officially dead (after more than 12 years), it's time to move on the last half dozen computers I tend to that have XP will be upgraded in the next month to W7 or 8 (whichever is cheaper, though I am pushing for 8 because of language pack availability and ease of reconfiguration).
I agree that winXp lacks Cuda support as well its mainly a 32bit system. Windows 7 is a much needed improvement over Vista. As for your comment about Windows 8 out selling Xp in the first quarter, thats where you're sadly mistaken. Why do you think Microsoft fired the Ceo? Valves head man, Newell, even said so himself that Windows 8 is a catastrophe to gaming developers.
"Windows 8 out selling Xp in the first quarter, thats where you're sadly mistaken"
When considering only legally obtained copies, even Vista sold more than XP. It's a simple mathmatical concept, even small percentages of a large number can be larger than a larger percentage of a smaller number. Windows 8 has sold more copies, that isn't wrong at all. Those copies might be lower in market share (unknown though, since microsoft never kept track of licenses before XP so the only method to count is web traffic), but it doesn't change the fact there are more.
"Valves head man, Newell, even said so himself that Windows 8 is a catastrophe to gaming developers."
Newell says a lot of stupid things. Windows 8 came in, 100% of games that worked in Windows 7 worked in Windows 8, and everyone forgot about it. He was just pissed that Microsoft set up a new store that is incompatible with Steam's DRM. If anything tests show time and time again that 8.1 is significantly (3%+ ) faster than Windows 7 (http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/11/24/battlefield_4_windows_7_vs_81_performance_review/1#.UzIkpSgQ9hE). Hardly a catastrophe, though Blender performance won't change too much since it doesn't rely on directX components (which were optimized in 8.1)
Postponing XP's death is just going to prevent Blender from actually moving forward, and the improvements in performance and code unity gained from VC12 are just too large to pass up. The sooner they put XP behind the sooner they can focus on core improvements instead of compatibility.
I wonder where are you getting your info from? Mobile devices are killing Laptop sales by 20-1 with exception to the Surface. Microsoft couldn't even give those away but instead of engineering a better device microsoft decides to buy Nokia.....hahaha....and the ship keeps on sinking.
"..are you suggesting that I stole vista?"
Not at all. I am stating that over half of chinese and russian computers using XP do so because they are cracked copies. Microsoft pegs the number at over 80%, and even china admits 35% of government computers run cracked copies of XP. "OEM" sellers with cracked copies is also a pretty big issue in many other countries too.
"Mobile devices are killing Laptop sales by 20-1"
I don't know of anyone running Blender on a mobile device. Considering touch controls are non-existent, even if you were to port it it wouldn't be much more than a tech demo. Your comments are no longer about how OS statistics affect Blender.
You fanboys need to get with the times and wake up, Microsoft is no longer the king of the hill.
"when considering only legally obtained copies, even Vista sold more than XP. "
..are you suggesting that I stole vista? Hahaha! How can that be when the registration keys for Vista were single use and therefor needed to be obtain via a legal copy. Dealers were no longer allowed to sell computers with the OS preinstalled. If you bought a new PC you received a legit copy of vista on disk which actually increased the price of computers overall.
then how come gaming rigs like Coolermaster, Razor and Alienware still ship with Windows7?
the performance benefit of gaming on window8 with DirectX11 is so marginal that it's not even worth mentioning. Depends which game you are playing. There is no significant different bewteen 7 and 8 when it come to performance. Surprizingly Dx11 had a slight drop in preformance with older games. Roll the dice if you like.
FYI Ubuntu is at version 13:10, not 6:06....
When will stereoscopic view and Oculus Rift be supported? It was proposed a couple of times but dropped out of the list each time. Now it seems to be completely off the list for 2.71/
Because its absolutely top rated feature that Blender lacks, right? Whats with Oculus hype lately? Its not going to speed up your workflow or anything, its just a toy(and thats being generous, its not even a mass product as of now).
Yes fair enough, you aren't wrong by saying that, but the future possibilities that will be made possible thanks to the oculus rift is amazing being able to create a game and experience it as if you were in the game, that would give an all new meaning to FPS, being able to create a real time visualization of some models that you have created like for instance an archviz project, the person will be able to walk around the house as if he was actually there, while watching movies, your standing there dead centre as the action unfolds around you.
I believe the oculus rift is going to be a game changer, however this would be something that would be best suited to a more mature game engine no offence to blender but with something like Unity 3D, the oculus rift would actually make sense and allow for a more interactive experience in more than one way.
There is of course a but though, the oculus rift is expensive, not sure when it is coming out, not even sure if there are games coming out that are utilizing it or when there will be games coming out that will be utilizing it, oh and since blender doesn't progress at the same rate as commercial software programmes due to it being open source, the commercial software would have it integrated first if anything and if blender was to get it, would not be until much later or at least until it got a more meaningful market share to the point that people were actually using it.
Whats all the buzz with Oculus Rift? Its just a VR headset. Virtual Reality has been around for nearly twenty years and still hasn't taken off.
The creator of Minecraft was developing a VR version of his popular game for Oculus until Facebook bought them out. It turns out he is not willing to work with Facebook and I dont blame him.
I would personally feel bad if XP support were removed since I'm still running it as my primary OS. A lot of third-world nation users too aren't able to afford upgrading their hardware to run Windows 7. Why not wait another year to see if the usage drops markedly below the current 30%
According to w3schools, XP is already just 11% (below 8's 13%).
Most "third world" installs are pirated anyway, especially china where 90% of XP installs are estimated to be pirated (which means a real user base of just 5% is using XP, http://www.neowin.net/news/ballmer-9-out-of-10-copies-of-windows-in-china-is-pirated). Not including china and russia puts XP users at less than 20% already, and using only civilized (i.e. piracy under 20%) countries puts you under 15%.
thats still 11% more than windows 8