[Soc-2010-dev] status report (fancy input devices)

Mike Erwin significant.bit at gmail.com
Sat Jul 3 10:29:38 CEST 2010


week in review --

Enabled hi-fi input for blender on Mac OS, and it's everything I dreamed of.
Nice smooth strokes even on slower machines or complex scenes. Right now,
mouse and pen are hi-fi by default, which most tools don't need or want.
This will be fixed when tools are able to auto-hint their preferred input
fidelity to ghost (default is normal-fi, the current behavior).

Wacom developer support informed me that neither their driver nor Windows
coalesces tablet input (unlike Mac OS). This was the key to hi-fi input on
the Mac, so I had to brainstorm a bit to find the Windows solution. Found
it! Coming soon.

Thoroughly re-read (and scribbled all over) the "3D Mouse" developer guide
with an eye toward Windows implementation. Mostly worked out, just need to
type it in.

Discovered that my SpaceNav demo crashes if you don't have the SpaceNav
driver installed. Not a big deal for a demo, but a deal breaker for blender
integration. Weak linking against the 3Dconnexion framework should fix this.
Also tweaked my axis normalization code to treat 350 (not 500) as 100%, as
recommended by their docs. I'm releasing the updated demo for Mac OS 10.4+
as it doesn't depend on any later features.

Now building on Windows using MinGW. Had to clean up some very minor errors
-- gcc 4.5 is picky! -- but it compiles. Then fails to launch. The code is
0xC0000005, meaning it tried to execute data. Maybe this has to do with
Python? ABI incompatibility with libs? Disabling DEP does not help.

Reverted to previous "continuous grab" code, since mine was much worse.

Studied event dispatch mechanisms, which are essential for lo-fi input and
mouse/pen event spoofing. wm_event_system is a beast compared to the austere
GHOST_EventManager...


next week --

Continue wrangling with Windows build. Suggestions are welcome! Already
tried the Win7 SDK then Visual Studio 2008 on one machine (64-bit) and MinGW
on another (32-bit).

Integrate NDOF support and clean up plugin boilerplate, which I never got
around to this past week.

Get Windows hi-fi input to match the Mac version.

Post more plans for the pen on the project web site. The pen is due for an
overhaul, and I need to hammer out the details.


progress --

One of my main goals for this summer (and the one people seem to want the
most) is high fidelity input, which now works on one platform and is
catching up fast on another. I'm about to crawl from ghost into the window
manager, which I suppose is itself a sign of progress. On track!


[invisible-cow.com/blender/soc]

Mike Erwin
musician, naturalist, pixel pusher, hacker extraordinaire
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