[Bf-committers] BlenderPocket and iPhone/iTouch

[Dustin Martin]

Hey there,

This is an interesting idea but your biting off a lot more than you  
think trying to get blender working on an iPod touch.  The resources  
are a very tight to begin with and the first few generation of devices  
can only support about 30 megs of memory for blenders runtime, with  
about 20 megs of texture memory.  iPhone 3Gs and later have more  
memory but its still very limited.

Cocoa and CocoaTouch share the Foundation framework for NSObjects and  
such, but all of the UI components are CocoaTouch and are not  
computable with Cocoa.  The work that is going on right now to get  
blender working with Cocoa can be used but that project is still  
experimental.

OpenGL ES is not backwards computable with OpenGL either so any code  
in blender using OpenGL immediate mode would have to be rewritten,  
this use to be everything having to do with UI rendering but maybe  
this isn't the case any more.

The last big issue would be the user interface.  You would have to  
redesign how blenders UI works in order to use it on a device with  
less than VGA graphics resolution.  It can be done, but don't expect  
this to be easy.

Not trying to rain on your parade or anything, but I wanted to take a  
moment to point out the technical issues of this endeavor.  Best of  
luck and if you do create it.  If you do go threw all of the trouble  
sell it, make an account on the iTunes store and sell it for $10.

- Dustin

On Sep 25, 2009, at 2:50 PM, Salvatore Russo wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I recently bought an iPod Touch and this device is really cool: the
> screen is wonderful and the usability with the multi touch interface  
> is
> impressing. And naturally, my first idea was to play with Blender on
> this clean device ;) So I am currently analyzing the situation to
> understand how much work it would be to make Blender work on this  
> new toy.
>
> From my previous work on BlenderPocket for Windeows Mobile, what  
> should
> be reusable is:
> my OpenGL wrapper to extend OpenGL ES,
> some optimizations for small screen/resource device,
> the understanding of the Ghost library,
>
> But the first difficulties that I see are:
> 0) iPhone OS is not a so open platform and to install Blender on it,  
> you
> will have to jailbreak it.
> 1) iPhone OS is using Cocoa and not carbon,
> 2) it will not be possible anymore (as in my previous version of
> BlenderPocket) to use hardware buttons to emulate shift/control/alt: I
> will have to find an “easy” way to use Blender only with multi touch  
> screen.
> 3) I still have to investigate how to have phython on iPhone OS
> 4) For this version, if it works, I would try to extend  
> BlenderPocket to
> the game engine...
>
> It seems that some work was successfully done around the port of Ghost
> for cocoa as written here:
> http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:SundayMeetingAgenda/2008-08-17th
> http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Source/Blender/Architecture/CocoaBlender
>
> It would help me if I could have access to the source code of the  
> ghost
> cocoa version (even in alpha/beta status) in order to perform some
> additional analysis. Is it available somewhere? I tried to contact
> Mrrage without success...
>
> Feel free to send me any suggestions that I will consider carefully.
>
> Good luck in your work on Blender 2.5!
>
> Salvatore
> http://russose.free.fr/
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