[Bf-committers] Meeting Notes for March 6th 2005

[Tom M]

Meeting notes for march 6th

1) Text3d Python Module
A module for creating and controlling 2D/3D text via the python
interface (which is a thin wrapper for Blenders Font Objects) has been
contributed by Joilnen Leite and has been reviewed and committed to CVS by
Stephen Swaney.  A page will be added to the wiki by Stephen Swaney
with pics and
instructions for usage.

2) wood texture
Chris Burt has improved his wood texture, and also added code to allow some
of the same functions have been made available in the marble texture.
The changes has been committed to CVS.  Chris Burt also plans a grid
texture, and Ton suggested examining tiles.c for how to make the
textures AAed.

You can see examples of the improvements here http://blender.spaceisbig.com/wood

3) transform refactor
Martin Poirier would like more testing PLEASE.  See his wiki page for usage

http://wiki.blender.org/bin/view.pl/Blenderdev/TransformRefactoring

for those building via makefiles you can turn on the new code by adding

export NAN_NEW_TRANSFORM=true

to your user-def.mk

or uncomment the define in include/BIF_transform.h also there might be
testing builds with the new transform turned on

http://www.blender.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=phpBB2&file=viewforum&f=18

before reporting a bug check Martin's wiki page to see if it has been
already reported.  Ton still has been swamped with other things so
hasn't had much time to work on Transform coding (but has achieved
freedom now).  Also there was yet another unsuccessful attempt to
convince Ton to learn python.

4) Bpython
Willian Padovani Germano wanted feedback on 'best practices' for a new
method for
persistent bpython configuration data, whether it should be 'all one
file' or 'many small files' one for each script.  After much discussion Ton
suggested he do it how he feels is best (so Willian will take the
'many small files'
approach).

5) warnings patch
JLuc Peuriere has been cleaning out the warnings in the blender tree.  Please
test it and make sure nothing breaks.  Especially developers who use MSVC.  If
no one complains that it breaks stuff, it will be committed in a few
days.  Martin Poirier and Joseph Gilbert will do some checking on MSVC 6 and 7.

6) other current projects

Ton has finished much evil administrative work such as bookkeeping
and subsidy reporting.  Chris Burt noted that Freenode.net the hosting for
the IRC channels where blender developers and users communication
could really use donations, they are at roughly 1/5th of their target
funding level.

http://freenode.net/fundraiser.shtml

Chris has continued 'prettying the release logs'

Tom Musgrove asked on policy of keybindings that are for specific scripts
being listed in the help for blender.  Currently Ton would like just
good documentation (tutorial and images) to be present on
blender3d.org .

wanted to know what policy would be regarding syntax/keyword
highlighting for blenders text editor.  Ton suggested waiting for a
decision until a patch was submitted by the developer and mailing list
discussion.  Also OOPz would like input on what should be highlighted.

JLuc Peuriere asked for a goal date for the dependency graph work (which will
be needed for the animation refactor).  He has proof of concept level
code ready and already committed.  Ton will check the code but would
appreciate it if another coder can do so since he is sort of a
bottleneck for a few coding projects.  Ton suggested turning it into
a library - JLuc Peuriere agreed and will finish the proof of concept and
commit it as a lib).