[Bf-committers] Gameengine - ODE and Python

[Willian Padovani Germano]

Hi,

On Sun, 2003-07-27 at 13:12, Michael Hertel wrote:

> To come to an end, my questions are:
> Is anybody also working on that parts?
> How far is solid back in away?
> Should I post some UML drawings I made about
> KX_SceneConverter::ConvertScene()
> [Sequence diagramm] and
> ODEPhysicsController::SynchronizeMotionStates()
> [Activity diagramm]?
>  
> Maci_Ray.

>From what I know, the situation is this: when Blender became
open-source, SOLID (the collision lib) was taken out because of its
non-free license.  A developer tried to integrate ODE, but stopped due
to lack of time.  The SOLID author will publish a book about it and free
the sources, but the book release was postponed and may take some months
yet.  Recently Ton was offered to include SOLID in binary form, with the
API documented, but that could conflict with Blender's license, so it
didn't happen and possibly the better decision is to wait till SOLID is
open-sourced.

About ODE: it's a great project.  A few weeks ago they integrated
collision detection directly into it, from what I know, and there's also
a faster solver much better for when speed is more important than
accuracy.  It would be ideal to use ODE today.

The main problem is that, as far as I know, there's no developer working
on the game engine code.  That's obviously a big big problem, even if
SOLID comes back and the game engine is reactivated.

It's also been discussed that separating the game engine from Blender
(making it a stand-alone app to run .blend game files created with
Blender) would be a good idea.  But anyway, without developers, things
are not looking good for it.  I've read about users trying to find
interested coders in 3d game dev forums, etc.  No success yet.

If you (or others) are willing to work on it, make basic documentation
(look in the blender/doc cvs dir for examples like the python one) to
help others jump in, etc -- get discussions going -- then we'd have a
start.

About your diagrams, if you can post them somewhere, I'd be interested :
).

--
Willian, wgermano@ig.com.br