[Bf-committers] Blender CVS: When can we make collaborativ animation project?

[Artem Baguinski]

Ton Roosendaal wrote:

> In fact your proposal can be read in 2 ways:
> 
> - discussing tools to implement in Blender, that will support  
> collaboration between artists better
> - proposing to start a blender animation project, and looking for  
> webspace or other collaboration tools for it
> 
> The latter can better be done at the forums of user sites, like  
> www.elysiun.com. The first is interesting to look at in more depth. But  
> still a discussion that's better to do at the forums of www.blender.org.

>> Like CVS, which help people to work together on a same program, Do you 
>> plan to make a similar system for blender.
>> 
>> For instance, as writer, i can write the story and create basic shape, 
>> like cube, sphere, ... and make camera movement. A modeler in another 
>> part of the world, can change my stupid cube by a wonderful car. Another 
>> change the texture, and so so... In few time we can see, what each other 
>> done, and animation are make faster.
>> 
>> If someone can answer me about this project, it will be a great 
>> pleasure. (it's time to liberise the animation)
>> 
>> Mathias

If i get it right Mathias refferes to quite technically challenging
problem: multiuser authoring of structurally complex media "products".

Group of media artists attempting to work, say, on animation together
would fairly envy a group of programmers working on a source code. CVS
is a nice tool allowing ... (well, subscribers of bf-committers know).
Attempting to use CVS for anything but text files will fail because it
will treat it as binary gibberish, with no way to track changes and
merge different versions. Even XML-like based formats suffer, because of
their not-quite-linear structure. The point is - the only structure CVS
understands is directory structure where files are located (and even
here it sucks - try moving files around in you repository and keep track
of their revisions...)

the example of a project that for quite some time tries to solve some of
these issues is leo (http://leo.sf.net/) - it's a outline editor and
literate programming tool whose document format is xml based. half a
year ago, when i the last time used leo, they still didn't find a
nice solution, and their XML is way simpler structurally and closer to
cvs-compatible plain text then blender file.

another project that is gonna solve similar problem is PlayList (Evo, is
there any URL with project description?). They are working on
collaborative multimedia authoring tool (mainly video/audio oriented,
but Evo knows better) which is going to allow multiuser access to
complex multimedia data. 

cheers,
artm