New Developer Q & A Session
Blender developers are hosting an on-line Q&A session this Sunday.
We would like to invite anyone interested in becoming involved with blender development to an online Q&A session where you can be certain to meet up with blender developers and ask questions related to starting out with blenders source code.
The first topic is Blender2.5 with the alpha released there is a lot of interest in recent additions.
If this proves to be a success we will hold this at the first Sunday of every month, 1 hour before the usual meeting.
Where: #blendercoders on freenode, see www.pasteall.org‘s IRC link to connect over the web.
When: This Sunday, 6th of December, 3pm Amsterdam time.For more info on IRC: http://www.blendernation.com/getting-started-in-blender-irc/
– Regards, Campbell
Would be cool if someone would give an overview of the questions answered there, as I won’t be able to be there at all. :(
I quote “anyone”…
Where’s the truth in that?
@Davis, sure!
There have been offers to record and edit a log, it will probably be released with the meeting notes.
Heres the thread where most of the discussion took place
http://markmail.org/message/tkl3xij3kbd267ys
This is an excellent idea!
100 x thumbs up for this.
Please – do keep in mind – that the developers does this out of their SPARE TIME, and it’s their interest as much as it is yours – so be respectful when you ask them.
– Suggestions are better than “you should have done this and that”.
– Suggestions are better when accompanied by well thought out procedures, mock-up images, documents etc.
Again – I can’t stress this enough – be RESPECTFUL!
Kind of seems like a bad time to try to recruit new devs with the source tree being in so much flux.
I mean, what part of blender isn’t the shading pipeline redesign going to touch and where can someone start out when there isn’t even a set plan as to where this work is going?
Not to sound overly negative but this is essentially saying ‘Join us on our journey…we’ll tell you where we’re headed when we get there’.
Just, ya know, might be a good idea to clean up the house a bit before inviting over guests.
what time zone will that “Sunday” be ?
@Hamish: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=amsterdam+time+zone
@Anonymous Coward
Seems to me that by this criterion, there will NEVER be a good time. There’s also the pons asinorum aspect to it — if you can’t deal with a certain amount of flux and uncertainty, you might want to work on something else. Where there are users, there will be pain for developers.
Anonymous Coward: The shader system is only one isolated part of Blender, really, there’s a lot that won’t be touched by it.
Another thing to keep in mind is that although with 2.5, Blender is still in flux, it’s a lot *less* in flux than it used to be :) Many of the major architectural changes have been mostly implemented, a lot of what is needed now is to finish things up, cleaning things and polishing. This is a great job for new developers – it’s much easier to work within an established system, than it is to be involved in creating the system itself. There’s plenty of these small bugs and issues in 2.5 that’s going to take some time to fix up, and it’s a great way for new devs to get involved.
Anonymous Coward, I have a feeling you don’t know what your talking about.
#blendercoders is a great place!
Is it ok to attend as an observer? I’d like to help with the development at some point, but my skills are not at a point where I’d be of much help now.
@Jeff, yep, lurking is fine :)
@Anonymous Coward, many areas of blender hardly changed even with the flux of 2.5, Non developers seem to over-estimate how much has changed (because of the new UI?).
as Matt said, even these changes have eased off so I dont think this is a problem though it depends on the area of blender being worked on.
Hey, I’m just saying what ‘they’ are thinking…
Folks poke around in the source code, do some google searching, find something like the 2.5 roadmap and see that they will have to recode when bmesh is merged into trunk. Or the new sculpt branch, nurbs, shading system, etc, etc.
I’ve seen more than a couple projects get started, someone mentions that $feature_X is planned for inclusion which will effect their (working but incomplete) project and said project gets put on the back burner until $feature_X hits trunk…eventually. I know I have a couple things that I had (or almost had) working in 2.4x that I’ve been waiting to port over to 2.5 once things settle down enough. There’s also a couple things I’d like to try once bmesh or the (newly announced) shader rewrite gets merged.
Anyway, as I was saying, I’m just saying. Just trying to give you an alternative viewpoint to mull over as someone who, apparently, ‘doesn’t know what they’re talking about’. Probably not the best thing to bring up during the dev ‘meet and greet’ IRC meeting so I brought it up here instead.
I’ll actually bring this up at Seabug this Saturday, and see if I can get a brainstorm list from the Northwest Corridor to ask. Now I’ve just got to wake up at 6 AM and we’re set :P