[Bf-committers] BlenderPocket and iPhone/iTouch

[Campbell Barton]

Hi, I'm not sure what your intention is to have the blender
application running on a handheld since its not that usable?
But It would be nice to port the blender-player to portable devices.
blender builds/runs fine on 32bit ARM architecture with debian at
least so that should go smoothly.

If there are problems with running python the game engine could be
made to compile without it (only logic brick games). Blender running
without Python or the BGE is currently possible though not very useful
since most of the interface uses python now.
for porting still helpful.

To me this seems an easier to achieve goal, would also be nice to have
you OpenGL ES wrapper in SVN so devs could get blender running on
handhelds like...
http://www.gp2xwiz.com
http://openpandora.org (can you actually buy this yet?)

On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 3:05 PM, Dustin Martin <dustin at 54.org> wrote:
> 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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-- 
- Campbell