Work on 2.60 has started, with lots of branch merging coming up. Merging is always a nasty task - wish our developers luck!
Ton Roosendaal writes:
Blender 2.60 targets
- Lukas Toenne: particle 2010 can get in this week. Merging will be not easy, due to code that moved in branch.
- Benoit Bolsee and Dalai Felinto conform that the "Recast Detour" branch (2010 GSoC project, BGE navigation maps) is ready to be applied. Gets added as 2.60 target.
- Morten Mikkelsen has patch to stop using inverted bump normals (Blender renders bump inverted because face/vertex normals point inside in render). Ton has it on hold for fixing up, to ensure correct version patching happens, also when using trunk and 2.59 mixed.
- Dalai: Moving properties from "texface" to Material is target for 2.60 too.
- Campbell Barton will finalize review of VertexGroup modifiers this week
- UI translation branch: has some usability issues still. It uses an environment variable, which requires Blender restart to work. The code itself hasn't been checked yet. The Win64 version doesn't work. Sergey Sharybin will do code review and help out. We give it a week for final OK. Hopefully branch developer Xiao can be around in irc to assist this week?
- Ocean sim branch: Matt Ebb noticed pending todos here, he advised to wait with it.
Blender 2.60, other projects
- Alexander Kuznetsov works on proper UTF8-UTF16 support for Windows. This will fix writing or reading file paths (or selecting via file browser). Text editing of UTF is another topic.
- Dalai: question on Carbon support for Apple Ghost library... Cocoa's Python support fails for tkinter. Jens Verwiebe suggests to drop Carbon for 2.60, but code will not be removed for it yet. Dalai keeps in touch with Jens about it.
- Ton: does a call for developer, we need proper (OS level) rawkey support in Ghost library, to ensure proper system-controlled mapping of non-US keyboards for shortcuts in Blender.
- Campbell proposes to remove Irix as build target; we agree we need someone to maintain it at least! Solaris... same issue.
Other projects
- Discussion went on about FFmpeg instability in Windows 64 bits. Unconfirmed what's the reason for it, it relates to playing video and WAV sound files.
- BMesh: the team happily continues work on it, Howard, Ender & Campbell are busy. There's a designated bug tracker open for BMesh issues.
- Ton updates on status of development fund. Proposals/ideas for new funded projects are open!
- Question: how do we ensure Developers with Fund support complete targets? Suggestion: just do the (last) payment when they complete it.
15 Comments
Hello,
Does anyone know when the Particle fluids surfacing will be ready?
Thanks
Scott
For ensuring projects are finished, why dont you just stipulate a contract with the dev? It would be like you hired him for the time of the project and he will be required to finish the work.
Thanks for all the hard work Ton & Co.
2.6x will be awsum. So many great features are coming. Keep it up, guys!
I agree with Luca. A contract would be the best way. A legal binding contract. Problem that could arise is laws in each country since blender dev is multinational.
and if the developer fails to meet the deadline? the blender community will initiate a class action lawsuit?
i dont think so...
Tough question :"how do you ensure project finishing?
Payment conditioning is a real-world one, I guess,but in my working experience the contractors give you 50% in advance just to kick start and the rest payment due is given when you fishish something.
At least this works for me.
Contracts are good...when you and your contractor are in the same country, city or maybe economic area like Europe, but I don´t know anything about how those laws work over there.
If anything else fails, then rest of the money(50%) goes to someone who can tackle on the unfinished project, so no so much money is laid to waste.
In case of a project is dead and hence not merged to the trunk, "punish" the developer to not let him send patches or do any official development for a year or something. Tough one but I guess it is necessary to create awareness this IS a serious issue: breach of "contract" specially when money is involved.
My two cents.
...I almost forgot... lawsuits are ugly looking in media, specially in Open Source culture, we don´t need bad reputation as a community for lawsuits against developers, please avoid them.
"Question: how do we ensure Developers with Fund support complete targets? Suggestion: just do the (last) payment when they complete it."
This is simple. You write up a proper contract with clear targets and goals (There should be some standard once laying about around the internet, hopefully one for each country for the developer is base in), and a time frame, they only get paid once each goal as been met and confirm by the Blender foundation. Not rocket science. Payment method should be agree with in the contract.
"and if the developer fails to meet the deadline? the blender community will initiate a class action lawsuit?"
No they simply do not get paid. The developer can choose whether they want to file lawsuit against the Blender Foundation or not. The Blender Foundation can use the fund to hire other developers to complete the work. An by having the code being deliver to Blender Foundation at end of each stage of the contract, The foundation should still benefit even if the developer pull out.
This how it generally operated in the UK and no money is paid upfront to contractors, and contractors only get paid once each stage is completed and agree as such by each party.
"Text editing of UTF is another topic." - lol.
I was reminded of the ASCII limitation by a recent Blender Podcast. I remember a while back modifying a font to put the characters I needed within the ASCII range so I could use them in a text object. It will be like a dream come true when blender has UTF-8 support.
One of these days I'll get around to learning to code so I can help out.
Money is the root of all evil,however a little bride don't hurt...
This not a September fool day is it ?
thanks
good luck!!
I have found a bug!!! every time I press the little X on the upper right corner Blender keeps disappearing.
Forgive the advocacy, but merging is only a “nasty task” because the version-control system they use, Subversion, doesn’t handle it very well.
They should move to a distributed VCS, of which the two currently most popular choices are Mercurial and Git.