[Bf-committers] Meeting topics of past month

[Ton Roosendaal]

Hi,

It's september, summer holiday is over, so hopefully we can get back to  
weekly summarizing the results of irc sessions on this list again. :)
Here's notes I gathered from the past month.

*** Move to Python 2.4
- Windows and Linux releases will get a static 2.4 Python lib
- FreeBSD/Irix/Sun will probably stick to static 2.3
- OSX will distribute both;
   - 10.2 OSX: will stick to have a static Python 2.3
   - 10.3/4 OSX: will get 2 versions, for 2.3 and 2.4 Python frameworks  
(dynamic)

It's not something that deserves the beauty prize, but probably the  
best we can do... :)

*** Game engine project
- The game engine has new physics (Bullet library, developed by Erwin),  
which still uses Solid for collisions. We really need docs & demos  
about this work still, for example for using the physics engine to  
create animated objects.
- Erwin; can you summarize the engine todos or plans for the engine  
future?
- What's the status on Crystal Space integration?
- What's the status on project Girona (by Jordi Rovira)?

*** Make/Scons issues
- We need more attention from the various platform maintainers for the  
makefiles or scons issues related to compiling Blender (and engine  
especially). Suggested is to find an official Windows cygwin &  
free-msvc platform maintainer.
- Makefiles still use old NAN names, Kent volunteered to look into this
- The game player Web Plug-in will be disabled as default compile target

*** Google Summer of Code
- The IK library project has been moved over to bf-blender
- Decisions on integrating the other projects are pending reviews  
still. All finished projects (7 out of 10) seem to be good candidates  
for integration.
- Officially the students are finished now. Mentors are preparing the  
review docs for Google.

*** Tuhopuu3 admin
- Chris Want will withdraw as CVS moderator for Tuhopuu end of this  
month. (<sob>We'll miss him, he did a great job!)
- We need to validate & extract the work there to include in bf-blender  
still (Ton will work with Matt on his part).
- Chris Want suggests to use the Google project method for an  
experimental tree, where each cvs writer gets an own Branch, and  
becomes responsible for merging changes him/herself.

*** Subversion to replace CVS?
- Some discussions happened on this topic, nothing clear here... will  
require more investigating and reviews of what impact would be. Ton  
suggested to wait with a decision on this until Blender Foundation has  
budget again to pay an expert on upgrading the projects website  
(GForge) to  the latest release. Might be in october or november.
http://wiki.blender.org/bin/view.pl/Blenderdev/SVNMigration

*** Current projects; animation recode
- Review currently is needed on the new IK features, like how to  
present it in UI etc.
- Next development steps will involve Action and NLA editing
- Python API for bones/armatures/poses needs to be rewritten still

*** Current projects; Mesh Subdivsion tools
- Johnny still seeks for help with the subdivide-smooth
- UI access to the new tools need to be evaluated, Wkey menu is too  
crowded now

*** Current projects; Modifier system
- Work on this has nearly completed now, although new features can be  
added a lot still
- Main todo is release docs & demos

*** Current projects, other;
- OpenEXR, what's the status?
- new 3D Text editing; can we get a cool doc too? :)
- Rendering in Blender should get support for UV (or ST whatever)  
tangent vectors, this will make normal mapping much nicer, and enable  
anisotropic shading.
- Any dev here switched to 64 bits already? We get more and more  
requests for official 64 bits builds.

*** Patches
- There's a whole load of patches in the tracker waiting to be reviewed  
still....
http://projects.blender.org/tracker/?atid=127&group_id=9&func=browse

*** 2.4 Release targets
- It's about time to define the targets for the Blender 2.4 release.  
Would suit nice if we can release that around Blender Conference (Oct  
14).
- My proposal; for today's meeting try to agree on a tentative target  
list, with target candidates (tracker, SoC project) assigned to devs to  
further evaluate on.


-Ton-

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--
Ton Roosendaal  Blender Foundation ton at blender.org  
http://www.blender.org