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Developers Meeting minutes, Sunday 15th august, 2010

15

A new beta by the end of this month? And the return of the mystery sponsor!

Ton Roosendaal writes:

Hi all,

Summary of topics discussed on today's meeting:

Current projects

  • Campbell's 'declarative UI' experiment has been discussed extensively now. Conclusion remains to stick to what we have, but stay open for (compliant) improvements that make the scripts more readable, with a visual structure more closer resembling the button layout itself. For this Campbell has code in svn now.
  • Campbell also proposed to officially make UTF8 a standard for name strings in Blender (but not file paths). Some code needs to be checked for it still, especially to solve string length checking (amount of bytes can be larger than amount of glyphs). Meeting is in general OK with this.

2.5

  • RNA names (variable names) for UI and scripts will get a better consistency, as already been worked on by Campbell, Brecht and Luca. Campbell will make Wednesday a final patch & proposal, Friday it can be applied (after review).
  • Meeting discusses briefly which GSoC projects can make it to svn now. For now, only the audio library project will be updated, since coder claims that this will fix most of the open bugs with audio. Other projects should still wait.
  • Also branches will need to wait. There's no wide consensus to apply the Durian render branch either; which is acceptable, since the Durian project DVD will ship with this branch's binary, to allow full re-renders. Brecht is still available to help on merging later on.
  • A next beta was originally scheduled end of august, that's soon... next week we should put this on agenda again.
  • Meeting agrees on keeping focus on getting Blender stable. As Benoit stated "Blender is quite unstable today (I would even say dramatically unstable) and it should be the top priority." :)
  • Ton announces that the sponsor (who paid for Matt) extended the sponsoring with sufficient funds to hire two part-timers on maintenance and bug-fixing. He's currently investigating the how and who. Within a week more news on this!

GSoC

  • It's pencils down today (August 16, 19:00 UTC)! Obviously students can keep working on their branches, we even hope they will keep being involved! Also, since trunk is not available for mergers, we hope the students will stay around to do this later. (Which is a good reason to not add new stuff in trunk, then everyone can keep branches in sync).
  • Students will get reviews from mentor team this week, which will be sent to Google. Note that good end-user and technical docs in wiki will do miracles!

Thanks,

-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.

15 Comments

  1. I'm sure Blender will (and already has) turned around a lot of heads. One of the greatest open source applications ever!
    It should be heavily promoted when 2.5 is ready to come out. It would be great to have professional looking "promotional" video's for each key feature. For example ZBrush is doing a great job on this to get attention.

  2. Yes, Blender is already a great program that allows much modern things to be done in 3D. And I personally love 2.5 for its fantastic approach to Python scripting, what brings a great versatility.

    Open Source projects like this allows everyone to fastly incorporate all new ideas and technologies. I'm sure os will take the general place in near future thanks to such great developers as in Blender project.

    As already everyone knows, now the most significant part of job to be done is stability and bug fixing, of course.

  3. Great news!

    Idea:
    What if everyone did all their best to make their greatest (or just a super) 3d model/sculpt/animation so that when 2.5 is released we have a huge gallery at blender.org... or just send your best model done in blender to the gallery?

  4. "Meeting agrees on keeping focus on getting Blender stable."

    I'm glad to see this as a high priority.
    Fancy new features can wait.

    I hope the GSoC students will still be there and motivated when merge time will come.

    It's great that funding is not so much of an issue nowadays, even after Durian having sucked everything ;)

  5. "Also branches will need to wait. There’s no wide consensus to apply the Durian render branch either; which is acceptable, since the Durian project DVD will ship with this branch’s binary, to allow full re-renders. Brecht is still available to help on merging later on."

    If the projects like Durian etc are done to showcase what blender is capable of; doesn't it defeat the point to need a 'special' version of blender to do things seen in the showcase project? :/

  6. @fabs, absolutely right. The reality is this project is taking some very bad turns along the way. If it was a commercial project there would have been big shake ups by now.

  7. @Nobody: Wrong analogy.
    Good analogy:They are selling a new dish, telling people they can do it too with their recipe but officially giving out a different recipe from the one they used to make the dish...

  8. Fabs, I'm sure that GraphicAll.org would put up the Durian branch as soon as they get it. I'm assuming that it makes more sense to get this next beta as stable and bug free as possible before combining the Durian branch, which likely has its own set of problems.

  9. Fabs is completely right. The movie is made with Blender, so you download Blender and hit render, but get a different result, WTF?
    Global Illumination is what a lot of pros are expecting, it works quite well now and the team has used it for the movie, why delaying it's release???

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