[Bf-committers] Newbie coding advice.

Greg MacDonald gtmacdonald at gmail.com
Wed Sep 28 04:32:16 CEST 2005


Hi all,

I'm new to blender development and have been busy writing import/export
python scripts to support OpenFlight http://sourceforge.net/projects/blight/.
But I found that the scripts weren't enough and that I needed new object
types. So I'm currently adding objects for point lights, level of detail
nodes, group nodes, etc. About 5 in all, plus a few objects that will behave
similar to materials in blender.

Development is going good so far, but I'm curious if I should be talking to
someone about how to do this; I don't want to waste my time coding stuff
that won't get accepted. OpenFlight is used by the visual simulation
industry (for flight sims, commercial airline trainers, combat sims, etc.),
but not by anyone else really. I'm concerned that someone might not like me
adding complexity to the interface for functionality that only a subset of
blender users will use. But I think if I can get this finished, it will be
much better than the OpenFlight support offered by Maya and 3DStudio. And it
would open up blender to a whole new community of users. AND, I'd get to use
blender at work. :)

I was hoping I could get some sage design advice. Should I place a button in
the info panel to turn on and off OpenFlight functionality? (This is how it
works in Maya as users have to explicitly enable the OpenFlight plugin.) Or
will that make it easier for someone to break my code without noticing? Any
thoughts would be appreciated.

-Greg MacDonald
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