[Bf-committers] Re: Newbie coding advice.

[Greg MacDonald]

>
> You can create your extra objects using meshes, that's probably the best
> way to represent them well visually. You can store these special meshes
> in a .blend and use python to load them.
>

I never would've thought of that, that's a good idea. And I've already got a
GUI written. But I just have one last wrinkle. Light points have a sizeable
number of properties and a city can have thousands of them. Openflight deals
with this by having light point appearance and animation palettes from which
a light point can index into both at the same time. I was going to duplicate
this in blender by creating palette objects that light point objects would
point to. I also have other non-heirarchical types to consider, like file
header information that would contain info like units, flat vs round earth,
etc. I suppose I could just create an empty with attributes attached for
these as well. But that would create the possibility of two header objects.

Still I'm drawn to extending blender directly because I don't want the user
to try and edit my mesh light point representations. Plus, I don't need
anything 3D to represent the light points, all I need is a glpoint. And I
can make the two header object problem go away in a much nicer fasion.

I'm realy torn between coding in c so I get the effect I want and coding in
Python where I'll be sure that my code will be widely accessible. No one in
the Windows world is going to apply my patch and recompile. That's going to
decrease the number of people who can benefit from my work significantly.
Especially since Creator, the program that spits out openflight, only runs
in Windows.

I think the right thing to do would be to write a general plugin
architecture for Blender where everything is a plugin, including core
functionality. That way people like me wouldn't have a reason to mess with
the underlying code base because there wouldn't be any advantages to it. It
would be slower but Blender isn't a runtime engine.. Oh, wait. It has one of
those doen't it. :) I still think it could be good. For the game engine, you
could have rendering plugins where people could insert the runtime that
their developing for and easily have a model viewer that would save them the
time of loading their models into a seperate program. I would love to
contribute to such a project. Would be a huge undertaking though. Is anyone
considering doing this? Because I can't be the only one with this idea.

-Greg
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