[Bf-committers] Re: Newbie coding advice.

[Nathan Letwory]

This sounds to me like you'd be easiest of creating n lights in a seperate
.blend and then later on link to any of the lamp data you want. Just give
the lamp data smart names, and you'll have your lighting palette.

/Nathan

> 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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